and machines were to fetter and vulgarize them even more.

Afterward, when sailors mutinied and abandoned their ships or
killed their officers to be able to remain in Tahiti and its
sister islands, there grew up in England a literature of wanderers,
runagates, and beach-combers, of darkish women who knew no reserve
or modesty, of treasure-trove, of wrecks and desperate deeds, piracy
and blackbirding, which made flame the imagination of the youth of
seventy years ago. Tahiti had ever been pictured as a refuge from a
world of suffering, from cold, hunger, and the necessity of labor,
and most of all from the morals of pseudo-Christianity, and the
hypocrisies and buffets attending their constant secret infringement.

One morning when we were near the middle of our voyage I went on
deck to see the sun rise. We were that day eighteen hundred miles
from Tahiti and the same distance from San Francisco, while north
and west twelve hundred miles lay Hawaii. Not nearer than there,
four hundred leagues away, was succor if our vessel failed. It was
the dead center of the sea. I glanced at the chart and noted the spot:
Latitude 10º N.; Longitude 137º W. The great god Ra of the Polynesians
had climbed above the dizzy edge of the whirling earth, and was making
his gorgeous course into the higher heavens. The ocean was a glittering
blue, an intense, brilliant azure, level save for the slight swaying
of the surface, which every little space showed a flag of white. The
evaporation caused by the blazing sun of these tropics made the water
a deeper blue than in cooler latitudes, as in the Arctic and Antarctic
oceans the greens are almost as vivid as the blues about the line.

I watched the thousand flying-fishes' fast leaps through the air, and
caught gleams of the swift bonitos whose pursuit made birds of their