ed that Europe had been set afire emotionally by the first
reports, the logs of the first captains of England and France who
visited Tahiti. In that eighteenth century, for decades the return to
nature had been the rallying cry of those who attacked the artificial
and degraded state of society. The published and oral statements of
the adventurers in Tahiti, their descriptions of the unrivaled beauty
of the verdure, of reefs and palm, of the majestic stature of the
men and the passionate charm of the women, the boundless health and
simple happiness in which they dwelt, the climate, the limpid streams,
the diving, swimming, games, and rarest food--all these had stirred
the depressed Europe of the last days of the eighteenth and the first
of the nineteenth centuries beyond the understanding by us cynical
and more material people. The world still had its vision of perfection.

Tahiti was the living Utopia of More, the belle ile of Rousseau, the
Eden with no serpent or hurtful apple, the garden of the Hesperides,
in harmony with nature, in freedom from the galling bonds of government
and church, of convention and clothing. The reports of the English
missionaries of the nakedness and ungodliness of the Tahitians created
intense interest and swelled the chorus of applause for their utter
difference from the weary Europeans. Had there been ships to take them,
thousands would have fled to Tahiti to be relieved of the chains and
tedium of their existence, though they could not know that Victorianism
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 mi