The South Seas ... the islands of Tahiti, Hawaii, Samoa, the Marquesas ... the most seductive places on earth.
A Dream of Islands tells the stories of five famous figures who found their fate in the islands: Paul Gauguin, a bourgeois Frenchman who declares himself a white savage; Robert Louis Stevenson, the most famous author of his day, who goes into picturesque personal exile in Samoa; Herman Melville, whalerman out of New England, deserter, mutineer, beachcomber, who ultimately flees the islands for civilisation; Walter Murray Gibson, political adventurer, who dreams of a Polynesian empire of islands and ends his days in exile; and John Williams, a driven missionary, the Livingstone of the South Seas, who builds his own ship to carry the word of God to all the islands of the ocean and who is clubbed to death and eaten by cannibals.
"The South Seas" refers not so much to a place on the map as to a state of mind - a dream of islands where the white man was shown the other side of his own civilised humanity. A voyage to the South Seas was likely to turn out to be a journey into the self, and that is what this book is about.
