What effect did life, does life still, exert upon Europeans in the Pacific? Does it weaken cultural bonds with Europe or does it sustain them? Does it set up alternative cultural standards by means of which European culture may be more critically assessed’) And individuals may more critically assess their own motivations? Are their lives fulfilled in the Pacific or does it destroy them’? These are among the questions which Gavan Daws has set himself, in this highly readable and elegantly written series of linked biographies of five men, Williams, Melville, Gibson, Stevenson, and Gauguin, whose fame and destiny were determined in whole or in part by their lives in the Pacific. Each of them found in the islands ‘the other side of his own civilised humanity’. The book, therefore, though it contains a great deal of factual information about the movements and lives of these men in the Pacific, is really about the romantic voyage, the voyage ‘into the self’.

Almost half a century before Williams, the first of these voyagers into self, set sail for the Pacific, the French Encyclopaedist, Denis Diderot, in his Supplement au voyage de Bougainville (written in 1772 but not published until 1796) had asked the central question, ‘Was not Tahitian life, with its sexual and marital freedom, its gay and easeful life (as Diderot had chosen to extract it from Bougainville) a standing criticism of European civilisation?’ That question, though constantly rebutted by the self-confident and more often than not, self-righteous, upholders of European values, continued to nag at the European mind, tempting it to test its restless drives and confirmed beliefs, in the islands of the Pacific.