The Pacific trade as it was: a Kanaka diver, a drunk supercargo, a white man gone native and unbothered by it, a mission station, a schooner and a debt collected in blood. Becke went to sea at fourteen, traded for twenty years across the islands and worked for the blackbirder Bully Hayes; he wrote the Pacific with no romance whatever, and it made Kipling's contemporaries take notice. Newly typeset for this edition. Fifty-six plates of sea and shore by painters from Turner to Homer, from Aivazovsky to Munch, give the Pacific its weather.
