Melville and a shipmate are put in irons for refusing duty aboard a whaler, jailed by a comic English consul in Tahiti, escape, and go beachcombing across the island — planting potatoes, dodging missionaries and watching a culture being dismantled by people who mean well. He had done all of it himself two years earlier; the sequel to Typee sold on the scandal, and the London missionary societies wrote furious letters. Fifty-seven plates by painters including Winslow Homer and Ivan Aivazovsky follow the voyage itself, from calm water and stowing sail to shipwreck on stormy seas.
