Typee

By the American novelist, essayist and poet, widely esteemed as one of the most important figures in American literature and best remembered today for his masterpiece Moby-Dick (1851). In 1841, he sailed from Fairhaven, Massachusetts on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific Ocean. The vessel sailed around Cape Horn and travelled to the South Pacific. Melville decided to abandon the vessel on reaching the Marquesas Islands. He lived among the natives of the island for several weeks and the narratives of Typee (1846) and its sequel, Omoo (1847), tell this tale.