Faery Lands of the South Seas

Two war-weary veterans, fresh from the trenches of the Great War, set sail for the South Pacific in search of something the modern world no longer offers. James Norman Hall and Charles Nordhoff, who would later immortalize their sea-faring adventures in Mutiny on the Bounty, begin their journey in postwar Paris, haunted by boredom and nostalgia, until the dream of distant islands overtakes them. What follows is a luminous account of atolls and palm-fringed shores, of polynesian life unfolding in rhythms that seem to belong to another century entirely. The authors encounter a world where time moves differently, where the line between sea and sky blurs, and where the 'simple' life reveals itself to be anything but. Written with the keen eye of someone who has seen too much death and the grateful heart of someone discovering beauty still exists, this book captures a Pacific that existed before tourism, before atomic testing, before the modern world arrived to transform it. It is both a travel narrative and a meditation on what we seek when we seek paradise, and why we so rarely find it.