I have said already that but for the hazard of a journey to Tahiti I should doubtless never have written this book. It is thither¹ that after many wanderings Charles Strickland came, and it is there that he painted the pictures on which his fame most securely rests. I suppose no artist achieves completely the realisation of the dream that obsesses² him, and Strickland, harassed³ incessantly⁴ by his struggle with technique, managed, perhaps, less than others to express the vision that he saw with his mind’s eye; but in Tahiti the circumstances were favourable⁵ to him; he found in his surroundings the accidents necessary for his inspiration to become effective, and his later pictures give at least a suggestion of what he sought. They offer the imagination something new and strange. It is as though in this far country his spirit, that had wandered disembodied, seeking a tenement⁶, at last was able to clothe itself in flesh. To use the hackneyed phrase, here he found himself.

It would seem that my visit to this remote island should immediately revive my interest in Strickland, but the work I was engaged in occupied my attention to the exclusion⁸ of something that was irrelevant⁹, and it was not till I had been there some days that I even remembered his connection with it. After all, I had not seen him for fifteen years, and it was nine since he died. But I think my arrival at Tahiti would have driven out of my head matters of much more immediate⁷ importance to me, and even after a week I found it not easy to order myself soberly. I remember that on my first morning I awoke early, and when I came on to the terrace of the hotel no one was stirring. I wandered round to the kitchen, but it was locked, and on a bench outside it a native boy was sleeping. There seemed no chance of breakfast for some time, so I sauntered down to the water-front. The Chinamen were already busy in their shops. The sky had still the pallor of dawn, and there was a ghostly silence on the lagoon¹⁰. Ten miles away the island of Murea, like some high fastness of the Holy Grail, guarded its mystery.

I did not altogether believe my eyes. The days that had passed since I left Wellington seemed extraordinary and unusual. Wellington is trim and neat and English; it reminds you of a seaport¹¹ town on the South Coast. And for three days afterwards the sea was stormy. Gray clouds chased one another across the sky. Then the wind dropped, and the sea was calm and blue. The Pacific is more desolate¹² than other seas; its spaces seem more vast, and the most ordinary journey upon it has somehow the feeling of an adventure. The air you breathe is an elixir¹³ which prepares you for the unexpected. Nor is it vouchsafed¹⁴ to man in the flesh to know aught that more nearly suggests the approach to the golden realms of fancy than the approach to Tahiti. Murea, the sister isle¹⁵, comes into view in rocky splendour, rising from the desert sea mysteriously, like the unsubstantial fabric¹⁶ of a magic wand. With its jagged outline it is like a Monseratt of the Pacific, and you may imagine that there Polynesian knights¹⁷ guard with strange rites¹⁸ mysteries unholy for men to know. The beauty of the island is unveiled as diminishing distance shows you in distincter shape its lovely peaks, but it keeps its secret as you sail by, and, darkly inviolable, seems to fold itself together in a stony¹⁹, inaccessible²⁰ grimness. It would not surprise you if, as you came near seeking for an opening in the reef, it vanished suddenly from your view, and nothing met your gaze but the blue loneliness of the Pacific.

Tahiti is a lofty green island, with deep folds of a darker green, in which you divine silent valleys; there is mystery in their sombre depths, down which murmur²¹ and plash cool streams, and you feel that in those umbrageous²² places life from immemorial times has been led according to immemorial ways. Even here is something sad and terrible. But the impression is fleeting²³, and serves only to give a greater acuteness to the enjoyment of the moment. It is like the sadness which you may see in the jester’s eyes when a merry company is laughing at his sallies; his lips smile and his jokes are gayer because in the communion of laughter he finds himself more intolerably alone. For Tahiti is smiling and friendly; it is like a lovely woman graciously prodigal²⁴ of her charm and beauty; and nothing can be more conciliatory than the entrance into the harbour at Papeete. The schooners²⁵ moored²⁶ to the quay²⁷ are trim and neat, the little town along the bay is white and urbane²⁸, and the flamboyants, scarlet²⁹ against the blue sky, flaunt³⁰ their colour like a cry of passion. They are sensual with an unashamed violence that leaves you breathless. And the crowd that throngs³¹ the wharf³² as the steamer draws alongside is gay and debonair³³; it is a noisy, cheerful, gesticulating crowd. It is a sea of brown faces. You have an impression of coloured movement against the flaming blue of the sky. Everything is done with a great deal of bustle³⁴, the unloading of the baggage, the examination of the customs; and everyone seems to smile at you. It is very hot. The colour dazzles you.