Richard Parkinson's Thirty Years in the South Seas was first published in 1907. In this 900-page work, Parkinson drew together and expanded on the scientific and popular papers he had been publishing since 1887, creating in the process a landmark ethnography of the Bismarck Archipelago. Parkinson moved to New Britain in 1879, only seven years after the first trader had established himself in the area. Over the next thirty years, he employed many local people on the family's expanding plantations, and travelled widely in the area, trading for produce (especially coconuts), observing traditional life, and buying artefacts for museums in Europe, USA and Australia. His travels covered the islands now known as New Britain, New Ireland, New Hanover, Manus, Buka and Bougainville, but he also collected information about the mainland of New Guinea (Kaiser Wilhelmsland). His observations covered a wide range of topics, from religious life and ceremonies to artefacts and language. It is clear he talked extensively with people - though mostly with a translator - and compared accounts. He also took many photographs, some 200 of which were included in the volume. Given the period, all his human subjects had to be posed, but the range of associated detail, probably unconsciously included, is substantial. What is particularly important about this work is the period in which it was written. While Parkinson may never have been the first contact of any local people, he was clearly among the first, and observed many societies before they were extensively incorporated into the Western economy, or missionised. Thirty Years in the South Seas is unparalleled in the literature of the Bismarck Archipelago. It is an incomparable picture of a time and place now long past.

John Gibson Paton was a Scottish Protestant missionary to the New Hebrides Islands of the South Pacific. During his mission, he brought to the natives of the New Hebrides education and Christianity. To support the locals economically, he developed small industries for them, such as hat making. In his engaging autobiography, John G. Paton relates his life spent as a missionary among the cannibal peoples of the South Sea Islands and the education and development he helped bring to those remote isles.

"Richard Parkinson's Dreissig Jahre in der Sudsee was first published in 1907. In this 900-page work, Parkinson drew together and expanded on the scientific and popular papers he had been publishing since 1887, creating in the process a landmark ethnography of the Bismarck Archipelago." "His travels covered the islands now known as New Britain, New Ireland, New Hanover, Manus, and Buka and Bougainville, but he also collected information about the mainland of New Guinea (Kaiser Wilhelmsland). His observations covered a wide range, from religious life and ceremonies to artefacts and language. It is clear he talked extensively with people - though mostly with a translator - and compared accounts. He also took many photographs, some 200 of which were included in the volume. Given the period, all his human subjects had to be posed, but the range of associated detail, probably unconsciously included, is very wide."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Long before Magellan entered the Pacific in 1521 Westerners entertained ideas of undiscovered oceans, mighty continents, and paradisal islands at the far ends of the earth. First set down by Egyptian storytellers, Greek philosophers, and Latin poets, such ideas would have a long life and a deep impact in both the Pacific and the West. With the discovery of Tahiti in 1767 another powerful myth was added to this collection: the noble savage. For the first time Westerners were confronted by a people who seemed happier than themselves. This revolution in the human sciences was accompanied by one in the natural sciences as the region revealed gaps and anomalies in the "great chain of being" that Charles Darwin would begin to address after his momentous visit to the Galapagos Islands. The Pacific produced similar challenges for nineteenth-century researchers on race and culture, and for those intent on exporting their religions to this immense quarter of the globe. Although most missionary efforts ultimately met with success, others ended in ignominious retreat. As the century wore on, the region presented opportunities and dilemmas for the imperial powers, leading to a guilty desire on the part of some to pull out, along with an equally guilty desire on the part of others to stay and help. This process was accelerated by the Pacific War between 1941 and 1945. After more than two millennia of fantasies, the story of the West’s fascination with the insular Pacific graduated to a marked sense of disillusion that is equally visible in the paintings of Gauguin and the journalism of the nuclear Pacific. Strangers in the South Seas recounts and illustrates this story using a wealth of primary texts. It includes generous excerpts from the work of explorers, soldiers, naturalists, anthropologists, artists, and writers--some famous, some obscure. It begins in 1521 with an account of Guam by Antonio Pigafetta (one of the few men to survive Magellan's circumnavigation voyage), and ends in the late 1980s with the writing of an American woman, Joana McIntyre Varawa, as she faces the personal and cultural insecurities of marriage and settlement in Fiji. It shows how "the Great South Sea" has been an irreplaceable "distant mirror" of the West and its intellectual obsessions since the Renaissance. Comprehensively illustrated and annotated, this anthology will introduce readers to a region central to the development of modern Western ideas. "This is a carefully conceived anthology covering an excellent range of subjects. The selections are well chosen and interesting, and the introductory materials are both scholarly and accessible. It should be widely used in university courses dealing with almost any aspect of the Pacific." —Rod Edmond, University of Kent at Canterbury

This book offers a wide-ranging survey of Australian engagement with the Pacific Islands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through over 100 hitherto largely unexplored accounts of travel, the author explores how representations of the Pacific Islands in letters, diaries, reminiscences, books, newspapers and magazines contributed to popular ideas of the Pacific Islands in Australia. It offers a range of valuable insights into continuities and changes in Australian regional perspectives, showing that ordinary Australians were more closely connected to the Pacific Islands than has previously been acknowledged. Addressing the theme of travel as a historical, literary and imaginative process, this cultural history probes issues of nation and empire, race and science, commerce and tourism by focusing on significant episodes and encounters in history. This is a foundational text for future studies of Australia’s relations with the Pacific, and histories of travel generally.

This particular Jack London collection mirrors the incredible adventurous life of the author, it shows all the things he witnessed and experienced on his travels. Besides being a novelist, journalist and social activist – Jack London was also a railroad hobo, gold prospector, sailor, an oyster pirate, rancher, war correspondent... Novels The Cruise of the Dazzler A Daughter of the Snows The Call of the Wild The Sea-Wolf White Fang Burning Daylight Adventure The Scarlet Plague A Son of the Sun The Abysmal Brute The Mutiny of the Elsinore Jerry of the Islands Michael, Brother of Jerry Hearts of Three Short Stories Son of the Wolf The White Silence The Son of the Wolf The Men of Forty Mile In a Far Country To the Man on the Trail The Priestly Prerogative The Wisdom of the Trail The Wife of a King An Odyssey of the North The God of His Fathers: Tales of the Klondike The God of His Fathers The Great Interrogation Which Make Men Remember Siwash The Man with the Gash Jan, the Unrepentant Grit of Women Where the Trail Forks A Daughter of the Aurora At the Rainbow's End The Scorn of Women Children of the Frost In the Forests of the North The Law of Life Nam-Bok the Unveracious The Master of Mystery The Sunlanders The Sickness of Lone Chief Keesh, the Son of Keesh The Death of Ligoun Li Wan, the Fair The League of the Old Men The Faith of Men & Other Stories A Relic of the Pliocene A Hyperborean Brew The Faith of Men Too Much Gold The One Thousand Dozen The Marriage of Lit-lit Bâtard The Story of Jees Uck Tales of the Fish Patrol White and Yellow The King of the Greeks A Raid on the Oyster Pirates The Siege of the "Lancashire Queen" Charley's Coup Demetrios Contos Yellow Handkerchief Lost Face South Sea Tales The House of Pride & Other Tales of Hawaii Smoke Bellew The Red One On the Makaloa Mat Dutch Courage & Other Stories Memoirs The Road The Cruise of the Snark Through The Rapids on the Way to the Klondike From Dawson to the Sea Our Adventures in Tampico