Search -
Omoo, A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas
Omoo A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas Author:Herman Melville no pub date. C183 in Dolphin catalog. Published in 1847, Melville's second novel takes its title from a Marquesas dialect word signifying "a rover, or rather a person wandering from one island to another." The work is drawn from the writer's own adventures in the South Seas; it is a sharp and unsparing report, first on the hazards of life on a... more » rottingt whaleboat, and later on the injurious effect of white missionaries upon the Polynesian natives. Most of the action occurs in Tahiti, where, after mutineering, the narrator and his shipmates are help by the English consul in a curiously congenial prison. After his release, the narrator tries his hand at work on a plantation and spends five weeks among the inland villagers before his restlessness leads him to join another ship and resume his erratic itinerary in the Pacific. This humouous and unsentimental account delighted D. H. Lawrence, who wrote: "Omoo is a fascinating book: picaresque, rascally, roving..For once, Melville is the gallant rascally epicurean, eating the world like a snipe, dirt and all baked into one bonne bouche."« less