As a boy I read Melville's book - his first, I think - as a factual though fascinating account of how he jumped ship at Nukahiva with a shipmate, made his way inland, and spent some months with Marquesan natives before escaping back to "civilisation". It seems now that much of it is fiction, and Melville's picture of his South Sea islanders probably owes more to Rousseau's Noble Savage than to reality. First published in 1846, the book's hostile picture of American missionaries, and its ridicule of the French colonial regime with its massive gunboats moored in Nukahiva bay, infuriated many people at a time when the West's civilising mission was believed in implicitly. (Incidentally, the ship he jumped was a whaler, which presumably helped him with the local colour for Moby Dick.)