Typee

Two sailors desert a whaler in the Marquesas and walk into a valley whose people treat them with perfect kindness and will not let them leave. Melville had done exactly this at twenty-two; the book made him famous as the man who lived among cannibals, his publisher cut the attacks on the missionaries, and he spent the rest of his life being asked whether it was true. Fifty-three plates of sail, storm and open sea by painters including Joseph Vernet and J. M. W. Turner carry the voyage from Devon waters to the Dutch and English fleets of 1805.