By Reef and Palm

The Pacific as a trading station: a white man with two families, a native wife who understands the arithmetic, a mission, a schooner, a debt. Becke went to sea at fourteen, traded twenty years across the islands and worked for the blackbirder Bully Hayes; these 1894 sketches were his first book, and they are short, dry and entirely without palm-tree romance. Fifty-four plates of frigates, brigs and heavy weather by marine painters such as George Webster and Louis Meijer give these trading sketches the sea they were sailed on.