“Once in a while, we came in at the death of a chief’s pig; the noise of whose slaughtering was generally to be heard at a great distance. An occasion like this gathers the neighbors together, and they have a bit of a feast, where a stranger is always welcome. A good loud squeal, therefore, was music in our ears. It showed something going on in that direction.”
Herman Melville continues his narratives from Typee with a series of adventurous romances set in the South Pacific in Omoo.
Written in the mid-19th century, Melville chronicles riotous adventures aboard a whaling vessel, including the recruitment of natives, to the depictions of desertion and mutiny. Heavily based on his own experiences in the South Pacific, Melville paints a vivid picture of Polynesia and seafaring in the 19th century.
