A Dream of Islands is in one way or another built around the central theme of restlessness: the restlessness of European man in the process of industrialising himself and dominating the world. Daws seeks for the source of this restlessness in the family situation of his chosen five and traces its course in the wide theatre of the Pacific. Mrs Williams wanted her son ‘to be a good Christian’ and believed that ‘life in a trade became by definition a life of holiness, devotion and piety’. John Williams, in his restless peregrinations from one Pacific Island to another found that successful evangelism was only possible if it combined God with industry. He taught his Raiateans how to build their own houses, sit upon sofas under pleasant awnings and listen to the gospel as they took tea; like any civilised English person. The restlessness of Robert Louis Stevenson. who went through life in fear of his lungs, was impelled by a vision of good health in the Pacific. Launched at Paradise, Stevenson voyaged towards home (though he never dared, for health reasons. to return physically). Daws shows how the bohemian son gradually reconciled himself to his dead father and built at Vailima, in Samoa. an establishment which he maintained like a Scottish laird.

The dreams were. of course, essentially European dreams – or visions – and they took on a different colour for the five protagonists. With Williams it was a Christian dream, of Christian archipelagos spread throughout the Pacific. Christianity was the harbinger of civilisation. But with Melville the pendulum swings back to Diderot: his dream is not a Christian dream. He detests the missionaries, the traders, the consuls and the soldiers. He is in the Bounty tradition. As a young man he had slipped ship from the whaler Acushnet when it put in at Nukuhiva in the Marquesas, for wood, food and water, and there he lived for a few weeks with the savages of Taipivai. It was this experience of life, among a people reputed to be cannibals even by Marquesans themselves, from which he wrote Tvpee and made his reputation as a writer. With Melville the Christian dream is becoming dislodged; resolving itself into an aesthetic dream; though he could still say that Tahiti was the most suitable locale for Christ’s coming.

For Walter Murray Gibson, it is a dream of power, imperialism shorn of its grandeur, and reduced to a series of confidence tricks. Born in 1822 Gibson, was of Northumbrian stock. When he was a boy his family migrated to Canada. Three of the children died there two of cholera. Then the family moved to New York. At fourteen Gibson left home and ended up in South Carolina. Here had a vision of a great city in an island of Malaysia. ‘I wondered who should help, who should teach, and who should do good to the people of the Indian seats’.

In Gibson we may witness the degeneration of the Christian vision as it comes to serve the needs of personal power. With the vision of the Malaysian kingdom in his head he wandered widely about the world – gun-running in Central America, ever under the suspicious eye of the authorities whether in Brazil, Sumatra or Singapore. The achievements of James Brooke, the white Rajah of Sarawak, captivated his imagination. Later, back in America, he turned to the Mormons, who were also much given to visions, for support. He became one. ‘While I lay in a dungeon in the island of Java’ he wrote to Brigham Young, ‘a voice said to me: ‘You shall show the way to a people, who shall build up a kingdom in these isles, whose lines of power shall run around the earth.’

Later he met Young and convinced him of his sincerity. Young empowered him to do missionary work in the Pacific and beyond for the Mormons. With his family, a daughter and two sons brought from the American mainland, he established himself as the head of the Mormon Church in the ‘City of Joseph’ in the valley of Ephraim, better known as Palawai – a settlement made in an extinct volcanic crater on the island of Lanai. Later he began to dabble in Hawaiian politics, and was excommunicated from the Hawaiian Mormon community. Then he began to run newspapers; and eventually rose to become premier in the government of King Kalakaua. In this position he strove for the creation of a Polynesian confederacy of islands, with Hawaii as the centre of power. Through his newspapers he made demagogic appeals to the Hawaiians. But this essay in imperialism-in-little, when it came into conflict with Germany’s interests in Samoa, quickly fell among shoals. At home in Hawaii, the Hawaiian League, a party of white reformers, conspired against Gibson and the King, and in 1887, in the wake of a scandal in which the king was exposed as accepting bribes toward an opium licence, Gibson fell from his post as premier – and had to run for his life.

The dream of power also animated Robert Louis Stevenson. But it was less ambitious than that of Gibson – the power of the Scottish laird over the extended family of Vailima, and a chance to meddle in the local politics, by entertaining the native chieftains at his table and writing letters to the Times. His real ambition seems to have been to write the great book on the South Seas. It turned out to be one of the dullest he had ever written – A Footnote to History – Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa. Like Melville before him life played cruel tricks on Stevenson, invoking him to be serious and philosophical, when his genius was for adventure, lightness of touch and narrative skill.

Melville, after writing his greatest work Moby Dick, was carried on by a still more destructive demon. Throughout life at war with his family and at war with himself, the early, Pacific side of his life was only the geographical aspect of his whirlpool. ‘Deep, deep and still deep and deeper must we go, if we are to find out the heart of a man: descending into which is as descending a spiral stair in a shaft, without any end ...’ So he wrote in his novel Pierre, which no one reads now and no one wanted to read then.

Later still he wrote a long poem of eighteen thousand lines, called Clarel, about his experiences in the Holy Land twenty years before. He had to keep on writing, but the world had forgotten him, and did not buy his books. From the success of his early books and a loan from his father-in-law he had bought himself a property of 160 acres in Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, and become a gentleman farmer. But though he ‘gave every sign of wanting and needing a conventional middle-class safe place, there was something else in him, very powerful, paired with the idea of bourgeois respectability but ferociously hostile to it’. Early in life the Pacific had mirrored his restless spirit and he struggled through life to escape from it into deeper profundities, which his readers did not care for. When he died, everyone was quite surprised to find that he had been alive for so long, and the New York Times got his name wrong.

Paul Gauguin tried harder than all the others to escape the civilised bonds of Europe. It was as if he had decided to put Diderot’s vision of Tahiti as the critique of civilisation fully to the test. But Europe, for all that, held him. This is Gavan Daws’ conclusion after a careful assessment of the last Tahitian phase of his life; and it is surely the correct one. Speaking of Melville, Daws quotes Lawrence’s comment, ‘one cannot go back … Melville couldn’t go back, and Gaugin couldn’t really go back … We can be in sympathy with them. We can take a great curve in their direction onward. But we cannot turn the current of our life backward ...’ Gauguin was not to return to the savage, but to create a different kind of image of the European artist, distinct from that of the successful bourgeois artists of the Salons, men whom he detested. And to give his life, if need be, to the creation of the new image. It was of the first importance that that image should be created. The paintings went back to Paris from Tahiti; the letters to Daniel de Montfried continued. He did not lose contact. It is the new Nietzschean image of the artist as pure will, and superman, driving himself onwards towards his martyrdom. The book begins with Williams, the martyr of religion: and ends with Gauguin the martyr of art.

Gavan Daws’ thesis is D.H. Lawrence’s thesis: man cannot go back. Cannot escape the imperatives of the culture into which he is born. None of his five protagonists were changed into Polynesians. Yet their lives do testify to a change in European man. For men now attempted, pace Gibson, to understand a totally alien culture, enter into its secrets and even its sanctities. They were men of the cultural interface who chose to live between separate worlds because their own worlds had been divided for them in childhood. It was bound to occur. For the Pacific, as Diderot’s insight grasped, did continue to offer a tremendous challenge to accepted European values. Its islands and seas, its bordering continents, provided evidence enough to transform evolution from a vague philosophical hypothesis into a scientific theory backed by a great wealth of evidence. Its peoples, the bemused objects of European scientific curiosity, contributed a knowledge of their traditional cultures to the foundations of new sciences of man: ethnology, anthropology, sociology and comparative religion. The Pacific became the laboratory of the Enlightenment, where the heady theories of the Philosophes, their Revolution achieved, were tested against a new vast world of facts. It was into this laboratory that Daws’ five protagonists, impelled by the uncertainties of their childhood were thrust, and where each in his own way worked out his internal drama – at the alluring, stimulating and destructive interface of the European and Polynesian cultures.