The South Seas have been a particular object for Eurocentric imaginative scrutiny ever since the beginning of the 18th century. The South Sea Bubble, the Cook voyages and the Bligh mutiny were early instances; later writers like Melville, Stevenson and Gauguin, saw the area in quite different, explicitly romantic terms; in the 20th century imaginative perceptions have changed all over again. The South Seas are, all at once it seems, a `dark continent' awaiting civilisation and exploitation, an escapist idyll and a mirror in which Western writers have seen their own disappointments.