The closer they got, the brighter the colors became. They needed new eyes for this. They were all on deck, their gaze on the scarped and shattered peaks that protected the inner loop of the bay. Around the bay, the white reefs were as delicate as lace.

Pal was all the way out on the bowsprit. A white thread of a waterfall cascaded thousands of feet down the steepest of the cliffs to break into mist below. David informed them that it was Typee Falls, from the Typee valley.

Around the black point of the escarpment, the panorama of the bay opened out. A file of houses lined the white sand behind coconut palms and thickets with crimson flowers. Murnau could make out cassi, frangipani, and the evergreen smell of oleander.

David pointed out that he was weeping.

Bambridge said, “He’s been weeping for the last fifteen minutes.”

They beat in three tacks into the bay through the first smooth water they’d seen since San Pedro, six fathoms deep. They looked overboard to the bottom the way they might look down from a fourth-story window on a sunny day.

A whaleboat piloted by a native guided them to their anchorage. A white-haired Frenchman in a military jacket and sailcloth pants announced himself as Harbormaster and Chief of Police, and brought them ashore.

Murnau’s initial contact with the native population was with a few dockworkers. He was surprised at their sullenness. They distrusted Pal and stared without smiling as they went about their work. Most of the women were missing teeth. A hundred years before, the Frenchman informed him, the Marquesas had had a population of one hundred and forty thousand; now, thanks to the white man, a thousand were left.

Their temporary quarters were overrun with ants. They napped instead on the beach, on shaded benches and tables. The unshaded sunlight was stunning. The Harbormaster drowsed where he sat, opposite Murnau, his hand still on his glass of lemonade. Pal crouched beneath a table with ears down and chin low. Enormous yellow flowers called burao fell heavily, as if from the heat, onto the sand; the sound was like a dropped cap.

Still, Murnau was unable to sleep. He was beginning to understand how much time, patience, and work would be required to capture any part of the shattered and fugitive splendor of the islands. The land was not the issue. What he’d have to search for everywhere were men with the pride, the beauty, and the independence he’d imagined in their ancestors.

No one on Nukahiva remembered Spiess. The Harbormaster remembered someone named Thun or Thule, whom he was sure had been a Dane.

A week later they successfully negotiated the Passe de Fakarava, an emerald channel flanked by shoals. It was the last step involved in threading the treacherous Paumotos, listed on the charts as the Low or Dangerous Archipelagoes.