At twilight they took advantage of the cooler air for a meeting aboard the ship. Fourteen tons of equipment unloaded from the freighter were heaped under waxed tarpaulins and a makeshift shelter near the docks. That included the lighting generator, the spare cameras, the toolboxes, two projectors, the endless crated cannisters of raw film, and all the apparatus for the developing laboratory.

Had Flaherty looked into the possibilities for the safer storage of such materiel? He had not. What were the possibilities, Murnau wanted to know. Flaherty outlined a few. The best option seemed to be an unused portion of a copra trader’s metal-roofed warehouse. Flaherty promised to approach the man the next morning.

After the meeting, Murnau went off by himself for a cheap meal and a cheerless walk. Papeete looked like a dismal metropole of the South Seas. Automobiles and omnibuses roared along the shore. The streets were lit by electric lights. Cinemas and dance halls and cabarets and Chinese restaurants blared their music out into the moonlight.

What have I done? he asked himself.

Later, to cheer him up, Flaherty led him to the other end of town, where a dilapidated movie house with a sheet of corrugated metal for a door advertised on its display board a film called Sæur Angelique, “Directed by F. Murnau.” Flaherty found the announcement funny. What did it mean? There was no way to know. The movie house, Flaherty said, had apparently been closed for some time.

Over the next few days, Murnau’s spirits began to recover. In the mornings he took breakfast—limes with sugar, a mango, a roll, and a pot of black coffee—on the Montparnasse’s veranda, facing the peaks of Moorea. By seven o’clock they were flooded with morning light.

The crags and slopes of the volcanic islands of Oceania seemed to him so steep and wicked-looking that the coastlines, with their pale lagoons, looked gentle by contrast. There was always a scrap of mist around the peaks, and that unsettling below-the-horizon boom of surf on the invisible reefs. The population seemed to live entirely on the fringes of inaccessible slopes, so the villages appeared small and crowded.

Their materiel was safe in the copra trader’s warehouse. The cost was a dollar a week, payment deferred. The trader had accepted two bottles of whisky as down payment.

Crosby had been spending his days in the warehouse with the film stock, trying to account for ten thousand feet of negative that probably had never been loaded aboard in San Pedro.