Transit of Venus: Travels in the Pacific

With the potent myths of the Pacific Ocean in mind, Julian Evans journeys ever deeper into a world of gin-clear lagoons, palms and sand, in search of both remnants of the fabulous kingdoms of the nineteenth-century European imagination -fed by an abundance of fruits, fish and guilt-free sex -and their twentieth century reality. Ever since Captain Cook first went to Tahiti in 1769 to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, the Pacific has offered this promise of Paradise, shadowed by a ...