The Marquesas Islands are a remote archipelago of steep volcanic islands in the eastern Pacific, part of French Polynesia. Among the earliest-settled islands of East Polynesia and a likely springboard for the peopling of Hawaii and Rapa Nui, they developed one of the Pacific's richest cultures before European contact triggered a catastrophic collapse of their population. Annexed by France in 1842 and reduced by disease to a fraction of their former numbers, the islands are today the site of a determined Polynesian cultural revival.
A young sailor named Herman Melville jumped ship here in 1842 and found what he took for an untouched paradise. He was half right and half blind. The valleys were indeed astonishing, terraced with stone, guarded by carved figures taller than a man, and filled with people whose skin was inked into dense black art found nowhere else on Earth. But the paradise was already dying. The same ships that had carried Melville also carried diseases the islanders could not survive, and within a lifetime nine in ten of them would be gone. The world he mistook for Eden was a civilisation in the middle of its own near-extinction.