There is in the nature of every man, a longing to see and know the strange places of the world. Life imprisons us all in its coil of circumstance, and the dreams of romanace that color boyhood are forgotten, but they do not die. They stir at the sight of white-sailed ship beating out to the wide sea; the smell of tarred rope on blackened wharf, or the touch of the cool little breeze that rises when the stars come out will waken them again. Somwhere over the rim of the world lies romance, and every heart yearns to go and find it. It is for those who stay at home yet dream of foreign places that this book has been written, record of one happy year spent among the simple, friendly cannibals of Atuona valley, on the island of Hiva-oa in the Marquesas. In its pages there is little of profound research, nothing, to startle the anthropologist or to revise encyclopedias: Days, like people, give more when they are approached in not too stern a spirit ... The reader need bring with him omly an open mind and a love for the strange picturesque. He will come back, with some glimpses into the primitive customs of the long-forgotten ancestors of the world, and a memory of sun-steeped days on white beaches, of palms and orchids and the childlike savage peoples who live in the bread-fruit groves of Bloody Hiva-oa.... Keywords: White Shadows in the South Seas, O'Brien, Atuona Valley, Hiva-oa, Marquesas,

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