South Seas

The South Seas become Martin Eden’s imagined alternative to a world he has come to regard as an illusion: first a place of escape after his faith in magazines collapses, then the setting for an elaborate plan of independence, and finally a destination that no longer promises relief. The distance between his vivid visions of island life and his weariness on the eve of departure gives the region its changing significance in the novel.

A refuge from disillusionment

After the public mocks Brissenden’s poem and the magazines confirm Martin’s worst suspicions, Martin feels sadness rather than anger. He concludes that Brissenden had been right about the literary market and that his own arduous years of work had only taught him this too late. Against that disappointment, the South Seas begin to call more insistently: Tahiti appears to him as clean and sweet, a far-off contrast to the world he has found disillusioning.

His imaginings move through a particular island geography. He sees himself aboard trading schooners or small cutters, leaving Papeete at dawn through the reef and beating north across the pearl atolls toward Nukahiva and the Bay of Taiohae. He anticipates a welcome from Tamari and Tamari’s daughters, who, as he pictures it, would greet him with flowers, song, and laughter. The South Seas are thus not merely a distant destination; they are a landscape filled out by anticipated movement and hospitality.

The island life he plans

Martin’s vision becomes a concrete scheme while he waits for money from books that may soon be published. He knows of a valley and bay in the Marquesas Islands that could be bought for a thousand Chili dollars. The valley, he estimates, covers about ten thousand acres, running from a horseshoe-shaped, landlocked bay to high, cloud-capped peaks. It is uninhabited and, in his description, abundant with tropical fruits, wild chickens, wild pigs, occasional wild cattle, and wild goats pursued by wild dogs.

The bay is central to his plan. Martin remembers it as deep enough for the largest vessel and sufficiently sheltered to be recommended by the South Pacific Directory as a careening place for ships over a wide area. He imagines buying a schooner, trading copra, and pearling among the islands, with the bay and valley as his base. A grass house modeled on Tati’s would anchor the settlement; he pictures it staffed by dark-skinned servants and open to the factor from Taiohae, visiting trading captains, and other South Pacific visitors. In this imagined household, he would entertain like a prince and leave behind both his books and the world that had disappointed him.

Departure and the loss of its promise

For a time, Martin’s projected island life gives purpose to waiting: he intends to make money from forthcoming publications and take a substantial sum with him. Yet the pull of the South Seas does not survive unchanged. As departure approaches, he has no zest for the journey, and the islands charm him no more than bourgeois civilization. He feels the act of leaving as an exhausting prospect and thinks he would feel better if he were already aboard and gone.

This reversal makes the South Seas a measure of Martin’s growing exhaustion, not a settled answer to it. The region that had offered vivid freedom and a new life becomes, at the threshold of departure, another destination unable to restore his desire. The novel therefore places the promise of escape beside the diminished feeling with which Martin finally faces the prospect of going.