Typee: A Romance of the South Seas

Typee: A Romance of the South Seas, also called Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, is an adventure novel written by Herman Melville in 1846. It is Herman Melville's first book.

This is a book about travels and adventures on the island of Nuku Hiva, in the Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific. It is partly based on Herman Melville's own experiences there, where he spent a month with his companion Toby Greene and decided to write about it.

The book intersperses adventurous fiction with factual commentary on the lives of the inhabitants of the Typee Valley. It details their customs, food, clothing and homes. This work brought Melville great fame and made him known as the man who lived among the cannibals.

The fictional story begins with the young sailors Tommo and Toby who decide to abandon the whaling ship they were traveling on in the Marquesas Islands. However, there they are attacked by the Typee cannibal tribe and flee through the jungle. They will be involved in a conflict between tribes where the Typee and the tribe of the neighboring valley Happar fight.

"Six months at sea! Yes, reader, as I live, six months out of sight of land; cruising after the sperm-whale beneath the scorching sun of the Line, and tossed on the billows of the wide-rolling Pacific—the sky above, the sea around, and nothing else! Weeks and weeks ago our fresh provisions were all exhausted."