Complete and unabridged, with 59 full-page plates by Thomas Baines, Frederic Edwin Church and J. M. W. Turner. Forty years among the Samoans distilled by a missionary who wrote down their gods, their war customs, their medicine and their sayings before the missions had finished changing them. Turner published in 1884, and the second half of the book is a village-by-village record of beliefs he collected from old men. He is a partisan, and he is also the fullest source there is for what he describes. Fifty-nine plates of island light and shore, from abandoned boats to the Bay of Fundy, by painters including Thomas Luny and John Sell Cotman, carry the reader across the seas Turner's Samoans knew.