James Vlahos Taiohae Bay, on the southern coast of Nuku Hiva, lured Herman Melville to jump ship in 1842. The sailor was the not-yet-famous writer Herman Melville, and he had arrived in July of 1842 at one of the South Pacific’s most beautiful archipelagos, the Marquesas Islands. As he later wrote, “Had a glimpse of the gardens of Paradise been revealed to me, I could scarcely have been more ravished with the sight.” More than a century and a half later, I rowed an outrigger canoe across the same bay on the south coast of an island called Nuku Hiva. To my left, I could see a scattering of bungalows in the greenery that comprised the island’s only luxury accommodations, the Keikahanui Nuku Hiva Pearl Lodge.