Lost in the Pacific

At six in the morning of 20 July 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson first set eyes on a Pacific Island. As the sun rose, the land ‘heaved up in peaks and rising vales’. The colours of the scene ‘ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive’, rising into ‘opalescent clouds’. The whole effect was a ‘suffusion of vague hues’ shimmering so that mountain slopes were hard to distinguish from the cloud canopy above. Oceania, the new exhibition at the Royal Academy devoted to the region’s arts and cultures, is almost as beautiful as that dawn landscape, and just about as difficult to make out with any precision.

Nonetheless, it is full of the most marvellous things to see. One of the most spectacular is a ‘soul canoe’ from New Guinea, some nine metres long, containing a cargo, or perhaps crew, of crouching turtles, birds and human beings: a sculpture as powerful as any by Brancusi.