This awareness of ships and voyages and how the Pacific was settled is something I encounter throughout the week—though no one beats the way Tavita Manea tells the story. He’s got the whole thing tattooed on his back: a canoe sailing out from his spine, Marquesan mountains across his shoulders, a god perched below his neck. I meet Tavita on day two on the ship, when we’re anchored off Taha‘a; he’s come on board to teach us about tattoos and draw us each a temporary one. Tavita is a billboard for his art form: a walking, talking cultural monument who got his first tattoo at twenty-one and now, seventeen years later, is covered in them from head to toe. He has felt pens stuck through holes in his ears; he grabs one, then my foot, and deftly creates a tour de force. "L’histoire de la mer," he says when I ask what he would call it, and he shows me how the abstract black patterns he has drawn are a wave, a motu, the eyes of the wind, a dolphin. It’s beautiful, and when I think about swimming later that afternoon, I have to weigh my desire to be in the ocean against my desire to keep its story from washing off my foot.

Like Mahea, Tavita has had his share of time outside the islands: He mentions casually to one of the Spaniards on the ship that he spent a year in Barcelona. This theme is a recurring one: Many of the Tahitians I meet are people who’ve been away, then returned to live on ancestral land. "J’aime beaucoup parce que c’est sauvage," Tavita tells me when I ask why he moved to his mother’s home island of Taha‘a. In other words, he’s on this agrarian island, population 4,000, for a back-to-the-land experience. Actually, make that a back-to-the-island experience. Maybe, I think, like so many who start out on islands, he has found himself unable to live anywhere else, unable to live without the immediacy of the enveloping sea. I wonder, too, if he is wedded to living in a place where the lines of the land become so familiar, they begin to exist in the consciousness like a tattoo.