The Fatal Impact: the Invasion of the South Pacific 1767 - 1840 (Alan Moorehead)

Alan Moorehead, The Fatal Impact: The Invasion of the South Pacific, 1767 - 1840. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987.

Large (27 x 19 cm) hard cover, pictorial dustwrapper, 252 pages, numerous illustrations, some in colour.

In excellent condition.

This book was first published in 1966. It was republished posthumously in this revised and well-illustrated edition in 1987.

'When Captain Cook entered the Pacific in 1769 it was a virgin ocean, pristine and savage, and its inhabitants lived a life of primeval innocence.

'Seventy years later firearms, disease and alcohol had hammered away at this way of life until it crumbled before them, and what Satan had sown the Protestant missionaries reaped: the Tahitians, who 'had no God but Love', came to accept the morality of an English suburb; the Australian Aborigines were ousted from their fertile valleys by convict settlements; and in Antarctica the prolific wildlife was jostled towards extinction by merchants and hunters.'