I think they were writing about me....

"In the days when a line of schooners ran from San Francisco to Tahiti, touching at the Marquesas on the way, he felt a call to the South Seas, and shipped for a round trip before the mast. When he returned to San Francisco a change seemed to have come over him; the old wandering life had lost its charm - had gone flat and stale.

"Like many another, he had eaten of the wild plantain unaware. The evenings of carousal ashore no longer tempted him; even the long afternoons of reading (for reading has always been this curious fellow's chief delight), stretched on his bed in a sailor's boarding house, had lost their flavor - the print blurred before his eyes, and in its place he saw lands of savage loveliness rising from a warm blue sea; shadowy and mysterious valleys, strewn with the relics of a forgotten race; the dark eyes of a girl in Tai-o-Hae."

 - A Memory of Mauke, short story by James Norman Hall and Charles Bernard Nordhoff (c. 1920)