For a summer, Lafcadio Hearn travels as a passenger on a steamship through the Lesser Antilles, moving from island to island. Back in New York, he processes his notes into a travelogue of exotic sensuality, a word painting of intense vibrancy. With a striking sensitivity to colors, shapes, and scents, and with the astonished curiosity of a lover and the keen eye of a journalist, he attempts to capture every minute detail in words. Time and again, he delights in describing the slightest differences in the sameness of the landscape and tropical daily life. Throughout, he remains aware of the social conditions, the people and their peculiarities, their habits and customs: it is a world of flourishing decline after a long and painful history of colonial upheavals. Hearn seeks to preserve what he sees, knowing that.