Thomas H Booth

Vanuatu, a cluster of 13 large islands and 80 small ones in the southwest Pacific, 1,300 miles east of Australia, has had a kaleidoscopic past. Formerly known as the New Hebrides, it was administered as a British-French Condominium, referred to as "pandemonium," and the events surrounding independence in 1980 had Gilbert and Sullivan qualities. Then there are the languages they speak: French, English, 105 indigenous tongues and the wonderful common...

Nature is excessive, lovely and ominous in the Solomons, and the Melanesians who live there, often blond or redheaded, are the blackest of all people. Before World War II, such names as Guadalcanal, Savo, Munda were rarely heard. Guadalcanal, over 100 miles long by 30 miles wide, is the largest island. Then in descending order there's Malaita, San Cristobal, Choiseul, New Georgia and Santa Ysabel. All of them are mountainous, covered with rain forest...

Tahiti is one of the Society Islands which, with the Gambiers, the Tuamotus, the Australs, and the Marquesas, make up French Polynesia. This archipelago spread out over several million square miles of the south central Pacific is a mixture of high volcanic islands and low coral atolls. Moorea, the land mass you can see in the distance from Papeete, is 12 miles away. It's a lovely 82-square-mile triangular-shaped island of sharp peaks, deep valleys,...

Enchanting, mysterious, romantic. These are the islands where Margaret Mead, Somerset Maugham, Robert Louis Stevenson and Gary Cooper lived for part of their lives. The only U.S. Territory south of the Equator, American Samoa lies 2,300 miles south of Hawaii, 4,200 miles south of San Francisco. It is a mere 77 square miles, and Tutuila, the largest island, has 53 of them. Not much land is left for the other six. The total population of the seven islands,...