They were unveiled to the world through Herman Melville's immortalizing novels, Gauguin's paintings and Jacques Brel's songs. The Marquesas Islands, this archipelago of French Polynesia, still remain hazy in the western world. They are wild lands still scarcely inhabited; they are a land with rough relief; they are a land where men and nature, still primitive and untouched, live side by side. But most of all, the Marquesas Islands are the land of a an exceptional people: men.