OMAI, FIRST POLYNESIAN AMBASSADOR TO ENGLANDThomas Blake ClarkColt Press ($3.50).
Fanny Burney mentions him. Horace Walpole mentions him. Boswell mentions him. But Thomas Blake Clark's handsomely bound and printed book is the first full-length account of Omai (pronounced Oh, My!), the Polynesian Islander, who for two years (1774-76) was "the lyon of lyons" of London drawing rooms.
A year before the embattled farmers started shooting at Concord, bored British society was looking with almost unseemly eagerness for a noble savage. Rousseau had written that as civilization progresses, morals decline. Advanced Britons had reached...
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