According to scholars Harrison Hayford and Walter Blair, in August and September 1842, the Lucy Ann, an Australian whaleship, took Melville from the Marquesas Islands to Tahiti.

[1] In the Preface to Omoo, Melville claimed the book was autobiographical, written "from simple recollection" of some of his experiences in the Pacific in the 1840s and strengthened by his retelling the story many times before family and friends.

But scholar Charles Roberts Anderson, working in the late 1930s, discovered that Melville had not simply relied on his memory and went on to reveal a wealth of other sources he drew on in writing the book.

Later, Melville scholar Harrison Hayford made a detailed study of these sources and, in the introduction to a 1969 edition of Omoo, summed up the author's practice, showing that this was a repetition of a process previously used in Typee: "He had altered facts and dates, elaborated events, assimilated foreign materials, invented episodes, and dramatized the printed experiences of others as his own.

[4] In 1842, the narrator, having just escaped an “indulgent captivity” among the natives of Nuku Hiva, joins the crew of an Australian whaling ship from Sydney.

Soon after coming aboard he meets and forms a friendship with the vessel’s surgeon, a tall thin man known to his crew-mates as “Dr Long Ghost”.

Essentially, an example of this can be found in chapter 27 of Omoo, where the narrator sees on a ship in the harbor of Tahiti the name of a town along the Hudson river: "In an instant, palm-trees and elms--canoes and skiffs--church spires and bamboos--all mingled in one vision of the present and the past.