Intro
Melville's Typee, tells the story of a sailor's time among the natives of an island in the Marquesas. It was based on Melville's own experience in the Marquesas in 1842, where he was stranded for four weeks.
Typee has a complicated publishing history. For one thing, it was issued in two editions: a British edition and an American edition. These editions existed side by side but were not identical. The critic John Bryant, in his book The Fluid Text, says that Typee is the perfect example of a fluid text because we can't give one version of the work more authority than the other—both editions of the novel are authoritative.
Quote
The procession was led off by two venerable-looking savages, each provided with a spear, from the end of which streamed a pennon of milk-white tappa. After them went several youths, bearing aloft calabashes of poee-poee; and followed in their turn by four stalwart fellows, sustaining long bamboos, from the tops of which hung suspended, at least twenty feet from the ground, large baskets of green bread-fruit. Then came a troop of boys, carrying bunches of ripe bananas, and baskets made of the woven leaflets of cocoa-nut boughs, filled with the young fruit of the tree, the naked shells stripped of their husks peeping forth from the verdant wicker-work that surrounded them. Last of all came a burly islander, holding over his head a wooden trencher, in which lay disposed the remnants of our midnight feast, hidden from view, however, by a covering of bread-fruit leaves.
Analysis
In his analysis of the different editions of Typee in The Fluid Text, John Bryant noticed that the way that Melville wrote about the natives changed a lot from one edition to the other. In one edition, he was more likely to refer to them as "savages." In the other edition, he was more likely to refer to them as "islanders." In the passage above, we can in fact see that Melville uses both the terms "savage" and "islander" to talk about the natives.
What's interesting about that, as Bryant argues, is that it suggests that Melville was thinking and rethinking his ideas about the natives. "Savage," after all, has a very different connotation from "islander." Are these guys scary cannibals who might eat him? Or are they just like him, human beings like any others? That's the conflict that we see in Melville's shifting use of "savage" and "islander" in these two texts.