Louis Becke’s experience as a Pacific Island trader is reflected in his first collection of short fiction, By Reef and Palm (1894). The collection is notable for its narrative style, especially for employing framed and also first-person plural narration, thereby creating a “traders’ voice” that expresses the concerns and perspectives of traders and crew on vessels plying the Pacific. This “traders’ voice” demonstrates shared knowledge of all parts of the vast ocean, its islands, atolls and reefs as well as its peoples. This knowledge is most often concerned with relations between white men and Pacific Islander women, which are maintained by violence, either enacted or threatened. Trained in writing for the Australian Bulletin magazine, Becke’s prose is spare, unemotional, and focussed on actions rather than the interiority of any of its characters. This had wide appeal in his era, especially among male readers. In demonstrating such knowledge of the Pacific, Becke constructs a literary map that makes the region available to the imperial imagination as a field for expansion.