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This chapter examines the seizure of Tahiti by French warships and the long resistance of Queen Pomare and chiefly leaders from around the Polynesian islands. The story focuses on the ways that the history of Tahiti, so torn by violence, civil war, and anticolonial struggle, was erased by French imperialists so that by the middle 19th century the primary representations became “islands of love.” Analyses of written and visual production, particularly the works of Pierre Loti and Paul Gauguin, demonstrate the ways that erotic loves of Tahitian “natives” came to occlude violent warfare, and the complicated implications of battles and alliances between the Queen and French Naval officers struggling for control of the Society Islands.

This chapter explores three cases—Tahiti, the Loyalty Islands, and Madagascar—in order to illustrate how Protestants from the Société des Missions Évangéliques de Paris (or Paris Mission) negotiated working in colonies alongside French Catholics. In each situation, the Paris Mission defended a missionary internationalism against a colonial nationalism, which both the French state and Catholic missionaries sought to impose by associating Protestantism with allegiance to the British Empire. The Paris Mission viewed this association of politics and religion as a trap meant to subordinate apostolic work to a political project.

This chapter traces the legal history of Pitcairn Island. Many of the original settlers were murdered, and their Tahitian womenfolk were ill-treated — and there was no machinery of justice, at least of the kind that modern lawyers would recognize as such — to deal with these activities. There was much coming and going of residents, the addition of new blood from time to time, a brief forced deportation to Tahiti in 1831, and a transportation to Norfolk Island (a penal colony until 1855) in 1856. There were various assertions of authority over Pitcairn by the British Crown from 1813, and particularly from 1856. And, from about 1886, Seventh Day Adventist practices were adopted on Pitcairn. In 1898, the Crown brought Pitcairn within the operation of the British Settlements Act, and within its definition of a colony, in response to the need to try Harry Christian for the murder of two people on the island. Thereafter some measures were taken by the British to put in place a criminal justice system, at least on paper. But there was still no British presence on the island until the criminal proceedings in Christian were underway, and there were only a couple of brief visits — one by a legal adviser in 1958 and one by the Governor in 1973. This indicates a laxity on the part of the British to the point of turpitude.

The role of Polynesia in the French Empire was more strategic than economic, but its sensitive location was of great interest. Victor Segalen's own first major literary work, Les Immémoriaux, has been recognized as one of the only early twentieth-century attempts to analyse Tahitian difference and to strive towards textual recreation of that very difference. For Segalen, the aesthetic attraction of exoticism is in the struggle to maintain difference rather than in the acceptance of the inevitability of its decline. Segalen's attitude to the role of Empire in the transformation of Polynesian culture and society is muted not only by its displacement into the context of early nineteenth-century evangelism, but also by the author's tendency to consider the processes of colonialism in the wider context of Westernization. The narrative of Les Immémoriaux is both obviously prescriptive and latently normative, suggesting a specifically Maori omniscience without any claims to universality.

This chapter describes the island of Tahiti. The place consists of two peninsulas—both of which are circular with an isthmus of low land about two or three miles long. The larger peninsula is called Tahiti Nui or Great Tahiti, which is about 80 miles in circumference, while the smaller one is called Tahiti Iti or Taiarapu, which is about 30 miles in circumference. Tahiti is, in most parts, defended by a reef of corals in some places, which are a mile or two from the shore, and within which lie several small black and white beaches. In addition, both peninsulas are mountainous and covered with different trees.

This chapter covers Milestone’s life until his death in 1980. During this time he directed two high-profile features. Warner Brothers’ Ocean’s Eleven, a widely-imitated heist movie set in the Las Vegas casinos, starred the celebrated and notorious “Rat Pack” led by Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, as a group of army buddies out to make a fast buck. Milestone next took over from fired director Carol Reed MGM’s expensive blockbuster epic Mutiny on the Bounty, shot under difficult conditions in Tahiti, along with its difficult star, Marlon Brando. Warner Brothers then hired Milestone to direct PT-109, about John Kennedy, but fired him after a month. In his last years Milestone directed a few episodes for television, but found TV work unsatisfying.

Like 1 & 2, this chapter sketches the broad shape of Ra’iatean society through the story of Mai’s ancestry and childhood, once again thwarting common assumptions about who gets remembered as an object of anthropology and who gets granted the dynamism of history. Mai was born around 1753 on Ra‘iatea in the Tahitian archipelago. When Mai is ten his homeland is overtaken by marauding Bora Borans; his father is killed and his remaining family flees to Tahiti. From his teens, Mai harbours a lifelong obsession to avenge his rightful inheritance. Through the late 1760s, Mai witnesses British and French ships “discover” his islands. Rather than a menace, however, he decides they represent the means to enact his vengeful dream. Mai secures a berth for himself to Britain via James Cook’s second Pacific expedition. If Ostenaco’s life mirrors eighteenth-century Cherokee society and Reynolds’s life represents the conflicts within his world, then Mai’s life is that of the outsider to his own culture, looking in. His view of eighteenth-century Ra‘iatea is filtered through the experiences of a refugee from it—crucially a refugee created by internal politics rather than European forces. Mai’s life is most characterised by a determination to use foreign empire for his own ends as much as possible.

The final chapter traces Mai’s voyage back from Britain to the Pacific. This voyage was arranged by the British government and led, again, by James Cook. Mai experiences various adventures during the voyage, including some altercations with different indigenous groups. In New Zealand, Mai secures two Maori boys to join him as servants. His arrival on Tahiti proves moving for Islanders and British alike. Here Mai reunites with a sister and an aunt, wrangles with a chief, and acquires a large canoe. Mai expects to be deposited back on Ra‘iatea, but Cook at the last minute decides against it, fearing Islander conflagration, and takes him to Huahine instead. Disappointed, Mai is at least gratified to have Cook’s men build him a house. In many ways, Mai’s plotline is the most tragic of the three characters: he begins as a refugee from his own society and never fulfils his dream of restitution. Even so, Mai offers at least one small twist to the old tale—European empire never steals the limelight in his story; instead, Mai turns the tables by employing European empire, almost entirely on his own terms, to seek his ultimate end.

This chapter suggests the case that it would have enabled canoes in Polynesia to sail much better than Andrew Sharp and other critics allowed. Long voyages to windward made by tacking directly against the wind may have been out of the question for Polynesian mariners, but it seemed to the author that their canoes sailed well enough to windward to have cut obliquely across the wind to destinations which would have been beyond their reach if they could only sail before the wind. The chapter discusses a way to test the ability of a Polynesian double canoe to sail long slants across and slightly into the trade winds: the legendary voyaging track between Hawai'i and Tahiti by the catamaran Rehu Moana. In 1967, after completing the Nālehia tests, an article outlining how a traditionally navigated voyaging canoe could be sailed from Hawai'i to Tahiti and back was published.

This chapter explains that the purpose in building Hōkūle'a and then sailing her to Tahiti was actually twofold. In addition to resolving issues about seafaring in Polynesia, the canoe and the voyage were intended to serve as vehicles for the revitalization of the culture of Hawai'ians and other Polynesians. In the centuries that have followed their disastrous encounter with the outside world and its epidemic diseases, weapons, and institutions, Hawai'ians, and to a greater or lesser extent other Polynesian groups, have become more and more alienated from their heritage of oceanic exploration and voyaging. Before the project, the great majority of Hawai'ians knew little or nothing about sailing canoes, traditional navigation methods, or the rich oral literature about voyaging back and forth between Hawai'i and Tahiti that inspired the voyagers' plan. It was this estrangement from seafaring skills and traditions that the voyage was intended to reverse.

This chapter addresses the third basic adaptation for oceanic expansion by analyzing how, in 1986, Hōkūle'a sailed eastward across Polynesia from Samoa to Tahiti by utilizing westerly wind shifts. In making his case for the origin in America of the Polynesians, Thor Heyerdahl claimed that the islands of Polynesia could not have been colonized directly from the west because “the permanent trade winds and forceful companion currents of the enormous Southern Hemisphere” would have prevented canoe sailors from the Asian side of the ocean from sailing through tropical latitudes to the east. Instrumented sailing trials with the Hawai'ian double canoe Nālehia, and the long slant across and slightly into the trade winds made by Hōkūle'a when sailing from Hawai'i to Tahiti in 1976, indicate that a double canoe progresses most efficiently to windward when she is sailed “full and by.”

The voyage Hōkūle'a made in 1976 from Hawai'i to Tahiti and back set a new standard in experimental voyaging, for it was the first time a reconstructed craft had sailed both ways over a long oceanic course. Hōkūle'a's passage to Tahiti and back in 1980 replicated the 1976 voyage and extended its significance in that both legs were navigated without instruments. Considered together, the first leg of the Voyage of Rediscovery from Hawai'i to Tahiti in 1985 and the last leg from Tahiti back to Hawai'i in 1987 comprise the canoe's third roundtrip between these two centers of Polynesia. To have made not one but three roundtrip crossings between such distantly separated islands stands as an accomplishment unparalleled in the field of experimental voyaging, particularly since Hōkūle'a was guided by noninstrument navigation techniques on all legs except the return one to Hawai'i in 1976.

This chapter states that there was something special, Nainoa Thompson went on to say, about those who sailed Hōkūle'a back to Hawai'i on the last, homecoming leg of the voyage. In addition to veteran sailors from Hawai'i, the crew included representatives from all over Polynesia. This transformation of Hōkūle'a into a symbol of resurgent pride, and the way this voyage galvanized Hawai'ians and other Polynesians, demonstrates how far the revival of culture has progressed since the idea of combining experimental and cultural goals had first been floated a decade and a half earlier. As an effort in cultural revival, the project shares much with other initiatives around the world wherein people consciously seek to re-create and elaborate ancestral ways for contemporary purposes. The chapter also explores the legendary basis behind the choice of the Hawai'i–Tahiti route as the seaway over which Hōkūle'a was initially tested.

Lahontan’s literary dialogue with the wise and well-travelled Huron Adario pioneered a genre which pitted clever dialectical savages against slow-witted Europeans. Adario contrasts the virtues of natural religion and natural equality, in the economic and political domains, with the moral decadence of contemporary France. Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality goes further by imagining an asocial humanity, fully free and equal but also profoundly amoral and incapable of transmitting any learned knowledge. Society, for Rousseau, contains the seeds of inequality, but property is the real driving force for social injustice. Diderot reprised the dialogue form used by Lahontan, pitting the Tahitian Orou against a French chaplain whose attempts to defend organized religion and repressive sexual morality fail miserably. These French Enlightenment thinkers all mobilize ideals of Nature to address issues of religion, politics, economics, and sexual morality.

This concluding chapter looks back to the lessons discussed in the previous chapters in drawing out the major themes the above scenes of ecological exchange imply. Selecting Tahiti as a focus, a place where ecological exchanges were particularly well documented, has rendered visible the processes by which ecologies and cultures alter each other. Tahitians engaged with Europeans more fully and from earlier in the eighteenth century than did other Pacific islanders, and their exchanges were complex. This chapter shows how those exchanges are still in effect even at present time, with contemporary Tahiti still engaging in the process of ecological and cultural exchange—and with the motivations behind the exchanges being as varied as ever, and continuing with nearly as little interest in the consequences as in the eighteenth century.