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The earliest written accounts of Tahiti date from the 1760s and 1770s when a succession of European voyagers arrived at the island. The first of these was the Englishman Samuel Wallis in 1767, followed by the Frenchman Louis de Bougainville in 1768 and then James Cook in 1769. The subsequent colonisation of Tahiti was slow and marked by co-operation between the two major European powers in the region, with French and British influence on the island alternating until the mid-nineteenth century. British missionaries arrived in 1797 and by the 1820s had established a virtual Protestant theocracy across the Tahitian archipelago. The arrival of French Catholic missionaries in the 1830s resulted in tension between the two missions and a French protectorate being established in 1842. Both missions persisted but Britain accepted French claims to the group in the 1847 Declaration of London, and French annexation of the islands was completed in the 1880s. British and French writing about Tahiti has a similar history of intersection and mutual influence. Bougainville’s Voyage Autour du Monde (1771) was translated into English the following year by the father-and-son team of J. R. and George Forster, the German-born but English-domiciled scientists who sailed on Cook’s second voyage in 1772 to 1775, and whose own subsequent accounts of the voyage are a vital source of knowledge of the Pacific at this time. This cross-Channel discourse inaugurated a tradition that has persisted so strongly that to concentrate entirely on anglophone travel writing would be to distort the picture.
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