TAHITI 



871 



Tantera, near Stevenson's Home. 



stevenson loved the beauty of this place and his descriptions, wonderful as they are, fail to do it 

 justice, but fail only, because no words of tongue or pen could adequately describe it. bougan- 

 ville, a famous frenchman, said of it, "l thought i was walking in the garden of eden." 



navigators, it was described to Eiirope 

 by Wallis (1767) and Bougainville 

 ( 1768) . They gave such a lively account 

 of the beauty of both island and people, 

 and of what they considered the idyllic 

 perfection of its semi- wild, semi-devel- 

 oped society, that much was written, 

 especially in philosophical France, to 

 argue that here was proof of the neces- 

 sity for return to nature by the human 

 race. 



Bougainville named it New Cytherea. 

 His companion, the naturalist Commer- 

 son, called it Utopia and wrote extrava- 

 gantly of the virtues which he said 

 flourished because the natives had no 

 conventional restraint. Diderot wrote 

 imaginary dialogues between Tahitian 

 philosophers and ship's chaplains, prov- 

 ing the immorality of marriage. In 

 England, Hawkesworth embroidered 

 Wallis' reports of the newly-discovered 

 Paradise until Horace Walpole de- 

 nounced him for his sentimentality. By 



some authorities it is believed that 

 these early reports of the remarkable 

 island, corroborating the theories of 

 Rousseau, actually influenced the French 

 Revolution and thus all Europe. 



Cook's and Forster's visits soon fol- 

 lowed (1769 to 1774), bringing fuller 

 information, and in 1788 England sent 

 Lieutenant Bligh in the Bounty to get 

 bread-fruit for introduction into her 

 tropical colonies. How his crew muti- 

 nied later, put back to Tahiti, sailed 

 from there again with a party of native 

 men and women, and disappeared from 

 the world until found long after on Pit- 

 cairn Island where they founded an 

 isolated colony that exists today, is 

 perhaps better known than any other 

 episode in Polynesian history. On the 

 whole, England seems to have been 

 more skeptical than France concerning 

 Tahitian manners, for her next step was 

 to send missionaries to improve them. 



