When Captain Cook first set sail for Tahiti in 1769, the Pacific twin-island archipelago was already considered “pacified” in London. Its British “discoverer” Samuel Wallis had created precedent two years earlier with the “Massacre of Matavai,” in which more than 300 men who had resisted his rule, but also women and children were killed by the guns of the British frigate Dolphin. The ship’s pilot, George Robertson, recorded in the Dolphin’s log: „… how terrible must they be shockd to see their nearest and dearest of friends dead, and toarn to pieces in such a manner as I am certain they never beheald before.”
In fact, the British took possession of the island with their overwhelming firearms – the Tahitians called it “the breath that kills from afar” – as King George III took possession of the island. With their violence, they ensured that the islanders would welcome English ships with a green palm branch, the Tahitian symbol of peace. Tahiti had already been weakened. For decades, individual island districts and their god-like aristocratic rulers (Tahitian: ari'i rahi) had fiercely fought each other. Such internal warfare had not been seen in the 2500 years since Polynesian double-hulled canoes arrived to colonize the island. Under these circumstances, Captain Cook dropped anchor in Matavai Bay, north of Tahiti. He soon established trade with the islanders at Point Venus, as the British navigator called his harbor, and supplied the ships with provisions for his ambitious expeditions across the Pacific. The British navigator returned to Tahiti and the Society Islands in August 1773, April 1774, and August 1777. Tahitian women were of particular interest to Cook’s sailors – after the ships returned to Europe, an eroticized Tahitian myth quickly took hold.
Indeed, Tahiti seemed paradisiacal to many of Cook’s traveling companions who had left famine-stricken Europe for the Pacific. For example, Georg Forster, Cook’s German naturalist draftsman on his second voyage around the world, noted in his travel chronicle “Voyage around the World”: “The calm contented state of the natives; their simple way of life; the beauty of the landscape; the excellence of the climate; the abundance, salubrity, and delicious taste of the fruits, were all together enchanting, and filled the heart with rapture.”