History

Islanders had been living on their tiny outposts for thousands of years before Europeans had the foggiest notion that the Pacific Ocean existed. Even after Vasco Nuñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and discovered this largest of oceans in 1513, and Ferdinand Magellan sailed across it in 1521, more than 250 years went by before Europeans paid much attention to the islands that lay upon it.

Venus In A Grass Skirt -- The South Pacific came to Europe's attention during the latter half of the 18th century, when a theory came into vogue that an unknown southern land -- a terra australis incognita -- lay somewhere in the southern hemisphere. It had to exist, the theory went, for otherwise the unbalanced earth would wobble off into space. King George III of Great Britain took interest in the idea and in 1764 sent Capt. John Byron (the poet's grandfather) to the Pacific in HMS Dolphin. Although Byron came home empty-handed, King George immediately dispatched Capt. Samuel Wallis in the Dolphin. Wallis had no luck finding the unknown continent, but in 1767 he stumbled upon a high, lush island known as Tahiti.

Less than a year later, the Tahitians similarly welcomed French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville. So enchanted was Bougainville by the Venus-like quality of Tahiti's women that he named their island New Cythère -- after the Greek island of Cythera, associated with the goddess Aphrodite (Venus).

Bougainville brought a Tahitian home with him. Parisians saw the man as proof of Rousseau's theory that man at his best lived an uninhibited life as a noble savage.

Captain Cook's Tours -- After Wallis arrived back in England, the Lords of the Admiralty put a lieutenant named James Cook in command of a converted collier and sent him to Tahiti. A product of the Age of Enlightenment, Cook was a master navigator, a mathematician, an astronomer, and a practical physician who became the first ship captain to prevent scurvy among his crewmen by feeding them fresh fruits and vegetables. His ostensible mission was to observe the transit of Venus -- the planet, that is -- across the sun, an astronomical event that would not occur again until 1874. If measured from widely separated points on the globe, the astronomical event would enable scientists for the first time to determine longitude on the earth's surface. Cook's second, highly secret mission was to find the elusive southern continent.

Cook's measurements of Venus were somewhat less than useful, but his observations of Tahiti, made during a stay of 6 months, were of immense importance in understanding the "noble savages" who lived there.

Cook went on to discover the Society Islands northwest of Tahiti and the Australs to the south, and then fully explored the coasts of New Zealand and eastern Australia. After nearly sinking his ship on the Great Barrier Reef, he left the South Pacific through the strait between Australia and Papua New Guinea, which he named for his ship, the Endeavor. He returned to London in 1771.

During two subsequent voyages, Cook visited Tonga and discovered several other islands, among them what are now Fiji, the Cook Islands, Niue, New Caledonia, and Norfolk Island. His ships were the first to sail below the Antarctic Circle. On his third voyage in 1778-79, he traveled to the Hawaiian Islands and explored the northwest coast of North America until ice in the Bering Strait turned him back. He returned to Hawaii, where on February 14, 1779, he was killed in a skirmish with the islanders.

With the exception of the Hawaiians who smashed his skull, Captain Cook was revered throughout the Pacific. He treated the islanders fairly and respected their traditions. The Polynesian chiefs looked upon him as one of their own. So revered was Capt. Cook that today you'll find Cook's Bay, Cooktown, Cook Strait, any number of Captain Cook's Landing Places, and an entire nation named for this explorer.

Mutiny On The Bounty -- Based on reports by Cook and others about the abundance of breadfruit, a head-size, potato-like fruit that grows on trees throughout the islands, a group of West Indian planters asked King George III if he would be so kind as to transport the trees from Tahiti to Jamaica as a cheap source of food for the slaves. The king dispatched Capt. William Bligh, who had been one of Cook's navigators, in command of HMS Bounty in 1787. One of Bligh's officers was a former shipmate named Fletcher Christian.

Their story is one of history's great sea yarns. The Bounty was late arriving in Tahiti, so Christian and the crew frolicked on Tahiti for 6 months, waiting for the next breadfruit season. They obviously enjoyed the affections of young Tahitian women as well as the balmy climate, for on April 28, 1789, on the way home, they overpowered Bligh off Tonga. After setting the captain and his loyalists adrift, Christian and eight other mutineers, along with their Tahitian wives and six Tahitian men, disappeared with the ship. Bligh and his men miraculously rowed the Bounty's longboat some 4,830km (3,000 miles) to the Dutch East Indies, where they hitched a ride back to England. The Royal Navy then rounded up the Bounty crewmen left on Tahiti.

Christian's whereabouts remained a mystery until 1808, when a U.S. whaling ship discovered the last surviving mutineer on remote Pitcairn Island. The mutineers, after landing there in 1789, had burned and sunk the Bounty. Their descendants still live on Pitcairn and elsewhere in the South Pacific.

Recovering the Bounty's Rudder -- Sunk by the mutineers in 1789, HMS Bounty remained in its watery grave until it was discovered by a National Geographic expedition in the 1950s. The Bounty's rudder is now on display at the Fiji Museum in Suva.

Guns & Whiskey -- The U.S. ship that found the mutineers' retreat at Pitcairn was one of many whalers roaming the South Pacific in the early 1800s. Their ruffian crews made dens of iniquity of many ports, such as Lahaina and Honolulu in Hawaii, Papeete and Nuku Hiva in what is now French Polynesia, and Levuka in Fiji. Many crewmen jumped ship and lived on the islands, some of them even casting their lots -- and their guns -- with rival chiefs during tribal wars. With their assistance, some chiefs were able to extend their power over entire islands or groups of islands.

Along with the whalers came traders in search of sandalwood, pearls, shells, and the sea cucumbers known as bêches-de-mer, which they traded for beads, cloth, whiskey, and guns and then sold in China. Some established stores became the catalysts for Western-style towns. The merchants brought more guns and alcohol to people who had never used them before. They also put pressure on local leaders to coin money, which introduced a cash economy where none had existed before. Guns, alcohol, and money had far-reaching effects on the easygoing, communal traditions of the Pacific Islanders.

Diseases brought by the Europeans and Americans were even more devastating. The Polynesians had little, if any, resistance to such ailments as measles, influenza, tuberculosis, pneumonia, typhoid fever, and venereal disease. Epidemics swept the islands and killed the majority of their inhabitants.

While the traders were building towns, other arrivals were turning the bush country into plantations: cotton in Tahiti, sugar in Fiji, coconuts everywhere. With the native islanders disinclined to work, Chinese indentured laborers were brought to a cotton plantation in Tahiti in the 1860s. After it failed, some of the Chinese stayed and became farmers and merchants. Their descendants now form the merchant class of French Polynesia. Something similar happened in Fiji, where East Indians were brought to work the sugar plantations.

Bringing The Word Of God -- The reports of the islands by Cook and Bougainville may have brought word of noble savages living in paradise to some people in Europe; to others, they heralded heathens to be rescued from hell. So while alcohol and diseases were destroying the islanders' bodies, a stream of missionaries arrived on the scene to save their souls.

The "opening" of the South Pacific coincided with a fundamentalist religious revival in England, and it wasn't long before the London Missionary Society (LMS) was on the scene in Tahiti. Its missionaries, who arrived in 1797, were the first Protestant missionaries to leave England for a foreign country. They chose Tahiti because there "the difficulties were least."

Polynesians, already believing in a supreme being at the head of a hierarchy of lesser gods, quickly converted in large numbers. As an act of faith, the puritanical missionaries demanded the destruction of all tikis, which they regarded as idols. (As a result, today most Polynesian tikis carved for the tourist souvenir trade resemble those of New Zealand, where the more liberal Anglican missionaries were less demanding.) The missionaries in Polynesia also insisted that the heathen temples (known as maraes) be torn down. Many have now been restored, however, and can be visited.

Roman Catholic missionaries made less puritanical progress in Tahiti after the French took over in the early 1840s, but for the most part the South Pacific was the domain of rock-ribbed Protestants. The LMS extended its influence west through the Cook Islands and the Samoas, and the Wesleyans had luck in Tonga and Fiji. Today, thanks to those early missionaries, Sunday is a very quiet day throughout the islands.

Colonials Took Charge -- Although Captain Cook laid claim to many islands, Britain was reluctant to burden itself with such far-flung colonies, beyond those it already had -- Australia and New Zealand. Accordingly, colonialism was not a significant factor in the history of the South Pacific islands until the late 19th century. The one exception was France's declaring a protectorate over Tahiti in 1842.

This situation changed half a century later, when imperial Germany colonized the western islands of Samoa in the 1890s (at the same time that novelist Robert Louis Stevenson arrived to live there). Britain took over Fiji and agreed to protect the Kingdom of Tonga from takeover by another foreign power; France moved into New Caledonia; and the United States stepped into the eastern Samoan islands, which became known as American Samoa. Britain also claimed the Cook Islands, but they were later annexed by newly independent New Zealand. Thus, within a period of 30 years, every South Pacific island group except Tonga became an official colony.

After World War I, when Germany was stripped of its colonies, New Zealand took over in Western Samoa. Otherwise, the colonial structure in the South Pacific remained the same, politically, until the 1960s.

Large Australian companies, such as Burns Philp and Carpenters, built up island trading and shipping empires based on the exchange of retail goods for copra and other local produce, and Australia and New Zealand to this day dominate finance in most islands outside the French and U.S. territories.

Bases, Roads & Airstrips -- The South Pacific leaped onto the front pages in World War II. Although fighting took place only in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, many other islands played supporting roles. Airstrips and training bases were built all over the South Pacific; many airfields are still in use today. Out-of-the-way islands, such as Bora Bora and Aitutaki, became refueling stops, and the Samoas and Fiji were invaded by thousands of U.S. Marines and GIs preparing for the fighting farther west and north. Entire communities with modern infrastructures were built in weeks -- only to be abandoned almost overnight when the war ended.

Chiefs, Ministers & Nuclear Bombs -- Colonialism began to crumble in the South Pacific when New Zealand granted independence to Western Samoa in 1962. Three years later, it gave complete local autonomy to the Cook Islands. Fiji became independent of Great Britain in 1970.

All these young nations have governments based on the Westminster parliamentary system, with wrinkles tailored to fit their citizens' traditions. Almost everywhere, a council of chiefs advises the modern-style ministers on custom and tradition. Fiji's bloodless military coups of 1987, which overthrew that country's first Indo-Fijian-dominated government, shocked observers because it directly opposed this democratic tradition. Fiji has since adopted a constitution that provides for an elected parliament.

Of the old colonial powers, only the United States and France remain.

Between 1966 and 1992, the French exploded 210 nuclear weapons in the Tuamotu Archipelago, about 1,208km (750 miles) southeast of Tahiti, first in the air and then underground. Led by New Zealand, where French secret agents sank the Greenpeace protest ship Rainbow Warrior in 1985, many South Pacific island nations vociferously complained about the blasts. That same year, the regional heads of government, including the prime ministers of New Zealand and Australia, adopted the Treaty of Rarotonga, calling for the South Pacific to become a nuclear-free zone. After a lull, French Pres. Jacques Chirac decided in 1995 to resume nuclear testing, a move that set off worldwide protests, a day of rioting in Papeete, and a Japanese tourist boycott of French Polynesia. After six underground explosions, the French halted further tests, closed its testing facility, and signed the Treaty of Rarotonga.