What did Tahiti hold for me?  I thought vaguely of its history.  The world first knew its existence only about the time that the American colonies were trying to separate themselves from Great Britain.  An English naval captain happened on the island, and thought himself the first white man there, though the Spanish claim its discovery.  The Englishman called it King George Island, after the noted Tory monarch of his day; but a Frenchman, a captain and poet, the very next spring named it the New Cytherea, esteeming its fascinations like the fabled island of ancient Greek lore.  It remained for Captain James Cook, who, before steam had killed the wonder of distance and the telegraph made daily bread of adventure and discovery, was the hero of many a fireside tale, to bring Tahiti vividly before the mind of the English world.  That hardy mariner’s entrancing diary fixed Tahiti firmly in the thoughts of the British and Americans.  Bougainville painted such an ecstatic picture that all France would emigrate.  Cook set down that Otaheite was the most beautiful of all spots on the surface of the globe.  He praised the people as the handsomest and most lovable of humans, and said they wept when he sailed.  That was to him of inestimable value in appraising them.

About the beginning of the nineteenth century the first English missionaries in the South Seas thanked God for a safe passage from their homes to Tahiti, and for a virgin soil and an affrightingly wicked people to labor with.  The English, however, did not seize the island, but left it for the French to do that, who first declared it a protectorate, and made it a colony of France, in the unjust way of the mighty, before the last king died.  They had come ten thousand miles to do a wretched act that never profited them, but had killed a people.

All this discovery and suzerainty did not interest me much, but what the great captains, and Loti, Melville, Becke, and Stoddard, had written had been for years my intense delight.  Now I was to realize the dream of childhood.  I could hardly live during the days of the voyage.

I remembered that Europe had been set afire emotionally by the first reports, the logs of the first captains of England and France who visited Tahiti.  In that eighteenth century, for decades the return to nature had been the rallying cry of those who attacked the artificial and degraded state of society.  The published and oral statements of the adventurers in Tahiti, their descriptions of the unrivaled beauty of the verdure, of reefs and palm, of the majestic stature of the men and the passionate charm of the women, the boundless health and simple happiness in which they dwelt, the climate, the limpid streams, the diving, swimming, games, and rarest food—­all these had stirred the depressed Europe of the last days of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth centuries beyond the understanding by us cynical and more material people.  The world still had its vision of perfection.