6 - Polynesian missions and the European imaginary

Summary

We have discovered them, and in a sort have brought them into existence

From the early European voyages of ‘discovery’ to South Pacific islands, interest in what were regarded as island paradises was intense. Romantic ideas about lost Edens, noble savages, and utopian island cultures pervaded European visions of the area, resulting in acute public attention and a subsequent demand for narrative accounts of these idealised locales. Within the British imagination, the South Pacific figured as a site of desire – desire for heroic discovery; desire for a prelapsarian state of nature; desire for the economic and strategic power which possession of the region promised; and desire for the social and sexual utopianism typifying European fantasies about the region and its people. When the LMS deputation led by Reverend Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet reached Taïti in September 1821, they wrote: ‘Tahiti, “the desire of our eyes”, came upon us at sunrise, in all its grandeur and loveliness; – more grand in the height of its mountains, and more lovely in the luxuriance of its valleys, than our imaginations had ever pictured it from the descriptions of former visitors and Missionaries.’

The South Pacific functioned as a very particular kind of colonial space. Whilst early European visitors went on to establish official colonies in places like Australia, European nations appeared reluctant to add the Pacific formally to their portfolio of overseas colonies.