Descriptions of very different ways of organising social relations had a profound influence on European intellectuals, broadening their sense of social, political, cultural and economic possibilities. They assumed that the discovery of Europeans had equally profound effects among the Pacific Islanders who were simultaneously 'discovering' new ways of living and thinking. This chapter examines a sample of early cross-cultural encounters, from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, to try to grasp the ways in which some Islanders understood both the events and their implications for their own lives and ideas. When Europeans and Islanders 'discovered' each other, the self-conscious European explorers were fully expecting to grapple with strange languages, customs and modes of living and thinking. Epidemics of influenza, venereal diseases, tuberculosis and other afflictions did cause population decline and sometimes collapse: in extreme cases, such as Kosrae or Rapanui, populations of several thousands fell to a few hundred.