For good reason, artists and writers alike have portrayed these islands as paradise on earth. And paradise they must have seemed to the seafarers of old who first saw them and settled there perhaps a thousand or more years ago. These remarkable pioneers, whose roots apparently go back to Southeast Asia, were among the forefathers of the people we now know as Polynesians. Over the centuries, they fanned out from established island bases and sailed ever farther into the vast Pacific, making its myriad islands and atolls their domain.

Europeans Arrive

Spaniard Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira discovered some of the Marquesas Islands in 1595. Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, who had served under Mendaña de Neira, found part of the Tuamotu Archipelago in 1606. Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen discovered Bora Bora, Makatéa, and Maupiti in 1722. In 1767, Captain Samuel Wallis, aboard the British warship Dolphin, went ashore at Tahiti, the largest island in French Polynesia. The following year French navigator Captain Louis-Antoine de Bougainville did likewise.

Impressed by the beauty of the island and amazed at the amorous ways of its inhabitants, Bougainville named Tahiti “Nouvelle Cythère, after the Peloponnesian Island of Kithira near which Aphrodite [the goddess of love and beauty] was said to have risen from the sea,” says the book Cook & Omai​—The Cult of the South Seas. British explorer James Cook visited Tahiti four times, from 1769 to 1777. He named the Society Islands, the archipelago that includes Tahiti.

Following the explorers came the missionaries. The most effective were those sent out by the London Missionary Society, a Protestant-backed institution. Two of its missionaries, Henry Nott and John Davies, accomplished the mammoth task of putting the Tahitian language into written form and then translating the Bible into that language. To this day, the Tahitian Bible is extensively used in French Polynesia, especially in the many islands where the Protestant Church holds sway. Adventist, Catholic, and Mormon missionaries also had a measure of success. The Catholic Church, for instance, has a strong foothold in the Marquesas, Gambiers, and eastern Tuamotus.

How did the five archipelagoes become a French territory? Beginning in 1880, France progressively annexed the islands, forming a new French colony. Papeete, Tahiti, was made the capital, and the people of the territory were extended French citizenship. In 1946, France designated the islands an overseas territory, and in 1957 the territory adopted the name French Polynesia.