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.

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.