History, Johns Hopkins University

Venus Rising:
Uses of Tahiti in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination

Antoine-Louis de Bougainville landed on Tahiti in 1768, calling it “The New Cythera” after the island on which Venus had been born. Thanks to Bougainville’s descriptions and those of Captain Cook in 1776-9, Tahiti became the image of a tropical paradise of unrestrained sensuality whose inhabitants lived out their lives wholly in accordance with the laws of nature. For those who read Bougainville and Cook, the Tahitians became a means of measuring and criticizing prevailing European views of pleasure, nature, and the place of culture in the creation of the human personality. They seemed to offer a last glimpse, before the missionaries and the settlers took over, of what mankind might once have been. They were the last, and most vivid of the “Noble Savages,” and they and their fate served to illustrate a crisis in the European moral imagination.