Captain Cook was a skilled sailor and mature in his judgment of the people he encountered in the Pacific. While Bougainville had developed a romantic notion of the Tahitians, Cook reserved judgment until he had gained an understanding of the local culture and mores. One factor in the success of Cook's voyages to the Pacific is the support that his expeditions received from the Royal Society.
It was the strategies that members of the Royal Society had developed for combating scurvy that resulted in Cook's second voyage returning home to Great Britain without the loss of a single life. From that point forward, explorations of the Pacific and consequent incipient commercialization became almost routine.
The arrival of HMS Dolphin in Tahiti in 1767, which had heralded Captain James Cook's Endeavour, had been foretold by a priest, named Vaita, who had gone into a trance and had announced that a new kind of people were coming to their island. Vaita had been more perceptive than perhaps he may have realized.
And this land will be taken by them
The old rules will be destroyed
And sacred birds of the land and the sea
Will also arrive here, will come and lament
Over that which this lopped tree has to teach
They are coming up on a canoe without an outrigger
(39).
The lopped tree refers to an incident that took place at a sacred place - a tapu-tapu-tea, which can be roughly translated as temple. A marauding party from Bora Bora, had destroyed the grounds around the temple some time before the arrival of the Dolphin. The purpose of this attack was to destroy the mana of the people of the Island of Tahiti and thereby subjugate them so that a new and vengeful god could be brought in. The arrival of this new and vengeful god, a short time prior to the advent of the Europeans resulted in the culture of the people of Tahiti being in a state of flux.
In Tahiti, the culture was bombarded by two events. The first catastrophe was of course the attacks by warriors from Bora Bora and the second was the ever-increasing presence of Europeans in the Pacific (35). This is where we come to the part where one of Vaita's predictions seems to have come true.
"The impression that the Dolphin's men, were closely linked with the gods must have been reinforced by a strange episode on 5 July, when some of the sailors caught a large female shark and shot it in the head with their muskets. For some reason, they decided to tow this shark ashore, and left it on the beach at the watering- place. They had no idea that the Teva people claimed descent from a Shark God, who had slept with the wife of a high chief while he was away collecting red feathers for his son's feather girdle" (46).
