BY the early nineteenth century, the British were looking back at the Otaheite craze of the 1770s with some embarrassment. In the years after Cook's first expedition, the Encyclopaedia Londinensis recalled in 1821, ‘the public discourse was about nothing but Otaheite and its beautiful girls, and queen Oberea, and king Otoo, and his wise and accomplished privy-counsellor Tupia’. This brief public mania, the writer adds, ‘excited some degree of ridicule on the continent’.

Still, ‘Otaheite and its beautiful girls’, as late as 1823, retained enough imaginative force to provide Byron with the unspoken model for the Oceanic island of ‘Toobonai’ in The Island. Byron's Toobonai, which will be examined in more detail in Chapter 3, preserves essentially unchanged the key ideas about Tahiti introduced to the metropolis decades earlier by the navigators Samuel Wallis and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville. Wallis's violent encounter with Tahiti initially had little significant impact on ‘the public Attention’, according to one contemporary newspaper. However, Bougainville's publication of a narrative, Voyage autour du monde, was successful in France, where the court and salons were also entertained by the visit of the Tahitian Ahutoru. After the book's translation into English in 1772, it sold well in the British metropolis. Alongside Denis Diderot's Supplément (written in the 1770s although only published in 1796), Bougainville's account of the nine days he had spent on the island famously presented Tahiti as a Nouvelle-Cythère in which the ideals of libertine Enlightenment philosophy came to life. A naturally healthy climate and a simple lifestyle, metropolitans read, produced a nation of happy, handsome men, and fair, submissive women. Tahitian society was disturbed by little or no crime or deprivation, and was characterised by sensuality and sexual freedom. ‘The very air which the people breathe, their songs, their dances’, Bougainville claimed, ‘all conspire to call to mind the sweets of love.’ Yet, superficially appealing as the Nouvelle-Cythère was, nine days (as part of a long and controversial colonial voyage) was not a long enough visit to gather material that could sustain European curiosity for more than a few months.

By the time Bougainville's voyage was published in English, the British Admiralty had already sent the Endeavour, captained by the naval lieutenant James Cook, to make astronomical observations from Tahiti.