When European eyes first gazed on the island jewels of the Pacific, there was no way of predicting the role that such territories might play in the future imperial chess game between the British and the French. Ferdinand Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe may have provided naming rights for the largest of the Earth's oceanic divisions, but the peaceful ocean seemed almost entirely empty to him. Apparently deceived by the unfortunate location and lack of water on the tiny atolls of the Disappointment Islands, it was only the western island of Guam that caught his attention on that historic voyage. Subsequent Spanish forays by Mendana de Neira into the South Seas discovered the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, the Solomon Islands and the Marquesas towards the end of the sixteenth century. Some decades later, in 1643, the Dutchman Abel Tasman sighted the Tongan archipelago and Fiji Islands. The prizes of the Pacific were, however, yet to be claimed.

It was the eighteenth century that brought the British and the French into the Pacific, with the discovery of Tahiti by Samuel Wallis in 1767. A year later, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville's arrival launched a torrent of utopian depictions of the island paradise, which was represented as Thomas More's ideal republic and the New Cythera: