The accounts of Commerson, Bougainville and Cook have engraved in the European imagination an idyllic image of the stay in Tahiti, a veritable paradise on earth, and of the hospitality offered by Tahitian men and women. However, a careful reading of the logbooks reveals a different reality : relations with the Tahitians were often tense, with numerous conflicts, misunderstandings and misunderstandings. The inaugural scene, often forgotten, is a real naval battle. On June 24 1767, ten months before Bougainville's arrival, the English ship Dolphin, commanded by Captain Samuel Wallis, opened fire on the Tahitian pirogues that tried to attack it, killing and wounding many islanders. Relations subsequently calmed down, but this show of force created an asymmetry between the two partners.
Exchanges then developed according to a dual modality : barter, or silent and immediate trade, quickly regulated by tacit conventions, and the personal alliance, based on gift and counter-gift, which the Tahitians called " tayo ", a term that the French and English have translated as " amitié " or " friendship ". Following Vanessa Smith's analysis, we can reflect on the ambiguities of this " friendship ", which Europeans translated into the new European language of affective and disinterested friendship, reproaching Tahitians for stealing objects from them. Conversely, they denounced the sailors' violence: "tayo maté" - you are our friends and you are killing us- was the cry of protest raised by Tahitian women in front of Bougainville.
In European stories, the sexual freedom of Tahitian women is a recurring theme. But the myth of the island of Cytherea, dedicated to the pleasures of love, is a fantasized and literary projection that covers a much more sordid reality, where young girls were encouraged, and perhaps forced, to have sexual relations with the newcomers. For anthropologist Serge Tcherkézoff, these practices were ritual ceremonies aimed at capturing the supernatural power of the Europeans, who would have totally misunderstood them as nothing more than a form of sexual hospitality. A reading of the texts suggests a more nuanced interpretation. The relationship between Tahitian women and sailors seems to fall within the double register of exchange described above : a sexual trade that gradually evolves into a form of prostitution ; the exchange of women as part of a personal alliance of the taio type. European navigators were partly aware of this : their accounts bear witness to an embarrassment that led them to describe troubling and contradictory details, while covering them with a literary discourse that complacently idealized the situation.
