This second session is devoted to setting the scene for the meeting, on the eve of Wallis and Bougainville's arrival in Tahiti, by nuancing the usual opposition between Europeans driven by scientific curiosity and a spirit of adventure, and Tahitians trapped in their island world and traditional beliefs. The curiosity of the former is undeniable, but it is based above all on a geographical error, a false belief shared by the greatest European scientists : the existence of a vast southern continent. This ancient hypothesis once again fired the imagination of European scientists from the mid-18th century onwards. Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, buoyed by his expedition to Lapland and his status as Secretary of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, published a Lettre sur le progrès des sciences, in which he imagined himself conversing with the inhabitants of the South Seas, " wild men, hairy men, wearing tails, a species halfway between the apes and us ". In his Histoire des navigations aux terres australes, President de Brosses continued the debate, arguing in favor of a major expedition to the Pacific. He was enthusiastic about the riches this unknown continent had to offer, and the glory the French monarchy would derive from its discovery.
On the other side of the world, according to an oral tradition collected by English missionaries in the early 19th century, a priest of the god Oru prophesied the arrival of foreigners on a large outriggerless pirogue to destroy ancestral customs. Is this prophecy to be believed, or is it merely a retrospective construction ? What sources can we draw on to learn about the history of Tahiti before the arrival of Europeans ? In the case of Tahiti, as in other comparable cases, a critical approach to the documentation casts doubt on the theme of prophecy or omens announcing the arrival of Europeans. On the other hand, it is quite possible that Tahitians remembered the sinking of the Afrikansee Galei, one of the ships of the Dutch Jabob Roggeveen expedition, in the Tuamotu in 1722. When the English arrived in 1767, they would have been neither terrified nor amazed : they were already aware of the existence of pale-skinned men traveling on large ships without outriggers.
