In 1767 the British naval officer Samuel Wallis reached Tahiti during a Pacific voyage. His visit was one of the first recorded European encounters with the island. It opened a new phase of contact, exchange, misunderstanding and representation in the South Pacific.

European accounts of Tahiti profoundly affected travel writing, Enlightenment speculation and later poetry about paradise and innocence. They also filtered Polynesian oral cultures through outsiders' narratives, often distorting the voices they claimed to describe.