Trading Nature: Tahitians, Europeans and Ecological Exchange

When Captain Samuel Wallis became the first European to land at Tahiti in June 1767, he left a British flag on shore along with three guinea hens, a pair of turkeys, a pregnant cat, and a garden planted with peas for the chiefess Purea. Bougainville, Cook, Boenechea--all planted seeds of vegetables, grains, and fruit from Europe and elsewhere and gave breeding pairs of cattle, goats, sheep, and poultry to island chiefs. In turn, they were sent away with great quantities of important island resources, including valuable and spiritually significant pigs, trees, and fish. What did these exchanges mean? What was their impact? The answers are often unexpected. They also reveal the ways islanders retained control over their societies and landscapes in an era of increasing European intervention. Paradise Exchanged explores--from both the European and Tahitian perspective--the effects of "ecological exchange" in Tahiti from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Through a series of dramatic episodes, Paradise Exchanged uncovers the interweavings between chiefly power, ordinary Tahitians, European maritime ambitions, missionary endeavors, transplanted species, and existing ecologies. The long-term implications of these interweavings are important in not only the Tahiti-Europe encounter, but any cross-cultural exchange (particularly on island shores) in which plants and animals change places: Their ecological impact is always wide-ranging and rarely expected. Evidence of these transactions can be found in a rich variety of voyage journals, missionary diaries, Tahitian accounts, colonial records, traveler's tales, and a range of visual and material sources. The story progresses from the first trades on Tahiti's shores for provisions for British and French ships to the contrasting histories of cattle in Tahiti and Hawai'i. Two key exportations of species are analyzed: the great breadfruit transplantation project that linked Britain to Tahiti and the Caribbean and the politically volatile trade in salt-pork that ran between Tahiti and the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century. In each case, the imprint of the exchange on modern Tahiti is highlighted.