ABSTRACT
French captain and explorer Louis-Antoine de Bou gainville arrived in Tahiti in 1768 and proceeded to claim the island, which he named New Cytheria, for France. In the Treaty of Paris of 1763, France had forfeited almost all of its colonial possessions to England. Soon afterward, French seamen like Bougainville (an army officer with no formal naval training) were encouraged by King Louis XV to explore vast stretches of the Pacific, claiming island after island for France. These claims meant little to England and other Euro pean powers-or to France itself-at the time. From a com mercial standpoint, the Pacific islands were considered valueless in the eighteenth century. This assessment would change in the nineteenth century.
