ABSTRACT
The hoary myth that talking about sex was taboo before Freud, before our own emancipated' century, has now been well and truly scotched, above all by Michel Foucault in his sadly unfinished History of Sexuality. Tahiti possessed a ravishing beauty which disarmed its first discoverers. 'The country', wrote Captain Wallis, 'has the most delightful and romantic appearance that can be imagined'. The first brief encounter with Tahiti produced no written 'anthropology' of South Sea sexuality, but rather its assimilation, in Robertson's macho narrative, within a age-old tale of the commerce of horny sailors and easy women. Two years later Cook arrived, on the first of his three expeditions. The Tahitians thus won Cook's seal of approval ('the more one is acquainted with these people the better one likes them'), and he attempted to revive their reputation in the world's eyes, as he saw it, by vindicating their sexual regularity.
