ABSTRACT
Many people have fallen in love with the islands: navigators, adventurers, sailors and ship's doctors has felt the need to explain to their contemporaries, relations, friends and readers what Tahiti was, or at least what the island meant to them. Running parallel with the unfolding of the main image of Tahiti in the western consciousness, people can observe the development of a critical trend, the result of more objective observation of what was going on in Tahiti and the Marquesas islands. Instead of a New Cythera, a land of delight where Love and Reason reigned, Tahiti became confused in the world of the imagination with iniquitous Babylon. It is easy to see that the image of Tahiti in the twentieth century has been exploited by tourism and advertising. The island of Wallis, Bougainville, Loti and Melville plays an archetypal role, but it also and primarily constitutes a market from which the maximum profit must be extracted.
