ABSTRACT
This chapter combines the historical archival turn with the Spanish attempt to settle on the island of Tahiti in the late eighteenth century. It reads this episode through the looking glass of primary and secondary literature. Through such writings, the short-lived Spanish settlement took on a decisive missionary bias, which blamed the Tahitians and their customs for the venture’s failure. Unlike the Franco-British vision that heralded Tahiti as a Romantic ideal, the Spanish condemnation of the population also prevented an expansion from encompassing the novelty of the Pacific in the archival holdings in the central archive in Seville. This episode contributes to an understanding as to why the Pacific and its many islands remain a conceptual blind spot in Spanish archives.
