On this calculation Eimeo should have had a total number of about forty thousand inhabitants, and on the same scale Tahiti should have had one hundred and sixty thousand, which makes two hundred thousand in all, as Cook estimated it. At all events, one cannot resist the evidence that between one hundred and fifty thousand and two hundred thousand persons at the least were then living in these little islands where some twelve or thirteen thousand now exist. The population was known to be excessive even for a race so simple in its wants. A single bread-fruit tree was often owned by two or more families, who disputed each other's rights of property over the branches. Infanticide was habitual.

Taking the smaller number of one hundred and fifty thousand, and supposing that, on an average, every mile of coast supported a thousand persons, if the main island of Tahiti and its peninsula of Taiarapu contained a population of one hundred and twenty thousand people along its coast line of one hundred and twenty miles, the Tevas and their coanections must have numbered more than eighty thousand; but the four districts which belong to the inner Tevas -- Papara, Atimaono, Mataiea and Vaiari -- covering about thirty miles of coast, would, on the same scale, have numbered about thirty thousand only, and these are the districts which made the home of the Papara family whose chief was, when Wallis and Cook arrived, the head-chief -- Ariirahi -- of the Teva connection, or, as they thought, the king.

Every one who has tried to tell the story of Tahiti has had to struggle

Indigenous Histories