The revolution in Taiarapu is the starting-point of what we may call island history. It happened about a hundred years before Wallis discovered Tahiti; for the beautiful Taurua and Tetuaehuri were contemporaries, and while Taurua by her second marriage with the Papara chief, Tuiteral i arorua, became the source of our Papara family, Tetuaehuri by her marriage with Taaroa manahune became the source of the Pomares.

From this point our Papara genealogy seems clear. Amo of Papara, Cook's friend, was a gray-headed man in 1774, and his wife was five-and-forty in 1767; Amo was therefore born about 1720; since he was regarded by Cook as brother of Hapai or Teu, who must have been born as early as 1720. Amo's father, Tuiterai, must therefore have been born about 1690 or 1700; Tuiterai's father, Teriitahia, the son of Taurua, would be born between 1660 and 1670, which cannot have been very long after the date of the Rahui and the birth of Tetuaehuri's son.

Unfortunately these dates differ by two whole generations from the record of the Pomare genealogy. According to this, Tetuaehuri's son was Teu or Hapai, and lived until 1802, when he died, a very old man, well known for more than thirty years to all Europeans who visited Tahiti. He was about seventy years old in 1797, according to the misssionaries, who knew him intimately. He was supposed to be the oldest man in the island when he died, but no one seems to have supposed him to have been born before 1720. Even by shortening ten years each generation of the Papara genealogy, it cannot be made to coincide with the Pomares. Tetuaehuri should be not the mother but the great-grandmother, of Teu. Amo and Teu were contemporaries; their grandmothers should have been contemporaries; but, according to the genealogies, Teu's mother, Tetuaehuri, and Amo's great-grandmother, Taurua, were bearing their first children at about the same time. The Rahui, imposed after the birth of Taurua's first son, was broken by the birth of Tetuaehuri's first son.

Indigenous Histories