The natural goodness of the human heart and the moral blessings of a state of nature, were the themes of all Rousseau’s followers, and at that time all Europe was following Rousseau. The discovery of Tahiti, as Wallis and Commerson painted it, was the strongest possible proof that Rousseau was right. The society of Tahiti showed that European society had no real support in reason or experience, but should be abolished, with its absurd conventions, contrary to the natural rights and innate virtue of man. The French philosophers seriously used Tahiti for this purpose, and with effect, as every one knows. Wallis’s queen played a chief part in the European play, by exciting interest and sympathy; for the years before and after 1770 were sentimental, and, between Diderot’s Orou and Goethe’s Werter, the sentimental princess of Hawkesworth’s voyages was at home. As the queen, according to our family record, was our great-great-grandaunt Purea, or rather the wife of our great-great-granduncle, and as I know something about Tahitian women, and especially about this one by tradition, I will not deny that perhaps Dr. Hawkesworth may have added some color of rose to the story that Wallis had to tell; but this has nothing to do with the curious accident that Tahiti really influenced Europe, and that our great-great-grandaunt, "my princess, or rather, queen", was, without her own knowledge or consent, directly concerned in causing the French Revolution and costing the head of her sister queen, Marie Antoinette.

As Diderot and Commerson show, the interest felt in France for the state of nature in Tahiti was largely caused by the eternal dispute about marriage and the supposed laxity of Tahitian morals in regard to the relations of men and women. I say "supposed" because no one

Indigenous Histories