European explorers projected a sexual paradise fantasy onto Tahiti

Evidence

When Captain Cook arrived in Tahiti in 1769, the same idyll of a sexual paradise was repeated all over again. The women were extremely beautiful, the vegetation lush and tropical, the life simple, innocent, and free; Nature nourished the people without the apparent necessity to work or cultivate; the sexuality was open and unashamed—untroubled by the burden of European guilt. The naturalist on Bougainville’s voyage to the Pacific said that the Tahitians were “without vice, prejudice, needs or dissention and knew no other god but Love” (Moorhead 1968, 51). “In short,” Joseph Banks, the gentleman-scientist who accompanied Cook, observed, “the scene that we saw was the truest picture of an Arcadia, of which we were going to be kings, that the imagination can form” (quoted in Moorhead 1987, 38). As Cook’s biographer, J. C. Beaglehole, remarks: “They were standing on the beach of the dream-world already, they walked straight into the Golden Age and embraced their nymphs” (quoted in Moorhead 1968, 66). The West’s contemporary image of tropical paradise and exotic holidays still owes much to this fantasy. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 617

Categorization

• XREF: This is a key instance of European projection onto the Other — directly parallel to the Orientalist fantasy construction that downstream Islamophobia readings will apply to the Muslim Other.