Mangareva

The Mangareva are the Polynesian people of the Gambier Islands, a volcanic group at the south-eastern edge of the Tuamotu. Settled from the Society Islands around the year 1000, they lived in a stratified tribal society of warring clans, haunted by intermittent famine; canoe trade linked them with the Pitcairn Islands until deforestation between the tenth and fifteenth centuries broke the network.

Their scholars developed a binary-style counting system built on units of ten, twenty, forty and eighty, centuries before European binary arithmetic. Their pantheon included the war god Tu and the demi-god Māui.

British captain James Wilson arrived on the missionary ship Duff in 1797 and named the group after Admiral James Gambier. Civil war had shaken the islands when Catholic priests Honoré Laval and François Caret landed in 1834 and converted King Maputeoa, who was baptised in 1836.