Maohi

The Māʼohi, or Tahitians, are the indigenous Polynesian people of Tahiti and the other Society Islands. Their ancestors reached the islands around 400, sailing by way of the Cook Islands from the Samoan homeland. Society was split into the chiefly ariʼi, the landholding raʼatira and the commoner manahune; rival districts fought with war canoes.

Sustained European contact began in 1767, when Samuel Wallis brought the British ship Dolphin into Matavai Bay. The chief Tu, later called Pōmare, used European weapons to unite Tahiti, Moorea and neighbouring islands by 1788 and found the Pōmare dynasty, whose rulers turned to Protestantism in the 1810s.

Diseases from visiting ships cut the population from perhaps 110,000 at contact to roughly 15,300 by 1830, while the Pōmare kings extended their influence over the Society Islands, the Austral Islands and the Tuamotu Archipelago.