File:American forestry (1910-1923) (17959891379).jpg

Title: American forestry
Identifier: americanforestry201914amer (find matches)
Year: 1910-1923 (1910s)
Authors: American Forestry Association
Subjects: Forests and forestry
Publisher: Washington, D. C. : American Forestry Association
Contributing Library: The LuEsther T Mertz Library, the New York Botanical Garden
Digitizing Sponsor: The LuEsther T Mertz Library, the New York Botanical Garden

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TAHITI 871
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Tantera, near Stevenson's Home. stevenson loved the beauty of this place and his descriptions, wonderful as they are, fail to do it justice, but fail only, because no words of tongue or pen could adequately describe it. bougan- ville, a famous frenchman, said of it, "l thought i was walking in the garden of eden." navigators, it was described to Eiirope by Wallis (1767) and Bougainville (1768). They gave such a lively account of the beauty of both island and people, and of what they considered the idyllic perfection of its semi-wild, semi-devel- oped society, that much was written, especially in philosophical France, to argue that here was proof of the neces- sity for return to nature by the human race. Bougainville named it New Cytherea. His companion, the naturalist Commer- son, called it Utopia and wrote extrava- gantly of the virtues which he said flourished because the natives had no conventional restraint. Diderot wrote imaginary dialogues between Tahitian philosophers and ship's chaplains, prov- ing the immorality of marriage. In England, Hawkesworth embroidered Wallis' reports of the newly-discovered Paradise until Horace Walpole de- nounced him for his sentimentality. By some authorities it is believed that these early reports of the remarkable island, corroborating the theories of Rousseau, actually influenced the French Revolution and thus all Europe. Cook's and Forster's visits soon fol- lowed (1769 to 1774), bringing fuller information, and in 1788 England sent Lieutenant Bligh in the Bounty to get bread-fruit for introduction into her tropical colonies. How his crew muti- nied later, put back to Tahiti, sailed from there again with a party of native men and women, and disappeared from the world until found long after on Pit- cairn Island where they founded an isolated colony that exists today, is perhaps better known than any other episode in Polynesian history. On the whole, England seems to have been more skeptical than France concerning Tahitian manners, for her next step was to send missionaries to improve them.

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