In the Samoan case, just as for the first contacts in Tahiti, European interpreters have made a double error. Firstly, the presentation of young girls to early European visitors has been mistaken for sexual hospitality offered by ‘women’, when it was in fact a ritual presentation of ‘(very) young girls’ who were (always or often?) virgins. For Samoa, the sources only give us a description of the ritual presentation of young girls and, later, proposals of marriage as well as explicit ‘refusals’ to grant favours according to a European commercial notion of payment for sexual acts. The presentations of young girls may have been part of a strategy of theogamy and an atua or ‘divine’ pregnancy. This last explanation remains here a suggestive hypothesis.

Secondly, it has been erroneously inferred that these presentations of girls were an indication that an attitude promoting sexual freedom prevailed within the indigenous society. Such reasoning, which equates the relationship between Samoans and the first Europeans with the daily relationship between Samoans themselves, supposes that the newcomers had been viewed by the Samoans as ordinary men coming from some other neighbouring island. But this appears to be a total absurdity: it is contradicted by all the evidence we have about Polynesian attitudes to the Papālagi. The 18^th-century encounters in Samoa show clearly that the Papālagi had by no means been viewed as ordinary men, and we shall see in Part Two that much comparative data, as well as the linguistic discussion of the word Papālagi, confirms this.

The European voyagers of the 18^th century thought that they had been welcomed as ordinary human foreign visitors. Later, in the 19^th century, and to an even greater extent in the 20^th century, European visitors and scholars developed the mistaken idea that the Polynesians had viewed the first Europeans as ‘gods’. Recent academic critiques of this late European invention of an ‘apotheosis’ have led some scholars to reject any inquiry about the Polynesian interpretation of the other-than-merely-human nature of the first Europeans. Some have denounced as victims of a ‘Western-inspired myth’ anyone interested in understanding why the Polynesians had—hesitantly, and with many queries—expressed the notion that the nature of the newcomers had something to do with the ‘sky’ and with the ‘sun’. In Part Two, I shall try to clarify these academic misunderstandings and to give more evidence in relation to the interpretations that Polynesians made about Europeans in those earlier times.