Of course, European male visitors could rationalise this in only one way. It gave them a further reason to conclude that the main goal of the young girls’ education, according to the “customs” of the islanders, was the proper or even “artistic” performance of the act of sexual intercourse – in effect an apprenticeship in what would later be the “main preoccupation” and activity of their adolescent and adult lives.^[47]

John Hawkesworth was an even more active proponent of this particular misinterpretation than Bougainville and his companions. In 1773, when he was given the task of editing the manuscript of Cook’s journal of his first voyage for publication, he unfortunately rephrased Cook’s and Banks’ observations noted in 1769 in Tahiti, to accord with this view. He did so particularly when he dealt with a scene which later came to be called the “Point Venus scene” in the literature. It happened just a year after Bougainville’s visit, and the circumstances add another ethnographic example to our file on the young age of the girls presented. On this occasion Tahitian dignitaries brought before the British a young man (“a young fellow above 6 feet high”) and a “little girl of about 10 to 12 years of age,” as Cook wrote in his journal, and they ordered them to have intercourse – which they could not do, as they were terrified.^[48] Being himself the director of a girls’ college, Hawkesworth misunderstood what he read in the journals, erroneously interpreting this scene in terms of an educational and cultural value specific to these societies. He saw fit to add a paragraph of his own on the topic, presenting the act of intercourse as the main “religious” value of Tahitian society, as if these were Cook’s own words.

Shortly afterward, in 1775, the French philosopher Voltaire, from his reading of Bougainville’s book (where this metaphor of “love as the only religion of the place” is present) and of Cook’s voyage (as retold by Hawkesworth), concluded and made known to all of Europe that, as the French and the British “observations in Tahiti are identical,” this account, however incredible, of a “Tahitian custom” which describes how intercourse must always be staged in public, how it constitutes the whole of the local “religion” and how it is the main educational goal, had indeed to “be true.” And the explanation for this could only be that in this society sexuality came to be the main preoccupation, indeed the Tahitians’ “whole religion.”^[49] Voltaire did not realise that Hawkesworth had rephrased many passages from Cook’s journal, and that Hawkesworth, who knew French, had of course read the short piece by Commerson, the naturalist with Bougainville’s expedition, published in Paris in 1769 (Post-scriptum sur l’île de Taïti), who affirmed that indeed the only religion of the place was “love.” Hawkesworth would also have had the time to read Bougainville’s book, which came out in May 1771, while he was working on his version of Cook’s journal.

The Western myth of Polynesian sexual freedom was poised to spread in every direction. Twelve years later La Pérouse arrived in Samoa. His interpretation about the offering of female “favours” and his blindness to the very facts he had noted only a few lines earlier were already a consequence of that myth. The interpretations of Williamson one hundred and fifty years later and, of Margaret Mead’s supporters and exponents, two centuries later, are no less due to the cultural misreadings that created the Western myth of “Polynesian sexuality.”^[50]