Beyond the New World was an ocean that stretched for miles and miles, out of all human sight and sense, into the kingdom of the stars. To young explorers unlearned in geography and astronomy, the earth was a flat disk, and nothing stirred beyond the waters – nothing, until ships dared to sail into the unknown and map the then ominous, endless Pacific.

With the Age of Enlightenment came the Age of Exploration, and as explorers such as Louis de Bougainville, James Cook, George Vancouver, and La Pérouse sailed past storms and winds, they found numerous islands and (sometimes) welcome shores. They named their find Polynesia, and as they conquered it, so did the country change. Families fought over the Tahitian throne. Missionaries made their home amidst the trees and mountains. France kept its hold upon its colony.

French Polynesia is composed of five major island groups: the Society Islands (including Tahiti and Moorea), volcanic and heavily etched with valleys; the Marquesas; the Austral Islands, volcanic and forested, with areas of dry grassland; the Tuamotu Archipelago; and the Gambier Islands. Most of French Polynesia is composed of coral reefs or sleeping mountains, embedded in wide, flat atolls that dip gradually into the sea.

Despite their location, studies show that the Marquesas had already been settled in by as early as 300 AD, and part of the Society Islands had already been inhabited by 800 AD. These early settlers subsisted on basic agriculture before the Europeans came. By the time modernity reached them, new crops had taken root, and more were being exported. Interested in the new colony, a group of Chinese fled the poverty of southern China and arrived in Tahiti in 1856, to find work in the cotton and coffee plantations of the Marquesas.

With the Old World still gaping at the wonders of the new, quite a number of Polynesian food crops became attractive to Europeans. The Breadfruit tree soon became a favorite of the colonists, who then organized an expedition to collect cuttings and transplant them in the British West Indies. The uru, as it was known to the natives, was typical of the pre-European Polynesian diet. A single tree could produce fruit three times a year for about fifty years – a significant advantage for an archipelago so dramatically isolated from the rest of humanity. Village healers also used its latex to plaster fractures, sprains, and rheumatism. Breadfruit gum was used to capture birds, and the tree’s wood hollowed into small single canoes.

Today’s Polynesia is a haven for tourists, where travelers are greeted by sandy shores dappled with swaying coconut trees. However, it is only in the last hundred years that Polynesians planted coconut. There were more breadfruit trees than coconuts when the colonists came, but coconut soon became the country’s principal crop. Agriculture has been relegated to outlying villages, where most work is on root crops, fruit, coconut cultivation, and coffee and vanilla growing. In the more urban areas, tourism has replaced agriculture as the main source of income, as Polynesians take to their shores, the way European explorers once did.

Through the centuries of journeys, tribal wars, and even nuclear testing, the islands are islands all the same: in the middle of an ocean vast with storms and discoveries, in the company of stars in a sky as endless as the universe.

For more information, visit http://www.iexplore.com/dmap/French+Polynesia/History and http://www.tahiti1.com/en/indentity/agriculture.htm.