Wallis Visits Tahiti

Background. Samuel Wallis was a Royal Navy officer and explorer, born at Fenteroon Farm near Camelford, Cornwall, on 23 April 1728. He is credited with making the first recorded visit by a European navigator to Tahiti, the largest island of the Windward group of the Society Islands in the central Pacific Ocean.

The Visit of 1767. While circumnavigating the globe in HMS Dolphin, Wallis's expedition sighted Tahiti on 18 June 1767 and made the first European landfall there in June 1767. Wallis named the island "King George the Third's Island" in honour of the King. This was the first of the European visits to the region during the period of intense Anglo-French rivalry that filled the twelve years between the Seven Years' War and the American Revolutionary War.

Aftermath and Legacy. After leaving the Pacific, Wallis continued to Batavia, where many of his crew died from dysentery, then via the Cape of Good Hope to England, arriving in May 1768. Following his return, he passed on useful information to James Cook, who was due to depart shortly for the Pacific; some of the Dolphin's crew sailed with Cook, though it is not known whether the two men met before Cook's departure in August 1768.