French Polynesia

In the 1820s, France was eager to catch up with the British and Americans in the Pacific, and the Catholic Church was eager to compete with Protestants there for souls. Catholic missionaries, supported by France's government and navy, carried a message into the Pacific about the glories of France mixed with the Gospel. They landed in Hawaii in 1827, and there they encountered hostility from New England missionaries, and the Catholic missionaries were expelled from the islands.

In 1834, the French navy landed Catholic missionaries in the Gambier Islands, 14 small mountainous islands, more than 1600 kilometers (1000 miles) southeast of Tahiti, in the extreme southeast corner of Tuamotu archipelago. On the main island there, Mangaréva, Father Honoré Laval converted the king, Maputeoa, and, within four years, the islanders in general were considered Christian.

Father Laval established stringent rules, called the Mangarévan Code. He ruled the Gambier Islands as a despot and started a huge building program, forcing people to build more than 116 coral stone churches, convents, mills and other buildings. One of the buildings was the highly decorated Cathedral of St Michael, built to accommodate 2000.

The population of the Gambiers is estimated to have been between 5,000 and 6,000 when Father Laval arrived. By 1886 there were only 463.

French Control in Tahiti, the Marquesas and other Islands

In 1836, two Catholic missionaries from the Gambier Islands arrived in Tahiti. British missionaries were advisers to Tahiti's Queen Pomare IV, and the two Catholic missionaries were arrested and deported. France was displeased and demanded reparations, while six years passed. Then the French were confident enough to intervene militarily. The British were busy in India and Afghanistan and were satisfied with control of the area around New Zealand and Australia. A French warship arrived at Tahiti to arrest and deport the English missionary, Rev. W.T. Pritchard, whom they held responsible for the deportation of their missionaries. Resistance to the French erupted on several islands. Queen Pomare IV fled to Raiatea. The British missionaries complained. The French gave assurances to Britain that Protestants would be allowed to do their work where the French were dominant, and Tahiti and surrounding islands (the Society Islands) became a French "protectorate." The French were poised for taking control of the Marquesas Islands (closer to the equator, 1400 kilometers northeast of Tahiti), an island with a population now of around 5,000 people -- a small fraction what it had been. Whalers and other whites in the main port of the Marquesas were defying the local chief, who was allied with the French. The chief asked the French to intervene. The French obliged, and in late 1842 the Marquesas Islands became another French protectorate.

The French were less successful in the islands of New Caledonia (in Melanesia, between Australia and the Fiji Islands) where Catholic missionaries arrived in 1843 and father Pierre Chanel was killed and eaten, and because of his martyrdom he became Oceania's first saint. In 1853, France annexed the main island among the islands of New Caledonia, and there they established a penal colony and occasionally were the targets of violence from hostile local inhabitants.

Trouble then returned for the French in Tahiti and the Society Islands. Only a minority there supported French domination, and between 1844 and 1847 bloody battles were fought for freedom from French rule. The freedom fighters requested help from the British, which was not forthcoming. With their superior firepower the French crushed the rebellion. And Queen Pomare IV returned to Tahiti and ruled under French domination.

In Tahiti during the U.S. Civil War, cotton plantations were attempted, and labor was imported from southern China. The plantations were soon abandoned, but the Chinese remained, some becoming traders or growers of crops, and some of them eventually blended with the Polynesians.