PAPEETE (Pacnews) — Culture minister and lecturer with the University of French Polynesia, Louise Peltzer, has launched a book on the history of the first arrival of Polynesian race into the Pacific. The book chronicles major dates and events starting with the arrival of Polynesians in Samoa and Tonga around 1000 BC to the present.
“For reasons that we will probably never really know, the future Polynesians left a location west of the Pacific still unclear today. They started an unique maritime odyssey made of discoveries of small islands on the biggest ocean of the world,” Peltzer wrote.
The book also deals with the first encounters between Tahitians and Europeans in the 17th and 18th century, the French protectorate over Tahiti (1843-1880) and the first autonomy statute granted to French Polynesia in 1977.
