Description

Tahiti Origin. The Journey to the Pacific, a History. On Tahiti in the 1750s and 1760s there was clearly a hierarchical, feudal-like society: of high chiefs, the arii, who were very high indeed; of landowners or nobles, called the raatira; and of an ordinary lowborn class called manahune or teuteu. But unlike his European counterpart even the lowest could feed himself readily and build himself a shelter against the storms. while he lived as a servant-companion in his mater's house or tilled his own "sharecropping" acre of his master's land, he still possessed a very important social right. If he deemed his raatira cruel or excessively demanding or unfair, he could pull up stakes and take his valuable labour to the land of another feudal lord, who would almost certainly welcome him. There were, significantly, no constraints upon this right except, importantly, the consent and sympathy of his fellow manahune.