The 1797 Duff Mission’s Encounter with Tahitian Sacred Objects

Record summary

Reports from the Duff mission describe encounters with Tahitian marae, images, offerings and other objects that missionaries classified as idols or evidence of false religion. These records are useful for tracing how sacred artefacts entered European collections and how Indigenous ritual categories were translated into Christian polemic. They also provide a documentary bridge between eighteenth-century voyage narratives and later ethnographic collecting. The sources generally describe objects through missionary priorities, so their names, uses and meanings must be checked against Tahitian-language research and archaeological evidence.