When Captain Samuel Wallis of HMS Dolphin became the first European to lay anchor in Matavai Bay in 1767, the island's women paraded their genitals at the pale-faced Englishmen. The gesture was meant to stop the newcomers from landing on the island under pain of death, but the island was eventually conquered.
It is now 250 years since the first Europeans arrived and I set out on a two-week journey to follow their path, to see whether traces of the former Arcadia, with its mesmerising nature and unconventional way of life that the early explorers raved about in their travel journals, can still be found.
On this emotional journey in the tracks of my childhood heroes, I also learn about ancient customs and gruesome rites, and about cultural misunderstandings and islands that not many know about.
As most visitors to French Polynesia do, I start my trip through the island world in Papeete on Tahiti.
A fortnight is not a lot of time for 118 islands and atolls - of which 67 are inhabited.
So I focus on the Society Islands, which together with the Tuamotu Archipelago, the Gambier Islands, the Marquesas Islands and the Austral Islands, constitute the French Polynesia overseas territory.
One thing I discover in no time: It is not a mistake to get out of Papeete - 25,000 inhabitants, two churches, one McDonald's - at the earliest opportunity.
There is no better place to start travelling back in time than at Point Venus, 10km to the east.
Standing on this little peninsula at the eastern end of Matavai Bay, it is not hard to dream up European ships under full sail greeted by a fleet of skilfully carved canoes.
The place conjures up the age of the Great Explorers. In 1769, two years after Wallis' arrival, British explorer James Cook pitched camp on the peninsula at the eastern end of Matavai Bay to observe the transit of planet Venus across the sun.
In 1788, Bligh ordered his breadfruit seedlings to be planted there, which the Bounty mutineers later threw into the sea.
Thomas Huggan, Bligh's ship's surgeon and a gifted drinker, was buried in the black volcanic sand of the promontory - the first alcoholic in Tahitian soil.
Every part of Point Venus can tell a story - you just have to imagine it without the carpark and the boys with their surfboards.
Halfway between Papeete and Point Venus, I detour to the tomb of King Pomare V, in the eyes of the painter Paul Gauguin, "an indescribably hideous monument".
Yet, it is worth seeing. The stone pyramid is crowned by an urn that resembles a wine carafe, a detail that is unintentionally apt. Tahiti's last king, who sold off his realm for a song to the French in 1880, also enthusiastically drank himself to death.
By then, though, the islands of the Age of Discovery had long vanished.
Thanks to British and French missionaries who fought hard for hegemony over the souls of the Polynesian pagans - with the French winning the upper hand in the end - all nudity had been covered up and church choirs had replaced lascivious dances and songs.
LUXURY AT A PRICE
Today, thousands of tourists arrive every year in Tahiti by ship and plane in search of paradise lost, with almost 184,000 tourists arriving in 2015.
"There were times when a great deal more came," says Mr Gaston Arai of the tourist office in Tahiti. But the 2007-2008 global financial crisis also left its mark in the South Seas and the repercussions are felt to this day.
The slump in tourist numbers does not seem to have had any appreciable effect on prices, however.
"Tahiti isn't exactly cheap," Mr Arai concedes, adding that Moorea, Tahiti's little sister, is quite a lot more expensive.
On the other hand, Bora Bora, the luxury isle with its famous water bungalows, makes the others seem like a bargain, he says.
While the price for the most expensive suite in a five-star lagoon resort in Moorea is a little less than $1,700, in Bora Bora, you might pay double that amount.
When Cook sailed to Moorea, you could still barter with nails and glass beads. Nowadays, huge luxury liners are moored where in 1777, on Cook's third voyage to the South Seas, his HMS Resolution - a heaving wooden tub measuring a mere 34m by 9.5m wide - lay at anchor.
Back then, as today, Opunohu Bay afforded an unbeatable view of the island - a deep incision in the thickly forested hills with bare, almost vertical volcanic cliffs that tower into the sky.
At some point, anyone travelling in the South Seas will fall in love with one of the countless atolls. For many, Moorea is the most beautiful of all.
But Cook's crew went away with no such romantic memories of the reef-encircled island. Not just because of the goat that was snitched from them by the local Mooreans, but above all, on account of the way the ship's master reacted.
Because of this goat, Cook, who on the first voyage, swore his men to friendliness and respect towards the "Indians", launched a savage punitive expedition against the natives. All along the coast, their homes and canoes went up in smoke.
When a sextant disappeared on Huahine island, the next stop, Cook ordered his men to cut off the ears of the presumed thief.
On each of his three voyages around the world, England's most famous non-swimmer moored off Huahine and, each time, there was trouble, not least because his men grabbed everything that could be boiled or roasted. Pigs, ducks, chickens - everything was spirited off into the "floating island" from the far-off kingdom.
HUMAN SACRIFICES
Mr Joselito Tefaataumarama knows all the old stories.
The wiry man with sunglasses, shorts and a flowery shirt stems from the former ruling dynasty of Huahine, so it is not entirely unlikely that his ancestors encountered Cook and his men.
These days, he drives tourists around and tells them about the times when surplus newborns were suffocated and human sacrifice was practised in the maraes, the sacred sites of the Polynesians.