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Air Tahiti Magazine 51
destination when they came back down, they were the only two survivors. they had seven sons and seven daughters. their offspring repopulated the island of tubuai as for the island s name, it . comes from tumurai fenua, which means the land that became prosperous papa taunua goes on : that s how the . island was named when the god taroa left his head here after his death. his head became the mountains, and his hair became the plants . i had come from tahiti the day before. from the plane s window, the radiance of tubuai s wide and shallow lagoon had moved me. i could see the few motu that fringe the reef on the eastern side. one of them, motu ofai, entirely made of black stone, really stood out. it is a lava sculpture on which only one coconut tree managed to grow. it is made of phonoliths, rocks from the most recent eruptions. laurent, from the bonne bouteille dive center, agrees to take me there. we leave from the wharf in mataura, tubuai s main village. the boat glides to the east. nearing motu ofai, a blue triangle attracts our attention. it s probably tauuterari s sailing canoe, he s the island s old fisherman but on closer inspection, it s not . tauuterari. a man and a woman stand face to face in the canoe. one is at the helm, the other holds the sail rope; the sail is a large blue canvas sheet tied to the mast with string. this is the second time that jean-paul and his wife clarita take out the traditional sailing canoe that they built themselves, in one piece from a mango tree trunk. in the old days, there were a lot of sailing canoes explains jean-paul. today there s only , two : tauuterari s and ours. motor boats have replaced them . was james cook fortunate enough, when he came to tubuai in 1777, to see traditional sailing canoes on the lagoon? we will never know, as hostile behavior kept him off this island and its difficult anchoring. flatlands, from yellow wide green and marsh-like into deep places, stretch to the turquoise blue lagoon in which this imposing mountain of an island has elected to sit tubuai dispose de kilometres de plage. it s precisely because of this difficult anchoring that fletcher christian and his crew decided to exile themselves to tubuai, this island of south polynesia 345 nautical miles from tahiti. on may 29th, 1789, the famous mutineers of the bounty anchored in one of the island s most beautiful bays, fringed by a white sand beach, tavana beach. the encounter with the locals lasted only 48 hours and ended with 12 of them being murdered. this is how the beach earned the name of bloody bay . however, fletcher christian was not discouraged by the failure of this first contact. he came back to tubuai on june 23rd, this time to a warm welcome by chief tamatoa. gifts from the ship (goats, pigs and a cow) were contributed to heal the wounds of the recent past. the mutineers settled in nataieva, today the village of taahuaia, and built a wood and mud fort, fort george of which nothing remains today. they had to abandon , their refuge a few months later, when tense relations with the islanders worsened to the point of causing the death of 66 > r e v u e d e b o r d n ° 5 1 / a i r ta h i t i / o n - b o a r d m a g a z i n e n ° 5 1 27
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