Modern Maritime Life

The last schooner in French Polynesia sank in the lagoon opposite the Kia Ora in Moorea, The Vaitere was the last boat of this type built in our archipelagos and also the last to be actively engaged in coastal trade. This 30 meters schooner was launched from the shipyard of Adrien Le Prado in Tahiti, in 1940. Along with her smaller version, the Tamara, she was the sole representative of the era of the seventies, when diesel engines and sails shared the trade. 

At first, these boats had been imported from California at the end of the last century, but later they were copied and built locally, especially in Rurutu and Tubuai. The boat builders used wood from the ati, tou, tohonu and purau, whose curved trunks were ideally suited to the rounded curves of the bilge. The planking was in pine or kauri from New Zealand. The schooners measured 25 to 30 meters on the average, and they transported 50 passengers, 130 tones of freight and about 20 crew members. The last of these vessels navigating purely under sail was the Manureva. During the diesel engine era, a return-trip to the Marquesas from Tahiti could last 25 days for these boats, and they did eight turn-rounds in a year.

The twenty-five units which made up Papeete's merchant fleet for decades were gradually replaced by small wooden coastal vessels which the shipbuilders brought from America. Today these little boats have disappeared, too, giving way to modern freighters which are still called schooners out of habit.

The Tamara, built in Tubuai in 1936 for the Protestant Society, became the property of Aratika's Pearl and Fishing Society. Ignored by the Administration, she was left to rot gently at her berth on the Papeete waterfront until she finally sank in 1983. The wreck was towed to the Faaa lagoon and sunk officially.

Shipping Services

At the beginning of this century, embarking for Tahiti did not mean a trip to dreamland and the inquisitive tourist had not yet come into existence. 

In 1900, passengers embarked at Marseilles or Le Havre and they could not count on landing in Tahiti in under ten weeks.

If you got on board in Marseilles, the boat went through the Suez canal, then stopped at Ceylon, Sydney and Auckland. From there, once a month, a little steamer, the Richmond took travelers as far as Papeete. This was reckoned to be the safest and the most regular crossing. 

The second itinerary, from Le Havre to New York meant first of all, a week to cross the Atlantic and then another week to get right to San Francisco, having traversed the United States from East to West. This land voyage was tiring and unpredictable. When the passengers finally reached California, their troubles were far from over because they had then to board a sailing ship, the only means of reaching Tahiti. 

The length and the so-called comfort of the journey depended on the vagaries of the winds. Finally, in 1906, the Americans established a regular service to Tahiti twice a year with the big steamship, the Mariposa, then the "Naval Company of Oceania" sent her steamships out from 191 0, but with no regular timetable. 

Up until after World War II, the "Messageries Maritimes" take charge of the line with steamships becoming successively faster and more comfortable; in the fifties, they set up two twin boats: the Tahitien and the Calédonien. 

These mixed liners guaranteed a return passage, Marseilles - Sydney Marseilles, via the Panama canal, with their paths crossing in the Pacific. 

All the Polynesians remember these ships arriving in Papeete or Taiohae, and the extraordinary welcome accorded to their passengers contributed greatly to Tahiti's renown. 

Their ports-of-call were Algiers, Madeira, Guadeloupe and Martinique, Curaçao, the Canal and Tahiti. The hierarchy of the class-system was strictly observed on board, a last whiff of the post-colonial era. Wealthy civil servants and traders traveled first class with exclusive rights to the upper deck, and the two remaining groups were only allowed to fraternize with each other.

Emigrants bound for Australia, frequently from Scandinavia, were huddled together in third class with the soldiers about to do their military service in Tahiti or Noumea. In the middle you had second class passengers consisting of non-commissioned officers, gendarmes and their wives, craftsmen and a few poor whites fleeing Europe. This floating mini-society spent the thirty-day voyage in complete boredom. 

Today many Marquesans miss the activity and amusement brought by the two ships when they arrived at Taiohae, their port-of-call, two days apart. The Tahitien and the Calédonien were the last passenger ships to provide a regular service from Europe to Tahiti. The Monterey and the Mariposa, of the Matson Lines also had a regular round-trip from Los Angeles to Tahiti, Auckland and Honolulu.