Surfing Guinness Book of World Records recognized a wave ride by Garrett McNamara at Nazaré, Portugal as the largest wave ever surfed. For hundreds of years, surfing was a central part of ancient Polynesian culture. Surfing may have first been observed by British explorers at Tahiti in 1767. Samuel Wallis and the crew members of who were the first Britons to visit the island in June of that year. Another candidate is the botanist Joseph Banks being part of the first voyage of James Cook on , who arrived on Tahiti on 10 April 1769. Lieutenant James King was the first
Tahiti rail accounts, the Tahiti rail was sufficiently well documented for there to be no doubt that it existed. The Tahiti rail has historically been confused with the extant Tongan subspecies of the buff-banded rail, "Gallirallus philippensis ecaudatus", which was also illustrated and described by the Forsters. In his 1783 description of the Tongan bird (wherein it was named "Rallus eucaudata"), the English ornithologist John Frederick Miller erroneously gave its locality as Tahiti, which led the Tahiti rail to be regarded as a junior synonym of the extant bird. He based his description on Forster's illustration (plate no.127) of the Tongan bird,