Tahiti on 11 October, Raiatea on 2 November, and Borabora on 7 December. On 26 October 1788, , under the command of Captain William Bligh, landed in Tahiti with the mission of carrying Tahitian breadfruit trees (Tahitian: "uru") to the Caribbean. Sir Joseph Banks, the botanist from James Cook's first expedition, had concluded that this plant would be ideal to feed the African slaves working in the Caribbean plantations at very little cost. The crew remained in Tahiti for about five months, the time needed to transplant the seedlings of the trees. Three weeks after leaving Tahiti, on 28 April 1789,
1769 Transit of Venus observed from Tahiti measuring the apparent solar parallax between different points on the surface of the Earth. In a 1716 issue of the "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society", Edmund Halley illustrated Gregory's theory more fully and explained further how it could establish the distance between the Earth and the Sun. In his report, Halley suggested places that a full transit should be viewed due to a "cone of visibility." Places he recommended for observing the phenomenon included the Hudson Bay, Norway and the Molucca Islands. The next transits would occur in 1761 and 1769. Halley died in 1742, almost twenty years before