Tahiti of ocean, was made possible by using outrigger canoes that were up to twenty or thirty meters long and could transport families as well as domestic animals. In 1769, for instance, James Cook mentions a great traditional ship ("va'a") in Tahiti that was long, and could be propelled by sail or paddles. In 2010, an expedition on a simple outrigger canoe with a sail retraced the route back from Tahiti to Asia. Before the arrival of the Europeans the island was divided into different chiefdoms, very precise territories dominated by a single clan. These chiefdoms were linked to each other
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