ÎLES GAMBIER

According to the reports of the exploratory captains, Westerners were not welcomed with open arms in the Gambiers. In Mangareva - as in Tahuata in the Marquesas, in Huahine in the Leeward Islands, in Tubuai in the Austral Islands... - the islanders did their best to oppose the arrival of these intruders, who finally overcame their struggle by the power of gunpowder.

The Gambier Islands were particularly affected, or enlightened, depending on one's point of view, by the corollary of the Western "discovery": the Christian missions.

Father Honoré Laval (1808-1880), of tenacious memory, had established a formidable Catholic theocracy on the archipelago. This brilliant schizophrenic also left writings, extremely precious for contemporary researchers, that are extremely precise on the past of the islanders, whose memory he devoted his life to banishing and destroying... Until the paroxysm of the colonial fact, because a few years later and a few miles away from the Gambiers, the sites of the nuclear tests of the neighbouring atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa were established!