Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Cargo cults are Melanesian religious movements centred on the ability of the colonial powers to bring the kind of trinkets that fill shopping malls and dollar stores to the some of the virgin corners of the earth. The first references to cargo cults, the Vailala Madness, which began in 1919, for example, saw Papuans preach […]

In 1766 Jeanne Baret, a young Burgundian, joined a round-the-world trip, a French mission to claim territory in the Pacific and Indian oceans. Her experiences, the subject of a recent book by Glynis Ridley, would have been remarkable in itself given her gender and the date. But as the French navy did not allow women […]

The meetings between Western explorers and Pacific peoples in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries saw a whole host of misunderstandings. And among the most interesting of these was, on the Polynesian side, the question of where the outsiders – with their great sailing boats and white skins – came from. Curiously, there are a rash […]