Purea

Purea by Philip James de Loutherbourg, 1785
Captain Samuel Wallis of HMS Dolphin being received by Purea, July 1767

Purea (Oberea, 1700s-?) was a queen from the Landward Teva tribe and a self-proclaimed ruler of all Tahiti. In 1767-68 Purea and her husband Amo built Mahaiatea, a place intended to be the ritual center of Tahiti.[1]

Purea entered the European imagination as something between a traditional monarch and a queen of the fairies.[2]

Notes

  1. ↑ Guida Myrl Jackson-Laufer, Guida M. Jackson. Women rulers throughout the ages, ABC-CLIO, 1999, p. 338
  2. ↑ Michael Sturma. South Sea maidens, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002, p. 20