Surrender of Tahiti. Engraved plate depicting the moment in 1767 when Queen Oberea of Tahiti surrendered the island to Captain Samuel Wallace, the first Westerner to make contact. Over the next 50 years, with increasing contact with Western visitors, about 96% of the population had been wiped out by smallpox, influenza, typhus and venereal disease. This plate was published in An account of the voyages undertaken by the order of His present Majesty : for making discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, by John Hawkesworth, printed at London in 1773.