Teuira Henry

Teuira Henry (24/27 January 1847 – 23 January 1915) was a British Tahitian scholar, ethnologist, folklorist, linguist, historian and educator. She worked to reconstruct a lost manuscript on the history of Tahiti written by her grandfather, English missionary John Muggridge Orsmond, by using his original notes. Most of her writings were published posthumously by the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum as the book Ancient Tahiti.

Raised on Tahiti, she was educated at the missionary school run by William Howe and his wife in Papeete. She became fluent in French, English and Tahitian.

Henry's maternal grandfather Orsmond had collected significant amounts of oral histories, genealogy, myths, folklore and traditional knowledge such as astronomy and navigation while living in Tahiti between 1817 and his death in 1856. In 1848, he had presented a manuscript about the history of Tahiti to French colonial official Charles François Lavaud, but it was lost before it could be published in Paris. During her lifetime, Henry reconstructed this lost manuscript by transcribing the original notes he left behind.

Henry died on 23 January 1915, in Paea, Papeete, Tahiti, at the age of 67 years old.

Her manuscript was posthumously published as Ancient Tahiti by the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in 1928. Bertrand Jaunez translated it into French in 1951 under the title Tahiti aux temps anciens. In 1995, Dennis Kawaharada re-printed some of Henry's stories alongside others in Voyaging chiefs of Havaiʻi.