An island group of French Polynesia in the southern Pacific Ocean east of Samoa. The group is made up of the Windward Islands and the Leeward Islands. Long inhabited by Polynesian peoples and first visited by Europeans in the early 1600s, the islands were claimed for France by Louis Antoine de Bougainville in 1768 and named by Capt. James Cook in 1769. They became a French protectorate in 1843 and a part of the overseas territory of French Polynesia in 1946.