Traditional Polynesian counting practices and numerical vocabularies have been significantly misunderstood or misrepresented by Western observers. In the late eighteenth century, Spanish seafarers collected a list of “number-words” from Rapa Nui islanders by showing them written Western numerals. Unsurprisingly, the results bear no resemblance to the Polynesian words for numbers collected in Rapa Nui by Captain Cook (and everyone else who followed him) only a few years later. A few years after the Rapa Nui incident, a Frenchman collected and published a list of Tongan “number-words” that turned out to be a crude practical joke on him. In the early nineteenth century, two French naturalists who had visited New Zealand spread the story that Māori counted by elevens, something no natural number system has ever been known to do. The hoax appears to have started as a printer’s error, but it intensified when the two men wrote to colleagues with additional (fabricated) details. In the late twentieth century, an amateur linguist published a collection of Pacific numerical vocabularies; about half were legitimate vocabularies, while the remainder were clumsy forgeries.