Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island

Others followed: Don Felipe González de Haedo in 1770, commissioned by Peru for Spain; James Cook, arriving for the British government in 1774; and Jean-François de La Pérouse for France in 1786. Like Roggeveen before them, González and Cook had been hoping for a continent. Louis XVI had asked La Pérouse to find a fabled Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean. While they stocked up on food and water, Rapa Nui was merely a way station for them. None of them viewed it as a destination or a place to revisit. They were on voyages of discovery, not interference or subjugation.

Europeans were used to finding people everywhere they went. Coming from a continent awash with ethnicities, languages, and histories, they knew the world as a place of endless varieties of culture. It was quite the opposite for Islanders. Evidence suggests that soon after its original discovery, Rapa Nui remained isolated until the arrival of Europeans. If discovery occurred around AD 1200, as I will argue, that would mean, in 1722, Islanders had seen no one but themselves for some twenty generations, an extraordinary position for a small community. And neither had they seen any other land: There was nothing but ocean in all directions, and a horizon beyond which lived the dead and yet to be born, in a place from which their own, mythical ancestors had sailed. So who were they?

James Cook had spent more time sailing the Pacific than the other Europeans. When he came to Rapa Nui, he was well into the second of three long voyages exploring ocean and islands. He was curious and observant, and had acquired a perceptive understanding of Pacific peoples. He knew who the Rapanui were.

On his first voyage, he went to Tahiti and Aotearoa New Zealand, among other islands. On the second, he led the first European ships to cross the Antarctic Circle, and on the third, his expedition was the first to visit the Hawaiian islands (where he was killed). Also on the second, he took on board two Polynesian men. One of them, whose name was recorded as Hitihiti or Mahine, was on the Resolution when it visited Rapa Nui, and was able to contribute his own perspective on what they saw.

Thus Cook understood the people of what today we would call Polynesia to be the same—in "colour, features, and language." Not that they all knew it, he said: They'd been dispersed long enough to have forgotten distant neighbors. Each had "adopted some peculiar custom or habit, &c," but the Rapanui had the same origin as people "over all the isles in this vast ocean, from New Zealand to this island, which is almost one-fourth part of the circumference of the globe."

Writing in his journal, Cook noted that the Rapanui grew sweet potatoes, yams, taro, plantains, and sugarcane, all of which his crew had eaten elsewhere in the Pacific. As in Tahiti, they cooked with hot stones in an oven dug into the ground; for fuel they used dried grass, and stalks and leaves from sugarcane and bananas. They also grew gourds as water containers, and the Tahitian "cloth plant," making fabric with the bark. The only animals Cook's crew saw apart from wild birds were rats and chickens, both eaten. Using tools only of stone, bone, and shell, Islanders made wooden spears and clubs, and canoes built from planks stitched together with plant fibers and fitted with outriggers. Everything is a Polynesian practice or object. The visitors even recognized numbers they had heard in Tahiti, though the "Languish [language] was in a manner wholly unintelligible to all of us"—except, "very imperfectly," to Mahine.

It wasn't just Cook who took this view of Rapanui culture. Among those also on the Resolution were Johann Forster, the expedition's naturalist, and his son George, who back in Europe published two volumes about the trip. They made some perceptive comments about the island's statues. All four European expeditions saw a Rapa Nui of gardens and grassland, with no forest or tall trees; Roggeveen had specifically noted Islanders' excitement at the sight of timber. In Tahiti the Forsters saw rows of roughly carved wooden figures, 20 to 30 feet (6 to 9 meters) high, raised in honor of "deceased friends." On Rapa Nui, wrote Johann, a land without wood, Islanders sought to achieve the same effect for "their chiefs and distinguished people" in stone. Raised "in honour of their kings," said George, the statues "have a great affinity to the wooden figures, called Tee, on the chief's marais or burying-places" in Tahiti.

The Europeans also described the Rapanui themselves. George Forster thought they closely shared features, customs, and languages with other South Sea Islanders. Skin color was not black, observed Roggeveen, but pale yellow or sallow. People were the color of a quadroon, said González, using an eighteenth-century word for someone who was one-quarter black and three-quarters white, adding that in the right clothes they could pass for Europeans. Their hair was black, said Cook, while Gonz·lez saw hair that was brown and loose, black, blond, or cinnamon-colored.

Perhaps González had witnessed hair coloring. Islanders certainly went in for body art, from painted white stripes reaching from beard to feet to complex tattooed designs. González gives us details of some extraordinary tattooing. Older men covered their entire body with burgundy-colored designs featuring "grid lines, pyramids, chicken and really ugly faces," all skillfully arranged with great order and symmetry, most impressively in the form of a perfectly drawn maze on the back. On the front, there might be frightful faces, either side of the belly.

These were a distinctive Rapanui take on a widespread Polynesian tradition. So too were perforated and extended earlobes, in older men and women hanging down well below their chins like fleshy rings. If they got in the way, they could be hooked up over the top of the ear, giving the impression that the lobes had been cut off. But the proper guise was to plug the holes with material such as rolled cane leaves or slices of white taro; in the nineteenth century, a shark vertebra was collected having served this purpose. Cook commented on the length of the statues' stone ears, but no eighteenth-century observer made the obvious connection: Not only do statues have very long, thin ears, sometimes distinct circular plugs can be seen carved in the lobes.