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

Such brief and intermittent encounters had profound consequences, for the Islanders and for our understanding of their story, even now. It began on the Easter day when the Africaansche Galey signaled land. The Dutch West India Company had sponsored an expedition to search for a southern continent, which was thought necessary to balance all the land north of the equator. Jacob Roggeveen, a lawyer turned explorer, had wandered about the Pacific with three ships and found nothing. His crews were beginning to lose faith till they spotted a turtle and floating vegetation, and birds overhead. There was great joy, Roggeveen wrote in his log: They were about to discover Southland. But the imagined continent soon revealed itself as no more than a low, flat island. Rising plumes of smoke showed it was inhabited. Weather marked the occasion: They waited at a distance for thunder, lightning, heavy rain, and winds to clear.

The pioneer encounter occurred 3 miles offshore. The Dutch, spotting an old man approaching in a canoe, sent out a sloop to investigate. This unceremonial meeting was the first contact between people whose ancestors had parted tens of millennia ago in Asia, and whose experiences, cultures, and beliefs separately reflected that distance. It was an innocent event played out repeatedly around the world in various forms. A marker of unity. A harbinger of change and loss.

The naked man put up a good fight, but was overpowered and brought to the Arend, Roggeveen's flagship. Curiosity trounced the Islander's fears, and he seemed delighted by what he saw, taking a special interest in the ship—how it was made, the masts' great height, the sails and the thickness of the ropes, and the guns, to which he gave particular attention. The sound of the ship's bell and the sight of himself in a mirror scared him, and he appeared to be ashamed of his nudity. Offered a glass of liquor, he poured it down his face and tried to rub it out of his eyes. He put his arms and head on the table, and repeatedly raised them toward the sky, shouting loudly as he "addressed his gods."

The whole performance might have been a traditional Polynesian welcome; or perhaps it was the simple question: Who are you? The smiling man kept it up for half an hour. He jumped and sang. Sailors played the fiddle. Surprised by the music, he danced with them. He had to be persuaded to leave, with gifts of trinkets and by the Arend sailing farther out to sea.

After this, Roggeveen decided to send two sloops and three other boats to shore and make friendly introductions. His main concerns were to find out what the Islanders looked like, and how they could help out with supplies. But he took no risks. His 134 men were armed with musket, cartridge pouch, and sword in case of a hostile encounter, and the Africaansche Galey lay close by with a couple of small cannon brought forward on the bow. They set out after breakfast on April 10, as summer was turning to winter, five days after the first sighting.

 

We will never fully understand what happened. Even before the expedition reached land, Islanders had gone out to the ships, paddling canoes or reed bundles, or just swimming, unafraid and unarmed. They had swarmed over the decks, climbing in through a window, taking hats and caps off sailors' heads, and seizing any timber they could find, from old brooms to firewood. Now as sailors stepped out into the surf, a great crowd tried to take oars off the first sloop. The men were almost overwhelmed by Islanders proffering bare hands in welcome, apparently jumping for joy.

The visitors picked their way across the rocky coastline, waving at the Islanders to move back and make space. The ships' commanders lined up their crews in three rows, guarded by soldiers. Then, out of the blue, four or five musket shots rang out, followed by shouts and, in an instant, the sound of more than thirty further muskets being fired. Scared out of their wits, Islanders fled. But not all of them. Some were wounded. "Ten to twelve" lay dead.

The confident welcome had unsettled the visitors. An Islander had tried to take a soldier's musket by grabbing the muzzle, while another had pulled at a sailor's coat. Others, it was said, watching their compatriots fail to obtain what they seemed to think was their right (or, we might feel, out of sheer panic), threatened to hurl stones. This apparently sparked the shooting, though the junior officer insisted he had not ordered it. When tension broke, one side was equipped with steel swords, muskets, and gunpowder. The other had pebbles.

After a time, Islanders returned. Cornelis Bouman, captain of Roggeveen's ship the Thienhoven, identified a "chief" who nervously tendered a chicken and a bunch of bananas and ran off. On seeing a favorable reception, he brought others with more gifts of food. It's hard to avoid seeing this as a peace offering. The inexplicable, sudden death of a dozen men was not enough to still curiosity, and an urge to show hospitality.

So it was that the outside world came to hear about the statues of Easter Island, or "Paasch Eyland" in the original coinage, in two Dutch paragraphs. At first the sailors were astonished: How could "stone images...fully 30 feet [9 meters] high and thick in proportion" have been raised without ropes or timber? But they soon decided—incorrectly—that they were in fact not made of stone at all, but "clay or greasy earth" into which had been stuck small stones to give the illusion of a great carving, in "the appearance of a human being."