The original inhabitants of Easter Island call…
March 1774 CE
The original inhabitants of Easter Island call their small and hilly home Rapa Nui (Great Rapa) or Te Pito te Henua (Navel of the World).
The first European to land on Easter Island, the Dutch admiral Jacob Roggeveen, had paid it a single day's visit in 1722, and named it named it Paaseiland (Easter Island) in memory of the day of arrival.
He and his crew described the island's population as being of mixed physical types who worship huge standing statues (moai, or busts) with fires while they prostrated themselves to the rising sun.
Some of them, said to be “white men,” had their earlobes slit and hanging to their shoulders, a distinctly non-Polynesian custom.
Some of these “white men” reportedly had red hair.
The next European visitors, in the person of an expedition dispatched by the Spanish viceroy of Peru, had rediscovered the island in 1770.
Spending four days ashore, they reported that the aborigines had their own local form of scrip, and estimated a population of some three thousand persons.
Just four years later, the British navigator Captain James Cook arrives in mid-March 1774 to find a decimated, poverty-stricken Polynesian population of only about six hundred or seven hundred men and fewer than thirty women.
The islanders no longer venerate the large statues, most of which have been deliberately overthrown.
Civil war, probably, and European diseases, almost certainly, are the suspected agents of this drastic population reduction, which apparently away carried the redheads.
Cook himself is too sick to walk far, but a small group explores the island.
One of Cook's crew members, Hitihiti, a Polynesian from Bora Bora, is able to communicate with the Rapa Nui.
The language most similar to Rapa Nui is Mangarevan, a Polynesian language spoken in the Gambier Islands, with an estimated eighty percent percent similarity in vocabulary.
Through the interpretation of Hitihiti, Cook learns the statues commemorate their former high chiefs, including their names and ranks.
Cook sees only three or four canoes, all unseaworthy.
Parts of the island are cultivated with banana, sugarcane, and sweet potatoes, while other parts looke like they had once been cultivated but had fallen into disuse.
Georg Forster reports in his account that he saw no trees over ten feet tall on the island.
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