Reply #30

Easter Island was unknown to Europeans until the 1722 visit by a Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen. In his journal he briefly notes “remarkable, tall, stone figures, a good 30 feet in height”. The second to visit, in 1770, were two Spanish ships.... One of the maps they compiled contains probably the earliest depiction of the moai statues, albeit a very schematic one:



In 1774, the island was rediscovered during the second voyage of Captain James Cook. One of the expedition’s artists was William Hodges, who produced this famous landscape:




In 1786 Jean-François de la Pérouse visited Easter Island and his gardener declared that "three days' work a year" would be enough to support the population.



Rollin, a major in the Pérouse expedition, wrote, "Instead of meeting with men exhausted by famine... I found, on the contrary, a considerable population, with more beauty and grace than I afterwards met in any other island; and a soil, which, with very little labor, furnished excellent provisions, and in an abundance more than sufficient for the consumption of the inhabitants.

The British ship HMS Blossom arrived in 1825 and reported seeing no standing statues. Easter Island was approached many times during the 19th century, but by then the islanders had become openly hostile to any attempt to land, and very little new information was reported before the 1860s.

http://isabelgg.blogspot.com/


Why had they become hostile? Imported disease and slave-traders.


Interesting how the science of the present is often a rerun of the supposedly less scientific observations of the past:

La Pérouse directed the crew to measure the statues on the island, and described one as 14 feet 6 inches high. He concluded that they were made of a light-weight volcanic stone called lapillo, and he agreed with Cook’s suggestion that the monuments could have been raised by the ancient inhabitants using levers.


http://www.lindahall.org/events_exhib/exhibit/exhibits/voyages/laperouse2.shtml

Man of Easter Island -- from Captain Cook's 1772 voyage:



This striking portrait displays ear piercings in which flexible rings were sometimes worn. Cook notes that the islanders’ "chief ear ornaments are the white down of feathers, and rings…"

http://www.lindahall.org/events_exhib/exhibit/exhibits/voyages/cook14.shtml

Cook thought the Easter islanders were related to other Pacific peoples.