In April of 1722 Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen and his crew stumbled upon a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They sailed for the Dutch West India Company in search of Terra Australis Incognita, a hypothetical undiscovered continent that doesn’t actually exist. The land they found instead was just a 64 square mile speck some 1,200 miles from the nearest island and over 2,000 miles from the nearest continent. This island, which they spotted on Easter Sunday, was incredibly small and incredibly remote. And yet, remarkably, there seemed to be people living there. Roggeveen and his crew were confused, as were the handful of Europeans who made occasional landfall in the centuries that followed, some Spanish explorers, the famed British explorer Captain Cook, a French explorer, and later Christian missionaries, American whalers, and enslavers from Peru. None of them could understand the mysterious people of Easter Island. Where did they come from? How did they get there? Why did they carve massive stone heads? How did they move them? There were so many unanswered questions, questions that have led to a complete lack of answers even today. But the real mystery is, why didn’t anyone just ask the Rapanui people themselves? Had any of these outsiders cared enough to ask, had any of them valued a people, a culture outside of their own enough to ask, to care, the mystifying Easter Island, Rapa Nui, would be no mystery at all. Let’s fix that. 

 

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. This topic was recommended by my dear friend O’Anna just in time for Easter, Happy Easter y’all. And, I know okay, loose tie. Yes, Roggeveen called this island Easter Island because his crew first spotted it on Easter Sunday but it was given other names by subsequent explorers, Isla de San Carlos, for example by the Spanish. But, in reality, it wasn’t any of those. It already had a name of course because it was already a thing well before Roggeveen arrived. In the 1860s its indigenous name, Rapa Nui, reemerged, although it’s disputed whether or not the island was actually called that by the people living there when the first Europeans arrived. And if that isn’t telling, I don’t know what is. We literally don’t even know what the island was called when Roggeveen arrived. And it’s not like those records were lost. Roggeveen, despite stopping on the island for only one day, kept immaculate records which have survived. He neglected to record the name of the island because, I’m fairly confident, he never bothered to ask the people what it was. He was just like “it’s Easter Island cause it’s Easter, duh.” And that’s really the theme of this whole episode. Europeans failing to seek answers, failing to care about anything outside of their own sphere and then later being like “what a mystery! It must have been aliens!” 

 

But before we go deeper, I want to quickly tell you that I did a mini fix this past week which is live on the Patreon. It’s super interesting. It’s about Torpedo Junction which was the name given to the water off Cape Hatteras, off the Outer Banks in 1942 when a handful of German U-boats set up shop and began ruthlessly sinking American ships in our own waters while we did almost nothing about it. Here’s a quick preview: It’s January 18th, 1942. Just off the coast of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a ship called the Allen Jackson passes swiftly and silently through the still early morning waters. This is the graveyard of the Atlantic. Beneath it lay thousands of shipwrecks, scattered across the seafloor like long forgotten skeletons. But Captain Kretchmer knows these waters well. He knows how to avoid running aground on the deadly shoals and he knows what to do when the weather turns suddenly. He can manage a squall no problem. And so the Allen Jacskon carries on towards New York City carrying 75 thousand barrels of crude oil. What Captain Kretchmer and the crew aboard the Allen Jackson do not know is that they’re headed directly towards the German submarine U-66. In fact, what they don’t know, is that U-66 has been stalking them for three hours now and it’s just about ready to strike. But the Allen Jackson isn’t being careless. They aren’t being naive. No one has warned them. No one seems to know that Nazi Germany, under the command of brutal dictator Adolph Hitler, has now made its way to American waters. U-66 launches two torpedoes at the unsuspecting Allen Jackson. Both hit their target with a massive explosion, igniting those 75 thousand barrels of oil, setting both the ship and the ocean ablaze. The Allen Jackson splits in two and sinks in less than 30 minutes, making it the first casualty at what will come to be called Torpedo Junction. When most people think of World War II, they think of British air raid sirens, men storming the beach at Normandy, the liberation of concentration camps, maybe the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What many don’t know is that one of the most violent naval battles of the war took place right here off the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Let’s fix that. 

 

So if you’d like to listen to that full mini fix, you can at patreon.com/historyfixpodcast. My Outer Banks listeners will especially like that one, I talk about what life was like for people living on the Outer Banks at the time, literally looking out at the ocean and seeing this all go down, the fear of actual Nazi’s coming ashore and walking among them. It’s a crazy story. I think everyone will enjoy it. So, patreon.com/historyfixpodcast. I really appreciate your support over their on patreon more than you know. My Patreon supporters make this show possible and I really hope y’all enjoy all the bonus content. I put a lot into those mini fixes. 

 

Okay, so, we don’t know much about Rapa Nui, I’m gonna call it Rapa Nui for obvious reasons. We don’t know much because no one ever bothered to ask. Now, granted, another part of the reason we don’t know much is because almost everything in their culture was passed down through oral traditions, right story telling. And, as you will see, their population went through a significant bottleneck with populations dropping to just over 100 people by the late 1800s. They did have a form of writing, or what’s referred to as proto-writing called RongoRongo. Today we have less than 30 wooden objects with this script engraved on them but it remains undecipherable. No one alive knows what they say or knows how to read or translate RongoRongo. So, without another Rosetta Stone discovery, these writings don’t tell us anything. 

 

For a long time, there was a dispute over where the people who inhabited Rapa Nui actually came from. Because it is out there. It is the most remote inhabited place on Earth. We don’t know for sure when people arrived either. There are theories that they arrived as early as the 300s AD. Other theories propose 700s or 800s and still others suggest it wasn’t until the 1200s that the first Rapanui people arrived on the island. The 1200s theory is based on radiocarbon dating so that’s the most likely answer. The other question has always been, where did they come from. They aren’t exactly close to anything. It is truly a speck in the middle of a vast ocean, 1,200 miles away from the next nearest island which is tiny itself. And when I say a speck, I do mean a speck. Rapa Nui is only 14 miles long 7 miles wide. And at the time that Europeans stumbled upon the island, they could not fathom how these people, these seemingly barbaric in their eyes, could possess the seafaring technology necessary to travel such vast distances. Yes, Europeans could do it with their big ships and their maps and compasses and sextants, but these people had none of those things. They just had little wooden canoes. There’s no way. Now we know better. Now we know that they did in fact possess the skills needed to voyage thousands of miles across open ocean without big ships and maps and compasses and all the bells and whistles. They did it in their little wooden canoes with knowledge and abilities that Europeans did not possess. But at the time, you know 1700s, eurocentrism was so strong that that wasn’t even a remote possibility in their minds. Now we know that it’s possible. So how did they do it? Well if you’ve ever seen Disney’s Moana, it’s an absolute favorite at my house, literally the only movie my kids watch which I’m not hating, that’s pretty much how they did it. We’re talking about Polynesian voyagers here. 

 

According to Liesl Clark writing for PBS quote “In island culture, the double canoe and its navigator were integral to the survival of the people. As an island became overpopulated, navigators were sent out to sail uncharted seas to find undiscovered islands. For weeks, they would live aboard boats made from wood and lashings of braided fiber. Thousands of miles were traversed, without the aid of sextants or compasses. The ancient Polynesians navigated their canoes by the stars and other signs that came from the ocean and sky. Navigation was a precise science, a learned art that was passed on verbally from one navigator to another for countless generations,” end quote. And this was quite different from how Europeans viewed and did ocean exploration which helps to explain their confusion upon realizing that the Rapanui must have come from thousands of miles away. Clark paints a stark contrast, writing quote “The people of the Pacific are intimately tied to the ocean. They sailed the sea hundreds of years before Europeans, using voyaging canoes crafted from island materials and stone tools. The Polynesians approached the open ocean with respect; indeed, the ocean was integrated naturally into Polynesian culture, as they came from small islands surrounded by vast ocean expanses. No other culture embraced the open sea so fully. For the continental Europeans, on the other hand, the ocean was looked upon as a menacing world that only the bravest explorers ventured upon for long periods of time. And even these explorers felt at odds with the ocean upon which they traveled. One of Magellan's chroniclers described [quote] "a sea so vast the human mind can scarcely grasp it." To a Polynesian islander, the world is primarily aquatic, since the Pacific ocean covers more area than land in this region. The Pacific, in fact, covers one third of the Earth's surface,” end quote. So for these voyagers in the Pacific, it wasn’t this crazy thing, it wasn’t a big deal like it was for Europeans. Ocean voyaging, spending weeks at sea on a tiny wooden canoe were normal. It was like second nature. This is what they did. 

 

Now, these skills, these wayfinding abilities would eventually fade as they were replaced with Western technology but we do have eyewitness accounts of them. Clark writes quote “In 1768, as he sailed from Tahiti, Captain Cook had an additional passenger on board his ship, a Tahitian navigator named Tupaia. Tupaia guided Cook 300 miles south to Rurutu, a small Polynesian island, proving he could navigate from his homeland to a distant island. Cook was amazed to find that Tupaia could always point in the exact direction in which Tahiti lay, without the use of the ship's charts. Sadly, Cook was never able to learn and document Tupaia's navigational techniques, for Tupaia, and many of Cook's crew, died of malaria in the Dutch East Indies. Unlike later visitors to the South Pacific, Cook understood that Polynesian navigators could guide canoes across the Pacific over great distances,” end quote. He understood it because he witnessed it with his own eyes. He actually cared to inquire. He asked a Polynesian voyager, Tupaia, you know, show me, tell me. Where is Tahiti? Take me to Rurutu. It’s really as simple as that. How many of these great mysteries today could have been avoided if European explorers had valued indigenous customs and abilities enough to inquire about them, enough to write them down. It’s the same story over again that I told in episode 39 about Mayanism, you know this concept that the Maya are this mysterious extinct race of people that no one understands. Nope. They were right there when the Spanish arrived, just doing their thing, and no one bothered to ask them any questions about their way of life. So now we don’t know. 

 

So we know how the Rapanui got there but the question for a long time was, where did they come from. They had a lot of things in common with the people inhabiting other Polynesian islands like Tahiti. They seemed very Polynesian, culturally and linguistically, but at the same time, there were a few things distinctly South American about them as well. For example, sweet potatoes. They were very into sweet potatoes on Rapa Nui, it was their main food source, almost sacred. And sweet potatoes are indigenous to South America. There is also some stone architecture on Rapa Nui that is very similar to Inca masonry work from the Andes Mountains in South America. The Inca had this really distinct building style where they didn’t use any mortar, they just fit the stone bricks together perfectly, so perfectly you can’t even slide a credit card between the bricks. And we see this on Rapa Nui as well. Even Captain Cook wrote of their architecture quote “The workmanship is not inferior to the best plain piece of masonry we have in England. They use no sort of cement; yet the joints are exceedingly close, and the stones morticed and tenanted one into another, in a very artful manner,” end quote. I love how he can’t actually say it’s good, he has to say it’s quote “not inferior.” Also, not inferior to the best “plain” piece of masonry in England. He’s basically saying it’s not worse than our worst stuff. Like just say it’s good, dude. It’s okay. Your fragile ego will survive. But this style of architecture and the existence of sweet potatoes on the island suggest South American origins. And so researchers were split on this for a long time. Did they come from Polynesia or did they come from South America? And thanks to recent DNA testing, we now know the answer to that definitively. 

 

A study published in September of 2024 in Nature which is like a scientific journal, I have it linked in the description, anyway in this study, they tested the DNA of 15 ancient Rapanui people whose bones were being stored at a museum in France for some reason. That’s a whole nother issue but anyway, they did whole-genome sequencing for these 15 individuals and it revealed a lot. They were able to definitively say that they were Polynesian and therefore probably came to Rapa Nui from one of the other Polynesian islands. But, they also had around 10% Native American ancestry meaning they had incorporated DNA from, probably, South America at some point, probably between the years 1250 and 1430 according to the study. And this explains a lot. It explains where the sweet potatoes came from. It explains the Inca style of architecture. The prevailing theory is that at some point, I guess between 1250 and 1430, Polynesian voyagers made landfall in South America where the cultures intermingled. They came away with sweet potatoes, building knowledge, and, it seems, a few South American brides and headed back out to sea, eventually making their way to Rapa Nui where the sweet potatoes were planted, the buildings were built, and the South American DNA carrying babies were born. And so, in a way they’re kind of both, Polynesian and South American, but mostly Polynesian. And I know I’ve talked about this a few times in past episodes but this is irrefutable proof that other explorers, Polynesian explorers reached the Americas before Christopher Columbus. So let’s put that whitewashed lie to bed once and for all. Keolu Fox, genome scientist at the University of California San Diego told Nature News quote “We’re confirming something we already knew. Do you think that a community that found things like Hawaii or Tahiti would miss a whole continent?” end quote. 

 

So they’re definitely Polynesian but the question remains, which Polynesian Island did they come from and also, what’s up with the giant stone heads, possibly the greatest mystery of all. You know, the Easter Island stone heads. They’re called Moai (mo-eye) in the native language and they were clearly of great cultural significance because the Rapanui put a ton of effort into carving and moving these things. We now know that they carved almost 900 of them out of hardened volcanic ash. The average size of a moai is around 13 feet tall weighing in at 14 tons which is 28,000 pounds. But, the biggest one is 72 feet tall and weighs around 150 tons or 300,000 pounds. But that one was never erected, it’s still lying in a quarry. The biggest one that they actually erected, moved and stood upright, is called Paro and it’s 32 feet tall and weighs 82 tons or 164,000 pounds. So they made almost 900 of these moai but only 288 of them were successfully transported and erected. Most of them are still laying in the quarries where they were carved and 90 some were abandoned in transit lying along roads that were clearly meant for moving them to their final destinations. So it’s an unfinished job really. At some point, they abandoned the Moai project that had once occupied so much of their time and energy. The final destinations, where they were moving the moai to, were called ahu. These were flat mounds upon which the moai would stand once they had been moved from the quarry. We don’t know how they moved them from the quarry, though. There are lots of theories which I’ll get into in a bit. But another mystery with the moai is that, for some reason between 1770 and 1774, in those 4 years, many of the standing moai were intentionally toppled by the Rapanui. They tipped them over, destroyed them on purpose for some reason. And we know this because when the Dutch guy, Roggeveen, arrived on Easter Island in 1722 and when Spanish Explorers visited in 1770, they both reported seeing only standing moai. They never saw the quarry, they didn’t know there were actually a ton more that never made it to their final destination but they saw the ones that made it and they were all standing up on the ahus as of the Spanish reports in 1770. In 1774 when Captain Cook arrived, many of the once standing moai had been toppled, they were now lying smashed and broken on the ground. And we don’t know why the Rapanui did this. But it continued. They continued to topple them into the 1830s and now the Moai are only still standing in two locations. So, I don’t know, but, you know 1830s. How hard would it have been in 1830 for someone to be like “hey dude, why are you toppling that statue?” Like, why is it some big mystery? Because, while the Rapanui do not have a written language that we know how to decipher, they did have a rich tradition of oral storytelling and if we had cared to listen to them, to record any of that, we could probably have learned a whole lot. 

 

Some of these stories have survived through the generations. And it’s hard to say how much stock we can put in them as like scientific evidence, or whatever, they are legends after all, but if you listen, if you care to listen to the Rapanui finally, the stories might shed some light. Paul Trachtman recounts a conversation with Benedicto Tuki, who is Rapanui, in an article for Smithsonian Magazine. He describes Tuki as a master wood carver and keeper of ancient knowledge. Trachtman writes quote “His piercing eyes were set in a deeply creased, mahogany face. He introduced himself as a descendant of the island’s first king, Hotu Matu’a, who, he said, brought the original settlers from an island named Hiva in the Marquesas. He claimed his grandmother was the island’s last queen. He would tell me about Hotu Matu’a, he said that day, but only from the center of the island, at a platform called Ahu Akivi with its seven giant statues. There, he could recount the story in the right way…  As our jeep negotiated a rutted dirt road, the seven moai loomed into view. Their faces were paternal, all-knowing and human—forbiddingly human. These seven, Tuki said, were not watching over the land like those statues with their backs to the sea. These stared out beyond the island, across the ocean to the west, remembering where they came from. When Hotu Matu’a arrived on the island, Tuki added, he brought seven different races with him, which became the seven tribes of Rapa Nui. These moai represent the original ancestor from the Marquesas and the kings of other Polynesian islands. Tuki himself gazed into the distance as he chanted their names. “This is not written down,” he said. “My grandmother told me before she died.” His was the 68th generation, he added, since Hotu Matu’a,” end quote. So, you know, that answers a lot of questions right there. One afternoon spent talking to an indigenous Rapanui person and boom we have the island of origin, Hiva in the Marquesas. We also have the purpose of the moai, the giant heads, they were based on ancestor worship. It’s really not a huge mystery if you simply care to ask. 

 

Now we can’t put a ton of scientific stock into these native legends though because they are legends after all. Tuki elaborated to Trachtman quote “Because of fighting at home, chief Hotu Matu’a gathered his followers for a voyage to a new land. His tattooist and priest, Hau Maka, had flown across the ocean in a dream and seen Rapa Nui and its location, which he described in detail. Hotu Matu’a and his brother-in-law set sail in long double canoes, loaded with people, food, water, plant cuttings and animals. After a voyage of two months, they sailed into Anakena Bay, which was just as the tattooist had described it,” end quote. Rapa Nui legends also tell us that the moai walked to the ahus where they now stand, that’s the Rapanui explanation of how they moved them. Liesl Clark writes for PBS quote “Like most oral traditions, Rapa Nui folklore has been passed down through the generations, and it is unknown whether the stories are based on historical fact. Most center on the mystical idea that the massive megaliths were moved using "mana," or divine power. Those who possessed mana were able to command the moai to walk to their designated places. Accounts of who actually possessed mana differ greatly. In 1919, Katherine Routledge, a British archaeologist who lived on Easter Island for a year, recorded in her journal: [quote] "There was a certain old woman who lived at the southern corner of the mountain and filled the position of cook to the image-makers. She was the most important person of the establishment, and moved the images by supernatural powers (mana), ordering them about at her will." Earlier accounts recorded by visitors to the island indicate that statues were ordered to walk by the mythical King Tuu Ku Ihu and the god Make Make. Even specialized priests were known to move moai at the request of those who wanted them on their family land or ahu,” end quote. I know Make Make as a dwarf planet because my son went through a pretty serious planets phase not too long ago. Did not realize it was named after a Rapanui god. Pretty cool. Anyway, these legends of people or kings or gods with the mystical powers to make the stone statues walk to their destinations, they’re cool, but they’re just myths. They aren’t physics, right. So how did they actually do it? Well there are quite a few theories that Clark details in that PBS article and some of them are actually based on the walking legends. 

 

For example, in 1982 Pavel Pavel who is a Czech engineer and experimental archaeologist who focuses on how ancient civilizations moved heavy things, he put a lot of stock in the walking moai legends and developed a theory based around that. Clark writes quotes “Pavel Pavel based his theory on the assumption that an upright moai was relatively stable; each statue has a low center of gravity thanks to a large base and a narrow head. Pavel Pavel used a crew of 17 people divided into two groups and tilted the statue onto its back edge (he calculated that five degrees was a safe tilt). With one rope around the head of the statue and another around the base, they "walked" the moai replica forward by swiveling and rocking it from side to side. Using this method, Pavel Pavel estimated that an experienced crew could move a statue approximately 650 feet each day,” end quote. That sounds pretty promising but there are some issues with it. The terrain on Rapa Nui is super rough and it doesn’t work as well on rough terrain without damaging the base of the moai. Other theories are even worse. Norwegian adventurer, which I didn’t know that was a thing, that you could just be an adventurer, but this Norwegian guy named Thor Heyderdahl came up with another theory in the 1950s that involved pulling the moai on their backs on a wooden sled using sweet potatoes as a lubricant. He tested this successfully using a moai that weighed 10 tons and needed 180 people to pull it. But 10 tons is kind of a small moai. The largest that was moved, remember weighed 82 tons which would require 1,500 people to move. So it’s just not very practical on that scale. There are other proposed theories too including, of course Erich von Daniken who I’ve talked about before. He’s written a few books about the ancient aliens theory. But he has almost no credibility. He’s actually been convicted of fraud and embezzlement. He’s a known con artist and charlatan so, huge grain of salt but he wrote in his 1972 book Return to the Stars quote “the men who could execute such perfect work must have possessed ultra-modern tools.” He proposed that a quote “small group of intelligent beings was stranded on Easter Island owing to a 'technical hitch.'The stranded group had a great store of knowledge, very advanced weapons and a method of working stone unknown to us.” He says they made the moai quote “Perhaps to leave the natives a lasting memory of their stay, but perhaps also as a sign to the friends who were looking for them, the strangers extracted a colossal statue from the volcanic stone. Then they made more stone giants which they set up on stone pedestals along the coast so that they were visible from afar,” end quote. The obvious problem with this theory being that there is absolutely no evidence for it whatsoever and no way to prove it, not to mention how damaging it is to the Rapanui people to imply that they were too stupid or not advanced enough or whatever to possibly pull something like this off themselves and therefore it had to be aliens. So, yeah. But anyway, somehow or another, they moved the giant moai sometimes as far as 9 miles away from the quarries where they were carved. I like the theories that incorporate an actual upright walking movement. That makes the most sense to me because of the Rapanui legends about the statues walking to their locations. There has to be some significance to that. 

 

So what happened, though, to the people on Rapa Nui? Because I think I mentioned earlier that by the late 1800s, there were just over 100 of them left. And only 12 of those survivors were adult males. So we’re talking about near extinction for this particular group. What happened? Well, the theory until very recently was that the population of Rapa Nui was already experiencing a sharp decline when Europeans arrived in the 1700s. Now we know, based on that 2024 study, that DNA evidence, that that is not true. But let’s explore that theory first because it has prevailed until like yesterday, the eco-cide theory it’s called. This theory proposes that the Rapanui people had so badly destroyed the environment on the island by over-using resources that it could no longer sustain them. They had cut down all the trees, possibly to use them to move the moai, the giant heads. But then they had no trees to build canoes and no canoes meant no fish and no fish meant hungry people and then they descended into fighting, warfare, and even cannibalism and massive population decline. It was theorized that their population was once at around 20,000 people but by the time the Dutch arrived in 1722, there were only a few thousand people left. People theorized that they were so focused on creating these giant stone heads, these massive statues and moving them that that’s where all of their effort went. That’s all they did. That’s all they focused on. And everything else fell apart. And this dystopian society upon which the Europeans had stumbled has been used as a sort of cautionary tale ever since. Right, take care of the land or face doom. It’s an important lesson, honestly but it just may not have been what happened on Rapa Nui. 

 

There are little bits of evidence for it. Roggeveen reported in 1722 that there were no trees on the island, that they had all been cut down and later Captain Cook’s men reported no trees taller than 10 feet. Trachtman reports quote “Some archaeologists point to a layer of subsoil with many obsidian spear points as a sign of sudden warfare… Smithsonian forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley, who has studied the bones of some 600 individuals from the island, has found numerous signs of trauma, such as blows to the face and head. But only occasionally, he says, did these injuries result in death,” end quote. But the real evidence against this theory comes from that 2024 study of those 15 Rapanui skeletons that were in the museum in France. The DNA genome sequencing they did proved that the population was not declining at the time the Europeans arrived. It was actually still on the rise which means that there had never been that many people living on the island to begin with, 20,000 people. That was a vast overestimation. Alexa Robles Gil writes for Smithsonian Magazine quote “If the population had indeed collapsed, researchers would’ve seen a reduction in genetic diversity, according to the paper. But this wasn’t the case,” end quote. Study author Barbara Sousa de Mota told a French newspaper quote “Our genetic analysis shows a stably growing population from the 13th century through to European contact in the 18th century. This stability is critical, because it directly contradicts the idea of a dramatic pre-contact population collapse,” end quote. More evidence against the eco-cide theory, Robles-Gil explains quote “Previous research indicated that roughly 12 percent of Rapa Nui could have been covered with rock gardens, an agricultural method that involves adding rocks to the soil to maintain moisture and nutrients. The team used satellite images to map out rock gardens on the island to better understand how many people were actually living there historically. Their findings revealed that only a small percent of the island—less than one-third of a square mile—was used for rock gardening. Such a low amount of agriculture could have supported about 4,000 people—nowhere near the [number of] people initially thought to have lived on the island,” end quote. DNA analysis is so amazing is it not? It tells us so much. It’s pretty much debunked the ecocide theory that has prevailed ever since Europeans arrived in the 1720s and it proves that Polynesian voyagers made contact with South Americans too. Very cool. But if that’s not what happened to the people on Rapa Nui, they didn’t self-destruct, then what did happen to them? Well the answer to that is unfortunately quite predictable. The same thing that happened to all the other indigenous cultures that had the misfortune of being air quotes discovered by Europeans: disease, oppression, and enslavement. I wish I didn’t have to tell you this same story over and over again but, here we are. 

 

So, Dutch ships arrive in 1722 led by Captain Jacob Roggeveen, this is the first contact with Europeans. Here’s how it went down. Now, let me remind you, Roggeveen was only on the island for one day. He did not like set up camp. He had no interest in this tiny tree-less island, he was looking for a whole fictional continent. And yet still, here’s how badly things went, okay? It starts out okay. Dutch officer Karl Friedrich Barons, who was present, wrote quote “During the morning [the captain] brought an Easter Islander onboard with his craft. This hapless creature seemed to be very glad to behold us, and he showed the greatest wonder at the build of our ship. He took special notice of the taughtness of our spars, the stoutness of our rigging and running gear, the sails, the guns, which he felt all over with minute attention and with everything else that he saw. When the image of his own features was displayed before him in a mirror, he started suddenly back, and then looked toward the back of the glass, apparently in the expectation of discovering the cause of the apparition. After we had sufficiently beguilded ourselves with him and he with us, we started him off again in his canoe towards the shore,” end quote. Alright, so fun, right? I mean sort of belittling, little bit of a circus sideshow freak thing going on, but it’s peaceful at least. Okay but then, geography professor Richard A. Crooker writes quote “islanders either paddled leaky canoes or simply swam out to the ships and were invited on board. Communication between the Dutchmen and islanders depended on expressions and signs, and soon there were misunderstandings. Roggeveen wrote that the islanders quote “took the hats and caps of the sailors from their heads and jumped with their plunder overboard, for they were extremely good swimmers.” Roggeveen decided to use force to collect the stolen belongings. The next morning he armed 134 men with muskets, loaded them into three launches, and accompanied them to the island. He wrote in his logbook, quote “we marched forward a little” and “to our great astonishment and without any expectation . . . more than thirty muskets were let off and the Indians being completely surprised and frightened by this fled, leaving behind 10 to 12 dead, besides the wounded.” One of Roggeveen’s men explained to him later that quote “some of the inhabitants . . . picked up stones and with a menacing gesture of throwing at us, by which by all appearances, the shooting from my small troop had been caused. . . .” end quote. 

 

One of the men who was killed was the guy with the mirror who had been so into the mirror that everyone got a kick out of. The Dutch Officer who wrote about that, Karl Friedrich Barons wrote that the crew was quote “much grieved” when they learned what had happened to the man. Like seriously? They picked up rocks so you shot and killed 10 to 12 of them? Why is it always like this? Professor Crooker goes on quote “Fearing for their lives, the islanders quickly made amends with their visitors by giving them sixty chickens and thirty bunches of bananas,” end quote. They shouldn’t be giving them chickens and bananas, they should be kicking them the eff off the island. Get your violent trigger happy ass out of here. Why is it always like this? Aw were they picking up rocks? Were you scared of the rocks? Yeah? I mean, really. After that, in the 1770s, the Spanish stopped by for a minute and then the British, Captain Cook, didn’t really mess with the Rapanui except to pass on a bunch of awful diseases they had no immunity to. Then the French made an appearance in the 1780s. Some French guy made a map of the island, the first map of the island. And after that, after it started showing up on maps, it started to be used as a resupply stop for sealing and whaling ships in the early 1800s. According to Wikipedia quote “Over time, these stops (starting with an 1805 visit from an American sealing ship) increasingly included pressing the islanders into the ships' crews as forced labourers, and – ultimately – outright slave raids… Disaster arrived in the 1860s when Peruvian slavers came, looking for captives to sell in Peru. Easter Island was not the only island to suffer but it was the hardest hit because it was closest to the South American coast. Eight ships arrived to Easter Island in December 1862. About 80 seamen assembled on the beach while trade goods such as necklaces, mirrors and other items were spread out. At a signal, guns were fired and islanders were caught, tied up, and carried off to the ships. At least ten Rapanui were killed. A second and third landing was attempted in the following days, but defensive measures forced a retreat back to the ships. More than 1400 Rapanui islanders were kidnapped, about half of the island's population. Some were sold in Peru as domestic servants; others for manual labor on the plantations. Food was inadequate and discipline harsh; medical care was virtually non-existent. Islanders sickened and died,” end quote. This kidnapping of Rapanui people for forced labor in Peru, thankfully, was highly controversial and a year later the Peruvian government actually forced the enslavers to return the Rapanui people that they had kidnapped but by then most of them had died of diseases like tuberculosis, smallpox, and dysentery. Those that managed to return to Rapa Nui alive brought those diseases with them which started an epidemic on the island that further reduced the population to around 110 people by 1877. 

 

So of course the population bottle neck didn’t happen before the Europeans arrived. Wouldn’t that have been all too convenient? “I don’t know what happened. It wasn’t our fault. They just like cut down all the trees and stuff. They weren’t taking care of the environment. We didn’t kill them. It wasn’t our fault.” Yes you did. The lack of accountability is infuriating. DNA tests do not lie. They were doing just fine on Rapa Nui until Europeans arrived with their diseases and their violence and their senseless need to enslave other human beings. Same old story, different island. And it’s not until literally last year when that DNA study came out that the narrative has finally shifted. 

 

But it shouldn’t have taken that long. The information was there, right there, for anyone who cared enough to know. But they didn’t. No one asked the Rapanui. No one studied their way of life. No one cared about it until the 1930s over 200 years after first contact. In the 1800s French seafarer and artist Pierre Loti wrote of Rapa Nui quote “There exists in the midst of the great ocean, in a region where nobody goes, a mysterious and isolated island. The island is planted with monstrous great statues, the work of I don’t know what race, today degenerate or vanished; its great remains an enigma,” end quote. A region where nobody goes gets me. Define nobody. Cause I'm pretty sure the Polynesians were zipping all over that region when your ancestors were still huddling in mud huts half starved and covered in their own excrement. Maybe I’m being dramatic but I’m so sick of this eurocentric BS. Feeling feisty. It wasn’t until 1934 that anyone cared to find anything out about Rapa Nui and its people, the few who were left. Ethnologist Alfred Metraux and archaeologist Henri Lavachery finally started to gather and record the legends, traditions, and myths passed down through generations of Rapanui people in order to try to understand their culture. Metraux’s books are what brought global awareness about Rapa Nui to the rest of the world. But it was, unfortunately, kind of too little too late. You can’t wait until a civilization has been almost completely destroyed and then try to ask them questions about who they once were. Most of that has been lost to time and now we’re grasping at straws, genome sequencing ancient DNA to try to figure out what really happened. 

 

I see a lot of similarities between the Rapa Nui story and the story of the Maya in Central America. This idea that they are extinct, that they no longer exist, that we’ll never know who they really were or what they were capable of. And that creates this sense of mystery, right, the Mayan calendar, the world ending in 2012, these misconceptions are based on a lack of knowledge, too many holes in what we know about them. Oh the Easter Island heads are so mysterious, how did they do that? I don’t know, why didn’t you ask them? Trachtman writes in his Smithsonian Magazine article quote “When I ask [Grant] McCall, [an anthropologist from the University of New South Wales in Australia] who has recorded the genealogies of island families since 1968, how a culture could be transmitted through only 110 people, he tugs at his scruffy blond mustache. “Well, it only takes two people,” he says, “somebody who is speaking and somebody who is listening,” end quote. And it really is that simple. The Maya are not gone and neither are the Rapa Nui. Their populations have been greatly diminished, their culture near erased, but they are still here. And both groups are trying desperately to regain some of who they once were, some of what was taken from them. There’s controversy now about the land in Rapa Nui which is currently a territory of Chile. Should the land be preserved, kept as like a national park, a world heritage site, or should it be given back to the Rapa Nui people from whom it was taken, people who are still here. Petero Edmunds, former mayor of Hanga Roa which is a town on Rapa Nui tells Trachtman quote “The moai are not silent. They speak. They’re an example our ancestors created in stone, of something that is within us, which we call spirit. The world must know this spirit is alive.”

 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix. 

Information used in this episode was sourced from Smithsonian Magazine, Nature News, PBS, UNESCO, and Wikipedia. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.