Roggeveen Reaches Easter Island (1722): First European Visit

On Easter Sunday, 5 April 1722, a Dutch expedition led by Jacob Roggeveen sighted a small, remote island in the south-eastern Pacific and named it Paasch-Eyland, Easter Island. The Rapa Nui people who lived there had been isolated for centuries, and Roggeveen’s journal gave Europeans their first description of the island and its giant stone statues, the moai. The brief visit also ended in violence, when Dutch sailors shot and killed around ten islanders.

Background: the search for the southern continent

In the early 18th century many European geographers still believed that a vast southern continent, Terra Australis, lay in the unexplored South Pacific. In 1687 the English buccaneer Edward Davis reported a low, sandy island with high land to the west somewhere off the coast of South America. This “Davis Land” was thought by some to be the edge of the continent, and finding it promised new trade and territory for whichever nation reached it first.

Jacob Roggeveen (1659-1729), a lawyer from Middelburg in Zeeland, had served as a judicial official for the Dutch East India Company in Batavia (Jakarta). His father, Arent Roggeveen, had once planned an expedition to the southern continent. In 1721, at over 60 years of age, Jacob persuaded the Dutch West India Company (WIC) to send three ships to search for it.

The expedition

The ships Arend (Eagle), Thienhoven and Afrikaansche Galey left Texel on 1 August 1721 with roughly 220 to 250 men. They crossed the Atlantic, rounded Cape Horn by sailing far to the south, and stopped at the Juan Fernández Islands off Chile to rest and take on water. From there they sailed west in search of Davis Land.

Arrival at Rapa Nui

On 5 April 1722 the lookouts sighted land. Because it was Easter Sunday, Roggeveen named the island Paasch-Eyland. Strong winds and caution kept the ships offshore for several days. A man came out to the ships in a canoe and was taken aboard, where the sailors noted his curiosity and friendliness.

On 10 April Roggeveen went ashore with about 134 armed men. As they advanced, crowds of islanders gathered around them. Some sailors at the rear, apparently fearing an attack after stones were thrown or objects grabbed, opened fire without orders. Around ten to twelve islanders were killed, and others were wounded. According to Dutch accounts, islanders afterwards brought fruit and chickens to the shore, apparently to restore peace.

The Dutch stayed only one day on shore. Bad weather threatened, and Roggeveen decided to move on, judging that the island could not be Davis Land or part of a continent.

What Roggeveen saw

Roggeveen’s journal and the accounts of other crew members, especially the German sergeant Carl Friedrich Behrens, are the earliest written descriptions of Rapa Nui. They described the islanders’ tattoos, their banana, sweet potato and sugarcane gardens, their chickens and their small canoes, and noted that the island seemed to lack large trees.

Most famously, they described the moai standing on stone platforms near the coast. Roggeveen wondered how people without thick timber or strong rope could have erected such large statues, and he believed, wrongly, that they were made of clay packed with stones. He also recorded seeing islanders light fires before the statues and squat with bowed heads, which he interpreted as worship. For background on the statues themselves, see Moai of Rapa Nui.

The sailors offered different estimates of the population, from a few thousand upward. Modern estimates of the island’s population at the time of contact usually range from about 1,500 to 3,000 people.

The rest of the voyage

After leaving Rapa Nui the expedition sailed west through the Tuamotu Archipelago, where the Afrikaansche Galey was wrecked on a reef in May 1722. It then passed several other Polynesian islands and reached the Manu’a islands of Samoa in June 1722, among the first European sightings of Samoa.

Short of supplies and suffering from scurvy, the remaining ships sailed along New Guinea to the Dutch East Indies. At Batavia in late 1722 the Dutch East India Company, as it had done with Le Maire and Schouten a century earlier, seized the ships for breaching its monopoly. Roggeveen returned to the Netherlands in 1723 on a company ship, completing a circumnavigation of the world. The West India Company later obtained compensation.

Consequences: later contact

Roggeveen’s visit did not lead to immediate European settlement. Nearly half a century passed before the next recorded visitors arrived. In 1770 a Spanish expedition from Peru under Felipe González de Haedo landed, held a ceremony claiming the island for the king of Spain and left a document that, according to the Spanish account, island leaders marked with signs. Spain never followed up the claim.

James Cook called in March 1774 during his second voyage, and the French expedition of La Pérouse visited in 1786. These later visitors noted that some statues had fallen, the first signs of a change that would continue for decades.

The gravest consequences came in the 19th century. Peruvian slave raids in 1862-1863 carried off around 1,500 people, and diseases brought back by the few who returned caused further deaths. By the late 1870s only about 110 islanders remained. Chile annexed the island in 1888. Seen against this later history, Roggeveen’s visit was the first step in a long and often tragic encounter between Rapa Nui and the outside world.

Key people

• Jacob Roggeveen (1659-1729): leader of the expedition, a lawyer and former VOC official rather than a professional seaman.
• Cornelis Bouman: captain of the Thienhoven, whose own journal also describes the visit.
• Carl Friedrich Behrens: German soldier on the expedition whose account, published in German in the 1730s, popularised the voyage.
• The Rapa Nui people: the island’s Polynesian inhabitants, descendants of settlers who arrived centuries earlier, as described in the article on the settlement of Rapa Nui.

Myths and facts

• Myth: the moai had all fallen when Europeans arrived. Roggeveen’s crew saw standing statues in 1722. They were toppled during the following decades, a process complete by the mid-19th century.
• Myth: Roggeveen found a dying society. The Dutch described a functioning community with gardens, canoes and many people. How far the island’s earlier deforestation affected its society is still debated by archaeologists.
• Fact: Roggeveen’s own journal was lost for over a century. It was found in the Zeeland archives and first published in 1838.

Timeline

• 1721, 1 August: Roggeveen’s three ships leave Texel.
• 1722, early: The expedition rounds Cape Horn and visits the Juan Fernández Islands.
• 1722, 5 April: The island is sighted on Easter Sunday and named Paasch-Eyland.
• 1722, 10 April: The Dutch land; about ten islanders are killed in a shooting.
• 1722, May: The Afrikaansche Galey is wrecked in the Tuamotus.
• 1722, June: The expedition sights the Manu’a islands of Samoa.
• 1722, late: The VOC seizes the ships at Batavia.
• 1723: Roggeveen returns to the Netherlands.
• 1770: A Spanish expedition visits and claims the island; James Cook follows in 1774.

Why it matters

Roggeveen’s visit marks the beginning of recorded contact between Rapa Nui and the outside world. His short and violent stay produced the first written description of one of the most remarkable cultures of the Pacific, and his account of the moai still shapes debates about how and why the islanders built them.