page_title: History of Easter Island
section_title: European contacts
hierarchical_section_title: History of Easter Island / European contacts
caption_attribution_description: Plan de l'Isle de Paque. Leve en Avril 1786 a board des Frigates Francaises la Boussole et l'Astrolabe. Jean-Francois de Galaup La Perouse (1741-1788), 1797. Paris, L'Imprimerie de la Republique.
context_page_description: Geologically one of the youngest inhabited territories on Earth, Easter Island, located in the mid-Pacific Ocean, was, for most of its history, one of the most isolated. Its inhabitants, the Rapa Nui, have endured famines, epidemics of disease and cannibalism, civil war, environmental collapse, slave raids, various colonial contacts, and have seen their population crash on more than one occasion. The ensuing cultural legacy has brought the island notoriety out of proportion to the number of its inhabitants.
context_section_description: The first-recorded European contact with the island took place on 5 April (Easter Sunday) 1722 when Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen  visited for a week and estimated there were 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants on the island. This was an estimate, not a census, and archaeologists estimate the population may have been as high as 10,000 to 12,000 a few decades earlier. His party reported "remarkable, tall, stone figures, a good 30 feet in height", the island had rich soil and a good climate and "all the country was under cultivation". Fossil-pollen analysis shows that the main trees on the island had gone 72 years earlier in 1650. The Dutch reported that a fight broke out in which they killed ten or twelve islanders.
  The next foreign visitors arrived on 15 November 1770: two Spanish ships, San Lorenzo and Santa Rosalia, sent by the Viceroy of Peru, Manuel de Amat, and commanded by Felipe González de Ahedo. They spent five days on the island, performing a very thorough survey of its coast, and named it Isla de San Carlos, taking possession on behalf of King Charles III of Spain, and ceremoniously erected three wooden crosses on top of three small hills on Poike.
  Four years later, in mid-March 1774, British explorer James Cook visited Easter Island.  Cook himself was too sick to walk far, but a small group explored the island. They reported the statues as being neglected with some having fallen down; no sign of the three crosses and his botanist described it as "a poor land". He had a Tahitian interpreter who could partially understand the language. Other than in counting, though, the language was unintelligible. Cook later estimated that there were about 700 people on the island. He saw only three or four canoes, all unseaworthy.  Parts of the island were cultivated with banana, sugarcane, and sweet potatoes, while other parts looked like they had once been cultivated but had fallen into disuse. Georg Forster reported in his account that he saw no trees over ten feet tall on the island.
  On 10 April 1786 the French explorer Jean François de Galaup La Pérouse visited and made a detailed map of Easter Island. He described the island as one-tenth cultivated and estimated that the population of the island was around two thousand.
  In 1804 the Russian ship Neva visited under the command of Yuri Lisyansky.
  In 1816 the Russian ship Rurik visited under the command of Otto von Kotzebue.
  In 1825 the British ship HMS Blossom visited
caption: 1786 La Pérouse map
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