Foreign visitors to Easter Island 1772 to 1862: Isolation proved a high price to pay

The impact of foreign visitors at Easter Island is much clearer now that 79 visits can be identified that involved contacts ashore before the slave raids in 1862 (Richards 2008). Of these, 56 visits were by whaleships – four British whalers before 1823, and 51 American whaleships between 1822 and 1862.

The ships of the explorers and the whalemen were well-provisioned for voyages of up to three years. Their main need was for water less stale than the water in the barrels they brought from home. It was soon clear that Easter Island was not well equipped to supply fresh water. However, in order to avoid scurvy, many whaling captains would also trade for vegetables and fruit if these could be readily obtained without risks to their voyages and to their crews. Thus sweet potatoes, yams, bananas, plantains and sugar cane were bartered for knives, nails, hoop iron and ironware, pins and needles for making fishhooks, and whatever trinkets the islanders fancied. Later, many islanders gave priority to taking toasted scraps from the whale-pots, which they devoured with great eagerness. These scraps became a standard trade item: in 1841, the Columbus of Nantucket obtained eight barrels of potatoes and twelve barrels of yams for three and a half barrels of scraps. Some ships, like the Navigator of Nantucket, took 50 barrels of potatoes in 1842 (Richards 2008:77; PMB 674,675 and 795; PMB 380). The whalers experienced no shortage of food on shore.

The visitors found the Easter Islanders keen to trade, but exuberant, excitable and unruly, and without any chiefly authorities to take control when misunderstandings and disruptions occurred. The islanders soon earned a reputation for skillful petty thieving. On several occasions initially amicable exchanges deteriorated into hostilities, with the visitors pelted with stones thrown with Polynesian accuracy. Distrust grew on both sides, with islanders killed in 1806, 1822, and 1838, and at least one whaleman killed, in 1856. In the later years, the visitors believed some islanders made most friendly gestures to them to go ashore, but only in order to steal their clothes. The whaling records show that generally, however, the islanders discouraged visitors from going ashore even very briefly.

One interesting, though rather convoluted, report indicates that the practice of discouraging foreigners from landing on shore was a conscious decision made by ‘the King’ as early as 1805. That year, Captain Page in the London whaleship Adventure touched at Easter Island “to refresh his crew, they having the scurvy.” When they departed, “King Crang-a-low was supposed to be 125 years old, scarcely able to walk, and his hair as white as milk, and the father of twenty-three children, all of whom were alive.” Captain John Page brought away “the youngest son, a handsome man aged about 22,” whom they called Henry Easter. He later told Captain Page that “about a year previous to their departure, an American ship [now known to have been the sealing schooner Nancy of New London, under Captain Crocker] had visited them for the same purpose as the Adventure, but after receiving the different fruits which the natives were able to furnish them with, took seven of them away; which was likely to be attended with serious consequences to the next visitors [in the Adventure]; they, not knowing what had happened, approached the shore unguarded, when they were attacked with showers of stones from slings, with which the islanders are very dexterous, and struck the Captain [Page] on the breast with such violence as to nearly kill him. Through the above affair, King Crangalow will not let any boat communicate with the shore.” (Sydney Gazette 8 December 1812; final italics added – see Note).

So from as early as 1805, the Easter Islanders required the visiting whalemen to adopt a form of trading that minimized the contacts and the danger. Most whaleships lay well off-shore and sent two or more whaleboats close in-shore, to anchor or to lie just outside the surf. Islanders of both sexes then carried their baskets of produce into the water and swam them to the boats, where the visitors took in the baskets and returned them with their trade items inside. On some occasions, near naked women got into the boats with great coquetry in order to obtain gifts and, if possible, to distract the crew so that other islanders could steal whatever small items they could. Generally, however, wise boatmen allowed the islanders to trade only one by one, and to keep all others away, lest they combine and upset the boats. A considerable quantity of goods could be exchanged this way, with minimal personal contact between the visitors and the islanders.

The scraps of information recorded by the whalemen add only a little to our limited knowledge of the Easter Islanders in this early ‘culture contact’period, but one point stands out clearly. This is that the local people ashore were not so impoverished, nor so hungry, that they would not barter valuable food, often playfully and in quite large quantities, for the “curiosities” offered by the visiting foreigners. Also, the islanders’ willingness to trade their own “curiosities,” such as moai kava kava statuettes and moai moko lizard figures, began vigorously from a very early date.

But probably the most fascinating conclusion to draw from the modest records is the very high price that the Easter Islanders paid, indirectly, for their mode of trading just off-shore, and for their reluctance to allow any foreigners to remain on shore. Put in a wider Pacific context, it is extra-ordinary that as late as 1862, Easter Island still had had no resident foreign ‘beachcombers,’ and no other foreigners, living ashore. The first resident foreigners had been living in New Zealand, Fiji, and Tahiti by 1799, and in Hawai‘i and the Marquesas Islands a little earlier, and foreign settlers had been arriving in increasing numbers there ever since. Indeed, after 1858, there were more foreigners in New Zealand than Maori. In Hawai‘i and elsewhere, there were modern ports and thriving settlements with local-born populations, often of mixed blood. By 1853, the population of the Hawaiian Islands, for example, included nearly 1,000 part Hawaiians. And by contrast, Easter Island apparently had none.

But ‘civilization,’ including even the ubiquitous foreign and ‘native’ missionaries, had passed by Easter Island, leaving a few items of foreign manufacture, but little else, and certainly not the contribution to the human gene pool so prolific elsewhere in the Pacific. Thus, by 1862, the Easter Islanders had not received the immunities that other indigenous peoples of the Pacific had acquired much earlier through close contact and inter-breeding. So the smallpox and other diseases that were brought home to Easter Island by the pitiful handful of slaves that were released from Peru, were doubly devastating and doubly fatal.

Seen in that context, the Easter Islanders had paid a very high price for maintaining their isolation, and for the cultural isolation that followed when they chose to limit their trade with the foreigners to encounters off-shore, outside the surf, as that distanced them from both the malign and the benign influences of foreign contact.

Note on Sources

Several newspapers carried identical reports announcing that Henry Easter, ‘the youngest son of Crang-a-low, King of Easter Island,’ had been baptized at Rotherhithe, near London, in October 1811. (The Morning Post and The Morning Chronicle, both of London, both on 6 November 1811; The Times, London, on 7 November; Caledonian Mercury, Edinburgh, 9 November; Hampshire Telegraph, Portsmouth, 11 November; Lancaster Gazette, Lancaster, 21 December; and the Massachusetts Spy of 8 January 1811.)

However, what has not been found is the original, the slightly longer version, ‘dated London 31 October 1811,’ and carried to Sydney with Henry Easter, which the Sydney Gazette copied and published on 8 August 1812. This version alone notes King Crangalow’s prohibition of shore visits, as quoted above in italics.

Other information added to this Sydney report was that ‘this Native Prince…. had been to school.... in England, spoke very tolerable English, and has manners more like those of a European than the native of a South-sea island…. The young man was handsome, very healthy, well cloathed and had every appearance of a satisfied mind.’ Henry Easter was then a crew member, ‘in what capacity we know not,’ on the London whaleship Phoenix, Captain William Parker, which had visited Sydney for a month from 29 June to 29 July 1812 (Cumpston 1964:81).

‘Whether Captain Parker’s idea was to return him [Henry Easter] to the place of his nativity [Easter Island], or not, we had not the opportunity to enquire; but from the benevolence of that gentleman’s disposition, we cannot doubt this to have been his view’ (Sydney Gazette 8 December 1812).

Captain Parker took the Phoenix to New Zealand and the sperm whale fishery, returning to Sydney for two months, from 22 June to 22 August 1813. The Phoenix departed for Rio de Janeiro and London, and arrived home on 24 May 1814 (Jones 1986:46).

On her next voyage, the Phoenix went first to the right whale fishery at the Derwent, and then to New Zealand for sperm whales, but called at Sydney from 23 July to 3 August 1815, and again in September, when she left for New Zealand and London (Cumpston 1964:87, 97, 99). There is, alas, no evidence whether Captain Parker visited Easter Island again, and whether he ever returned Henry Easter there on either of these two voyages home, presumably both via Cape Horn, or on any of his subsequent whaling voyages.