Moai watch from one of Earth's most remote inhabited isles
Rapa Nui, Chile's Easter Island, sits at the southeastern tip of the Polynesian Triangle and is famous for nearly a thousand moai. Pitcairn, the nearest inhabited land, lies 2,075 kilometres away, and Jacob Roggeveen named the island on Easter Sunday, 5 April 1722. When settlers first arrived is still argued.
Scholars debate first Polynesian landfall: many once favoured around 800 CE, while a 2007 study pushes closer to 1200. Islanders quarried and raised the stone figures that define global images of Oceania. Chile annexed the island in 1888; Rapa Nui gained Chilean citizenship in 1966 and "special territory" status in 2007 within Valparaíso Region.
Oral tradition says the first settlers came in two canoes from a homeland called Marae Renga under the chief Hotu Matu'a, landing at Anakena, which offers the island's best shelter from swells and a sandy beach. Researchers think the voyagers most likely sailed from Mangareva in the Gambier Islands, about 2,600 kilometres away, or from the Marquesas, 3,200 kilometres away, and the current best estimate for colonisation is the 12th century. By the 15th century the island was split between two lineage confederations, with the royal Miru of the Tu'u holding the north and west. At contact the population stood around 3,000 to 4,000.
Catastrophe followed. Blackbirders in 1862 and 1863 abducted or killed about 1,500 people, 1,408 of whom were forced into indentured labour in Peru, and between 1862 and 1888 roughly 94 percent of the population died or left. The name Rapa Nui, Big Rapa, was coined only after those raids, likening the island's shape to Rapa in the Austral group. The romantic gloss Navel of the World for Te pito o te henua comes from the French ethnologist Alphonse Pinart in 1877, and Spain's Felipe González de Ahedo had called it Isla de San Carlos in 1770.
Source: Easter Island
