On April 5 of 1722, a small fleet of three Dutch vessels commanded by Admiral Jacob Roggeveen arrived to the island. As that day was Easter Sunday, Jacob Roggeveen baptized his discovery with the name that is universally known, Easter Island.
According to islanders oral tradition, in this first encounter of a native with the Europeans, a man that was in a canoe was invited to come on board and it was offered a glass of wine and food, the islander instead of eating or drinking took the glass of wine and poured it on his own head.
The report of the same scene according to K.F. Behrens, a German who was part of Roggeveen's crew, said that an islander in a canoe approached the Dutch ships, so he was invited on board. The man was completely tattooed with many different figures and his ears were very long. He was offered a glass of wine but instead of drinking it, he poured it on his eyes. Behrens added that he believed that the islander thought that they were trying to poison him.
Two days later, the islander visited again the ships in the company of other natives. And that same day Roggeveen and Behrens took land with 150 armed men. A multitude of natives surrounded them and some tried to touch the sailors weapons, so some sailors opened fire and 13 islanders were killed.
From then on, the island was visited many times by European ships, although some visits were more happier than others:
- 1770, a Spanish expedition commanded by Captain Felipe Gonzalez y Haedo arrived from Peru and took possession of the island in the name of king Charles III. This expedition made the first map of Easter Island. They also compiled a small vocabulary of Rapa Nui language.
- 1774, a small British float of two vessels commanded by Captain James Cook arrived to the island. The science men and the artist of the expedition left a very interesting account of what they found in the island.
- 1776, two French vessels commanded by Count de La Perouse stayed in the island for one day. They gave islanders some seeds, pigs and sheep. They also left an excellent account of their stayed at the island. It is important to notice that in Easter Island there are just two toponymic names in foreign language: La Perouse Bay on the north coast of the island and Cook Bay.
- 1805, Nancy, an American ship of seal hunters arrived to the island. They kidnapped 12 women and 10 men to use them in hunting chores, after three of days of navigation the captives were released of the ropes that tied them. All the men jumped over the board to the sea and swam in direction of the island, only one arrived.
- 1806, an islander traveled to London on board of an English whaler. It was called Henry Easter by the crew.
During the next 50 years many ships visited the island with different purposes. Some of these visits ended with abuses from part of the crews of the visiting ships, like in 1822 when the crew of the whaler Pindos kidnapped some island women, throwing them to the sea after abusing them.
Other visits from the period are not so well documented, but in general the contact with visiting sailors, apart from introducing diseases, made the islanders to develop a more cautious attitude toward strangers.
Some of the visits of the period were as follows:
- 1837, Colo Colo a Chilean ship stayed at the island.
- 1838, Easter Island was visited by the frigate Venus from France.
- 1842, Chilean ship Janequeo visited the island.
On 22 of December of 1862, a fleet of merchant Peruvian and Spanish ships arrived to Easter Island with the intention of getting slaves for working in the guano islands of Peru. The slavers caught 349 islanders and sailed to the Peruvian port of Callao. Just a month later, in January of 1863, the Peruvian ship Teresa took 203 islanders to Callao, while another Peruvian ship, General Prim caught 117 islanders. More expeditions of this kind happened that same year, so the Government of Chile protested against the slave traffic and warned Peruvian ships that any prisoner person would be free again if the ship in which was carried arrived to Chilean territory. On its part the French Government protested officially against the Peruvian Government which acted against the slave merchants. So in August of 1863, 100 survivor islanders were sent back to the island, but just 15 of them arrived there. They carried with them diseases like influenza, tuberculosis and smallpox that resulted mortal to the island population.
This meant the final disaster to Easter Island culture, so affected during the anarchy period. As a result of the kidnapping of islanders and the diseases, most of the island sages or maori rongorongo died and their knowledge was lost. When in 1864, the first Catholic misionner and first Westerner to live in Easter Island, lay brother Eugene Eyraud arrived to the island, he found a group of people that were dying of several diseases and scarcely remembered some traits of their culture. Brother Eyraud died of tuberculosis in Easter Island just four years later.
In 1888, Chilean Navy ship Angamos arrived to Easter Island and his Captain, Policarpo Toro, took possesion of the island in the name of the Chilean Government ( this happened after the Chilean Government received notice from the French Government assuring that France had no interested in Easter Island). The population of the island at that moment counted just 201 Rapa Nui people.
After being declared Chilean territory, the Chilean Government put Easter Island under the administration of the Navy. And with the idea of administering Easter Island as a colony, the territory of the island was rented to Williamson Balfour, a British company, in order to exploit it as a sheep hacienda. But in the 1960s, the Chilean policy towards the island changed and the contract with Williamson Balfour was finished. In the Chilean Congress, it was passed a special law for Easter Island recognizing the rights of Rapa Nui people to be proprietors of their island. In this way only Rapa Nui people could be land owners in the island, continental Chilean citizens as well as foreigners could only rent the land. Apart from that Easter Island was declared National Park.
In 1995, Easter Island was declared World Heritage Site by Unesco.
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