
1722 First European land on Easter Island
The first European to land on Easter Island was the Dutch admiral Jacob Roggeveen, who paid it a single day’s visit in 1722. He and his crew found a population that they described as being of mixed physical types who worshiped huge standing statues with fires while they prostrated themselves to the rising sun. Some of them, said to be “white men,” had their earlobes slit and hanging to their shoulders, a distinctly non-Polynesian custom. An expedition dispatched by the Spanish viceroy of Peru rediscovered the island in 1770. The Spanish spent four days ashore and were the first to […]