Sacred Texts -- Pacific Islander Religions

Te Pito Te Henua, or Easter Island: The Discovery of East...

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This is a late-nineteenth-century U.S. Navy report by Paymaster William J. Thompson, drawn from a voyage of the USS Mohican to Easter Island, with this opening section devoted entirely to adjudicating the disputed European discovery of the island. Thompson marshals competing primary accounts—Lionel Wafer's 1687 narrative crediting Captain Davis with first sighting, Jacob Roggeveen's 1722 formal claim of discovery, and analyses by Beechey and La Pérouse—to weigh whether Davis and Roggeveen encountered the same island. The central argument is that Davis likely did sight Easter Island despite navigational errors that distorted his recorded position, since strong Pacific currents routinely caused errors of 270–318 miles in vessels crossing that stretch; however, Thompson concedes Roggeveen's men were definitively the first Europeans to go ashore. A distinctive feature is Thompson's use of quantitative navigation data—comparing longitude reckonings by Cook, La Pérouse, and the Mohican itself—to ground the historical debate in surveying precision. The section closes by noting that most earlier visitors left only meager descriptions of the island, positioning the Mohican's own fresh survey (appended as a chart) as a corrective to inaccurate existing maps.

Te Pito Te Henua, or Easter Island: The Discovery of East...

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