Sacred Texts -- Pacific Islander Religions

Te Pito Te Henua, or Easter Island: Natives

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This is an excerpt from a late 19th-century American naval expedition report on Easter Island (Te Pito Te Henua), written by William J. Thompson following the USS Mohican's 1886 visit. The passage focuses on the island's population history, surveying estimates from European explorers spanning 1722 to the 1880s — ranging wildly from Roggeveen's "several thousand" to Cook's 600-700 — and concluding that only 155 people remained at the time of Thompson's census. The text's most striking content is its account of demographic collapse: a Peruvian slave raid in 1863 abducted most able-bodied men for guano labor, nearly all died of smallpox on their return, and subsequent emigration to Tahiti and the Gambier Archipelago further gutted the population. Thompson offers a notably sober, empirical tone — cataloguing conflicting historical estimates without resolving them, while grounding the account in a named survivor (Pakomeo) and a fresh head-count. The excerpt reflects the colonial-era documentary tradition of treating indigenous populations as objects of enumeration and ethnographic record, with the population's near-extinction treated as a logistical and historical fact rather than a moral reckoning.

Te Pito Te Henua, or Easter Island: Natives

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