Te Pito Te Henua, or Easter Island: Personal Appearance o...

This is a late 19th-century ethnographic account of Easter Island's indigenous inhabitants, drawn from William J. Thompson's 1891 survey expedition and situated within the tradition of Pacific exploration and natural history writing. The text's central project is correcting earlier voyagers' wildly exaggerated descriptions — particularly Behrens's claim that islanders averaged 12 feet tall — by substituting first-hand measurement and observation, including skeletal evidence from excavated tombs showing the ancient population was of medium stature, with the largest skeleton just under 6 feet. Thompson describes the islanders' physical features, complexion, hair, and dress in systematic detail, noting their resemblance to Marquesans and observing that sun exposure, not ancestry, accounts for variation in skin tone. He also characterizes their disposition as cheerful, modest, and morally superior to what early navigators reported, and documents the decline of practices like extreme ear-piercing. A distinctive note runs through the closing paragraph: Thompson attributes the population's dramatic decline not to alcohol — which he explicitly rules out, since kava is unknown on the island — but to smallpox and slave deportations, expressing hope that "the small remnant" will recover under colonial contact, a paternalistic framing typical of the era.

Te Pito Te Henua, or Easter Island: Personal Appearance o...

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