One fateful Easter

The first presence of Europeans came on Easter Sunday 1722, when Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen chanced upon the island. His stay was brief, but countless incursions by outsiders over the next two centuries would have a devastating impact on the Rapa Nui people.

In the 1860s, slavers from Peru brought around 1,000 islanders to the mainland. The few who made it back to the island brought smallpox with them, decimating the population. Many of those who survived the epidemic fled to Tahiti, leaving barely more than 100 Rapa Nui in 1888, when the island was annexed by Chile. Many of the Rongorongo tablets were lost or destroyed during this period, along with the only people who knew how to read them.

The language itself was vastly altered by the waves of foreign influence, with Tahitian, French, Spanish and English creeping into the lexicon. Rapa Nui historian Cristián Moreno Pakarati says that as a result, there’s little chance that we’ll ever be able to decode the surviving Rongorongo texts.

“The Rapa Nui that is spoken today is very different. It’s a language that has mutated and metamorphosed because of everything that happened here. The old language from before 1860 is what is reflected in the tablets – If we tried to use a dictionary of modern Rapa Nui to match it to the symbols, it wouldn’t work”, Pakarati said.