Chapter 1. June 1722, the Dutch ‘discovery’ by Jacob Roggeveen

During the 17^th and 18^th centuries, various Dutch expeditions ventured into the Pacific, searching for new routes to the East Indies and new lands where gold or spices would be abundant. Small islands did not present any interest other than as sites for brief restocking of provisions such as wood, water, or fruit. When indigenous people were encountered, they became a target for the guns of the visitors the moment that their gestures could be interpreted as a sign of hostility. The Spaniards had opened fire on indigenous people in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. After Mendaña’s massacre in the Marquesas in 1595, news of these dreadful creatures—the Spaniards—must have spread through Eastern Polynesia. And after LeMaire and Schouten’s musket firing on canoes in north Tonga in 1616, the awful news of this deed must likewise have spread through Western Polynesia. We know that the memory of such extraordinary encounters can last many generations. As we shall see in chapter 11, the Tongans explained to Cook in the 1770s that some ‘Papālagi’ had already come to their shores: undoubtedly this was Tasman in 1643 (and/or LeMaire even earlier).

The last of the Dutch expeditions conformed perfectly to the rule of brutality when it ‘discovered’ Rapa Nui in 1722 on Easter Day, hence naming it ‘Easter Island’, and fired on the Pascuans. It also happened to be the first expedition to sight the Samoan Islands, in June 1722. The expedition was under the command of Jacob Roggeveen, ‘President’, and consisted of three ships, the Arendt (Captain Jan Koster), on which Roggeveen sailed; the Thienhoven (Captain Cornelis Bouman); and the Africaansche Galley (Captain Roelof Rosendaal). This third ship was wrecked on the reef of one of the Tuamotu atolls in May 1722. Roggeveen’s journal has been made more accessible through Andrew Sharp’s translation from the Dutch (Sharp ed. 1970: for Samoa, see pp. 150-6). Sharp also mentions the relevant entries of Bouman’s log. In the 18^th century, the story of the expedition was widely known only through the sometimes imaginary account of a young officer, Carl Friedrich Behrens, whose narrative was published in German and in French (Behrens 1739). Concerning the discovery of Easter Island, Behrens’s narrative contains crucial supplementary pieces of information, but he has nearly nothing to say regarding contact with the Samoans.