The History of the World

Indigenous · History Classes · Grades 10–13 · College · University

Rapa Nui 1862–63 — The Peruvian Slave Raids

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

DRAFT — CULTURAL REVIEW PENDING. These history classes are a publisher’s draft blend of the Collection’s Indigenous history research, standing on its own website. Indigenous cultural review precedes any public release of this strand. Readings carry the research labels unchanged: Documented Fact · Tradition — the people’s own account · Debated / Claim. This page carries no advertising.

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

For the teacher — teacher-facing guidance for this class stands in this box only; the reading below is the student reading. Senior band only. A Pacific case beside the Americas, taught as such: Rapa Nui is Polynesia, and this class stands in the record by the Genocide Record’s commission, not inside the Extermination Census’s hemisphere frame — say so to the class. The rongorongo severing is the cultural heart of the lesson: a script tradition ended not by destroying the tablets but by taking the readers; Eyraud’s 1864 letter is the primary witness and is labelled as such in the reading. Distinguish the numbers’ kinds: the 1877 figure of 111 is a documented census; the pre-raid population is an estimate range and must be taught as one. The Rapa Nui survive — this is the nearest approach to extermination in their history, not its completion.

Rapa Nui, 1862–1877 — the raids, the return, the 111

Class: RESEARCH. Compiled documented record, resting on the modern scholarly and demographic record: Grant McCall, Rapanui: Tradition and Survival on Easter Island (1980; rev. 1994) and his demographic work; Steven Roger Fischer, Island at the End of the World (2005) and Rongorongo: The Easter Island Script (1997); Alfred Métraux, Ethnology of Easter Island (1940), built on testimony from islanders within living memory of the events; and Chilean and Rapa Nui institutional sources. Peruvian official vocabulary — Polynesian labourers as "colonists" under contract — is the perpetrators' category language, quoted and labelled as such. Where sources disagree on a number, the disagreement is printed and never silently resolved.

Scope note, in terms: Rapa Nui is Polynesia — a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific, today administered by Chile. It is carried in this record as the examination directed: a Pacific case beside the Americas, not inside the Census's hemisphere frame. It stands here because the mechanism documented — state-licensed slave raiding, mass abduction, death in forced labour, and a repatriation that carried epidemic disease home — is the same mechanism this record documents in the Americas.

This is not an extermination account. The Rapa Nui are a living people on their own island: several thousand strong, with a reviving language and a standing claim to land and self-government. What this file documents is the nearest approach to extermination in their history — the sequence of 1862–1877 that reduced them to 111 people — and the cultural severing that came with it: the loss, in a single abduction, of the greater part of the island's trained memory.

1. The island before December 1862

Rapa Nui is the most isolated inhabited island on earth, some 3,500 km from the Chilean coast. Its people are Polynesian, settled — on current archaeological ranges — around the twelfth–thirteenth centuries. By the nineteenth century the population had already been reduced by the disorders and diseases of the contact era; estimates on the eve of the raids cluster around ~2,500–3,000 (McCall; Fischer, 2005), printed as an estimate range, not a count — Rapa Nui had never been censused before its catastrophe.

The island carried a cultural apparatus out of proportion to its size. Its hereditary chiefs (ariki), headed by the ariki mau — the paramount chief, in 1862 of the line of Koreto (his young heir was among those taken and died in Peru, in the community's and the scholarship's account) — stood over trained specialists: the ma'ori rongorongo, experts in the chanting and, on the rongorongo question, the reading of the inscribed wooden tablets. Rongorongo — some two dozen authenticated tablets and inscribed objects survive — is the only known Indigenous script of Oceania. Whether it was a full writing system or a mnemonic proto-writing remains genuinely unsettled (Fischer, 1997, argues the strongest case for true writing; radiocarbon dating published in 2024 placing at least one tablet's wood in the fifteenth century bears on its antiquity, not its decipherment). It has never been deciphered. Section 3 records why.

2. The raids, December 1862 – 1863

Peru had abolished slavery in 1854. What replaced it, for the guano economy, was contract labour — and where contracts could not be recruited, raiding. The Chincha Islands guano workings, whose fertiliser exports underwrote the Peruvian state, consumed labourers at a notorious rate; Chinese indentured labour was supplemented, from 1862, by a licensed trade in Polynesian "colonists" (colonos) — the official category, labelled here as the perpetrators' language: the people taken from Rapa Nui were not colonists, were not recruited, and had signed nothing. In 1862–63 Peruvian-flagged vessels raided across Polynesia and struck Rapa Nui hardest, the Polynesian island nearest the South American coast (McCall; Fischer, 2005).

In December 1862 a fleet of eight ships arrived; some eighty seamen came ashore and spread trade goods on the beach. At a signal, shots were fired; the islanders who had gathered were seized, bound, and carried to the ships. At least ten Rapa Nui were killed in the first seizure. Further landings met resistance and were partly beaten off, but raiding continued into 1863, by deception where force failed — islanders lured aboard and held below decks (Métraux, 1940, from island testimony; McCall; Fischer, 2005).

The scale, printed as the record carries it: ~1,400–1,500 people taken — the commonly cited specific accounting gives 1,408 landed in Peru as indentured labourers; rounded scholarly summaries give 1,400, and others up to 1,500. On the pre-raid estimate range of §1, that is roughly half the island's people — taken in a matter of months. Among them, on the consistent testimony of the record, were the ariki mau and his heir, the chiefly families, and the greater part of the ma'ori rongorongo and the tumu ivi 'atua, the bearers of genealogy, chant, and ritual knowledge (Fischer, 2005; McCall; Métraux, 1940).

3. Peru, the Chinchas, and the severing of rongorongo

The captives were sold in Peru — some to domestic service in Lima and the coastal towns, some to haciendas, and a large part to the guano workings of the Chincha Islands, where Polynesian labourers dug bird excrement in conditions the Peruvian press itself had already exposed for the Chinese trade: inadequate food, brutal discipline, virtually no medical care. The Rapa Nui died at a catastrophic rate — of tuberculosis, smallpox, and dysentery above all, diseases to which an isolated island population carried minimal resistance (McCall; Fischer, 2005).

The cultural loss is documented as a fact of demography, not as a flourish. A script tradition carried by a small trained elite does not survive the removal of that elite. When the missionary Eugène Eyraud reached Rapa Nui in 1864 — the year after the repatriation — he reported rongorongo tablets "in all the houses," covered in signs the inhabitants venerated but could no longer read [Eyraud, letter, 1864 — PRIMARY WITNESS to the tradition's state immediately after the raids]. Later island informants could chant for tablets — recitations associated with them — but no verified reader of the script was ever found by any subsequent expedition, Métraux's included. This file therefore records the loss at its documented level: the raids and the Peru mortality removed the rongorongo-literate elite, and with them the living transmission of the script; rongorongo survives as artefacts, undeciphered. Claims beyond that level — that a named tablet says a named thing, or that a decipherment has succeeded — are handled in §7.

4. Protest, the repatriation order, and the catastrophe of the return

The trade was stopped from outside Peru and inside it. Peruvian newspapers campaigned against it, and the protest the record names first is that of Bishop Florentin-Étienne "Tepano" Jaussen of Tahiti, who pressed the case of the Polynesian captives through the French government and the missionary networks; France protested formally, beside other governments (McCall; Fischer, 2005). In 1863 Peru prohibited the further "introduction of Polynesian settlers" and ordered the surviving captives freed and repatriated.

The order came after most were dead. Of the ~1,400–1,500 taken, only a remnant survived to be gathered for the return ships in autumn 1863 — and aboard the repatriation vessel smallpox broke out. Of those shipped back, only about 15 reached Rapa Nui alive: ~15 in the commonly carried modern summaries (McCall; Fischer), some accounts giving about a dozen landed; this file carries ~12–15. Larger variants are printed in §7, not resolved.

The survivors brought smallpox home. The epidemic ran through a population with no immunity and few chiefs or specialists left to organise against it; the missionary-era record describes dead left unburied for want of hands. Tuberculosis, already present from the whaling era, took its own continuing toll. The repatriation — the act meant to repair the raids — completed them.

5. The reduction completed: missions, removals, and the 111 of 1877

What the raids and the epidemic began, the following decade finished, by removal as much as by death:

Chile annexed Rapa Nui in 1888; the survivors and their descendants were confined to Hanga Roa while the rest of the island was leased as a sheep ranch — a confinement lasting, in its essentials, until the 1960s (Chilean citizenship came in 1966). Angata's 1914 rising against the ranch regime stands in the record as the bottleneck generation's own answer: reduced to a remnant, the people had not consented (McCall; Fischer, 2005).

6. Survival and standing today

The recovery is slow arithmetic first: 111 in 1877; a few hundred by the early twentieth century; today the Rapa Nui number several thousand on the island, with further thousands in mainland Chile and a wider diaspora — figures carried as ranges because Chilean census categories (Rapa Nui ethnicity vs. island residence) do not align. The language is under active revival — immersion schooling, a Rapa Nui language academy, broadcasting — and is classed as endangered in UNESCO's listings: the survival is real and the peril is real, and this record prints both. Rapa Nui National Park was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995; in 2017 its administration passed to the Rapa Nui community organisation Ma'u Henua — the first Indigenous administration of a Chilean national park. The political claim continues: land title, control of migration to the island (a 2018 Chilean residency law was itself a Rapa Nui demand), and self-determination under the people's own name for themselves and their island: Rapa Nui.

The raids' legal character, stated at the record's level: they were carried out by private vessels under Peruvian licence and flag, under a state that had abolished slavery and chose to call the traffic colonisation; the Peruvian state stopped it under protest and ordered reparation by repatriation — and the repatriation killed. No prosecution of the raiders stands in the record this file could hold to standard.

7. What cannot be held to standard

Sources for this file

McCall, Rapanui: Tradition and Survival on Easter Island (1980; rev. ed. 1994) and subsequent demographic papers • Fischer, Island at the End of the World (Reaktion, 2005); Fischer, Rongorongo: The Easter Island Script (Oxford University Press, 1997) • Métraux, Ethnology of Easter Island (Bishop Museum Bulletin 160, 1940) — island testimony; the 111 of 1877 and the 36 with offspring • Eyraud, letters from Rapa Nui (1864) [PRIMARY WITNESS] • Routledge, The Mystery of Easter Island (1919) • Ferrara et al., radiocarbon dating of a rongorongo tablet, Scientific Reports (2024) — the wood's antiquity only • UNESCO World Heritage listing, Rapa Nui National Park (1995); UNESCO Atlas of Languages in Danger • Chilean institutional record: the 1877 enumeration as carried in the demographic literature; the 2017 park-administration transfer to Ma'u Henua; Chilean census series • Rapa Nui community and institutional histories (Museo Antropológico Padre Sebastián Englert, Hanga Roa; Moe Varua).

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