On Easter Sunday 1722, sailors participating in a Dutch West India Company-sponsored expedition led by the explorer Jacob Roggeveen became the first Europeans to set eyes on the place now known by the Polynesian name Rapa Nui. Thousands of kilometres from the South American landmass and the nearest inhabited Pacific islands, Rapa Nui – also known as Easter Island – is a low, flat, treeless volcanic triangle of territory, no more than twenty-four kilometres long and twelve wide. Before the Dutch expedition, Europeans had spent two centuries crossing the Pacific without coming upon it. Its population comprised the descendants of Polynesians who had settled there some five centuries before.

For the Dutch explorers, the sparsely populated island’s towering anthropomorphic stone statues, known as moai, presented a mystery. Some lined the coast with their backs to the ocean, while others were positioned inland. Some were half-buried, with only the upper torsos and giant heads protruding; others had toppled over, lying facedown in the volcanic earth. To the Dutch, writes Mike Pitts, they seemed ‘identical, anonymous, stylised and alien’.

A further seven European ships would visit the island over the following sixty years, including vessels commanded by Captain James Cook and the French explorer La Pérouse. From these fleeting contacts, an explanation coalesced: this barren, windswept island was a relic of a once-great civilisation that had collapsed through ecological