Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen becomes first European to reach Easter Island and Samoa

Story: 1722 C.E.  |  Last updated: April 5, 1722

On Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722 C.E., three Dutch ships dropped anchor off a remote volcanic island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. The crew had never seen anything like it — massive stone figures lined the shore, and thousands of people came out to meet them. The Dutch commander, Jacob Roggeveen, had set out looking for a mythical continent. What he found instead would change European understanding of the Pacific world forever.

Key findings

• Jacob Roggeveen Pacific: The 1722 C.E. expedition charted Easter Island, six islands of the Tuamotu Archipelago, two Society Islands including Bora Bora and Maupiti, and four islands in Samoa — all for the first time by a European navigator.
• Easter Island discovery: Roggeveen arrived on Easter Sunday and named the island accordingly, encountering a population he estimated at 2,000–3,000 people and the towering moai statues that would later captivate the world.
• Dutch West India Company: The expedition was sponsored not by the more famous Dutch East India Company (VOC) but by its rival, the West India Company, which sought a western trade route to the Spice Islands — a corporate rivalry that shaped the entire voyage.

A 62-year-old’s Pacific ambition

Jacob Roggeveen was born in 1659 C.E. in Middelburg, in the Dutch province of Zeeland. His father, Arend Roggeveen, was a mathematician and navigation theorist who spent years studying the mythical southern continent known as Terra Australis. Arend even secured a patent for an exploratory expedition — but never carried it out.

Jacob carried the dream forward. He trained as a lawyer, earned a doctorate from the University of Harderwijk in 1690 C.E., worked for years in colonial administration in Batavia (present-day Jakarta), and returned home at 55. Then, at 62 — an age when most men of his era were preparing for death, not ocean crossings — he outfitted three ships, recruited 223 men, and sailed west into the Atlantic.

His fleet, the Arend, Thienhoven, and Afrikaansche Galey, departed on August 1, 1721 C.E. Roggeveen pushed south through the Falkland Islands, passed through the Strait of Le Maire, and pressed beyond 60 degrees south latitude before swinging north into the Pacific. He made landfall near Valdivia, Chile, spent three weeks at the Juan Fernández Islands, and then continued west into largely uncharted water.

Islands no European had ever mapped

The Easter Island landfall on April 5, 1722 C.E. was the expedition’s most dramatic moment. The island’s people — the Rapa Nui — came out in canoes to greet the ships, and some climbed aboard. Roggeveen recorded his astonishment at the enormous stone statues, the moai, standing along the coast. European scholars would puzzle over them for centuries.

From Easter Island, Roggeveen sailed northwest through the Tuamotu Archipelago, charting six islands, before reaching the Society Islands. There he became the first European to record Bora Bora and Maupiti. He then continued west to Samoa, documenting four islands in that group — again, the first European to do so.

The Pacific had, of course, been home to seafaring peoples for thousands of years. Polynesian navigators had settled Easter Island roughly 1,000 years earlier, reached Samoa well before that, and developed sophisticated open-ocean navigation using stars, swells, and bird behavior. Roggeveen was not discovering empty islands — he was encountering the easternmost and far-flung communities of a vast, connected Polynesian world that Europeans were only beginning to comprehend.

The moai of Easter Island alone became one of the most studied archaeological subjects in Pacific history, raising lasting questions about Rapa Nui society, resource use, and resilience that researchers are still actively debating today.

Lasting impact

Roggeveen’s voyage opened a new chapter in European geographic knowledge of the Pacific. His charts of the Tuamotu Archipelago, Society Islands, and Samoa gave later navigators — including James Cook, who visited many of the same islands decades later — a foundation to build on.

Easter Island entered the European imagination as a place of mystery, and that fascination drove further expeditions, scientific study, and eventually serious scholarly engagement with Polynesian history and culture. The island was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995 C.E., in recognition of its outstanding universal value.

Roggeveen’s journey also contributed, indirectly, to a legal precedent. After reaching Batavia in 1722 C.E., he was arrested by VOC authorities for violating their trade monopoly. His ships were confiscated. But after a lengthy lawsuit back in the Netherlands, the VOC was ordered to compensate him and pay his crew. It was a small but notable moment in the history of corporate accountability.

Beyond the legal outcome, the history of Pacific exploration was fundamentally altered by what Roggeveen’s crew recorded. The sheer scale of Polynesian civilization — spread across tens of millions of square kilometers of ocean — gradually forced European thinkers to reckon with the navigational and cultural achievements of peoples they had previously dismissed.

Blindspots and limits

The voyage was not without violence. At Makatea, in the Tuamotu Archipelago, Roggeveen ordered his crew to open fire on a crowded beach following a tense encounter with the island’s inhabitants. In retaliation, the Makateans ambushed a shore party and killed ten of Roggeveen’s men. The expedition also lost its flagship, the Afrikaansche Galey, on a reef at Takapoto atoll.

Roggeveen’s observations were filtered through the assumptions of an 18th-century European administrator, and his accounts of Easter Island — including his estimates of population — have been scrutinized and revised repeatedly by modern researchers. The people he encountered were already living through the disruptions that would make contact with Europeans catastrophic within generations: disease, forced labor, and eventual deportation reduced the Rapa Nui population to fewer than 200 by the late 19th century C.E. That history casts a long shadow over what Roggeveen called a discovery.

His route also relied heavily on geographic knowledge accumulated by earlier Spanish, Portuguese, and English navigators — and on the oral knowledge of Pacific Island pilots who sometimes guided or assisted European ships. The “first European” framing, while accurate in a narrow sense, can obscure how much intercultural knowledge shaped what any individual explorer achieved.

Still, Roggeveen’s meticulous charting, his detailed journals, and the sheer audacity of a 62-year-old setting out across the world’s largest ocean for the first time left a genuine mark on human knowledge — one that still shapes how we understand the peopling of the Pacific.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Jacob Roggeveen

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