ufo_data/bin/rr0/tran1722.md

• April 5: Easter day. Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen (who, according to Lyon Sprague de Camp, was not particularly skilled in latitude and longitude calculations) arrives at the island he will name Easter Island. The first Europeans to set foot on this island, located 4000 km from the Chilean coast and 2000 km from the nearest Polynesian island, discover an arid land, battered by the winds and sparsely populated. Remarkably, it is dotted with several hundred strange statues, called "moai" by the natives and many of which are erected on stone pedestals called "ahu". The size of the moai can reach almost 10 m high in the case of the moai Te Pito Te Kura, with an estimated weight of 80 t. This moai is the largest erected on an ahu but there is another, unfinished one, measuring almost 20 m for an estimated weight of 300 t. The moai were carved from the tuff of the island's volcano, Rano Raraku. On the other hand, the huge red tuff cylinder that often tops their heads comes from another volcano, Puna Pau. Last detail, the size of the gigantic statues seems to have suddenly stopped, as evidenced by many of them left in various stages of completion on the slopes of Rano Raraku.