ABSTRACT
In 1789, American whaleships began entering the Pacific, rounding Cape Horn to cruise off the Pacific coast of South America. Their immediate success prompted such a gold rush that within three years 40 whaleships were taking sperm whales off the coast of Chile and Peru. The visitors found the islanders keen to trade, but exuberant, excited and unruly, and without any chiefly authorities to take control when misunderstandings and disruptions occurred. The islanders soon earned a reputation for skillful petty thieving. The practice of discouraging foreigners from landing on shore was a conscious decision by the King as early as 1805. The Easter Islanders had paid a very high price for their geographical isolation, and for the cultural isolation that followed when they chose to limit their trade with the foreigners to encounters offshore, outside the surf, as that distanced them from both the malign and the benign influences of foreign contact.
