Tea at Trianon: What Europeans Found on the Most Isolated Island in the World

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, January 29, 2026

What Europeans Found on the Most Isolated Island in the World

From Literary Hub:

Europe came late to Rapa Nui, two centuries after Magellan led a pioneering Spanish expedition across the Pacific in 1521. Many of the statues were probably carved in those eight generations. When ships finally arrived—eight in all between 1722 and 1786, from Holland, Spain, England, and France, bringing a total of around 1,400 men—the visitors saw things they found hard to believe. There was a long tradition in Europe of representing named individuals realistically in stone, whether known persons or mythical beings or gods. The statues on the island were much larger, and far more numerous, than any standing at typical installations in Europe. And they seemed identical, anonymous, stylized, and alien. From the Islanders’ point of view, the visitors were equally strange, as they appeared and vanished overnight, over sixty-four years spending a total of no more than a week ashore. We may imagine that Islanders found it hard to stop talking and thinking about what had happened. But there must have been many who never saw a European.

Such brief and intermittent encounters had profound consequences, for the Islanders and for our understanding of their story, even now. It began on the Easter day when the Africaansche Galey signaled land. The Dutch West India Company had sponsored an expedition to search for a southern continent, which was thought necessary to balance all the land north of the equator. Jacob Roggeveen, a lawyer turned explorer, had wandered about the Pacific with three ships and found nothing. His crews were beginning to lose faith till they spotted a turtle and floating vegetation, and birds overhead. There was great joy, Roggeveen wrote in his log: They were about to discover Southland. But the imagined continent soon revealed itself as no more than a low, flat island. Rising plumes of smoke showed it was inhabited. Weather marked the occasion: They waited at a distance for thunder, lightning, heavy rain, and winds to clear.

The pioneer encounter occurred 3 miles offshore. The Dutch, spotting an old man approaching in a canoe, sent out a sloop to investigate. This unceremonial meeting was the first contact between people whose ancestors had parted tens of millennia ago in Asia, and whose experiences, cultures, and beliefs separately reflected that distance. It was an innocent event played out repeatedly around the world in various forms. A marker of unity. A harbinger of change and loss.

The naked man put up a good fight, but was overpowered and brought to the Arend, Roggeveen’s flagship. Curiosity trounced the Islander’s fears, and he seemed delighted by what he saw, taking a special interest in the ship—how it was made, the masts’ great height, the sails and the thickness of the ropes, and the guns, to which he gave particular attention. The sound of the ship’s bell and the sight of himself in a mirror scared him, and he appeared to be ashamed of his nudity. Offered a glass of liquor, he poured it down his face and tried to rub it out of his eyes. He put his arms and head on the table, and repeatedly raised them toward the sky, shouting loudly as he “addressed his gods.” (Read more.)