Talking Boards of the Pacific

Abstract

Joseph-Eugène Eyraud returned to Easter Island as a consecrated lay brother in 1866 in the company of an ordained priest of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts (SSCC). Several months later, another priest and lay brother joined them, and for the next few years the four Catholic missionaries evangelized on ravaged, tuberculosis-gripped Rapanui. In 1868 Eyraud himself died of TB on the island, curiously enough without having informed his three colleagues of the remarkable “hieroglyphics” he had witnessed there four years earlier.