Rapa Nui Point Rapa Nui Point Rapa Nui Point is a rocky point projecting 180 m westwards into Shirreff Cove from the west coast of the small (2.6 km by 1.6 km) ice-free promontory forming the north extremity of Ioannes Paulus II Peninsula, western Livingston Island in the South Shetland Islands, Antarctica and ending up in Cape Shirreff. The point is dominated by "Scarborough Castle", a 35 m crag roughly charted and descriptively named by the British sealer Captain Robert Fildes in 1821. The feature is named descriptively from its resemblance to the moai figures of Easter Island (Rapa Nui), Chile. Rapa Nui
Easter Island Polynesian society for generations. However, the origins of the sweet potato trace back to South America, suggesting evidence of interaction at some point in time between these two geographic areas. Although recent research suggests that sweet potatoes may have spread to Polynesia by long distance dispersal long before the Polynesians arrived. When James Cook visited the island, one of his crew members, a Polynesian from Bora Bora, Hitihiti, was able to communicate with the Rapa Nui. The language most similar to Rapa Nui is Mangarevan, with an estimated 80 percent similarity in vocabulary. In 1999, a voyage with reconstructed Polynesian