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 explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who encountered it on Easter Sunday (5 April) in 1722, while searching for Davis or David's island. Roggeveen named it "Paasch-Eyland" (18th-century Dutch for "Easter Island"). The island's official Spanish name, "Isla de Pascua", also means "Easter Island". The current Polynesian name of the island, "Rapa Nui" ("Big Rapa"), was coined after the slave raids of the early 1860s, and refers to the island's topographic resemblance to the island of Rapa in the Bass Islands of the Austral Islands group. However, Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl argued that "Rapa" was the original name of Easter Island and that