The phrase "Te pito o te henua" has been said to be the original name of the island since French ethnologist Alphonse Pinart gave it the romantic translation "the Navel of the World" in his "Voyage à l'Île de Pâques", published in 1877. William Churchill (1912) inquired about the phrase and was told that there were three "te pito o te henua", these being the three capes (land's ends) of the island. The phrase appears to have been used in the same sense as the designation of "Land's End" at the tip of Cornwall. He was unable to elicit a Polynesian name for the island and concluded that there may not have been one.