Hotu Matuꞌa was the legendary first settler and ariki mau ("supreme chief" or "king") of Easter Island and ancestor of the Rapa Nui people.
[1] Hotu Matuꞌa and his two-canoe (or one double hulled canoe) colonising party were Polynesians from the now unknown land of Hiva (probably the Marquesas).
Hotu Matuꞌa led his people from Hiva; linguistic analysis comparing Rapanui to other Polynesian languages suggests this was the Marquesas Islands.
The royal adviser es:Hau-Maka had a dream in which his spirit traveled to a far country, to help look for new land for King Hotu Matuꞌa.
[12] Some early accounts of the legend place hanau epe as the original residents and Polynesians as later immigrants coming from Oparo.
[14] The first description of island's demographics by Jacob Roggeveen in 1722 still claimed that the population consisted of two distinctive ethnic groups, one being clearly Polynesian and the other "white" with so lengthened earlobes that they could tie them behind their necks.
[16] The fact that sweet potatoes, a staple of the Polynesian diet, and several other domestic plants - up to 12 in Easter Island - are of South American origin indicates that there may have been some contact between the two cultures.
DNA sequence analysis of Easter Island's current inhabitants (a tool not available in Heyerdahl's time) offers strong evidence of Polynesian origins.