Editing Rongorongo (section)

===Discovery===
[[Eugène Eyraud]], a lay friar of the [[Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary|Congrégation de Picpus]], landed on Easter Island on January 2, 1864, on the 24th day of his departure from [[Valparaíso]]. He was to remain on Easter Island for nine months, evangelizing its inhabitants. He wrote an account of his stay in which he reports his discovery of the tablets that year:<ref>Eyraud 1866</ref>

{{blockquote|In every hut one finds wooden tablets or sticks covered in several sorts of hieroglyphic characters: They are depictions of animals unknown on the island, which the natives draw with sharp stones. Each figure has its own name; but the scant attention they pay to these tablets leads me to think that these characters, remnants of some primitive writing, are now for them a habitual practice which they keep without seeking its meaning.{{refn|{{lang|fr|Dans toutes les cases on trouve des tablettes de bois ou des bâtons couverts de plusieurs espèces de caractères hiéroglyphiques: ce sont des figures d'animaux inconnues dans l'île, que les indigènes tracent au moyen de pierres tranchantes. Chaque figure a son nom; mais le peu de cas qu'ils font de ces tablettes m'incline à penser que ces caractères, restes d'une écriture primitive, sont pour eux maintenant un usage qu'ils conservent sans en chercher le sens.}}|group="note"}}|Eyraud 1866:71}}

There is no other mention of the tablets in his report, and the discovery went unnoticed. Eyraud left Easter Island on October 11 1864, in extremely poor health. Ordained a priest in 1865, he returned to Easter Island in 1866 where he died of tuberculosis in August 1868, aged{{nbsp}}48.