Brother Eugène Eyraud was the first to mention the existence of wooden tablets and staffs covered in hieroglyphs, in a letter dated December 1864 to the vice-provincial of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, in Valparaiso, Chile, letter published in 1866 in the "Annales de la Propagation de la Foi."
Alphonse Pinart's account of his visit to Easter Island in 1877 was published in 1878 in volume 36 of "Le Tour du Monde." Pinart saw no mystery at all in how the statues could have been carved, moved, and erected (see p.230).
Traduttore, traditore, and so those texts will be presented in the original French. A translation will perhaps follow later. Meanwhile, perhaps you can use AltaVista's Babel Fish, or read what William Thomson and George Cooke reported.
William Thomson's account of U.S.S. Mohican's 1886 visit to Easter Island was first published in 1889 and George Cooke's in 1897 in the Report of the National Museum, reprinted in 1891 and 1899 respectively in Miscellaneous Papers of the Smithsonian Institution, reproduced here in their entirety, except for the concluding vocabularies. These are of marginal interest, and not amenable at all to optical character recognition.