Diamond and others view these disasters as the final assault on a society that had already destroyed itself. Peiser, along with Hunt and Lipo, thinks the disease introduced by Europeans is a plausible trigger of the only real collapse of the society. They note also that while Roggeveen’s impression in 1722 was of “singular poverty and barrenness”, there are contradictory descriptions. Peiser quotes an extract from the journal of a member of a French expedition that visited in 1786: “Instead of meeting with men exhausted by famine…I found, on the contrary, a considerable population, with more beauty and grace than I afterwards met with on any other island; and a soil which with very little labour furnished excellent provisions.”