Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island

Rapa Nui is so remote that even Islanders were said to have named it Land's End. In 1994 I reached it from Tahiti, where my money had been running out, flying eastward six and a half hours from the center of the South Pacific, crossing four time zones. Had I continued, it would have been another six hours farther east to reach mainland Chile, which in a fit of deluded aspirations had announced in 1888 that it owned the place. Polynesian discovery was a triumph of determined ocean navigation unsurpassed by any other peoples.

For the settlers, finding the island was just the start. It's small. I was able to bike across it and back in a day, bumping along a red, dusty road (and buckling a couple of spokes). Laid over New York City, it would cover the Brooklyn Bridge at the southwest and Yankee Stadium at the north, and reach to the Cross Island Parkway in the east. In England, its triangular shape—it's a little like Sicily turned upside down, but a twentieth of the size—encompasses the Thames winding from London Bridge to Hampton Court. Battered by subtropical seas south of the equator, it was no paradise. Its soils were fragile, its land and marine life restricted, and there were no permanent freshwater streams. In fact its only truly abundant resource was stone. Rapa Nui is the world's greatest example of a people given lemons, and making lemonade.

And as I will show, there really is no lemonade like Rapa Nui's.

 

Part I

Prey

 

Chapter 1

First Contact

Extremely Fertile Due to Farming

This story about statues begins on Easter Sunday 1722, on what was then the remotest inhabited island on Earth. This was the day the first European set eyes on Rapa Nui, the start of the final century when Islanders were in control of their own world. It was the day when everything about the island began to change, so that within a few generations no one there could say what the statues meant or who made them.

That time, as incompletely documented as it is, is the closest we can get through real lives to when statues were being carved, and Islanders' only contacts were with themselves; when the island was still owned by those who discovered and made it. Whatever had happened in previous centuries, events must somehow have led to what was seen and described in the eighteenth.

My second reason for starting here is that, again, the records set a baseline, only now looking forward, to help us get the measure of what followed. Perceptions of eighteenth-century Rapa Nui have influenced more recent attempts to understand the island. By looking at the actual accounts, we can hope to see what it was really like. The observations, of course, were not scientific, and academics have come up with reasons for questioning them, some of which we must take seriously. The records themselves are not easy to use; manuscripts are shelved around the world, and the texts, written in four different European languages, still have not been fully brought together in modern translations and analysis. Only in recent decades, for example, have manuscripts from the French expedition been relocated: its two ships sunk on reefs in the western Pacific with the loss of all lives (Louis XVI was said to have asked about the missing crews before mounting the guillotine scaffold). A witness report from the English expedition turned up in a Polish library, and was published as recently as 2014.

On the other hand, we hear almost nothing from Islanders. There is one documented case of a reverse visit. In 1811, a young Rapanui man, said to have been the son of a "king," joined a ship back to Britain, where he was baptized Henry Easter in Rotherhithe, London. Press reports say he learned English at school, was handsome and well mannered, and had "every appearance of a satisfied mind." We last see him as a crew member on a ship in Sydney, and no record is known of his thoughts, expressed by him or anyone else. The island's early European visitors may have arrived ignorant of Rapanui ways and holding different, irreconcilable values, but they left priceless records. We would be remiss to ignore the quantity of information they contain.

Europe came late to Rapa Nui, two centuries after Magellan led a pioneering Spanish expedition across the Pacific in 1521. Many of the statues were probably carved in those eight generations. When ships finally arrived—eight in all between 1722 and 1786, from Holland, Spain, England, and France, bringing a total of around 1,400 men—the visitors saw things they found hard to believe. There was a long tradition in Europe of representing named individuals realistically in stone, whether known persons or mythical beings or gods. The statues on the island were much larger, and far more numerous, than any standing at typical installations in Europe. And they seemed identical, anonymous, stylized, and alien. From the Islanders' point of view, the visitors were equally strange, as they appeared and vanished overnight, over sixty-four years spending a total of no more than a week ashore. We may imagine that Islanders found it hard to stop talking and thinking about what had happened. But there must have been many who never saw a European.