Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

“Now the struggle commenced of getting the land away from the natives. Without any government, and the land of each district owned in community by each clan, the queen and the Frenchman had to get title by cunning and force. They did not succeed in that without blood. Booze and guns and meat did it. The remaining head men gave away the land for sheep to eat, for gin and rum to drink, and for guns to shoot those who objected to having their land taken. Of course, it was really a community, with no private property inside the clans, but the chiefs signed papers they couldn’t read, and the firm claimed everything soon. It was legal as things go, as legal as England taking New Zealand or Australia, or France taking my Tahiti. The people divided into factions, headed by self-appointed chiefs, and went to fighting. Some were driven into craters, and some hid in caves. The crowd that had the upper hand chased the other groups. They all began to steal the sheep for food, and the Frenchman hired a band to stop the marauding and end the war. Then the real massacres began. Natives were so pressed they took up cannibalism again, and without fire they ate their meat raw. Ure Vaeiko told me how he warmed a slice of a man’s body in his armpit to make it better eating.

“In the end a kind of peace was made by the terrible misery of all. But the Frenchman who had gotten the land did not live long to enjoy his bargain. They caught him unawares when he was on a ladder helping to repair the very house we lived in, and which he built. They struck him down with a club, and buried him near-by. Other whites all but lost their lives later when they tried to prevent the islanders from stealing sheep when hungry. They were besieged in our house, but finally were saved by the arrival of a vessel. Now, with their potato plantations destroyed, their houses burned, the natives were done for. They consented to sign contracts to work in the hot sugar-fields of Tahiti. Five hundred were removed there. I often saw them, poor devils. They were homesick to death, and they never were brought back as promised. They died in Tahiti, crying for their own land.

“It was not long after that I went to Easter with the American, Willis. Queen Korato had followed the Frenchman into the grave, and the Scotchman had become the sole owner of the island. No one disputed him, and when Willis and I took up our residence in the former royal residence at Mataveri, Timi Linder was the virtual king. The entire population either lived on small plantations which they had to wall in to keep the cattle and sheep from eating their yams, or they worked for us looking after the cattle and horses, and shearing the sheep. The fighting was over, for the spirit of the wild islanders was extinct as was almost all the twenty thousand Linder said were there a few years before. The two or three hundred left lived in the ruins of the ancient stone houses, cairns, and platforms, the tombs of the dead Rapa Nuiis for ages. The living piled up more stones or roofed in the walls with slabs and earth, and got along somehow. They had lost all reverence for the past, and often brought us the skulls of their ancestors to trade for a biscuit or two or a drink of rum.

“Willis and I were young, and though both of us were intensely interested in the mystery of the island, and the unknown throngs who had built the gigantic sepulchers and carved the monoliths, we had many dull hours. When it rained or at night we thought of the outside world. The howling of the sheep-dogs, the moaning of the wind, and the frightful pests of insects made the evenings damnable. The fleas were by the millions, and the glistening brown cockroaches, two or three inches long, flew at our lights and into our food, while mosquitoes and hordes of flies preyed on us. We often sat with nets on our heads and denim gloves on, and on our cots we stuffed our ears with paper to keep out snapping beetles. Willis was wrapped up in trying to read the wooden tablets Linder had collected, on which were rows and rows of picture symbols. First, he had to learn the Rapa Nui language. There’s one way to do that in these islands. We all know that, and it was easy there. They had always had a custom by which a husband leased his wife to another man for a consideration. Linder attended to that, and sent over to us two girls to teach us the lingo. They were beautiful and merry, being young, and looked after our household. Taaroa was assigned to Willis and Tokouo to me. We got along famously until one day, after a year or so, a schooner arrived to take away wool, and on it was a white girl and her father. That changed everything for us.”

In Llewellyn’s air and low, mournful voice there was confession. In his words there had been anger at Captain Pincher’s accusation, but with Lying Bill and McHenry, mockers at all decency, missing from the circle, we others became impressed, I might say, almost oppressed, by impending humiliation. In an assemblage, a public meeting, or a pentecostal gathering, one withstands the self reproach and contrition of others, or, perhaps, experiences keen pleasure in announced guilt and remorse, but among a few, it hurts. One’s soul shrinks at its own secrets, and there is not the support and excitement of the throng. We moved uneasily, with a struggling urge to call it a night, but Llewellyn, absorbed in his progress toward unveilment, went on without noticing our disquiet.

“My God! What a change for Willis and me! The schooner was in the offing one morning when we got up. We calculated that the wind would not let her anchor at Hanga Piko, and started out on horses for Rana Raraku to photograph the largest image we had found on the island. You have been in Egypt, O’Brien?”

I nodded assent, and the lamp threw a spot of light on Llewellyn’s gloomy face.

“You remember the biggest obelisk in the world is still unfinished in the quarry at Syene. This one, too, was still in the rough. It lay in an excavation on the slope of the huge crater, not fully cut out of the rocky bank, but incredibly big. We measured it as quite seventy feet long. It was as all those images, a half-length figure, the long, delicate hands almost meeting about the body, the belly indrawn—pinched, and the face with no likeness to the Rapa Nui face, or to any of the Polynesians, but harsh and archaic, perhaps showing an Inca or other austere race, and also the wretchedness of their existence. Life must have been dour for them by their looks and by their working only for the dead. How they ever expected to move this mass we could not understand. They had no wood, even, to make rollers, as the Egyptians had, because their thickest tree was the toromiro, not three inches in diameter, but they had to depend on slipping the monstrous stones down slopes and dragging them up hills or on the level by ropes of native hemp and main strength. Hundreds or thousands of sculptors and pullers must have been required for the 555 monoliths we found carved or almost finished. But they never were of the race the whites saw there.

“Before we began the descent of Rana Rauraku we stopped a moment to survey the scene. The sun was setting over La Perouse Bay, and the side of the crater on which we were was deepening in shadow. As we went down the hill the many images reared themselves as black figures of terror and awe against the scarlet light. Willis was in a trance. He was a queer fellow, and there was something inexplicable in his attachment to those paradoxes of rock dolls. He thought he had discovered some clue to the race of men or religious cult which he believed once went almost all over the world and built monuments or stonehenges long before metal was known as a tool. We rode across the swelling plain past the quarry in the Teraai Hills where the hats for the images were carved of the red sandstone, and we stayed a minute to see again a monster twelve feet across and weighing many tons. It was a proper head-covering for the sculpture in the quarry. What had caused the work to stop all of a sudden? There were hundreds of tools, stone adzes and hammers, dropped at a moment, statues near finished or hardly begun, some half-way to the evident place of fixation, and others almost at them. What dreadful bell had sounded to halt it all?