Today the natives are reduced to a handful grouped at one end of the island, the learned men have all passed away, and not a single statue stands upright upon the platforms of the coastal memorials. A part of the sea-border where a series of highly interesting carved rocks stand is being undermined by the sea, and in a few years little will be left. Science is therefore deeply indebted to the splendid work of the Routledge Expedition of 1914–15 in chronicling the exact results of a thorough examination of the remains, as well as for the indefatigable research work throwing new light upon this strange and ancient culture.
Modern historical knowledge of Easter Island is scanty. It was discovered by the Dutch Admiral Roggeveen on Easter Day, 1722, when he was searching for a small island seen previously by the English corsair Davis. Roggeveen stayed here for a week, recorded the cultivation of sugar, sweet potatoes, bananas and figs by the natives, and noted the thirty-foot high stone statues that stood thickly upon the sea’s edge. Fifty years later came a Spanish expedition under González, who took formal possession for the King of Spain and had a map made. A few years later, in 1774, Captain Cook sailed into the western bay retaining his name, the expedition’s botanist, Forster, leaving an account of the island; La Pérouse of unlucky memory was here in 1778. These later visitors saw little cultivation, thought the island poor, and, according to Cook, the natives no longer venerated the statues. When the British Admiralty sent the Blossom here in 1825 the figures near the shores were nearly all ruined.
Fate of the Islanders
Destruction of the natives and their peculiar culture proceeded at the same time. American sealers, short of hands, raided the villagers from the early nineteenth century, and when, about 1855, the exploiters of the Peruvian guano beds needed workers they sent slave-hunting expeditions to the Pacific. In the course of these raids one thousand men are said to have been taken to Peru, the prisoners including chiefs and “wise men.” Principally at the instance of the French, who sent French-Chilean missionaries about this time to the island, a number were returned, but only fifteen reached Easter Island alive. These took back the germs of small-pox with them, and the remaining islanders were decimated by this disease and by phthisis, introduced, apparently, by the devoted French priests. This mission had converted all Easter Island to Christianity by the year 1868, and in the zeal of proselytisation brought about the destruction of quantities of the inscribed wooden tablets.
Commercial exploitation of the island by French traders operating from Tahiti led to the shipment of many natives to Tahitian plantations and the gathering of the 175 survivors into one small settlement at the western end of the island (at Mataveri) by the time that the Topaze called in 1868. This vessel took away the two stone statues that are, fortunately, now preserved in the British Museum. The American vessel Mohican came in 1886, the paymaster Thomson subsequently publishing an account of the conditions, and retailing a few folk-stories; a statue was excavated and taken to Washington. In 1888 the Government of Chile formally took possession of the island, retaining part of the western territory for the permanent use of the natives. The rest of the island is under the control of a British stock-raising company with headquarters in Valparaiso.
That is the brief record of Easter Island from the outside. But it has been increasingly plain since archæology and ethnology took form as organised sciences some fifty years ago that the strange series of stone figures and wooden carvings emanating from Easter Island presented a magnificent puzzle. The work done with courage and ability by the Routledge expedition will perhaps only be adequately appreciated when the remains upon the island are no longer intelligible to the remaining natives. This time is rapidly approaching, and the resulting mystery adds to the picturesque quality of this lonely spot.
The Statues
The majority of the figures bordering the sea were overthrown during tribal feuds. These figures originally stood at the end of sloping platforms of stone slabs, called ahus, upon which the bodies of the dead were laid, or under which they were buried; and the figure upon each ahu was crowned with an enormous “hat,” five to eight feet in diameter, of reddish volcanic stone brought from one spot, a quarry on a slope of the volcano Punapau.
But these statues of the burial-places formed only one of the island series. The Routledge Expedition identified three roads, apparently connected with tribal ceremonies or rights, which were once bordered by giant figures; while on the interior as well as the exterior slopes of the volcano Rano Raraku, in the southeast, are scores of these strange carvings. The slopes of Raraku are almost the sole sources of the “image stone” used by the islanders, and in the quarries are to be seen huge heads in all stages of preparation, some completed and in process of removal. The figures vary in size, some weighing 40 to 50 tons, but all follow a similar design: a tremendous face, with closed lips, and long nose with a concave bend. The back of the head is so narrow as to be almost negligible, but a distinguishing feature is the length of the ear-lobes, distorted to four or five times the natural size. The back is carved with some care, and a curious design that includes circles is often marked out upon it; the shoulders are well shaped, but the arms and hands are shown by a simple and well-conventionalised method, the fingers frequently meeting across the front of the waist. At the hips the carving ceases, the rest of the stone being generally shaped into a peg for convenient erection. Severely simple and quite primitive as the figures are, there is a fine dignity, a repose, about the slightly up-tilted faces that is impressive; the effect of the statues en masse, as they are still to be seen, many of them erect, with the faces looking out from the mountain on the slopes of Raraku, is remarkable, even through the deadening medium of a black and white photograph. Why the statues were carved in such number—there are 150 above the crater lake of Raraku—and why the work ceased, is one of Easter Island’s problems. The unanimity of design, its peculiar conventions, and the skill and decision of the workmanship, suggest a “school”; and as the writers and readers were a special inner guild, so, apparently, were the image-makers. It is true that there seems to have been at one time an itch for carving, for in certain regions every piece of stone that projected from the ground has been carved as it lay, without any attempt to remove it: perhaps, a beneficent influence was created with each serene carved face. But it is certain that many of the statues were set up to mark boundaries, and were so well known that their special names still survive. The larger figure now under the portico of the British Museum, for instance, which comes from Orongo, is “Hoa-Haka-Nana-Ia,” which may be rendered in English, “There is a friend who watches”; the inference certainly being that this statue stood on a boundary. The image stone is a fairly soft volcanic rock, and the tools used, many of which have been found near the images in the quarries, were pieces of harder stone, roughly chipped, bearing a striking similarity to the tools found near Stonehenge, and used in dressing the monoliths. The natives had, of course, no metal. A people of extremely simple habits, they neither made any kind of pottery nor wove cloth, using beaten bark (tapa) for body-coverings. Food was cooked in holes in the ground, lined with stones and heated. Fresh water was and is obtained only from the crater lakes or other collections of rain. The people seem to have lived contentedly in the many caves on the island, but also built huts of a uniform pattern: in shape long and very narrow, the hut had a floor of stones edged with a little wall of slabs; from this sprang a series of twigs, bent and interlaced together at the top, and covered thickly with leaves. Food consisted chiefly of the sweet potato, a kind of sugarcane, and bananas; there was no animal upon the island yielding meat except a small rodent, but the islanders were expert fishermen, and also, in the season, caught great quantities of the sea-birds that visit the nearby rocks to breed.