CHAPTER XVIIEASTER ISLAND
A Lost Culture.—Fate of the Islanders.—The Statues.—The Bird Cult.—Wooden Carvings.
Chile is the only South American country owning territory situated at a considerable distance from her shores; it was picked up, in fact, in 1888 as a kind of derelict child of Spain in whom nobody had much interest.
For Easter Island has little commercial importance; it has never yielded precious metals, includes no fair widespread lands inviting agricultural settlers, and has no woodlands nor a single river. The sheep and cattle bred upon the island are the property of one company, a British enterprise, and the natives are but a couple of hundred in number. The island lies in a lonely position, at the extreme west of the South Pacific series, and measures but thirteen miles in length and about seven in width. The hues of the land are sand and tawny; the sea is a faithful mirror of the turquoise sky; the dreamy heat of Polynesia endures throughout the year. Easter Island is lonely, lazy, unproductive, a little speck upon the broad breast of the Pacific.
But shut within its tiny compass, it holds one of the great mysteries of the world. It contains one of the keys to Polynesian culture, although it bears no apparent connection, as was once believed, with ancient American civilization. The strange, almost incredible evidence upon Easter Island speaks of a culture at once more advanced and more primitive than thatwhich should be most intimately connected with it. For instance, the Easter Islanders speak a language which is a branch of a Polynesian tongue; in certain aspects, the culture of the old people is clearly allied to that of Polynesia in general. But—here is the problem of the ethnologists—Easter Island possessed a written language: the early European visitors put it upon record that the learned men of the territory could read the script of the wooden tablets of which specimens still exist. But Polynesia never had a written language, and pre-Spanish South America, the nearest mainland, was equally ignorant; the nearest country to the east with any idea of such script was Central America, in the Maya culture-area, and the nearest to the west was Sumatra.
The striking and eloquent evidence of Easter Island is fast disappearing. Two hundred years ago, when it was first visited by Europeans, stone statues stood, with their tawny headdresses, as a thick fringe upon the coast, and there were perhaps a couple of thousand natives, divided into tribes spread over the land, among whom were the small clan of “wise men” who chanted from the script of the wooden tablets.
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 theBlossomhere in 1825 the figures near the shores were nearly all ruined.
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 remainingislanders 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 theTopazecalled in 1868. This vessel took away the two stone statues that are, fortunately, now preserved in the British Museum. The American vesselMohicancame 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, calledahus, upon which the bodies of the dead were laid, or under which they were buried; and the figure upon eachahuwas 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 convenienterection. 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 statuesen 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.
The Routledge Expedition, with good fortune and exquisite patience, discovered and elucidated the extremely interesting story of the Bird Cult of Easter Island. Dependent upon the sea-birds’ coming for an important part of their food-supply, the islanders evolved a series of rites connected with the event. The chief ceremony was concerned with the securing of the first egg, deposited on Moto Nui, one of three little rocky islets opposite the highest peak of Easter Island, Rano Kao, at the southwestern edge. At a spot called Orongo, on a slope of Rano Kao, are still to be seen fifty stone huts, where the people went in September and waited for the sea-birds’ coming. Several birds visit the rocks, but it is the egg of the Sooty Tern, known asmanu-tara, that was the islanders’ objective; competition among the watchers was keen,and only members of the temporarily most powerful clan, or their friends, could take part in the contest. The competitors, men of substance, waited in special houses, but deputed servants to swim to the islet when the season was at hand; carrying food, these men lived in a big cave, whose carvings are still to be seen, until the curious scream of the birds heralded their coming. When the first egg was found, the deputy shouted the news to his employer (who shaved his head and painted it red), and swam ashore with the precious egg in a tiny basket tied to his forehead. The victor and his rejoicing party danced ceremonially, carrying the egg, all the way from the west to the eastern end of the island, where the bird-man went to a special house for a year, at Orohié, on Rano Raraku’s slope, strict tabu being maintained for five months. Each old egg was as a rule given to the incoming bird-man, and by him buried on Raraku.
Mrs. Routledge says that apparently the last year in which the dominant clan went to Orongo to await the birds was in 1866 or 1867, although the competition for the first egg survived for some twelve years afterwards.
Legends of the Easter Islanders appear to point to their racial origin upon other Pacific islands, and migration in at least two separate periods, a tradition which is confirmed by the divergence of types found, and the number of shades, from dark brown to nearly white, of the skin of the different people. Stories of the wars between the “Long Ears” and the “Short Ears” suggest that the image-makers, always depicting elongated ear-lobes, differed in tribal attributes from their opponents. None of the native settlements upon Easter Island appear to be of very old establishment.
Wooden Carvings
A curious and beautiful series of small objects is typical of the peculiar culture of Easter Island. The natives had, of course, no metal, and it must have been with stone or hardwood tools that quantities of small wooden figures made in former days in Easter Island were carved. It is not known with certainty whether the territory formerly included a larger number of trees, offering timber for this work and for the larger canoes of which tradition speaks, or whether use was made of driftwood. Today there are no trees of the quality shown by the figures.
The most striking of the old wooden objects represent human figures—rarely, those of women, and most commonly, of singularly emaciated men. Specimens of the latter are beautifully finished, and the head shows “long ears” and faces with “imperials” or little beards, and marked aquiline features, quite distinct in type from these of the conventional stone faces. These statuettes are from 29 to 30 inches in height, the carving bearing a technical resemblance to the “lizards,” another highly-finished series. Crescent-shaped breast ornaments, formerly worn by women, have almost entirely disappeared, although a few specimens survive, one, in the British Museum, bearing inscriptions. The dancing-clubs or paddles belong to another series of high artistic merit, but the most interesting of the wooden carvings from an ethnological point of view are the tablets engraved with signs whose meaning was lost when, sixty years ago, the last of theariki(learned men) died, a slave in the guano fields of Peru.
Tradition upon the island states that the wooden figures were originally made by a great ariki, namedTuukoihu, one of the first immigrants to Easter Island from the western islands; but the art of wood carving still survives feebly, chiefly in the manufacture of objects for sale, as antiques, to unsuspecting visitors.
The natives today wear clothes, a habit which has probably tended to render them more liable to disease; they number about 250. Retaining their two-hundred-year-old reputation of being courageous and persistent thieves, they have however lost many of their ancient arts and are not addicted to regular work. But they are of a physically fine type, appear to possess a gift of wit, and, unless when instigated to anger by their equivalent for medicine men or women, are an amiable people. They formerly tattooed the body in definite conventional patterns; their religious cult was chiefly connected with respect to ancestral dead, and ideas of spirits, kindly or the reverse. A certain clan, the Miru, assumed possession of supernatural powers, and specially gifted men and women were given the usual homage of the medicine man. But religious ceremonies, as apart from the burial rites, initiation into the bird cult, and, later, ritual connected with the visits of European ships, do not appear to have existed.
Of weapons, quantities are found; black obsidian flakes, roughly chipped at edges, with a short stem bound to wooden handle, are typical.
Exterior communication with Easter Island depends upon the Chilean Government, sending an Admiralty vessel yearly, and upon the visits of a sailing ship sent to bring away the wool clip, product of the flock of the 12,000 sheep, by the commercial company of Valparaiso leasing the main part of the territory.
The Chilean vessel sent of recent years on the trip is the training shipBaquedano, a corvette fitted with auxiliary engines.
Visits of the British company’s boat are rare, and the representatives at Mataveri are cut off from the outside world for long periods. During the early months of the war five vessels of the German fleet appeared in Cook’s Bay: theScharnhorst,Gneisenau,Leipzig,NurnbergandDresden; they used the island as a naval base for six days, gave out the first news, considerably garbled, of the war, and went away, first to sink theGood HopeandMonmouthoff Coronel and later to meet their fate at the Falklands. ThePrinz Eitel Friedrichalso entered on December 23, went out and captured a French barque, and sunk her inside the three-mile limit in Cook’s Bay, after landing her crew and that of a British sailing ship taken off Cape Horn.