The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  But Easter Island is still itself, a barren rock in the middle of nowhere, littered with hundreds of masterpieces of stone carving, blown by the wind, covered in grass, and haunted by the lonely cries of seabirds. It is not as you imagine it, but much stranger, darker, more complex, eerier. And for the same reason that it always was strange: because it is so distant and infertile an island.

  Late in the afternoon there was a sudden downpour, and as the heavy rain persisted I ran for shelter, taking refuge under a cliff. I crouched there for about twenty minutes before it dawned on me that other people had done exactly what I had done: I was crouching in an ancient shelter, which had been hollowed from the cliff and decorated with petroglyphs, and the sides shored up by bouldery walls. If it hadn’t rained I would not have found it.

  Walking up this west coast, looking for an ancient canoe ramp or a place to launch my boat, I marveled at the emptiness of the island, and lamented the decline of its ancient culture. It is not as though it was swept away. The material culture was so substantial that now more than twelve hundred years after the first moai were carved (Tahai I, just down this coast, was dated and shown to have been in use around A.D. 690) they still exist and still look terrifying, their expressions sneering, Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

  I didn’t find a place on this coast to launch from but I was heartened none the less by the utter emptiness – just me, and the staring heads, and the soaring hawks.

  On my way back to Hanga-Roa I took an inland route and first met a man herding cows who said hello in Spanish, and then ran across a younger fellow, a Rapa Nui named Iman, about twenty-five or so, who had recently arrived back from Paris where he had been supervising his grandfather’s business. He had agreed to look after his aging parents on the island.

  “How do you like Rapa Nui?”

  “I hate it.”

  I asked him why.

  “There is nothing here,” Iman said. “Nothing to do. Nothing happens.”

  Near sunset we walked towards town. There were cacti and palms growing near some of the houses, and others had banana trees in their gardens. In spite of these plants the island did not feel tropical. It could be warm in the day, but it was cool at night. Always there was the smell of damp or dusty roads and the stink of dog fur.

  We came across the carcass of a horse. The thing had died on the road and it had lain there all day. Children were pitching stones at it, but timidly, as though at any moment they expected the corpse to scramble to its feet and neigh at them.

  “Look at that,” I said.

  “It is a dead horse,” Iman said. “It collapsed this morning. It belongs to the man Domingo. I saw it fall over.”

  “And yet you say that nothing happens here.”

  I rented a jeep and drove with my tent and collapsible boat to the top of the island, to Anakena, where Hotu Matua and the first canoes had arrived, where the first true Rapa Nui person had been born. It was a lovely protected bay, with a sandy beach, and just above the beach seven moai, some with cylindrical topknots, others decapitated.

  Camping there I dreamed of the writer Jerzy Kosinski, who had killed himself a few months before, how he laughed when I told him that I liked camping. Perhaps the dream had come to me because I had read an article about him recently. The piece said that he had had no writer friends. But I had known him and regarded him as a friend. He seemed a bit paranoid and insecure, and vain in an unexplainable way. One night in Berlin he had gone back to the hotel and put on a type of male make-up, giving his pale Polish complexion an instant tan. What was that all about? He told me that he was afraid of assassination attempts, of being the object of sinister plots.

  But it was the opposite that he feared – not notoriety. He was afraid of being ignored, not taken seriously; he could not stand being regarded as insignificant, or of his gifts being belittled.

  “He likes to camp,” Jerzy said to his then girlfriend (and, later, wife), Katarina. His Polish-Jewish accent made what he said sound like sarcasm, but I didn’t mind. He seemed to find my life negligible. I found his horrifying. Oh, well.

  He could not understand my incessant travel. I could not understand his need to be a Yale professor, hurrying up to New Haven to give lectures on the evils of watching television. He needed to be an intellectual. East European writers use that word all the time to describe themselves. I hated the word. He liked power. He wanted to be respectable. When he ceased to be respected – in the end he had actually been mocked for being a lightweight and suspected plagiarist – he killed himself.

  I woke up in my tent under the palms at Anakena thinking: A traveler has no power, no influence, no known identity. That is why a traveler needs optimism and heart, because without confidence travel is misery. Generally, the traveler is anonymous, ignorant, easy to deceive, at the mercy of the people he or she travels among. The traveler might be known as “The American” or “The Foreigner” – the palangi; the popaa, as they said here in Rapa Nui. But there was no power in that.

  A traveler was conspicuous for being a stranger, and consequently was vulnerable. But, traveling, I whistled in the dark and assumed all would be well. I depended on people being civil and on observing a few basic rules. Generally I felt safer in a place like Anakena than I would have in an American city – or American camp site, for that matter (mass murderers were known to lurk around camp sites). I did not expect preferential treatment. I did not care about power or respectability. This was the condition of a liberated soul, of course, but also the condition of a bum.

  A small Rapa Nui boy watched me setting up my boat later that day on the beach at Anakena.

  I pointed to the seven carvings on the huge ahu and asked him in Spanish, “What do you call those?”

  “Moai,” he said.

  “Are they men or gods?”

  “Gods.” Dios.

  The water at Anakena was no colder than that in Cape Cod Bay in July. Because there was no one here to tell me anything about the hazards – the current, the tides, the submerged rocks, the sharks – I paddled out in stages, to test the current and the wind. There was a light northerly wind blowing onshore, into the bay, and moderate surf. I made it to the opening of the bay and paddled east for a few miles and saw only waves crashing against the black rocks of the island. Once past Ure-Mamore Point (Punta Rosalia on my chart) I could see all the way to the far eastern headland of the island, more high cliffs rising to another of Rapa Nui’s four volcanoes; this one was Puka-tike on Poike Peninsula. There was a surf break nearer shore, which meant that I had to stay about a quarter-mile from the island to avoid being tipped over and dashed against the rocks. But still I felt pleased having come this far, and justified in having brought my boat.

  I had water and food in the boat, but the sea was so rough – the wind bashing my beam – that I could not put my paddle down long enough to eat anything. Instead, I went out farther (it was a safe wind: if I had tipped over I would have been blown back in to shore) and then in a westerly direction, past Anakena again, and onward, blundering toward another headland, Punta San Juan. The wind picked up and the sea was filled with breaking waves and cross-winds, and once again, looking along the whole Cabo Norte – I was amazed by what a rocky, inhospitable shore it presented: nowhere to land, nothing but breakers and black boulders.

  I was listening on my Walkman to a Charlie Parker tape, “Apex of Bebop” – it suited the surf, the tumbling clouds, the chop, the waves, every soaring bird: Crazeology and Yardbird Suite and Out of Nowhere and Bird of Paradise.

  Standing in the sunshine on the grassy slope of a volcano, among big-nosed stone heads, sniffing the heather, I had had no real idea of what an intimidating island this could seem. It was cows and meadows and huts, and smashed statuary. It was bleary-eyed and rather grubby Polynesians, and Chileans from the mainland.

  From my boat the island seemed truly awful and majestic, a collection of grassy volcanoes, beaten by surf, and surrounded by more than two thousand miles o
f open water. It was not like any other island I had seen in Oceania. Tanna had been rocky, Guadalcanal had been dense and jungly, the Marquesas had been forbidding – those deep valleys, full of shadows. But Rapa Nui looked terrifying.

  The tide was ebbing in the late afternoon when I returned to Anakena – the water had slipped down to reveal protruding rocks. I beached my boat and saw a woman walking along the beach. Her name was Ginny Steadman, and she was a painter, who had come here with her husband, Dave, an archeologist, who was digging near the ahu above Anakena.

  I talked a while with Ginny – about islands we had visited – but I found it hard to concentrate, because all the while I was thinking of how about six or eight months previously I had had a premonition of this exact moment – the way everything was positioned: how the sunlight hit the water, the slope of the beach, the angle of the boat, Ginny herself, the sight of the bay, even the air temperature and the swooping birds, so vivid a déjà-vu – I have seen this before, I thought – that I resisted telling her, afraid the poor woman would be startled.

  Dave Steadman was up to his neck in a symmetrically stepped pit. He talked without interrupting his digging and sifting and sorting. He had spent years traveling the Pacific, looking for the bones of extinct birds. Later, I read about him, how he had discovered new species of rails, of gallinules, of parrots, and as one of the world’s authorities on the extinction of species he had published many articles – Extinction of Birds in Eastern Polynesia, Holocene Vertebrate Fossils in the Galapagos, and others. He told me he was looking for bone fragments, but he said he picked up anything that looked interesting.

  “Here’s some flakes of various kinds – obsidian – and a drill.”

  It was a chipped stick of stone, about two inches long.

  “That was for drilling wood or bone – or making tools.”

  He had small plastic bags of sorted bird bones.

  “These might be shearwaters or petrels.” He pointed to the pit he had dug. “There’s lots of extinct birds down there. Not many up here on the surface. What have you got here? No trees. Hardly any birds. The cara-cara was introduced. They’ve got that gray finch. A few terns. Masked booby. Frigate bird. That’s about it.”

  He did not stop digging, and now Ginny was sifting through the sand he shoveled into mesh-bottomed boxes.

  “You can always tell what a place was like when you dig,” Dave said. “Polynesians got to an island and they started eating. And they didn’t stop. Within a hundred years or so they ate everything – all the birds are gone. That’s the first level – extinct birds. At the next level you find different bones – dogs, pigs. Then another level and, hey” – he glanced out of the pit, just his head showing – “they start chowing down on each other.”

  “Was there much cannibalism here?” I asked.

  Metraux had said there was, but he had done no digging. He had collected old stories about the kai-tangata, “maneaters,” on Easter Island: the way that victorious warriors ate their slain enemies after a battle, though sometimes people were killed to provide a special dish for a feast. Human fingers and toes “were the most palatable bits.” On at least one occasion some Peruvian slavers were ambushed and eaten.

  “Yes. Human bones have been found here, mixed together with fish bones and bird bones,” David said. “There was cannibalism all over Polynesia. In the Cooks, in Tonga, the Marquesas. Everywhere. You see the evidence when you dig. As soon as the population gets to a certain level people start chowing down on their neighbors.”

  He had returned to his digging, but he was still talking.

  “Some guy’s taro patch is bigger than yours? You want his mana? You kill him and you chow down.” After a moment, he added, “Cannibalism was big here in the sixteenth century.”

  Inevitably, our discussion turned to Thor Heyerdahl.

  Dave, who as an archeologist was the straightest talker J had met, as well as the most down-to-earth, said, “Thor Heyerdahl is perhaps the most fanciful adventurer to hit the Pacific.”

  This made Ginny wince, but then she smiled and nodded agreement.

  “Many things he says about Easter Island are incorrect,” Dave said. “He dreams something one night, makes a connection, and the next day he puts it into his book. See, he already has his theory. He just looks for ways of proving it. That’s not scientific. And he commits the worst sin of an archeologist – he has been known to buy artifacts from the locals as well as carrying out digs. If you dig them up you get provenential information. But when you buy them you know nothing.”

  He dumped another bucket of sand for Ginny to sift.

  “I guess you could say that because of him, Easter Island is on the map,” he said. “There’s been more archeology done here than on any other single place in the Pacific. But want my opinion of it? It’s shitty archeology. It’s some of the worst excavation in the Pacific. No one knows anything here. They get a big bag of bones and chips, and they don’t know where the stuff comes from. It’s all a mystery.”

  Dave pointed with his trowel at the ahu with the seven moai on it, their backs turned to us.

  “Look at that ahu. To rebuild it, they had to move tons of sand – right here, a whole mountain of it. What was in it? Where did it go? Think of all the information that was lost! And you can’t criticize the guy who did it, because he’s an archeologist.”

  “What about the reed-boat theory?” I asked. “That was disproved, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. By Flenley’s pollen studies. He proved that the reeds in the crater are 28,000 years old. How could they have been brought by South Americans? And the thing is, Heyerdahl was here when Flenley read his paper. He just sat there. He didn’t say anything. It was ridiculous.”

  But closely questioned, Dave became less rambunctious and more scientific. He even stopped shoveling to explain.

  “See, the lake sediment contains pollen, and the anoxic mud preserves the pollen. So you do a core, for x number of meters, and then you radiocarbon date it. They’re good tests. They’re real diagnostic.”

  The Steadmans covered their hole and left, and when they were gone it began to rain. Then the clouds blew past, and I was alone in pink late-afternoon sunshine. And I thought that, even without the moai, it would be a lovely island, because of the volcanoes – the craters and hornitos – and the long grassy sweep of their slopes.

  The sunset, purple and pink, altered slowly like a distant fire being extinguished, and then cold black night fell for thirteen hours.

  Everyone goes home and shuts the door when darkness falls, and at night on Easter Island I had a sense of great suspicion and separation, of distinct households, of a competitive, feuding society, full of old unresolved quarrels, in which there was quite a lot of petty theft, suspicion, envy, evasion, and insincerity. The toughness and self-reliance of the people made these traits even more emphatic.

  The next morning I went across the island, into town, to send a fax. It was simple enough. It went through the only phone in town, at the Entel/Chile communications center, where there was a large satellite dish. It was also possible to receive a fax there, for a dollar a page, or to make international phone calls (Easter Island was in the same time zone as Denver). Every day that office received by fax the news pages of the Santiago newspaper, Las Noticias, and these pages were tacked to the wall of the office: this wall newspaper was the nearest Easter Island got to having a paper but, in any case, people only read it when they were making a long-distance call.

  The Steadmans were back at Anakena, digging again the following day, sifting for bird bones and chips, and they seemed to me among the unsung heroes of Pacific archeology. Their fieldwork, like most scientific research, was laborious and undramatic, but it yielded indisputable results. And nearly every shovelful had something of value in it.

  Dave picked up a small bone from the screen. He blew the dust from it.

  “This is a bone from the inner ear of a porpoise.”

  “Did it swim here?”
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  “No. Someone chowed down on it. This is a habitation site,” he said, gesturing at the pit he had dug. “It’s all food here. And there’s enough organic material in that bone to date it.”

  “Is this what you’ve done in other places in the Pacific?”

  “Pretty much so. We dig, we collect what we can. Most people ignore us. We don’t care about that.”

  Ginny said, “Except for Tonga.”

  “We got some hostility in Tonga,” Dave said. ‘“Fucking palangi’ – that stuff. We kind of like the Cooks.”

  “Women don’t get hassled in the Cooks,” Ginny said. “They left me alone.”

  “There’s a rain forest in Eua, in Tonga,” Dave said. “When we were there in eighty-seven we said, ‘Take care of it. Eco-tourism is the big thing now. People will want to come here and experience this rain forest.’ They said, ‘Yeah. Yeah. Great idea.’”

  He was digging again – digging and talking.

  “We went back two years later. Now some Japs are planning a hotel and golf course in Eua, right in the rain forest.”

  It was pleasant to talk with people as widely traveled and knowledgeable as the Steadmans. I proposed that they write a Book of Extinct Birds. They said they had thought of it already, and might just do it. I asked Dave about the megapode birds I had seen in the Solomons. He was full of information, and had seen megapode skeletons – an extinct one as big as a turkey – but never a live bird. I described for him the pleasure of eating a megapode-egg omelette.

  He found the Easter Islanders an even greater riddle than their artifacts, but in their own way just as ruined.

  “I’ve seen more hard-core debauchery on this island than anywhere else in the Pacific.”