The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “Like what?”

  “You name it.”

  It was the drinking most of all that alarmed him. A bottle existed to be emptied. Even a full bottle of whisky was gone by the following morning.

  “Their attitude is, ‘If you’ve got ’em, smoke ’em.’”

  After I had chosen a spot and set up camp, I saw that I was only a half a mile from the famous moai quarry at the volcano Rano-Raraku. I walked there and spent the rest of the day wandering among the stone heads. From a distance, the heads look like the stumps of enormous trees, but walking closer you see how distinct they are. Most of them were two or three times my height. I counted thirty of them, then walked a bit farther and counted a dozen more. There are over a hundred of them here, on the slope of the volcano, from which they were carved. They have enigmatic faces, highly stylized, like the characters in old Virgil Partch cartoons, or like attenuated Greeks, or gigantic chess pieces.

  On these slopes, they are standing, lying on their faces, on their backs, broken, and seemingly walking down the slope – some have a whole trunk, a thick upper body, attached to them, buried underground. The inside of the crater had a number of them. And outside, some are half-sculpted, lying horizontal in a niche in the side of the volcanic rock. One of these was forty feet long – a head and body, lying like an unfinished mummy. Another was a kneeling figure. Yet another upright moai had a three-masted schooner carved on its chest.

  There were no other people at the site, which made the experience eerie and pleasant. It was without any doubt one of the strangest places I had ever been. From the heights of the volcano, I could look south and see more figures, twenty or thirty, strung out along the meadows, as though making their way towards Hanga-Roa.

  The questions are obvious. Why and how were they carved? Who are they? How were they moved? Why were so many destroyed?

  The long Norwegian shadow of Thor Heyerdahl falls across every archeological question on Easter Island. Even the simplest people I met on the island had an opinion about their history, and they all had views on Thor Heyerdahl.

  Drunk or sober, nearly all were skeptical about the man. The drunkest was Julio, a fisherman who, because of bad circulation brought on by his continual state of inebriation, was always shivering, and this in spite of wearing a winter coat and wooly hat (with earmuffs). Although the rest of the men went around in shorts or bathing-suits, I never saw drunken Julio take off either the thick hat or the coat.

  “You have heard of Thor Heyerdahl?” he demanded. “I worked for him for six months. I don’t like him. Listen, he gets publicity all over the world and what did I get for six months’ work? Nada!”

  Anna, a young mother in a torn T-shirt, also had views. She spoke a little English. She had been to Los Angeles in 1982, but hadn’t liked it. “Too many Mexican people.”

  We were near Rano-Raraku, in view of the quarry, and so I asked her about the moai. She said she had taken her little daughter to see them and that the little girl had wondered how they had been moved.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Thor Heyerdahl says that the statues ‘walked’ – that the people used ropes and lines to move them, while the statues were upright. But the stone is very soft and Tahai is nineteen kilometers away. So they would never have made it. I think Heyerdhal is wrong. There were palm trees here at one time. They could have used those trunks as sleds. The people must have pulled them that way.”

  In Easter Island: The Mystery Solved, Heyerdahl writes how a man telling him that “the statues walked” made perfect sense. (It was an island legend, this walking by means of the divine power of mana: Metraux heard the same tales.) Of course, ropes must have been affixed to upright moai and the great things rocked back and forth, one set of ropes yanked, then the other. Heyerdahl experimented, moving one moai twelve feet. This is something less than fifteen miles, but the more convincing argument was put in the magazine Archeology by Professor van Tilburg, who examined all the statues for “wear patterns” on the bases, necks and upper torsos and found none. If ropes had been attached to this soft stone and the statues joggled for fifteen miles, the stone would have been abraded.

  Much more likely is the sledge theory – the figures were dragged “on a frame or a sledge, to which ropes were attached … using a crew of approximately 150 individuals, over specially prepared transport roads.” Metraux’s conclusion is similar, though he says that skids must have been used, Tongan style, as they had when the forty-ton pillars of the trilithon had been moved across Tongatapu. The average weight of the Easter Island heads (because the stone is so porous) is only four or five tons.

  Thor Heyerdahl is shrill but mistaken in many of his assumptions. Far from solving the Easter Island mystery, he has succeeded in making the solution more difficult for qualified scientists and made something of a fool of himself in the process. He is an amateur, a popularizer, an impresario, with a zoology degree from the University of Oslo. And his efforts in the Pacific greatly resemble the muddling attentions of, say, the hack writer of detective stories when faced with an actual crime scene – someone who ignores the minutiae of evidence, hair analysis, or electrophoresis (for typing bloodstains) and in blundering around a crime scene, muttering “The butler did it!”, makes a complete hash of it for the forensic scientists.

  The mention of Heyerdahl’s name in academic circles frequently produces embarrassment or anger, and even villagers on Rapa Nui find Heyerdahl ridiculous. The Rapa Nui know they are the descendants of Polynesian voyagers and regard themselves as the creators of the monumental figures, which they claim are representations of various prominent ancestors. The figures are not gods, but men. (Forster, who went with Cook, claimed that the statues were of “deceased chiefs.”) Historians back up the Rapa Nui beliefs, even if Heyerdahl sneers at them. In an important article in Scientific American in 1983, “The Peopling of the Pacific,” P. S. Bellwood writes, “At least one thing is now quite certain: the Polynesians are not of American Indian ancestry, in spite of some evidence for minor contacts with the Pacific coast of South America.”

  “There is absolutely no hard data known from the cumulative effort of nearly 100 years of investigation,” Professor van Tilburg writes, “which would archeologically link the island to the mainland.”

  This view is supported by other Pacific historians and scientists, by Professor Sinoto of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, who has carried out excavations throughout French Polynesia and who has studied Easter Island; by P. V. Kirch in The Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms, regarded as the best documented study of Polynesian settlement; indeed, the view is supported by almost everyone except Heyerdahl himself, who clings to his absurd theory that Peruvian voyagers carried their culture – their stone-work, their gods, their sweet potato – into the Pacific. Polynesians came later, he says, and brought these thriving cultures to an abrupt halt.

  What about the totora reeds upon which Heyerdahl places so much emphasis in attempting to prove his reed-boat theory? As David Steadman said, pollen studies such as John Flenley’s have proven that the reeds have been growing in the craters for about thirty thousand years. Thor Heyerdahl claims that they were brought from South America about a thousand years ago, and this is one of the cornerstones of his reed-boat theory – that South Americans with reed-boat technology sailed to Easter Island bringing sweet potatoes and creating masterpieces of stonework.

  Why, you may ask, does the authoritative Encyclopaedia Britannica disagree with the botanists and support the conclusions of Thor Heyerdahl? The Encyclopaedia Britannica text supports all of Thor Heyerdahl’s assertions: “boggy crater lakes are thickly covered in two imported American species.” The answer is that the lengthy entry on “Easter Island” in Volume 6 of the Macropaedia bears the initials “Th.H.” and was written by the Norwegian.

  Probably the most obnoxious aspect of Heyerdahl is that he appears to display a contemptuous bias against Polynesians. In Fatu Hiva, he maintains that the Marquesans are too
lazy to have created the ambitious stonework and carvings on Hiva Oa. In Akuaku, reflecting on the stone-work of Easter Island, he writes, “One thing is certain. This was not the work of a canoeload of Polynesian wood carvers …” In The Mystery Solved, he rubbishes the Rapa Nui people even more: “No Polynesian fisherman would have been capable of conceiving, much less building, such a wall.” Too lazy, too uncreative, too stupid.

  This extraordinary prejudice is not only without foundation, but is the opposite of the truth. A review of his last book in the magazine Archeology called it “a litany of hypocrisy, superciliousness, and prejudice against Polynesians in general and the inhabitants of Easter Island, the Rapa Nui, in particular.” One of Heyerdahl’s most offensive theories is that the Rapa Nui were brought to Easter Island, from another island, possibly as slaves, by ancient Peruvian navigators who were cruising and being artistic elsewhere in Oceania.

  In a lifetime of nutty theorizing, Heyerdahl’s single success was his proof, in Kon-Tiki, that six middle-class Scandinavians could successfully crash-land their raft on a coral atoll in the middle of nowhere. That book made him a folk-hero. And it focused attention on the Pacific. I have not read an article or met a scientist that did not regard Heyerdahl as a nuisance, an obstruction and a pest. Heyerdahl’s theory has also been disproved by scientists studying human genetics and DNA.

  “In the Pacific there are two distinct branches [of the human family],” stated Dr Steve Jones of University College, London, in the BBC Reith Lectures for 1991. “One – the peoples of New Guinea and the Australian Aborigines – is genetically very variable, and differs greatly from place to place. They have been there for a long time. The other – which fills the vast area of the Pacific Islands – is more uniform and is related to east Asians. These people arrived after the origin of agriculture, a few thousand years ago. In spite of Thor Heyerdahl’s crossing of the Pacific on a raft, there is no evidence of any genetic connection between Pacific Islanders and Peru. Population genetics has sunk the Kon-Tiki.”

  In the face of this scientific evidence, one could easily reach the conclusion that Heyerdahl, in clinging to his silly theory that Hagoth-like voyagers set sail from South America to civilize Polynesia, is in the pay of the Mormons.

  Meanwhile, Easter Island remains a mystery.

  22

  Easter Island: The Old Canoe Ramp at Tongariki

  Lovely Anakena was penetrated by the past. Although it was a remote beach, the whole history of the island revolved around it. But it was whipped by wind, and I craved to paddle a long stretch of coast. So I folded my tent, packed my boat, said farewell to the Steadmans and drove across the eastern peninsula to Hotu-Iti Bay, which was protected – the towering cliffs of the Poike Peninsula were its windbreak. One of the stranger motus, Maro-Tiri, lay about two miles from the head of the bay, on the way to Cape Roggeveen.

  I wandered around this new bay, in the ruins of a settlement which was called Tongariki, and found a large broken ahu with fifteen smashed stone heads. The moai were lying every which way, with tumbled red topknots, and I later learned that they had been battered to pieces by a tidal wave that had engulfed the whole of Tongariki about twenty-five years before. There was also an ancient canoe ramp here, which had been in regular use for centuries, though it was last used, according to historians, a hundred years ago. I thought I would put it to use once again.

  Where once there had been a village at the edge of the bay, there was now a tin shack, and when I approached it and called out, some people emerged – about six or seven girls and perhaps five older men. Several of the men were drunk. I asked whether I could camp nearby.

  One of the girls said, “I’ll ask my father.”

  The man next to her looked up from his fish-heads and sweet potato, and he muttered in Rapa Nui.

  “Of course,” the girl said.

  Later, I heard the others – the girls, the men: laughter – but did not see them, and so I ate alone, boiling some noodles, and eating it with bread and cheese, and a can of fish. Another feast in Oceania. I slept, awoken every so often by the breaking waves and the surge of the sea.

  At dawn, the men were mending nets, but they stopped when I began assembling my boat.

  “That’s not a boat,” one of them said to me in Spanish.

  “That’s a canoe.”

  “What is your word for it? A waga?”

  “Not waga, but vahka. How do you know this Rapa Nui word? We don’t use this word anymore.”

  I did not tell him that the word was similar in the Trobriands, on the Queensland coast, in Vanuatu and Tonga – all over. Later in the morning, one of the girls brought me a boiled sweet potato. I amazed her by saying, “You call this a kumara?” In the Solomon Islands, seven thousand miles away, the villager, Mapopoza, had said to me, “Nem bilong dispela kumara –”

  The other men gathered and watched me putting my kayak together.

  “What are they saying?” I asked the girl, whose name was Jimene.

  “They like your boat,” she said. “They want it.”

  “If I give it to them I won’t have a boat.”

  “They say they will trade you something for it.”

  “What will they give me?”

  The men conferred and muttered to Jimene.

  “They will give you a moai for it.”

  “How will I take a moai away?”

  “Other people have taken them. That one near the road was taken to Japan and then brought back.”

  It seemed to me that the men were only half joking, and would have slipped me one of the fallen heads from the ahu at Tongariki, fifty feet away, if I had provided the means to dispose of it. Their outhouse had been plunked on the sacred ahu site. You could sit on their toilet and gaze upon exquisite carvings.

  The men were lobstermen. I asked them through Jimene how big their lobsters were, and speaking in Rapa Nui, she asked them the size (“Nui nuu?”).

  “One or two kilos.”

  From the ancient canoe ramp here, they went out in their twenty-five-foot motor-boat, plowing through the surf, to check their lobster traps. I engaged them in a discussion about sea conditions and with their encouragement I set off that day for Motu Maro-Tiri, a tall rock stack down the coast.

  Large waves were beating the base of the peninsula, but there were few waves breaking offshore. There was a moderate swell and a light wind. Inside the bay there was a high surf, but I skirted it, heading out to sea and then turning back when I got past the surf zone. I was now several miles from shore, and heading towards one of the more notable offshore islands of Rapa Nui. Here it was that people cowered from cannibals, having swum from shore, and in the old stories it was described how the cannibals went out in canoes, and captured the people who had fled from them, who were clinging to the heights of Motu Maro-Tiri, how they were hacked to pieces and brought back to shore to be eaten.

  I was listening to my Walkman, playing a tape of oboe concertos, and with Vivaldi’s Oboe Concerto in C, I paddled under the cliffs of the Poike Peninsula, onwards toward the island, very happy that I had brought my boat, feeling a total freedom of movement. Seabirds flew from cliff to cliff as I made my way to the rock pillar that they called an islet.

  It was like a gigantic grain silo, made of granite, with perfectly vertical sides – so steep that there was no way I could get out of my boat and climb it. The sea-facing side was dashed by waves, and behind the stack of rock the swell continually lifted and dropped me. I touched it with my paddle, adding it to the list of forty-something islands I had visited in Oceania.

  On the way back to Tongariki, in the failing light, I was startled by a sudden thump against my boat – dumpf! I stopped and turned to see whether I had hit a submerged rock, but there was nothing but black water. There was always the possibility of a shark, and sharks were said to be stirred by thrashing paddles – Here is a panicky creature that is afraid of me, the shark reasoned instinctively, I think I will eat it. So I made an effort to paddl
e fairly evenly, without any fuss, and when I got to shore I asked Carlos, one of the fishermen, whether he had encountered any sharks in these waters.

  “There are lots of sharks,” he told me in Spanish. “Big ones, too. Six or seven feet long. They surround us when we catch a fish.”

  It seemed a little late in the day for me to start worrying about shark attacks, and so I told myself that perhaps a turtle had bumped me.

  The patriarch of this fishing camp was a dignified old gent named Andres, who spent most of the day pulling nails out of wooden planks and cutting pieces of driftwood to manageable size. These he lovingly stacked near the tin shed, to be made into articles of furniture – he was planning a table, he told me. Every early traveler had remarked on the absence of trees on Easter Island, and the great value placed on wood by the islanders: “they made their most precious ornaments of wood. Even today the islanders do not despise the least plank.”

  “This wood would cost a lot,” Andres said, and he mentioned the peso equivalent of a dollar fifty for a small piece. “All wood is expensive here because we have no trees. The Chileans prefer to sell their wood to the Japanese, who have more money.”

  He went on thoughtfully yanking nails with his claw-hammer.

  “The Japanese are very intelligent people,” Andres said.

  “Do you really think that?”

  “Well, not compared to you or me, but just in general,” he said.

  I asked him whether he had spent his whole life on the island. He said no, he had gone to the mainland to work.

  “I worked on the railway in Valparaiso, and then I came back here. This is a good place, it’s a good life. I like the sea, the fish, the lobster. You live near the sea? So you know what I mean.”

  “Can I leave my boat here?”

  “Yes. There are no thieves. Oh, maybe someone drinks something and takes one or two things. But this is not like the continent. You can take off your clothes, leave them there, and when you come back they will be here. There are no real thieves on Rapa Nui.”