by Paul Theroux
“Why not?”
“Because we have no money. Nothing to steal. We’re not Japanese, eh?”
The girl Jimene stopped by my little camp that evening. She was nineteen, but had visited the United States – she had a relative in Seattle.
She said, “We were out fishing today. We saw you paddling. We started talking about you. We said how nice it is that you came to our camp.”
That inspired me to stay longer. I had to tell the owner of the jeep I had rented that I would need it a few more days. I drove into Hanga-Roa and found him. He was not bothered.
“You’re at Tongariki,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Someone saw you.”
The owner of the jeep was Roderigo. He was a medical doctor and part-time businessman. He wanted to buy my baseball hat. He wanted to buy my Patagonia jacket, my Walkman, my tent.
His assistant was Mou, whom I had met my first day on the island – he had picked me up on the road.
Mou said, “Give me your Walkman and I will get you some real rongo-rongo tablets.”
I swapped Mou my “Apex of Beebop” tape for Bob Dylan’s “Infidels,” which I had been meaning to buy. (A few days later, Mou said, “Can you find my father for me? He is somewhere in Colorado. I haven’t seen him since I was very young.”)
I asked Roderigo about health problems on the island.
“The worst, the principal problem on Easter Island is drinking,” he said. “Not from the medical point of view, but psychological. The drinkers have severe psychological problems. People go crazy. Their livers are all right, but it makes them strange and lazy.”
“What do you do about them?”
“We are getting a rehabilitation center,” he said. “Also, there are respiration problems, from the dampness and the humidity.”
I made it back to my camp just as night fell, as it always did, with a thud. I had so little light I ate quickly and crawled into my tent, and I spent the next few hours listening to the BBC, first the news, then a program called “Brain of Britain.”
– Who was the first Christian martyr?
– St Stephen.
– What is the center of the best cricket ball made of?
– Cork.
– What was a “louison”?
– A guillotine.
– What do we call the descendants of “meganura” which had a two-foot wing-span and lived in the Carboniferous age?
– Dragonflies.
And then I was overtaken by sleep.
Some days traveling in an odd place there is nowhere else I would rather be. I had this feeling now and then in Oceania, as you know. I felt it every day on Easter Island. I wondered why. The island seemed haunted. The people were unpredictable and inbred, which made them by turns both giggly and gloomy. It was a difficult and dangerous place to paddle a kayak. Some of this strangeness added to its attraction. But it was also the smallness of the island, and its empty hinterland, the symmetry of the volcanoes, the extravagant beauty of the stone carvings, the warm days and cool nights, the tenacity of the people, and all the island’s mystery, still unsolved.
There was also something wonderful about waking up in a tent, on a beautiful morning, with the great masked noddies hovering and swooping overhead, and looking over the bluff at the ancient canoe ramp at Tongariki and five miles up the island to the cape and thinking: I will paddle there today.
“What do you call that cape?” I asked Andres, pointing towards Cape Roggeveen.
“Vakaroa.”
“Do you know the name Roggeveen?”
“No.”
Jacob Roggeveen was the first European to sight the island, on Easter Day, 1722, and it was he who named it.
“What about the cape beyond it to the north?” On my chart it was Cape Cummings.
“We call it Kavakava.”
At that point I saw one of the girls returning to the camp with one of the older men, along the grassy path that led down to the caves and inlets at the edge of the bay. They were carrying nothing. They walked in silence. Andres said nothing to them – obviously they were father and daughter.
I saw more of this furtive behavior, and I was so unused to it – on other Oceanic islands it was taboo for a father to isolate himself with his daughter – I watched closely and I asked oblique questions. I knew from Metraux’s ethnology that there was a horror of incest on the island. There had always been. But it did not stop close cousins from marrying. I had met some married cousins in Hanga-Roa. I heard of a brother and sister who had not long ago fled the island – eloped was what actually happened, one of the weirder tales I heard about Rapa Nui. The graphic expression for incest on the island was eating your own blood.
At this camp, the daughters seemed to serve many functions. They cooked the food and tidied the place. They untangled and spread the nets (but did not mend them: that was man’s work). They fetched and carried. They played among themselves, but when they were called they kept their fathers company. The fathers went fishing and lobstering with their daughters. Often there was a group: the brothers, their daughters and nieces. But just as often the father and daughter were alone. There was always activity, always movement – “He’s going for a walk with his daughter” –the men always in bathing-suits and torn T-shirts, looking grubby. The girls were mostly fattish adolescents with bad skin. The eldest was nineteen. Her father was thirty-six, but looked much older. She was born when her mother was fifteen. That until recently was about standard childbearing age.
“My father goes to the disco with us on Fridays,” she told me.
“What about your mother?”
“She stays home.”
“Where is your mother now?”
“In town, selling fish.”
“With your aunties?”
“Yes.”
Another vivid sight was that of a father putting some sort of lotion on his daughter’s back, the father being roughly affectionate, the daughter giggling.
I trusted Andres’s instincts. If something was amiss, he would sort it out. He was the most reliable person at the fishing camp, and because he was always sober I brought him a present of a bottle of vodka. I gave the girls a large box of chocolates. But nothing was said about these gifts. They were never referred to. They were squirreled away as soon as they were handed over.
But Andres was always courtly.
“I like being here,” I said in Spanish.
“Good to have you.”
“It is my pleasure.”
“Equally.”
In the pleasantest circumstances, like this, I tended to procrastinate. I planned an expedition for the day, but then I would fall into conversation with someone, and find it interesting, and say to myself: I’ll go on my expedition tomorrow. Normally, I was not a time-waster – being busy kept my mood bright – but here I adjusted my pace, and I realized that I was living as they were. On a given day they would say they were going fishing, and they would sit around, talking and laughing until nightfall, the fishing trip forgotten.
When I was alone with an islander I enlarged my list of Rapa Nui words. On each island in Oceania, I made a list of thirty-odd words, the same in each place: moon, sun, day, fish, food, big, small, sweet potato, woman, man, water, canoe, land, island, and so forth, as well as the numbers from one to ten. I did it mainly for my amusement, to compare the language on one group of islands with another. The results were always revealing. Fiji was technically Melanesia, but the standard Fijian language was full of Polynesian words. And I marveled at how islands as far apart as Hawaii and New Zealand shared a common Polynesian tongue, that was mutually intelligible.
I wondered about Easter Island. The language was said to be corrupt. I had not read anything definitive about the impact Tahitian had had on Rapa Nui. There had been times when the entire island had been removed to Tahiti for economic reasons (there was still an acrimonious land dispute regarding the ownership by Easter Islanders of a portion of Tahiti)
.
On my days of procrastination I developed my word lists, and I discovered that many words were not Tahitian at all, and may well have been part of the original vocabulary, which had been traced to the Tuomotus. The numbers were different from Tahitian, though they resembled Samoan. Their word for sun, tera’a, was unique to the island (it was la in Samoan). Their word for man, tangata, differed from Tahitian tane, but was similar to Tahitian for human being, taata, and identical to the word for man in Tongan. Woman in Rapa Nui was vi’e, cognate with vahine but obviously different. The word for sweet potato, kumara, was universal in Oceania and the prevalence of the vegetable had given rise to one of Rapa Nui’s more melancholy proverbs for life on the island: “We are born. We eat sweet potatoes. Then we die.”
There was no reef around Easter Island, but there was still a concept of inshore and deep sea. Their word for the deep blue sea was moana – the word is known all over Polynesia. But “inshore” water, the Rapa Nui equivalent of inside the reef, was vaikava, “where the green water is,” Carlos explained.
I would not have paddled in the far moana around Easter Island for anything. If something went wrong I would be lost in cold water, in a high wind, with no possibility of rescue or of being swept to any other island. About a mile and a half was as far as I ever got from Rapa Nui, but that was enough – perhaps more than enough, since there was nowhere else to go. The islands, those vertical rock pillars, were less than a mile from shore, though they were never accessible from the nearest point on shore. You set out and had to paddle perhaps four miles along the coast to reach them.
I planned for my last long paddle a trip past Motu Maro-Tiri to the eastern tip of the island, beyond Cape Roggeveen. I brought food and water, my chart and my compass. I told Andres where I was going and that I would be back before evening. As I had been about a third of the way along this coast a few days before, I knew that if something went badly wrong – tipping over and having to swim to shore was about the worst – I could find a cave or a ledge somewhere in the rock wall of the Poike Peninsula. When I did not return, I assumed someone would look for me in one of the lobster boats.
The Dylan tape, “Infidels,” that Mou had swapped me was playing in my Walkman as I paddled out of the bay. I skirted the surf zone, watched for shark fins, and made a mental note of the configuration of cliffs on the peninsula, looking for a funk-hole.
The sea-caves beneath the 300-foot cliffs were lashed by surf which engulfed the cave entrance and then, after a long pause, and squirts from cracks and blow-holes, that same wave was spewed out, foaming. These waves made the front side of Motu Mara-Tiri inaccessible, and it was only there that it was possible to climb to a ledge or a cave. I made a feeble attempt, but gave it up, afraid that I would tip over.
For the next hour and a half I paddled northeast, about a mile or less from the peninsula, sometimes in choppy water, sometimes in high swells. If I paddled too close to the shore I was the victim of reflected waves, which tossed my boat; but farther out I had to contend with a stronger wind and a swell. I found it simpler, but slower, to paddle into the face of waves than in the direction they were traveling, because going downwind there was always the possibility of the boat broaching, turning sideways, or of your losing control because of the speed of your surfing.
I was just confident enough in this water to have a quick bread and cheese sandwich and a swig of water, and in the meantime I was paddling to the beat of Dylan’s guitar riffs. Musically, this was a different and less uplifting experience than the baroque oboe concertos of a few days before, but there was no time to change the cassette.
It seemed to me that a mile past Cape Roggeveen was as far as any sensible person would reasonably go on a winter day off Easter Island in a choppy sea. There were light winds behind the peninsula, but around the corner it was blowing twenty-odd knots.
The worst of it was the heavy surf, which resulted in reflected waves and a confused sea just offshore. I tried to find a middle ground to paddle in, between the chop and the deep blue sea. To take my mind off this, I marveled at the big waves breaking against the sea-caves, and spilling down the ledges – with the foam and the spray whitening the air at the base of the cliffs. It was a lovely and dramatic sight, the dumping sea and the whiteness of the waves.
All this to the sound of music.
And then I took the headphones off, and heard the immense roar of waves and the screaming wind, and I became frightened. The music had drowned the sounds of the beating sea, and without music I felt only terror. My boat immediately became unstable. I paddled hard to give myself direction and stability, and I pushed onward, past the cape to the corner of the island – the edge, round which the wind was whistling. Unwillingly I was thrust out, where I got a wonderful view – much better than I wanted – of Kavakava, Cape Cumming, and then I turned and spun my boat over the crest of a wave and began surfing back to the lee of the island, with a big wet following sea.
I stayed beyond the surf zone, which was especially dangerous on Easter Island because the waves broke on a rocky shore, yet I was curious to see some of these moai from the sea. I paddled across the mouth of the bay in a southerly direction, to Punta Yama, where there was a smashed ahu, and half a mile farther down the coast there were deep sea-caves. Rapa Nui people were fishing near the caves, a family with some horses were camped on the grassy cliff not far away, and there were more fishermen (and more broken statuary) another mile on.
It was odd to be hovering here, between the surf zone and the moana, the deadly emptiness of the enormous ocean behind me, the fatal shore in front of me – landing was impossible. But being here, bobbing in a small boat, demonstrated how resourceful these people had been. They had found ways in and out of the surf (swimming, surfing, using reed floats). They had made canoes, ingeniously sewing scraps of driftwood together in much the same way the Inuit had done to make kayaks in the Arctic. They had incorporated every geographical feature of the island – caves, ledges, cliffs, hills – into their cosmology. And they had done much more than merely survive here – they had prevailed over the inhospitable place and shaped it, made altars and temple platforms and houses with its boulders, and carved from its volcanoes some of the greatest, most powerful statues the world has seen, artistic masterpieces as well as engineering marvels.
They were also known as quarrelsome and competitive people, and there is evidence that warring groups on the island smashed each others’ moai and some also smashed their own, ritually decapitating them, and building better ones. Many of the statues that were standing when Captain Cook visited had been tipped over and broken a few years later.
About five miles away at a bay called Rada Vinapu I saw marked on my chart the abbreviation Lndg, but it was impossible to tell what that landing might be. I was afraid it might be a jetty – one that a ship could slide against, in spite of the waves that hit it, but impossible for me. I had been almost around the entire island and had found only two places to launch and land from; the rest was surf breaking on rocks.
Still outside the surf zone I paddled back, and when I got nearer to Tongariki I put in my tape of baroque oboe concertos and watched the island slip past me, and I felt Joyous.
Above the bay at Tongariki there was an unusual ditch-shaped land feature that seemed to cut across the peninsula. One of the island’s more colorful stories concerned an ancient battle between two distinct groups of islanders, the Long Ears and the Short Ears, in which the Short Ears had been victorious. The violent battle, involving flaming ditches and fierce pursuit, is part of the island’s oral tradition. But it seemed no more based on fact than the arrival – also here at Tongariki – of Tangaroa, who took on a useful incarnation (ata), the form of a seal, and swam from Mangareva to this very spot, where he revealed himself as the God of the Sea.
When I returned, I asked Carlos, Andres, and Jimene about these particular island legends. The men just smiled. Jimene said, “There are so many stories here, it is really wonderful.�
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There was a different man sitting there near the tin hut that evening. He was Juan Ito, a Rapa Nui man, who was caretaker of the great moai quarry across the long meadow at the volcano Rano-Raraku. Had he heard those old stories?
“Yes. I know those stories and I believe them,” Juan said.
He was one of many people who told me that he would never stay anywhere near the moai after dark, because of the existence of supernatural beings. But I was impressed by his fear, because he was among the moai nearly every day.
He asked me whether I was driving into Hanga-Roa. I was out of food, but I was not sure whether Andres and the others were planning to invite me for a meal – they had large anarchic meals of sweet potatoes and fish just before dark inside and around the tin shed. They did not invite me for a meal that night, or at all. I tasted their food occasionally, and we talked. They were neither hospitable nor hostile. They answered my questions. They tolerated me. But I asked no more than that.
Realizing that I would need some food, I drove Juan and his son, Roberto, the twelve miles into Hanga-Roa. Roberto was about eight. He was a skinny and rather undersized and neglected-looking boy – he had just come from school, he said. His hair was matted, his face was smudged. He looked very hungry, and when I found an apple and a boiled egg from the lunch I had only picked at he wolfed them in the back seat.
”How do you usually go from Hanga-Roa to the volcano?” I asked Juan.
“Walk. Sometimes I get a ride,” he said. “There is no bus. I have no car. If I walk the whole way it takes two or three hours.”
Juan’s Spanish was like mine, clumsy and functional, which encouraged me to converse unselfconsciously.
“What about a bike?”
“No money.”
“Have you got any other children?”
“Three boys altogether. Aged five, seven, and eight.”
We were driving along the cliffs I had paddled past that afternoon and they looked lovely and rubbly under the pink sky, with the waves breaking at the foot of them.