It has been proposed, though solid figures are difficult to ascertain, thatmoai construction might have been under way as early asA .D. 500, and that production peaked circa 1400. We know for certain from the record of European visitors that themoai stood erect as late as 1722, when Roggeveen visited, but that no construction was under way after 1774, when Captain Cook noted they had mostly been toppled. One fact, however, has been agreed upon: At the time themoai were abandoned, when the tools were thrown down beside the statues in the quarry, scores ofmoai, larger than any of those that had been standing, were in the process of being carved. Experts have taken this to mean that there was a flurry of carving activity at the very end. Sometime between 1722 and 1774 most, if not all, of the 200 standingmoai were toppled.
There is no evidence of natural disaster—in the form of tidal waves or volcanic eruption—to account for the sudden disappearance of the indigenous plants. The palynological data suggest a gradual decrease in pollen content with each subsequent sediment layer. And so we must consider the biota shift as, primarily, the result of human habitat destruction.
It is thetoromiro anddisperta palm whose disappearance would have had the greatest immediate impact on the native peoples. As indicated by the use of caves for habitation, the islanders could find shelter in the absence of a strong building material. However, as an island dependent upon the sea for its life, and on boats, specifically the typical Polynesian outrigger canoe, scarcity of wood, therefore scarcity of boats, would impact fishing and water transportation activities. (Roggeveen, Cook, La Pérouse, and Loti all noted the poor quality and small number of native canoes. And many of these visitors were greeted by islanders swimming to them from the shore.)
A major clue to this dearth of functioning watercraft is evident in the travelogues of the European explorers. Roggeveen described the first moment of contact between an islander and his ship:This hapless creature seemed to be very glad to behold us, and showed the greatest wonder at the build of our ship. He took special notice of the tautness of our spars, the stoutness of our rigging and running gear, the sails, the guns—which he felt all over with minute attention. On Cook’s expedition, the same event occurs:As the master drew near the shore with the boat, one of the natives swam off her, and insisted on coming aboard the ship, where he remained two nights and a day. The first thing he did after coming aboard was to measure the length of the ship, by fathoming her from taffrail to the stern. La Pérouse witnesses a whole party of islanders examining his ship:They examined our cables, anchors, compass, and wheel, and they returned the next day with a cord to take the measure over again, which made me think that they had had some discussion on shore upon the subject . By looking at the objects that held the greatest fascination for the early Rapa Nui, we can begin to understand what they lacked.
We then must imagine the secondaryhuman trauma caused by deforestation—soil erosion would have stunted the crop growth, and a general depletion of timber resources would result in an inability to catch fish. The population, within a matter of years, would have begun to starve.
Other researchers have determined that there was a large population concurrent with the period ofmoai construction; estimates place between seven thousand and twenty thousand on the island (the current island population is approximately three thousand). The natural demand of such a population on the environment—food resources—would have been a stress on the natural biota. Coupled with the rampant deforestation of the palm andtoromiro for the purpose of transporting themoai, this would have created, quite rapidly, an uninhabitable environment. It is likely that the population at first suffered a gradual and natural decline, without any specific understanding of the changes occurring in the environment.
One must then look at themoai, the monuments themselves, thrown facedown, for the silent story of the island’s population disaster. The earliest known inquiries (Roggeveen, 1722) into the purpose of the monuments indicate the statues were meant as memorials, representations of the islanders’ dead ancestors. Though they were not described as religious, or in our sense, protective, statues, it is not unreasonable to suspect that the carvers associated these monoliths with protective qualities—which is to say they believed their task of monument building to be beneficial. At whatever point the flurry of monument building began, we must imagine the arduous labor of building ever larger, ever more difficult-to-transport memorials, coupled with a progressively rapid deterioration of the island. Trees and bushes would have been disappearing, crops would have been failing. The population would have started to decline and, for perhaps the first time, this isolated people would have experienced starvation.
What we can reasonably assert from the evidence is a likely correlation between the increase in monument building and a devastation of the terrestrial landscape. Which is noteworthy as perhaps the only known instance in the history of mankind in which a people destroyed themselves by building monuments to their dead.
But there was something Greer didn’t write.
It involved the position of themoai . The statues didn’t look out to the sea as one would imagine; they faced inward, staring at the island, their backs to the ocean, as if these people, thousands of miles from other humans, had, over generations, lost knowledge of the outside world. As if in building these monuments, megaliths of the past with which to encircle themselves, they had forgotten, or tried to forget, that anything lay beyond their shores.
What, then, would they have thought the day Roggeveen anchored off the coast, the deck of his massive ship topped with goods they had never before seen, the men in a rainbow of brightly colored hats and jackets and epaulets? What would they have thought as they paddled alongside in their corroding canoes, climbing aboard to stroke the sleek sails and trim and ropes? What would they have thought when Roggeveen’s men rowed ashore, climbing the rocks with polished pistols and muskets by their sides, which, when raised, seized life in an instant? What would they think, three days later, as they looked at the bodies of their fallen friends while the ship sailed off beyond the edges of the world they had thought their own? Would the islanders have looked around at the barren landscape? The rocks and the reeds and the yellowed grass? Would they remember the trees? Or stories of trees—didn’t their mother once tell them of a girl who was told to plant her lover’s head in the earth? Would they look at the few canoes rotting in the surf? Boats that could hold no more than four people each, too leaky to make it more than a few miles? Would they know they were sharing the tragic fate of so many creatures, like the intrepid birds that had found their way to such distant shores and awoke one day to find they could no longer fly? Would they then look up at the massive stone giants they and their ancestors spent centuries building? At their own history, now no longer enough to protect them, to keep out their knowledge of another world?
Was this the moment when one furious man gave the command—Enough! Never again!—when they knew the dead had betrayed them, when they swarmed the nearest statue, their bodies heaving, angry, frightened by the weight of this massive relic, bleeding themselves for the sake of a new beginning?
30
The plane leaves at oneP .M. and both Vicente and Mahina are there to see her off at the airport. Sven and Isabel helped load her bags and said their good-byes at theresidencial . Now there is a commotion at the cargo bay as her crates and cores are loaded, and they all watch as her work of eight months is sealed inside the plane.
Mahina is strangely silent as the other passengers line up beside the plane, as though Greer’s departure is an unexpected betrayal. She has dressed for the occasion, though—a dress of white cotton printed with small yellow flowers; flowers that, Greer thinks, don’t exist. Fashion flowers. Around her neck is a shell necklace.
“Thank you for the books,” Greer says, tapping her backpack.
That morning, as Greer was packing up her toiletries and sealing her duffels, Mahina came by with a stack of books. “For thedoctora ,” she said, and placed them, one by on
e, onto the mattress. They were leather-bound, a faded burgundy, titles lettered in gold along the spines. The collection from the glass armoire above the desk. Greer lifted one book and opened it. Charles Robert Darwin,The Voyage of the Beagle, London, 1839. The front page was embossed:
Ex Libris
E.P.B.
Greer ran her fingers along the pages, the binding.
“But, Mahina. You wanted to sell these. These are Darwin. First editions. They’re extremely valuable. I can’t take them.”
“They are your kind of books. What you like to read. And they are a present. If you refuse my present, well, I refuse yours.”
“You are a tough woman,” said Greer.
“Yes,” said Mahina. “I am a tough woman. And I have enough to try to read with your paper. I cannot be troubled with so much English in my lifetime.” And she left Greer to put the books in her pack, calling Ramon to help load the duffels into the Jeep.
But Greer doesn’t know how Mahina feels about her own gift. She’s said nothing yet of her plans to leave. Greer will have to wait for Vicente to let her know if Mahina used the ticket. Hopefully Mahina will climb onto the plane and wave good-bye to her island, at least for a little while.
Vicente begins pacing. “So, Germany,” he says. “I’m sure there is some good wet ground there for coring. Come visit. Call it a research trip.”
“Where’s your first stop?”
“The beginning. Strasbourg. Where von Spee lived.”
“Strasbourg? France?”
“Only after the war. It used to be German.”
“I have a friend in Strasbourg I’m thinking of visiting.”
“Then you’ll have two friends in Strasbourg.”
He unwraps a cone of tissue paper and hands her a single daisy. “For my favorite botanist.”
“Vicente.”
“And the daisy, I am certain, is the flower that means ‘I will see you soon.’ ”
“Precisely,” says Greer, saddened by this reminder of all their conversations. How quickly one forms a past, even while trying to escape another. She puts the flower behind her ear. “I’ll miss you, Vicente. You’ve been wonderful.”
“We will meet again. I am sure of it. The flower says so.”
“I never argue with flowers.”
She turns now to Mahina and opens her arms. “And you . . .”
“Iorana,” says Mahina. “I mean both now. You come back,Doctora .”
“Someday,” says Greer. In this good-bye she can hear the echo of every other good-bye she has ever said. “I’ll be back.”
“You will come back to see themoai standing,” says Mahina.
Just the day before, they have learned of a new “moairestoration project” through SAAS. A team of French archaeologists will spend a year restoring a row ofmoai on the coast to their upright positions. The islanders have mixed feelings—themoai have been down for over two hundred years, and everyone is used to them that way. Greer, too, is undecided—the toppled statues tell the island’s true story, of its tragic collapse, but perhaps this project will become part of the island’s story as well: rebirth.
“Yes,” says Greer. “I must see that.”
The Lan Chile stewardess at the base of the portable stairs now waves the passengers forward. Greer embraces Vicente, who kisses both her cheeks, and then her forehead, saying simply “Strasbourg.” Then Mahina takes off the shell necklace and places it over Greer’s head. “Doctora,” she says.
“This is me.” Greer picks up her backpack, heavy with her new books.
She approaches the stewardess. It is the woman from her flight here eight months ago. Still smiling.
“Iorana. Buenos días.Hello,” she says, taking Greer’s ticket. At the top of the steps, Greer turns to Mahina, points at herself climbing onto the plane. “See how easy?” she shouts, and with a last wave, she ducks into the plane.
She takes the pillow from her seat and props it behind her neck. She has a long day and night of travel ahead. Santiago. New York. London. Reykjavik. And then the small expedition plane to Surtsey, twenty miles south of Iceland.
She has reviewed the necessary materials for the project. The island is volcanic, like Easter, but new, unblemished—just barely ten years old. It has seen growth, with no corruption yet. Sightings have already been made of sea rockets decorating the island with purple and white flowers, and the small pink blooms of sea sandworts. Even as she sits here, new seeds are pressing toward it. She imagines thousands of fern spores floating on the wind. All the box beans and Mary’s beans and morning glories, all the seeds on all the creatures bobbing on driftwood, carried by the current, waiting to take hold, to root themselves, to push through the darkness, into light, where a new life awaits.
The propellers spin and the plane begins to trundle down the runway. Greer looks once more out the window, but now the tarmac is empty, the glass of the airport a blur. Her seat shudders as the engine pushes the plane into the air, onto the current, and soon she is looking down on the island as it fades from view.
Climbing through the clouds, above nothing but ocean, the plane steadies. She glances around the cabin: several American tourists, already sleeping; a young European couple, perhaps German, holding hands; an older woman, Chilean, with two small girls beside her.
Greer pulls her backpack from beneath the seat and removes one of Mahina’s books, a copy ofOn the Origin of Species . She sets it in her lap, and falls asleep.
Hours later, on another plane, above another ocean, Greer awakens from a deep sleep and realizes she is almost there. To calm her nerves, she opens the old, weathered copy of Darwin and begins to read. The leather binding is soft, bleached at the corners. The pages are crinkled. There is some faded pencil underlining in the book, which no doubt compromises its value as a first edition, but then again, she has no intention of selling it. She finds the simple statement that has always made her pause:
No one ought to feel surprise at much remaining as yet unexplained in regard to the origin of species and varieties, if he makes due allowance for our profound ignorance in regard to the mutual relations of all the beings which live around us.
And beside the passage, this other reader, this invisible friend, has written in a neat and unmistakably feminine script—letters long and curled—the simple word:Lovely.
Greer looks out the window, at the island emerging. There, below her, is the emerald shimmer of newly sprouted plants, a broad-winged bird gracefully circling the shore, a white flower winking amid a thick blanket of green. Everything glistens with the urge to live.
Her hands rest gently on the book.
It is lovely, isn’t it?
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction, although several characters were inspired by historical figures:
The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European voyagers mentioned were all real people. Excerpts of their accounts of Easter Island are from the translations in John Dos Passos’s compilation of travelogues, Easter Island: Island of Enigmas.
The legend of Hau Maka’s dream presented in the book’s epigraph is a compilation of legends from various sources, particularly Thomas Barthel’s The Eighth Land: The Polynesian Discovery and Settlement of Easter Island.
Graf von Spee was the real vice admiral of Germany’s World War I East Asiatic Squadron, which did anchor at Easter Island before the battle of the Falklands. Von Spee’s actions on the island, however, were entirely invented for the purposes of this story. Graf Spee’s Raiders by Keith Yates, Coronel and the Falklands by Geoffrey Bennett, and The Long Pursuit by Richard Hough provided information about the movements of von Spee’s fleet. The scene in Tsingtao, in which von Spee learns of the outbreak of war, is a fictional synthesis of several incidents.
The expedition undertaken by Elsa and her family was inspired by the 1914 expedition of Katherine Scoresby Routledge and her husband, wonderfully described in her book The Mystery of Easter Island. It is worth noting that the Rout
ledge expedition did not go missing from the island, but returned safely to England.
The ecological history of Easter Island presented is factual. The first thorough examination of the Easter Island pollen record was started in 1977 by Dr. John Flenley. In 1984 John Flenley and Sarah King were the first to publish evidence that Easter Island was once forested by palm trees.
Two books pertaining to island biogeography were of particular importance in my research: The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen, a remarkable volume, and Island Life by Sherwin Carlquist, published two years before MacArthur and Wilson published their monograph formalizing the field.
Thomas’s angiosperm research is based on the work of several people who searched for magnolia pollen in that era. The Enigma of Angiosperm Origins by Norman F. Hughes was helpful to me in understanding Thomas’s process. As I write this, however, the magnolia is no longer considered the first flower. Through genetic analysis done in the 1990s, Amborellacaea, Nymphaeacaea, and Illiciacaea are now considered the first angiosperms.
In 1955, the first Easter Island moai was re-erected by Thor Heyerdahl at Ahu Aturi Huke, near Anakena. Ahu Akivi was restored in 1960, and subsequently Ahu Tahai, in 1967, both by Dr. William Mulloy. Ahu Nau Nau at Anakena was restored in 1978 by Sergio Rapu Haoa. Between 1992 and 1995, the fifteen moai at Ahu Tongariki were restored to their upright position by a joint team from the University of Chile and from Japan, with the Japanese TADANO corporation funding the project. Currently, only about seventeen percent of the statues that once stood upright have been re-erected, and most are still in danger of erosion. To protect the statues, an ongoing effort is under way through the Easter Island Foundation and other organizations to raise funds for preservation.
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