The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  Many of the moai had been ritually blinded by the islanders themselves. The archeologist JoAnne Van Tilburg mentions how “specific, probably ritual damage was done to only certain parts of the figures, in particular the heads, eyes, and occasionally the right arms.”

  That first day, I ran into an island woman who was secretary of the Rapa Nui Corporation for the Preservation of Culture, known locally as Mata Nui o Hotu Matua o Kahu Kahu o Hera (“The Ancestral Group of Hotu Matua of the Obscure Land”). She confirmed various stories that I had read about the island.

  Hotu Matua was the leader of the first migration to Easter Island. Descended from ancestral gods, this first king had mana, great spiritual power, and is credited with the founding of this civilization. Much of the early history is conjecture – there are so-called wooden rongo-rongo tablets, with strange figurative script incised on them, but no one has ever been able to decipher them. In spite of this, most of the stories regarding Hotu Matua agree on the salient points. That he sailed from an island (Marae-renga, perhaps Rapa) in the west, commanding two ninety-foot canoes. That he brought with him “hundreds and hundreds” of people. That some of these people were nobles (ariki) and others skilled men and women (maori) – warriors, planters, carvers – and still others commoners. That the captain of the second canoe was a noble named Tuu-ko-ihu. That on board these canoes they had “the fowl, the cat, the turtle, the dog, the banana plant, the paper mulberry, the hibiscus, the ti, the sandalwood, the gourd, the yam” and five more varieties of banana plant. (Later generations gave Hotu Matua credit for introducing animals which early explorers introduced, such as pigs and chickens.)

  After sailing for two months in the open sea, the voyagers came upon the island and they sailed completely around it, looking for a place to land. After their tropical home, this windy treeless island must have seemed a forbidding place: then, as now, black cliffs being beaten by surf. They found the island’s only bay, its only sandy beach. They went ashore there, and named the bay Anakena, their word for the month of August. It was an island of seabirds and grass. There were no mammals. The craters of the volcanoes were filled with totora reeds.

  Another happy incident, which occurs in all versions of this first-arrival story, is that shortly after Hotu Matua’s canoe reached the shore of the island, one of Hotu Matua’s wives, named Vakai, gave birth to a baby boy, Tuu-ma-heke, who became the island’s second king. The cutting of the infant’s navel cord caused the place to be called Pito-o-te-henua, Navel of the Land.

  The woman who was telling me these stories said that she was a teacher of the Rapa Nui language. But was there such a language? She claimed there was, but linguists said that the original tongue had been lost, and that the language spoken on Easter Island now was the Tahitian the Christian missionaries had brought – because that was the language of their Bible and hymn book. Because this Tahitian had many similarities to the old Rapa Nui it had displaced it. Easter Islanders were identified as Polynesians when they boarded Cook’s ship in 1774. As soon as they spoke, Cook recognized that their language was similar to Tahitian.

  Looking for a place to launch my boat I walked down the main road of the town, a dirt track called in the local language Navel of the World Street, past grubby little bungalows – they had the shape and dimensions of sheds: flat roofs, single walls – to Hanga-Roa harbor.

  It was not like any harbor I had ever seen, and it explained why if you totalled the time all the early explorers spent ashore on Easter Island, it would amount to very little. Few of the nineteenth-century explorers, Metraux says, “stayed on the island for more than a few minutes.” Some of the explorers, having made the 2,500-mile run from Tahiti (and it was nearly as far from South America), were unable to go ashore – too windy, too dangerous, too surfy. In 1808, for example, Captain Amasa Delano of Duxbury, Massachusetts (and of Melville’s story “Benito Cereno”) arrived at the island and sailed around it, but could not set foot on the island, because of the heavy surf off Hanga-Roa.

  Some ships did land, to the sorrow of the islanders. In 1804, the men on an American ship, the Nancy, kidnapped twelve men and ten women from the island after a fight – the intention was to use these captives as slave-laborers at a seal colony on Mas Afuera, a rock halfway to Chile. When the islanders were allowed on deck after three days at sea, they jumped off the ship and began swimming in the direction of their island, and all drowned. Whaling ships plying the southern oceans often abducted Easter Island girls, for their sexual pleasure.

  “In 1822 the skipper of an American whaling ship paused at Easter Island long enough to kidnap a group of girls who were thrown overboard the following day and obliged to swim back to the island,” Metraux writes. “One of the officers, simply for amusement, shot a native with his gun.”

  After more raids of this sort the islanders became hostile to any foreigners. But the foreigners persisted, either fighting them or employing more devious means to subvert the islanders, using gifts as bait, as in this raid in 1868: “the raiders threw to the ground gifts which they thought most likely to attract the inhabitants and … when the islanders were on their knees scrambling for the gifts, they tied their hands behind their backs and carried them off to the waiting ship.” The King, Kaimakoi, was kidnapped with his son and most of the island’s maori (experts). These and later captives were sent to work, digging on guano islands, where they all died.

  The history of Easter Island in the nineteenth century is a long sad story of foreign raiding parties (mainly American and Spanish), of slavery and plunder, leading to famine, venereal disease, smallpox outbreaks, and ultimately the ruin of the culture – the place was at last demoralized and depopulated. In 1900 there were only 214 people living on Easter Island, eighty-four of them children. A hundred years of foreign ships had turned Easter Island into a barren rock.

  The island had flourished by being cut off, and then it became a victim of its remoteness. Since the earliest times, it had never been easy to land on it, but it was so far from any other port, and in such a rough patch of ocean, that every ship approaching it took advantage of it in some way – looking for water or food, for women, for slaves.

  How was it possible for even a small ship to land here? In fact it had never been managed. No more than a scooped-out area, with boulders lining the shore and surf pounding beside the breakwater, the harbor was a horror, and it was difficult even to imagine a ship easily lying at anchor offshore, with a whaleboat plying back and forth with supplies. Problem one was mooring a ship in the wild ocean off Hanga-Roa; problem two was getting the whaleboat through the surf to shore and, since there was nowhere to land, steadying it long enough to unload it.

  I saw that I could paddle through the surf zone. But it was usually easier to get out than to paddle in. The danger here was that the surf was breaking on large rocks at the harbor entrance. Even if I surfed in I might be broken to smithereens on the rocks.

  The most ominous sight for a potential kayaker was that of Rapa Nui boys surfing into the harbor on big breaking waves. This surfing, locally known as ngaru, had been a sport here since the earliest times, and was the only game that had survived all these years. They had abandoned the ancient games of spinning tops, flying kites and going to the top of volcanoes and sliding down “tracks on which they had urinated to make the path more slippery.” But surfing had been useful in the early innocent days of foreign ships anchoring off Hanga-Roa in a heavy sea. Surprising the seamen, the islanders swam out to the ship, using “swimming supports” – a plank or a rush mat. Some of the islanders were observed surfing back to shore afterwards, riding the waves and using the planks as surfboards.

  In the Rapa Nui language there was a complete set of surfing terminology, which described the board, the surfer’s waiting for the wave, allowing the wave to crest, and settling on the wave; what in current surfing jargon would be the banana of the pig-board (or sausage-board), the pick-up and take-off, the cut-back on the hump, hotdogging, hanging ten and walk
ing the plank. In the olden days there had been surfing contests and some men, real Rapa Nui beachies, had gone far from shore to surf a long distance on the large ocean swells.

  But the sight of surfers convinced me that this was not a good area to paddle from – and it was the harbor!

  A place called Hanga-Piko, a rocky bay farther along, looked slightly more promising, but studying it closely – I walked along the shore and watched the breakers for about twenty minutes – I saw that it would be tricky here, too, because of big rollers – they tumbled in from the deep sea without anything to stop them or modify them.

  I walked another mile to Anakai Tangara, an ominously named cave (meaning “The Cave Where Men Are Eaten”) with petroglyphs on the walls, and nearby some stone foundations of ancient houses still existed. The stones had holes in them, where poles were inserted, for the tall tent – like structure which was then thatched. Below this place were sea-cliffs, and beyond was the volcano Rano-Kau. In the sky here and all over the island were hawks – the cara-cara, which the Chileans had introduced to rid the island of rats. The hawks were numerous, and highly competitive – they flew close to the ground, they perched fearlessly, they swept down on anything that moved, they were intrepid raptors.

  There were groves of thin peeling eucalyptus trees rattling in the wind on the lower slopes of the volcano. These had been planted by the Forestry Commission. I followed the dirt road that wound through them, seeing no one, only hawks. At the top I had a lovely view of the crater, and because this volcano was at the edge of the sea, beyond the crater’s rim was the blue ocean. In the depths of the crater was a lake, with totora reeds, papyrus thickets and steep walls, and in the most protected part of the crater – the lower edge, out of the wind – there were banana trees and an orange grove.

  Orongo, the site of the Bird-Man cult, was at the lip at the far side of the crater, high above the sea. That was another mile onward, and on the way I ran into a Rapa Nui man, Eran Figueroa Riroroko.

  Riroroko was about thirty, a handsome stocky man, who lived in a hut near Orongo and passed the time carving hardwood into animal shapes. In halting Spanish, he explained the Bird-Man cult – how in the ancient times the men gathered on the cliffs here every September (the austral spring). At a given signal they went out to the island, Motu Nui, about two kilometers offshore. It was not far, but the water was notorious for sharks.

  “They went in canoes?”

  “Swimming.” Nadando.

  Every ship that called at Easter Island in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remarked on the brilliant swimming skills of the islanders, but these hopu, candidates for the title Bird-Man, had to bring food with them. They scrambled up the ledges of Motu Nui to bivouac and wait for the first sooty tern’s egg of the season. When the first egg was laid and seized, the lucky man who held it called out his victory, and then tied it to his head in a little basket and swam to shore. He had no fear of sharks or waves, for the egg contained powerful mana. And his capture of the sacred egg meant that for a year he was Bird-Man – he had great authority, he lived in a special house, gifts were brought to him, and with this sudden assumption of power he settled any old scores he had – I’m the king of the castle, and you’re a dirty rascal, as a schoolchild might put it – for now, with this mana, he had warriors on his side, who would do as he bid.

  Bird-Man petroglyphs – a beaked creature of grotesque strength – were incised in the boulders and cliff faces all over Orongo, along with portraits of the great god Make-make, who was on Easter Island what Tiki or Atua were elsewhere in Polynesia. Smaller, broken ovals cut into the rock were depictions of vulvas – all over the island, on cliff faces and in caves, there were old carvings of vulvas (komari), which were cut by priestly elders when a girl reached puberty. These priests comprised a special class and were given the title ivi-atua, “kinsmen of the gods.”

  The Bird-Man cult, with its eggs, and the vulvas, and the solstice, all suggested that Orongo was associated with sexuality and fertility. On the bluff at Orongo there were also small stone dwellings built into the cliffs, dry-stone burrows and pillboxes with crawl-in openings, in which people had lived when this cult flourished.

  “Do you get frightened at night up here by the ghosts?” I used the local word for ghosts – akuaku.

  Riroroko said, “Yes, there could be akuaku here. Devils, I mean.”

  “Are you a Christian?”

  “Yes. Catholic.”

  “Have you traveled away from the island?”

  “I have been to Tahiti. To Santiago. To Venezuela.”

  “Were you tempted to stay at any of those places?”

  “No. Tahiti was unbelievably expensive,” he said (tremenda-menda caro). “But I was just looking. I just wanted to get to know them. I would never live in those places. Santiago is full of people, traffic, and bad air. I needed to come back here where the air is clean.”

  “What language did you speak in Tahiti?”

  “I spoke Rapa Nui and people understood me. Tahitian is very similar – close enough so that they can understand. I liked the people.”

  I walked down the volcano, five miles, taking a short cut through the eucalyptus plantation, but on the outskirts of Hanga-Roa I was footsore, and now from every roadside hut a crazy hostile dog ran at me.

  A beat-up jeep, with music blaring, shuddered along the road. I stuck out my hand.

  “I’m Rene,” the driver said. “He’s Mou.”

  They were two grinning wild-haired youths.

  “You speak Spanish?”

  “Yes. But Rapa Nui is better.”

  “What’s that music?”

  “AC-DC.” An Australian rock group.

  They dropped me on Navel of the World Street and sped away.

  When night fell at six or so, the island went black, and apart from wandering boys and homeward-bound drunks, no one stirred. I went to bed early and listened to my short-wave radio in the dark. The news was of floods in south China, which had drowned two thousand people. That was the entire population of Rapa Nui.

  The west coast seemed as unpromising for paddling as the south coast. There was a heavy swell, and high surf dumping on black bouldery shores. The islands marked on my chart were not islands at all, but like Motu Nui in the south – slick black rocks, washed by foaming breakers. God help anyone who tried to land a boat on one.

  I hiked along a road that narrowed to a path, which degenerated and lost itself among the grass on the high cliffs. But I liked the island’s obscurity. It resembled the Marquesas in having no signposts, no information at all. Half a mile from town there was an ahu with a line-up of five heads. I knew this was Tahai because of the paddling chart I had with me. Farther on there were more moai and some of them had had their eyes reinserted and were staring inland – in fact, all the statues on the island had their backs turned to the sea. They were carved from brownish volcanic stone, they averaged five or six tons apiece, some had topknots or hats carved from red scoria.

  Their size would have been overwhelming enough, even if they had been badly carved. But these were brilliantly executed, with long sloping noses and pursed lips and sharp chins. Their ears were elongated, and the hands clasping the body had long fingers, the sort you see on certain elegant Buddhas. Some of the statues had a mass of intricate detail on their back. And although there were similarities among the statues’ profiles, each one had a distinctly different face.

  When the first Europeans came to this island in 1722 all these “living faces” were upright. The first chronicler (Carl Behrens, who was on Roggeveen’s ship) wrote, “In the early morning we looked out and could see from some distance that [the islanders] had prostrated themselves towards the rising sun and had kindled some hundreds of fires, which probably betokened some morning oblation to their gods …” And this veneration might also have been related to the fact that the islanders had just had their first look at a Dutch ship and a mass of pale jug-eared sailors.

  A little
more than fifty years later, Cook recorded that many of the statues had been knocked over. And by 1863, all the statues were flat on the ground and broken – a result of warfare, competition, and an iconoclastic frenzy that periodically possessed the islanders.

  Stranger than the towering statues that stood and stared were the enormous fragments of broken heads and faces, tumbled here and there on the cliffs – just lying there among the cowshit and tussocky grass.

  Every rock on Rapa Nui looks deliberate, like part of a wall or an altar or a ruin. Many of them are carved or incised – with mystical symbols, with images, with vulvas. Most are black basketball-sized boulders and have the character of building blocks, as though they have been shaped for some structural purpose. I wondered whether it was ignorant of me to imagine this. Hiking alone all day can inspire fanciful thoughts. But at lunchtime, sitting among a mass of boulders, I saw that they led to a cave entrance, and I crawled into one that was walled, big enough to hold three people. (Islanders had hidden in these caves to escape the attention of slavers, the so-called “black-birders.”)

  I walked along the high cliffs of the west coast, to Motu Tautara and the caves near it in which lepers had once lived, and beyond to where the island’s highest volcano, Mount Terevaka, sloped to the sea. There were moai on this northwest coast, too – isolated heads, some of them fallen and broken. Heads like these, looking complete and final, were so far from any habitation that they had that hopeless and rather empty gaze of Ozymandias.

  You come to a place you have read about your whole life, that is part of the world’s mythology of mystery and beauty, and somehow you expect it to be overrun – full of signs and guidebooks and brochures, and other similarly rapt pilgrims and individuals. That very anxiety can forestall any real anticipation, and so you might procrastinate, fearing that it might be another Stratford-upon-Avon with Willy Shakespeare souvenirs, or Great Wall of China packed with tour buses, or Taj Mahal, entrance fee ten rupees. Instead of risking disappointment, isn’t it better to stay away?