Boris Johnson claims that in his first year at Oxford he attended just one lecture. Delivered in the crepuscular gloom of the Pitt Rivers Museum, it was about Rapa Nui, the tiny Pacific island 2,200 miles from mainland Chile. As a boy, Johnson had read the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl’s Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island and had become obsessed.
No wonder. For although Rapa Nui – or Easter Island – is only half the size of the Isle of Wight, it has a haunting history teeming with questions. Who first discovered this speck in the Pacific? How did they get there? How did they manage to settle in this place battered by subtropical seas, rat-infested, with no permanent freshwater streams and whose only abundant resource was stone? Were they cannibals? Most mysterious of all, how, why and when did they carve the massive, glowering stone statues, or moai, some nine metres high, many of which frown over the island with their backs to the sea?
Mike Pitts paid an unplanned visit to Rapa Nui in 1994 and was captivated. He is confident in his answers to most of the big questions. The first settlers were Polynesian, with perhaps a dash of Native American. They arrived in canoes with outriggers, having sailed for 45 days and nights, in around 1200. The construction of the moai began around 1450, and they were manoeuvred into position with ropes. They represent not gods, as some have thought, but ancestors.
Pitts is an archaeologist; but, as well as digging up and analysing bones and artefacts, he is good at bringing alive human stories – particularly about the indigenous islanders and how, after 20 generations of keeping their own company, they were shockingly assaulted by the outside world.
When the first Europeans arrived off Rapa Nui on Easter Sunday 1722, the islanders had no name for their home: they had never needed one. Their ears, perforated and elongated, hung down well below their chins. They wore no clothes. One of the first Europeans to drop anchor described them as ‘laughing and playful’. In a gesture of friendship, they offered the sailors chickens and bunches of bananas. Then their Eden began to collapse. Boarding one of the ships, a native looked at himself in a mirror and felt ashamed of his nakedness. Musket shots rang out. Suddenly ‘ten to twelve’ islanders lay dead.
What followed over the next century and a half was sad, shameful and exploitative. During the 1860s, islanders had their world turned upside down by slave traders. Rapa Nui slaves were marked with identifying collars or tattooed foreheads ‘like sides of beef’. Women were raped. The population plummeted from more than 5,000 to just over 100. Then, in the first half of the 20th century, the entire island was leased to a sheep-farming company, Williamson-Balfour & Co, and the islanders were forced to live in a stone-walled ghetto locked at night. Missionary priests made things even worse. One imposed a week’s compulsory labour on islanders who failed to attend mass.
It would be fascinating to leap forward a century from here to the present day. Do the indigenous people of Rapa Nui, flourishing financially on tourism, now feel they have got the better of the ‘outside’ world, or does servicing luxury hotels for the super-rich represent a new kind of slavery?
Pitts doesn’t address these questions. But at the heart of the book he offers a gripping story which, in a small way, redeems the horror of the Victorian brutality. Katherine Routledge, born in 1866 to a well-heeled family, was presented to the Queen and studied at Somerville Hall (now Somerville College), Oxford. Though born a woman, she had ‘the feelings of a man’, and, impelled by an urgent need to escape her upbringing, she sailed for Rapa Nui in a private yacht in 1913. Over a period of 16 months she learned the indigenous language, interviewed the elders and was treated like an honorary islander. Pitts suspects her research was the most important to have been so far undertaken. But back in England she fell prey to ‘paranoia’, and was locked up in a ‘madhouse’ in Ticehurst. After her death, most of her notes were scattered in private auctions.
Perhaps Routledge could have shed light on one abiding Rapa Nui mystery. Not long after the arrival of the Europeans, the islanders began to tear down the moai they had created so arduously over generations. Why? Some argue that this iconoclasm was prompted by self-inflicted ‘ecocide’. Pitts believes that the Europeans were responsible for breaking the bonds between the islanders and their ancestors. Writing in the Daily Mail after a visit to Rapa Nui last year, Boris Johnson advanced the theory – not incompatible with Pitts’s – that the islanders lost confidence in their ancestors, who didn’t seem to be protecting them. ‘That’s my guess,’ he wrote. ‘I bet I’m right.’
Comments