When the Gods Were Blind

Posted on 01. May, 2009 by Kerry Banks in International

Wandering amidst Easter Islands’ stone heads, one glimpses how the world ends

To calculate the distance between hope and despair, one could sit on the edge of a 250-metre oceanside cliff on the South Pacific’s fabled Easter Island and consider the fate of those who once lived in the world’s most remote, inhabited place. At first glance, there’s nothing to indicate how this dot of land, 3,700 kilometres off the coast of Chile (and smaller than B.C.’s Salt Spring Island), could have come to symbolize all that can go wrong with a society. The ocean on this day is cobalt blue and endless. An armada of cumulus is becalmed on the western horizon. The great stone statues that line the island’s promontories to my left are too distant to be seen. But etched into the boulders around me on this precipice are strange, half-man/half-bird bas-relief figures that, it is now known, mark the apocalyptic End Time of the tropical civilization that once thrived here.

Those people – the descendants of wayward fourth-century Polynesian mariners – flourished in splendid isolation on Easter Island amid their farms and forested hillsides for more than 1,000 years. Completely cut off by distance and time from any outside influences, they developed a mysterious religion and a still-undeciphered writing system, established an aristocracy, feasted on their little island’s bounty, erected temples and monumental statues, grew numerous and then – oblivious to the consequences of their own excesses – did nothing in the face of impending environmental calamity. Rather, in a series of events with ominous modern parallels, the islanders’ flagrant consumption and population explosion 700 years ago led to forest clear-cutting, fuel shortages and rising temperatures; and these, in turn, led to soil degradation, drought and famine. Still, the raising of Easter Island’s massive stone figures – called moai – continued unabated. Bigger became better. Prestige, for the statues’ wealthy benefactors, lay in size. So the moai grew to monsters: five metres, then 10, then 20 metres tall. Then came decades of unrest, looting and finally cannibalism as the Easter Islanders’ numbers dwindled and civil war swept the once-bucolic place. By the mid-1700s, most of the moai had been toppled and many among the aristocracy killed. The statues that had once served to protect the people had failed. In the face of island-wide anarchy, the survivors created the Cult of the Birdman, which marked the civilization’s last desperate grasp at salvation. And for 150-plus years – until well into the 19th century when there was almost no one left – the men of Easter Island ritually fought, and sometimes died, over the possession of a single tern’s egg. It is exactly here where I sit, on the sea cliffs at Rano Kau, and on the tiny, wave-washed islet of Moto Nui far below, that the bizarre – and ultimately tragic – annual competition over that egg took place.

A half-century ago, when explorer Thor Heyerdahl wrote his book Aku Aku: The 1958 Expedition to Easter Island, few would have been able to locate the place on a map. Even by the early ’90s, less than 5,000 tourists arrived annually. Today, that number has increased tenfold, with visitors drawn by the astounding and cautionary environmental story surrounding the place, by the collection of 16,000 archaeological sites and by the 1995 designation of Easter Island’s Rapa Nui National park – covering 60 per cent of the island’s total area – as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In a week spent wandering the island, I often walk among the fabulous stone heads that jut from hillsides and oceanside bluffs or lie on their backs amid the grasslands that cover much of Easter Island today. Knowing that the island’s story ends tragically makes the appearance of each new statue all the more profound. A rough trail cuts northeastward from the south coast toward the volcanic cliffs of Rano Raraku, following the ancient route the moai-builders themselves once utilized to haul the 12- to 80-tonne figures from the quarries, where they were hewn and extracted, to the scores of ceremonial sites where they once stood.

Along this trail today lie a dozen abandoned supine heads, half-shrouded in weeds, face up, their ears pendulous, their expressions uniformly melancholy, their eye sockets unfinished, awaiting the time – that never came – when they would be removed from their log rollers and slowly levered to the vertical to receive their fear-evoking coral and obsidian eyes. At that moment, the islanders believed, the all-seeing statues merged with the divine to funnel spiritual power from the cosmos, thus protecting the villages over which they loomed. I circle each one trying to grasp why the islanders once dedicated so much time and effort to such a Herculean enterprise; and how their fateful story resonates for the planet today.

The trail ascends the slopes of Rano Raraku, where I find myself walking into a scene I studied in National Geographic as a child, evoking a lifelong wish to see the figures first-hand. Ahead, with some of the island’s 2,000 horses grazing amidst them, the upright statues begin to appear. First one. Then three in a cluster. Then a dozen more, some leaning at odd angles, some high above, beneath the mountainside’s cliff-face quarries, some fallen, some chin-deep, some belly-deep in grass. They are black, impressively huge, with pursed lips and countenances of sober, almost sombre concentration, staring seaward like vigilant watchmen waiting for intruders. But it’s only when I reach the quarries where the statues were cut from volcanic rock that the sheer enormity of the project and the suddenness of its cessation becomes clear. Here, 397 more moai, most only half-finished, the biggest over 20 metres long, still lie within their stone crypts, their extrication halted centuries ago by the onset of civil war. All are eyeless. The quarries, I realize, are a cemetery for blind gods.

My companion on many of these walks is archaeological historian Ramon Edmunds, 41, a descendant of one of the few people who survived the Easter Island apocalypse that ended just over a century ago. Standing on the shoreline below Rano Raraku with the 15 recently raised moai of nearby Tongariki, Edmunds, a stick in one hand, gestures toward the land that spreads out before us. The upland pastures where cattle and horses graze are burnished to pale celadon beneath a relentless tropical sun. Little volcanic cones punctuate the horizon to the west where eucalyptus now grow. And big, open-ocean waves explode against the sea cliffs at our backs, sending their spindrift airborne. But where before us there was once an ancient ceremonial plaza and village, there is now nothing. The 15 standing moai today guard emptiness. “The destruction, the warfare, the deaths,” says Edmunds with regret, “have left much of what happened here an eternal mystery. The oral history I heard as a child ends . . . and the rest is myth.”

Heu Rapu, a local 53-year-old gaucho who herds his 250 head of cattle and horses on those upland pastures, joins us, and the three of us talk about what once was and what is coming to Easter Island. Of the moai, Rapu agrees, little is known of their purpose or of the religion they once embodied. They are, he’s sure, the living faces of his ancestors; the rest is conjecture. When Norwegian anthropologist and author Thor Heyerdahl came to the island in the 1950s, he recounts, the intricate stonework of the moai platform at Vinapu convinced him that Easter Island’s settlers came originally from Andean South America, just as Heyerdahl’s famous, trans-Pacific Kon-Tiki raft expedition aimed to prove in 1947. Author Erich von Däniken speculated, on the other hand, that it would have been impossible for humans to move the immense figures and attributed their construction to extraterrestrials who, he argued, utilized laser beams to cut the stone from the Rano Raraku quarries, then employed – of all things! – rope to lower the statues into position.

Modern science has a more plausible explanation. All I have to do is look at big, barrel-chested, top-knot-wearing Rapu to know that part of the mystery of the islanders’ origins and their strange statues has been resolved. Rapu is unmistakably Polynesian, and linguistic, mythological and archaeological accounts confirm this connection. The original Easter Islanders, riding outrigger canoes, left Polynesia’s Marquesas archipelago, 7,000 km to the west, around 300 AD. Somehow, after months of sailing eastward across the uncharted ocean, these seafarers managed to hit – in the vastness of the Pacific – the 15-km-wide, uninhabited speck that came to be called Easter Island. With plentiful fish, birds, palm trees and fertile fields, the mariners must have believed they’d found paradise. They established farms, clans and – fatefully – an aristocracy. Within a few centuries, they’d begun turning their traditional, one-metre-high coconut-trunk votive figures – called tiki across much of the South Pacific – into the larger stone figures that populate Easter Island today. But over time, the aristocracy became more demanding, the royal feasting more elaborate, an underclass more necessary, the statues bigger . . . and bigger, and then things began to fall apart.

On my last day on Easter Island, I walk with Edmunds amid a set of miniature volcanic cones to the Puna Pau archaeological site, located just outside the island’s tiny capital of Hanga Roa. From the brick-red, volcanic rock within the crater there, the islanders quarried the huge stone topknots, called pukao, that once sat like turbans atop the heads of many moai. Their purpose is lost to time. In the fields around us lie 18 of these spool-like hats, abandoned along with so much else when environmental collapse brought chaos. From this hilltop vantage point, the farms that today surround the little, tin-roofed village and its tree-lined streets are visible. All is peaceful. An afternoon breeze off the Pacific riffles the yellowing grass and sends the palms swaying. I know that beyond the few thousand people living quietly below, the rest of humanity lies far, far away. To the south, there’s nothing until Antarctica, 5,000 km distant. To the north, the Galápagos Islands, 3,700 km away. The coast of Chile lies the same distance to the east. And to the west 2,000 km are Easter Island’s nearest neighbours, the few dozen inhabitants of Pitcairn Island.

In fact, for more than 1,000 years, legends say, no one came to Easter Island. And once the last tree was chopped down 400 years ago, there was no wood to make a boat to leave. “You sit and look out,” Edmunds says, gesturing toward the ocean, “and see nothing. And you wonder, as people must have wondered then: ‘What’s out there?’ After centuries of isolation, being cut off from the world, people must have come to believe that they were alone on Earth . . . that there was no one else. It’s like that photograph from Apollo 11, of the Earth rising behind the moon. A little island . . . lost in space.”

When it appeared to Easter Islanders 300 years ago that the End Time was approaching, with rebellion raging and the sacred statues being pushed over and survivors believing the gods were dead, the remaining inhabitants, so the myths say, looked out from the cliffs at Rano Kau each spring and saw evidence for hope in the annual reappearance of the migratory sooty terns that nested on the seaside ledges of nearby Moto Nui islet. The birds had to come from somewhere, the people told themselves. Their eggs were proof of the possibility of renewal.

So, rather than killing one another as they had for centuries, they invented an annual athletic event that would decide who would be the island’s leader for the upcoming year. On a day in early spring, the Bird-Listeners would assemble above Moto Nui and await the sound of returning sooty terns wings. Young men – drawn from servants of the island’s leaders – stood ready, their bodies painted white, for the signal that the terns were coming. Then, the men raced down the cliffs, swam the shark-filled channel to the rookery and waited in caves near the nesting birds for the first egg. Men died falling from the Rano Kau precipice, from being taken by sharks, from starvation and thirst when the egg-laying was delayed. But whoever got the first tern egg carried it across the wave-swept channel and up the cliff face, then presented it to his honoured master, unbroken. That man was declared the Birdman and lived in year-long luxury, adjudicating peacefully over all issues concerning the islanders, until the following spring.

For a while, the people must have thought that, unlike the failed moai, their Birdman ritual worked.

Then one day in the late 18th century, a whaling ship appeared, and Easter Island’s long isolation came to an end. But the whalers brought syphilis, and some of the locals died. Several decades later, the first Peruvian slave ships came and, over the following years, took away 2,000 islanders to work collecting guano off South America. Those that didn’t die there were – after the abolition of slavery – returned to their Easter Island homeland. But the 15 returnees carried smallpox. Two thousand more Easter Islanders died. Of the estimated 15,000 people who lived on the island 600 years ago, a census taken at the end of the 19th century showed only 111. And these survivors had, in many cases, been reduced to living in caves, fearful that fate might play one more trick on a society that had suffered enough. By then the Birdman ritual had also ceased, leaving only the half-man/half-bird petroglyphs at Rano Kau as evidence that the people of Easter Island had once believed in the possibility of redemption.

Tags: Easter Island, Spring-09