Island at the End of the World: The Turbulent History of Easter Island
by Steven Roger Fischer
Reaktion
£14.99; 284pp
ISBN 1861892454
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One of Easter Island’s more recent creation myths goes as follows: the Primeval Being “took a stone, made a hole and f***ed. It was no good. So he formed a mound of soil, made a hole and f***ed, and there resulted a human to occupy the land.” Which perhaps explains the expressions of pained resignation on the island’s great stone statues. The myth certainly catches something of the bizarre and troubled history of this remote Pacific settlement, which, eloquently unravelled in Steven Roger Fischer’s book, appears as a metaphor for human beings’ maltreatment of their environment.
Mysterious cultures nourish myths of all kinds. Thor Heyerdahl was convinced that the islanders arrived on balsa-wood rafts from South America, and did the journey himself. Erich Von Daniken believed they came from outer space. In fact, the first settlers were part of the eastward expansion of Austranesians from southern China, and made landfall about AD600. They brought with them a well developed agricultural system — pigs, poultry, sugar-cane, yams, bananas, and a staple root-crop called taro. They hunted land-birds and fish remorselessly. Within a few centuries they had slashed and burnt their way through much of the luxuriant rainforest that covered the island.
They might have got by, just, if it hadn’t been for their religion, which was based on a kind of placatory bargaining with their ancestors. Its most extraordinary expression was the creation of the mo’ai, the colossal carvings of kinship deities that were produced in the 12th to 15th centuries. Von Daniken’s credulous fantasy is almost understandable when you consider what was involved in carving nearly 900 of these 5m tall (16ft) images out of steel-hard volcanic rock, using nothing other than basalt hand adzes. Each statue took six men one and a half years to create. The teams, of course, needed feeding. They needed ropes made of bark, and rollers from trunks. By the 16th century the impact of this obsessional, single-minded overconsumption had brought the island to the point of ecological collapse. The land birds were hunted to extinction. The inshore waters were fished out. The last patch of forest was hacked down in the 1640s, and the islanders sank into a morass of eroded land, social dereliction and petty feuding. Diseases (and even a spell of kidnapping) introduced by successive waves of French, Dutch and British visitors, delivered the coups de grâce to traditional Rapanui culture.
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It’s easy to see how the island, a tiny land-mass with strictly finite resources, populated by a people seemingly hell-bent on self-destruction, has become a symbol for the parlous state of spaceship Earth. Jared Diamond calls its history “a worst-case scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in or own future”.
Yet the original contribution of Fischer’s book is to take Easter Island’s history onward from that point of catastrophe, and show that it didn’t entirely collapse. With the entrepreneurial canniness and chameleon abilities that had got them to the island in the first place, the people simply re-invented themselves. They created a new religion — based, ironically on bird-gods — and toppled the old statues with a relish that recalls Lenin-skittling after the fall of Communism. Enthralled by the power of the written word among their visitors, they invented a kind of sacred cryptography — rongo-rongo — based on little more than the idea of linearity and left-to-right reading direction, and inscribed it on staffs and driftwood boards to imbue them with mana. Today, as a rather disgruntled colony of Chile, and with annual tourists exceeding the population by a factor of five (Fischer titles his final chapter “Museum Island”), the community survives by the Pacific-rim formula of mobility, inventiveness and multicultural opportunism.
The statues that toppled a civilisation are now venerated archaeological monuments, and are being re-erected. Sections of the indigenous population have started to deny that it was ever “their” fault that their old culture collapsed. The ambivalence of it all fills one with the queasy thrill of a narrow escape. Is this, perhaps, how the human species is destined to survive, not as the principled citizens we imagine ourselves to be, but as duckers and divers, main-chancers? How long before our ancestral deities are toppled again?