Rapa Nui

Current Events
by Leslie T. Waldorf
Ocean Challenge

Rapa Nui (Easter Island)
from Class Afloat News, October 7, 1996

Imagine being the first outsider to visit the most remote, inhabited place on earth, an island whose nearest neighbor is 1,400 miles away. The natives you encounter believe they are the only people who exist. In 1722 the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen had this experience when he "discovered" Easter Island. He was mystified by what he saw.

Unlike other Pacific islands which are tropical and lush, this one was completely barren. The soil was fertile because of the island's volcanic beginnings, but he saw no bushes or trees higher than ten feet. Equally puzzling was the complete lack of native animals: the largest one was an insect. A civilization had once thrived there--the over two hundred giant moia statues that lined the coastline were the most dramatic sign. How, he wondered, had statues weighing up to 82 tons each and reaching over 30 feet high been transported across the island, sometimes as far as six miles from the quarry?

In recent years archaeologists have pieced together answers to Easter Island's mysteries. Pollen analysis of its early settlement period (beginning around 400 A.D.) has revealed that the island was once a subtropical forest. Tall palms covered the land, and they were used as rollers for moving the moias and as levers for raising them to an upright position. The hauhau tree yielded rope for rigging these machines.

Bones in garbage piles dating from 900 to 1300 have shown what the islanders ate. Surprisingly, almost one-third of the bones came from porpoises, in contrast to the less than one percent found in heaps on other Polynesian islands. Here was another reason for the importance of the palm: from it they built sturdy, seagoing canoes used for hunting porpoises. They depended on this food source because cool waters around the island limited the fish supply and steep cliffs along the coast made fishing difficult. Sea and land birds were also consumed, so the island had once been a major breeding site for species that no longer exist. Late garbage heaps revealed widespread cannibalism. What had happened?

Cannibalism had become their means of survival because all their resources were gone. The palm tree had been overcut and by around 1400 had gone extinct. Without wood for making canoes they could not hunt porpoises, their major food source. All the other native plant and animal species also soon became extinct, so they had to depend solely on farming. But deforestation had caused erosion that left them low crop yields.

A culture that may have reached 10,000 people in its heyday had an impoverished population of just over a hundred at the turn of this century. Although the island is now able to sustain a few thousand people, there's a lesson for all of us about conservation of resources.