p The first Europeans to visit Easter Island, in the early 18th century, were amazed to find enormous carved stone images of long-eared human beings surmounted by hats or crowns.

p They also found wooden tablets covered with writing in a unique and undecipherable script.

p The statues stood on stone platforms (the local inhabitants called them ahus), some of them so large—all of 60 metres long and three metres high—that no less labour must have gone into their construction than into the statues themselves. An ahu usually supported several images. But literally before the eyes of the seafarers who visited Easter Island between late 18th and early 19th centuries the statues were pulled down from their platforms one by one. By about the middle of the 19th century not a single statue remained on the platforms. True, some images still remained upright, not on the coast but in the quarry, in the crater of a volcano, from where they began their journey to the shore.

p Altogether, some 600 stone images have been found in various parts of the island. The size of some of them staggers the imagination when we remember that they were fashioned with primitive stone implements. The largest statue, not only on Easter Island but in the whole of Oceania, is 20 metres 90 centimetres high. The 30 head of this giant is 11 metres high, with a nose measuring four metres!

p There is something else that is still more astonishing. Not only did the makers of the images sculpture them out of hard, unyielding stone, move them to the coast, and erect them on platforms, the building of which also called for titanic effort. They crowned the images with tall cylindrical hats of red tuff, which the islanders call pukaos. The pukaos were carved in a different quarry, located in the crater of a small volcano in the middle of the island. This is the only place having deposits of red tuff. The hats evidently had to be made of red stone.

p They fit the statues well. One statue had a hat just under two and three-quarter metres in diameter and two metres high. In the quarry itself lies a pukao that is more than three metres in diameter; it is two and a half metres high and weighs 30 tons!

p It is hard to imagine how the islanders managed, without hoisting devices, draught animals or implements of iron or bronze, to transport and erect the statues which discoverers of Easter Island were fortunate enough to see still upright. Yet the stone giants standing on the platforms, crowned by hats weighing many tons, are not the only notable sight—and mystery—although they are the main one, on this islet in the Pacific Ocean.

p The urge to record speech and keep accounts arises only in civilised societies; primitive tribes get along with pictographs, a language of drawings. Easter Island had a unique script, unlike any other in the world. All attempts to find convincing traces of similarity between any other writing and the writing of Easter Island, 31 known as kohau rongo-rongo (“the talking wood”) have failed. Yet scholars have compared the tiny kohau ron#o-ro/z£0 characters, engraved on wooden tablets with a shark’s tooth, with scripts ranging from Egyptian hieroglyphs and the writing found in caves on Ceylon to scripts discovered in Mesopotamia, Central America, Southern China, South America, India and Mexico.

p Many of the characters in the kohau rongo-rongo script closely resemble the stylised figures that cover Easter Island rocks and cave walls. The cave paintings depict insects, fish, mollusks, birds and, most important, the mysterious figure of a bird-headed man with outstretched paws with claws on them.

p According to legend, the Easter Islanders, before they were converted to Christianity, held an annual ceremony in which they chose their tangata-manu, or bird-man. The ceremony combined the elements of a religious cult with those of a competition. The winner of the competition became the ruler of the island—for one year exactly—and was honoured as a deity. The bird-man is represented in magnificent sculptures made of the hard wood which the islanders carved so skilfully, along with representations of fantastic beings, as well as fish, birds and humans.

p Stone giants weighing many tons; huge stone platforms; unique writing that is unlike the hieroglyphs of other ancient scripts; rocks covered with carvings; a surprising competitive religious ceremonial not encountered anywhere else; magnificent wooden sculptures—surely all this is too much for one tiny island lost in the vastness of the Pacific! Could other lands have lain 32 close by to Easter Island long ago? Or could Easter Island itself be only a small remnant of what once was a large and well-populated land mass?

p The famous mariner and explorer James Cook believed that a cataclysm must have struck Easter Island. Dumont d’Urville and Moerenhout were certain that the population and culture of Easter Island, like those of many other Pacific islands, are only the remains of the civilisation of a Pacific continent. Many scholars agreed with this hypothesis. Macmillan Brown gathered together all the evidence pointing to the existence of a Pacific continent that was tragically destroyed within human memory. Among other things, he cites enigmatic facts from the history of the discovery of Easter Island by European seafarers.

p First, there is the record of what Juan Fernandez saw. In 1572 this Spanish navigator discovered what we now know as the Juan Fernandez Islands, one of them Robinson Crusoe’s island off the coast of Chile. When, six years later, he again sailed the waters of the southeastern Pacific a storm drove his ship far to the south, towards an unknown land. Although Fernandez did not dare to drop anchor there he later declared that he saw the mouths of very large rivers and "people so white and so well-clad and in everything so different from those of Chile and Peru”. He took this to be the great Southern Continent, then believed to exist, which navigators before him had unsuccessfully tried to find.

p The delighted captain hurried back to Chile to make thorough preparations for his next expedition. He kept both his unexpected discovery of a continent (or large island) and his 33 preparations lor a big expedition there a secret. But death prevented him from carrying out his plans. The project died together with him. Only many years later did historians learn of Juan Fernandez’s surprising discovery.

p In 1687 the ship of the English buccaneer Captain Davis sailed direcly southward from the Galapagos Islands on the equator and, after covering about 2,000 miles, sighted a low, sandy shore at 27°20’S, 500 miles off the Chilean coast. Several dozen miles to the west was a long tract of high land.

p On April 6, 1722, the Dutch admiral Roggeveen discovered a small rocky island in that same area and named it Easter Island. There was no land anywhere near the island except for three tiny islets at the southwestern end and another islet near its eastern coast.

p To recapitulate Professor Brown’s chain of evidence: at the end of the 16th century Juan Fernandez sighted a large land, fruitful and wellpopulated; in 1687 Captain Davis saw "a low, sandy coast" and "a long tract of high land" west of it; but in 1722 Admiral Roggeveen found only a single patch of land, Easter Island (the islets do not, of course, count). Does this not imply that the disaster which struck Easter Island or, rather, the Pacific continent, occurred within that period? What Fernandez said may sound fantastic, but Captain Davis—and his entire crew, for that matter—really did see "a long tract of high land”.

p Traces of a cataclysm can be seen on Easter Island itself. Huge unfinished statues still lie in the quarry inside the crater of the volcano called Rano ^Raraku (ratio means volcano and raraku, or raku-raku, means "to scrape”). Beside 34 them lie the primitive stone chisel* and scrapers used to carve the images. It is a small island, yet in Professor Brown’s opinion it required many thousands of workers to make such a large number of stone colossi, at least as many workers as built the Egyptian pyramids. These thousands of people had to be fed while they worked. Where could the builders and the people who fed them have lived except on a large area of land? Also, such grandiose construction could have been undertaken only by a country with a strong centralised government.

p According to a legend about the peopling of Easter Island, the first settlers, sent by a chief named Hotu Matua, found some inhabitants there when they arrived. One of them told the new arrivals that Easter Island had once been a big country and was destroyed by a giant named Uoke. Since then the island has been called Te Pito o te Henua, the Navel of the Universe.

p No one knows what the writing engraved on the kohau rongo-rongo wooden tablets says. In the 19th century, however, enthnographers recorded several legends which were said by islanders to be translations of the tablets.

p According to one legend, when the island was first created it had many roads criss-crossing it. They were built by Heke (which means “octopus”), who sat in a place of honour in the middle of the island. From there the roads radiated in all directions like a grey-and-black spider’s web. No one could determine where the roads began and where they ended.

p Today there are traces of paved ways on Easter Island that run down to the edge of the sea and break off, roads that lead nowhere. Or do they 35 lead farther, to a land mass that vanished under the water?

p Professor Brown believed Easter Island to be a vast mausoleum where giant likenesses of the kings and chiefs of a now submerged country were erected. The statues give us an idea of the appearance of the vanished inhabitants of the hypothetical Pacific continent. They had imperiously jutting chins, compressed, arrogant mouths, deep-sunken eyes arid elongated ear lobes.

p A missionary, Eugenio Eyraud, said that the islanders used the tablets by custom, "without enquiring into the sense of them”. Doesn’t this indicate that the kohau rongo-rongo writing, like the stone giants, is a remnant of the culture of a submerged continent?

The mysterious rock drawings represent, as we have said, bird-men and the unusual royal election rites that took place annually on Easter Island until the ancient culture perished and the inhabitants were converted to Christianity. Gould this bird-cult, not found on other Oceanic islands or anywhere else in the world, be a survival of the beliefs of the people of the hypothetical Pacific continent? Is the old culture of Easter Island the last trace of a vanished civilisation?