p Perhaps it is, but it is not the only one. Professor Brown searched for the submerged culture of the hypothetical continent on other islands in Oceania, and he found stone statues similar in style to the Easter Island giants, 36 although smaller, OH the Hawaiian Islands, on tiny Pitcairn Island, and on the Marquesas Islands.

p Lost in the vast waste of waters of the Pacific, near the equator, there are several small islands on which the first European visitors, at the end of the 18th century, found nothing but scanty vegetation. No one appeared to have ever lived on those miserable patches of land.

p Yet coconut palms grew there, and they could have reached the islands only with the help of man. Since then other, more obvious, traces of man have been found. Christmas Island has rectangular platforms made of slabs of coral. Maiden, another island in this equatorial group, also has platforms, as well as the ruins of a temple. The shape of the temple, judging from a sketch, resembles that of the ancient pyramids of South America.

p With the ocean stretching on all sides for hundreds of miles, who could have built the platforms and the temple? How could the unknown builders have erected these structures if the islands do not even have a fresh water supply? Could the ruins be the remains of a mysterious culture that sank into the Pacific along with the fertile lands that fed the thousands of building workers? Was Maiden Island, like Easter Island, only a place connected with theceremonials and festivals of the people of a great country that now lies beneath the waves of the Pacific?

p The centre of this vanished empire lay, according to Professor Brown, far to the west, near small Ponape Island, where cyclopean ruins werejound in the 19th century. The basalt walls of some of these great structures were six metres 37 thick. Immense blocks of stone weighing up to 25 tons had been raised to a height of almost 20 metres! Such colossal work could have been performed only by the organised labour of many thousands of workers. A country capable of erecting such gigantic structures must have hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. Yet within a radius of 1,500 miles there live no more than 50,000 people, on islands and islets separated from one another by hundreds of miles. What is more, you would not find 2,000 among them capable of doing the hard work of a builder.

p There are likewise the remains of monumental structures—two parallel rows of stone pillars four metres high—on Tinian Island, which is also in the western part of Oceania. Were these pillars ornamentation, or did they support the floors of houses? And who built those enormous houses? The modern inhabitants of the Tinian Island live in small reed or wooden huts.

p Professor Brown cited other archeological, ethnographic and anthropological evidence pointing indirectly to the existence in the Pacific of large land masses or separate islands and archipelagoes that are now submerged. He was fully aware, of course, of the fact that all this was only indirect evidence and would remain such until bolstered by the findings of natural sciences like geology, zoogeography and oceanography. He did refer to some evidence furnished by those sciences, among them the fact that both the western and eastern parts of the Pacific, and the coasts of Asia and America which they wash, are subject to severe earthquakes. In other words, the earth’s crust there is unstable.

p At the time of Brown and Menzbir little was known about the structure of the Pacific bed. 38 In the mid-twenties of our century scientists had only indirect data to go by. On the basis of their sciences ethnographer Macmillan Brown and zoogeographer Mikhail Menzbir came to the same general conclusion—that a land mass had existed in the Pacific and it had vanished within man’s memory.

p Marine geology was now the only science that could prove the hypotheses and indirect evidence. Oceanographic research conducted in the region of Easter Island and north-east of the island early in the thirties led to the discovery of the large underwater Albatross Plateau. From the rocks brought up from the bottom the American geologist L. J. Chubb, who was in charge of the expedition, concluded that land connecting South America with Australia and perhaps even Asia had once existed there. But he also drew a conclusion that was of no comfort to the supporters of an "inhabited Pacific continent”. Submergence of the land mass here, he declared, took place very long ago; in the past few thousand years Easter Island ’has not subsided by a single yard. Despite Brown’s contention, at the time when the monuments were erected the shoreline was as stable as it is today.

p Although scientists now know a great deal more about the marine geology of the Pacific than in the 19th century or at the beginning of this century, the debate about hypothetical Pacific continent goes on. Many oceanographers and geologists believe that the vast depression in the Pacific has existed there ever since the formation of the earth’s crust. But some support the Pacific continent theory. Among the latter are the Soviet geographer Panov, the Bulgarian geologist Mikhailovich, the Soviet zoogeographer 39 Lindberg and a number of other Soviet and foreign scientists. Contemporary researchers on Easter Island have found rhyolite, rock that is of continental origin. What is even more important is the fact that they have found continental crust on Easter Island, although not a deep layer. "This supports the assumption that a continent once existed in the eastern part of the Pacific”, says Panov.

Millions of years ago, say advocates of the Pacific continent theory, this land mass covered a vast area, forming an unbroken bridge between Australia and America. Then sections of it began to subside and break up into island continents: Australia, a Melanese continent, including the islands of Melanesia, a West Pacific continent, combining what are now the thousands of small islands and islets of Micronesia, the Hawaiian continent, stretching from Japan to California and of which only the Hawaiian Islands remain today, and, finally, the East Pacific continent, of which Easter Island is one of the remains.