Books: At the Navel of the World

MYSTERIES OF EASTER ISLAND by Francis Maziere. 224 pages. Norton. $6.95.

An Athens in Antarctica might be easier to explain than the riddling ruins on Easter Island. More than 2,000 miles from the coast of Chile, still farther from the reefs of Tahiti, Easter is the world’s most isolated islet: a tiny (45.5 sq. mi.) blob of wind-scraped lava jutting from the gray Pacific like a roost for passing frigate birds. Yet on its stony surface, dozens of enormous statues, known in local dialect as modi, stand and stare. Some of them rear up to a height of 40 feet; many of them wear a subtle expression that presumably only sophisticated sculptors would attempt or could achieve; the best rank among the greatest sculptures of all time. What men produced these monsters? Where did these men come from? Where did they go? How and why did they shape their scoriae colossi?

In this century, a series of expeditions, including one in 1956 led by Norway’s ever-enterprising Thor Heyerdahl, have attempted unsuccessfully to answer these familiar questions. The latest expedition was led by a French ethnologist, Francis Maziere, who in 1963 took himself, his Polynesian wife and an adventurous friend to Easter Island for a nine-month stay. In this translation of his absorbing though frequently perfervid text, Maziere describes discoveries that seem to open a crack into the heart of the prehistoric puzzle. In doing so, however, he had inadvertently generated another mystery: were the discoveries made by Maziere, or did he borrow some of his facts from Father Sebastian Englert, a

Capuchin priest who lived on Easter Island and wrote two books on the subject before he died last January?

Yankee Potshots. Maziere begins his tale with an indignant account of Easter Island’s sufferings in recent centuries. The island was discovered on Easter Sunday, 1722, by a Dutch admiral named Roggeveen, who was intrigued by the stone giants and observed that although some of the natives were obviously Polynesian, others had white skins and red hair. He also let his men shoot down a few indigenes after a minor misunderstanding. Subsequent Western visitors apparently felt free to kill any native on whim. In 1811, an American whaler added a touch of Yankee ingenuity. Some island girls were lured aboard. After the crew had made a night of it, the girls were forced to swim for shore while the mate took potshots at their bare backs.

In 1862, Peru introduced the islanders to another benefit of civilization. A thousand of them were carried off to slave labor in the guano quarries. Five months later, when Britain and France protested the atrocity, Peru graciously shipped all 15 survivors home. They brought smallpox with them and an epidemic swept the island. By 1870, an original population of 5,000 had been reduced to exactly 111.

When Maziere arrived in 1963, the population had edged back to 1,000. But he found the descendants of the master sculptors living in “the most unbelievable wretchedness.” Now under the rule of Chile, they were penned up like sheep in a small compound, subject to forced labor, denied anything more than elementary education, refused the right to emigrate. As a gesture of sympathy, Mazière and his wife moved into the native village. According to Maziere, this apparently impolitic decision was largely responsible for the expedition’s success. The Mazieres shared with the islanders whatever they had. In return, the islanders shared with him a series of progressively more esoteric legends.

Legends, transmitted through an oral tradition, are notoriously unreliable. Yet those confided to Maziere seemed to yield strong evidence that Easter Island has passed through three epochs. In the first, the island was inhabited by “the Others,” who, according to native tradition, “were yellow, very big, with long arms. They came by boat from a land that lies beyond America.” It was the yellow men, Maziere believes, who created the first stone giants, the finest sculptures on the island. In the second epoch, which in Maziere’s rough chronology began in the 13th century, the island was invaded by Polynesians who struggled for supremacy until, at the start of the third epoch, they succeeded in incinerating the yellow men in a volcanic ravine. In the third epoch, the Polynesians continued to make modi in a degenerate style, until the white man’s diseases and depredations took the heart and the art out of their culture.

Two Discoveries. By Maziere’s not at all modest reckoning, his investigation generated two major discoveries. One was archaeology’s first clue to the sacramental significance of the figures. After a careful survey of the slopes of Rano-Raraku volcano, where 193 modi are still standing (83 have fallen), Maziere was intrigued by the fact that each giant faces in a slightly different direction. Then an old islander informed him that “each modi looks at a part of the world over which he has power and for which he is answerable.” The old name of the island, he reminded Maziere, was Te Pito Te Henua—The Navel of the World.

He made his second discovery when, with the assistance of the islanders, he dug three huge trenches in the rubbled slopes of Rano-Raraku. The largest of them was 48 ft. deep and 225 ft. long. At every level the diggers found modi stacked upon modi—Maziere believes that at least as many statues lie in the grainy earth of Easter Island as stand upon it. Some of the buried figures are the most massive yet found, and not a few preserve nuances of modeling that wind and weather have long since stripped from the giants on the headland. Unfortunately, before Maziere could complete his excavations, the island’s exasperated authorities rescinded his permission to excavate.

Cribbing or Research? Back in France, the narrative that Maziere created out of his far-flung findings has become an astonishing bestseller (some 230,000 copies). But Maziere drew the rage and scorn of some experts who accused him of everything from gross over-popularization to out-and-out plagiarism. In fact, it is clear upon examination of the texts that Maziere has clearly borrowed large chunks, word for word, from Father Englert.

In science, discovered facts necessarily become common property. But it is considered common courtesy among scientists to acknowledge their indebtedness to the original discoverer, and in this, Maziere seems to have been less than scrupulous. But in an age of popularization, as one cynic has observed, “if you steal from one author, it is plagiarism. If you steal from two, it is research.”