Alone, in the most solitary part of the Eastern Pacific, midway between
the earthquake-shaken littoral of Chili and Peru, and the thousand
palm-clad islets of the Low Archipelago, lies an island of the days
"when the world was young." By the lithe-limbed, soft-eyed descendants
of the forgotten and mysterious race that once quickened the land, this
lonely outlier of the isles of the Southern Seas is called in their
soft tongue Rapanui, or the Great Rapa.
* * * * *
A hundred and seventy years ago Roggewein, on the dawn of an Easter
Sunday, discerned through the misty, tropic haze the grey outlines of
an island under his lee beam, and sailed down upon it.
He landed, and even as the grim and hardy old navigator gazed upon and
wondered at the mysteries of the strange island, so this day do the
cunning men of science, who, perhaps once in thirty years, go thither
in the vain effort to read the secret of an all-but-perished race. And
they can tell us but vaguely that the stupendous existing evidences of
past glories are of immense and untold age, and show their designers to
have been coeval with the builders of the buried cities of Mexico and
Peru; beyond that, they can tell us nothing.
Who can solve the problem? What manner of an island king was he who
ruled the builders of the great terraced platforms of stone, the
carvers of the huge blocks of lava, the hewers-out with rudest tools of
the Sphinx-like images of trachyte, whose square, massive, and
disdainful faces have for unnumbered centuries gazed upwards and
outwards over the rolling, sailless swell of the mid-Pacific?
* * * * *
And the people of Rapa-nui of to-day? you may ask. Search the whole
Pacific--from Pylstaart, the southern sentinel of the Friendlies, to
the one-time buccaneer-haunted, far-away Pelews; thence eastward
through the white-beached coral atolls of the Carolines and Marshalls,
and southwards to the cloud-capped Marquesas and the sandy stretches of
the Paumotu--and you will find no handsomer men or more graceful women
than the light-skinned people of Rapa-nui.
* * * * *
Yet are they but the survivors of a race doomed--doomed from the day
that Roggewein in his clumsy, high-pooped frigate first saw their land,
and marvelled at the imperishable relics of a dead greatness. With
smiling faces they welcomed him--a stranger from an unknown, outside
world, with cutlass at waist and pistol in hand--as a god; he left them
a legacy of civilisation--a hideous and cruel disease that swept
through the amiable and unsuspicious race as an epidemic, and slew its
thousands, and scaled with the hand of Death and Silence the eager life
that had then filled the square houses of lava in many a town from the
wave-beaten cliffs of Terano Kau to Ounipu in the west.
* * * * *
Ask of the people now, "Whence came ye? and whose were the hands that
fashioned these mighty images and carved upon these stones?" and in
their simple manner they will answer, "From Rapa, under the setting
sun, came our fathers; and we were then a great people, even as the
ONEONE [sand] of the beach.... Our Great King was it, he whose name is
forgotten by us, that caused these temples and cemeteries and terraces to
be built; and it was in his time that the forgotten fathers of our fathers
carved from out of the stone of the quarries of Terano Kau the great
Silent Faces that gaze for ever upward to the sky.... AI-A-AH! ...
But it was long ago.... Ah! a great people were we then in those
days, and the wild people to the West called us TE TAGATA TE PITO HENUA
(the people who live at the end of the world) .... and we know no
more."
And here the knowledge and traditions of a broken people begin and end.
* * * * *
I
A soft, cool morning in November, 187-. Between Ducie and Pitcairn
Islands two American whale-ships cruise lazily along to the gentle
breath of the south-east trades, when the look-out from both vessels
see a third sail bearing down upon them. In a few hours she is close
enough to be recognised as one of the luckiest sperm whalers of the
fleet--the brig POCAHONTAS, of Martha's Vineyard.
Within a quarter of mile of the two ships--the NASSAU and the
DAGGET--the newcomer backs her foreyard and hauls up her mainsail. A
cheer rises from the ships. She wants to "gam," I.E. to gossip. With
eager hands four boats are lowered from the two ships, and the captains
and second mates of each are soon racing for the POCAHONTAS.
* * * * *
The skipper of the brig, after shaking hands with his visitors and
making the usual inquiries as to their luck, number of days out from
New Bedford, etc., led the way to his cabin, and, calling his
Portuguese steward, had liquor and a box of cigars brought out. The
captain of the POCAHONTAS was a little, withered-up old man with sharp,
deep-set eyes of brightest blue, and had the reputation of possessing
the most fiery and excitable temper of any of the captains of the sixty
or seventy American whale-ships that in those days cruised the Pacific
from the West Coast of South America to Gaum in the Ladrones.
After drinking some of his potent New England rum with his visitors,
and having answered all their queries, the master of the POCAHONTAS
inquired if they had seen anything of a Chilian man-of-war further to
the eastward. No, they had not.
* * * * *
"Then just settle down, gentlemen, for awhile, and I'll tell you one of
the curiousest things that I ever saw or heard of. I've logged
partiklars of the whole business, and when I get to Oahu (Honolulu) I
mean to nar-rate just all I do know to Father Damon of the Honolulu
FRIEND. Thar's nothing like a newspaper fur showin' a man up when he's
been up to any onnatural villainy, and thinks no one will ever know
anything about it. So just take hold and listen."
The two captains nodded, and he told them this.
* * * * *
Ten days previously, when close in to barren and isolated Sala-y-Gomez,
the POCAHONTAS had spoken the Chilian corvette O'HIGGINS, bound from
Easter Island to Valparaiso. The captain of the corvette entertained
the American master courteously, and explained his ship's presence so
far to the eastward, by stating that the Government had instructed him
to call at Easter Island, and pick up an Englishman in the Chilian
service, who had been sent there to examine and report on the colossal
statues and mysterious terraces of that lonely island. The Englishman,
as Commander Gallegos said, was a valued servant of the Republic, and
had for some years served in its Navy as a surgeon on board EL
ALMIRANTE COCHRANE, the flag-ship. He had left Valparaiso in the
whale-ship COMBOY with the intention of remaining three months on the
island. At the end of that time a war vessel was to call and convey him
back to Chili. But in less than two months the Republic was in the
throes of a deadly struggle with Peru--here the commander of the
O'HIGGINS bowed to the American captain, and, pointing to a huge scar
that traversed his bronzed face from temple to chin, said, "in which I
had the honour to receive this, and promotion"--and nearly two years
had elapsed ere the Government had time to think again of the English
scientist and his mission. Peace restored, the O'HIGGINS was ordered to
proceed to the island and bring him back; and as the character of the
natives was not well known, and it was feared he might have been
killed, Commander Gallegos was instructed to execute summary justice
upon the people of the island, if such was the case.
But, the Chilian officer said, on reaching the island he had found the
natives to be very peaceable and inoffensive, and, although much
alarmed at the appearance of his armed landing party from the corvette,
they had given him a letter from the Englishman, and had satisfied him
that Dr Francis ---- had remained with them for some twelve months
only, and had then left the island in a passing whale-ship, and
Commander Gallegos, making them suitable presents, bade them good-bye,
and steamed away to Valparaiso.
* * * * *
This was all the polite little commander had to say, and, after a
farewell glass of wine, his visitor rose to go, when the captain of the
corvette casually inquired if the POCAHONTAS was likely to call at the
island.
"I ask you," he said in his perfect English, "because one of my ship's
company deserted there. You, senor, may possibly meet with him there.
Yet he is of no value, and he is no sailor, and but a lad. He was very
ill most of the time, and this was his first voyage. I took him ashore
with me in my boat, as he besought me eagerly to do so, and the little
devil ran away and hid, or was hidden by the natives."
"Why didn't you get him back?" asked the captain of the POCAHONTAS.
"That was easy enough, but"--and the commander raised his eyebrows and
shrugged his shoulders--"of what use? He was no use to the corvette.
Better for him to stay there, and perhaps recover, than to die on board
the O'HIGGINS and be thrown to the blue sharks. Possibly, senor, you
may find him well, and it may suit you to take him to your good ship,
and teach him the business of catching the whale. My trade is to show
my crew how to fight, and such as he are of no value for that."
Then the two captains bade each other farewell, and in another hour the
redoubtable O'HIGGINS, with a black trail of smoke streaming astern,
was ten miles away on her course to Valparaiso.
A week after the POCAHONTAS lay becalmed close in to the lee side of
Rapa-nui, and within sight of the houses of the principal village. The
captain, always ready to get a "green" hand, was thinking of the
chances of his securing the Chilian deserter, and decided to lower a
boat and try. Taking four men with him, he pulled ashore, and landed at
the village of Hagaroa.
* * * * *