1687 - Pirate Edward Davis was the first Europeans to see Easter Island. Davis's entry in the ship's log was laconic, and the island's coordinates were rather inaccurate. The excuse for this is strong: a warship was chasing the pirate. The visit to the island was canceled: it was necessary to quickly hide from the pursuit.
34 years later, a Dutch expedition of three ships under the command of Jacob Roggeven set off in search of the legendary Unknown Southern Land. It was assumed that the piece of land that Davis discovered could be part of this continent. The voyage was difficult and the crew suffered from scurvy. Here is what a German campaign participant Karl Friedrich Behrens wrote:
“This miserable life cannot be described with a pen. The ships smelled sick and dead. One could get sick from the smell alone. The patients moaned and screamed pitifully … They were so emaciated and wrinkled from scurvy that they were the visible face of death … There were many suffering from mental disorders. No medicine would help here except fresh food … My teeth were almost completely exposed from the gums, and the gums themselves were swollen to a finger thick. On the hands and on the body nodules larger than a hazelnut appeared."
This description shows how hard and tormented the Europeans had to discover the Pacific Ocean. All the more magnificent are the achievements of those "sailors of the sun rise" who traveled thousands of kilometers in the ocean desert many centuries earlier, inhabiting uninhabited islands.
1722, April 6 - Easter, Roggeven's squadron stumbled upon a lonely mountainous island. A crowd of natives ran out onto the deserted shore, examining the outlandish ships. The "savages" were unarmed, but civilized Christian Europeans, in commemoration of their discovery and to ostracize the local population, fired a volley at them. And in memory of the resurrection of Christ, they gave the name to Easter Island.
An armed detachment of sailors, after disembarking ashore, plundered the native settlement, although these poor people had almost nothing to take. Subsequently, the Dutch expedition suffered a complete fiasco, discovering only a few sparsely populated small islands and not finding any continent, and its leader earned himself notoriety. But Behrens's book "A Journey to the Southern Countries and Around the World in 1721-1722", published in 1737, enjoyed success with readers largely due to the description of the mysterious Easter Island, on which it is not clear who and who knows when erected many stone idols. Some of them had stone caps weighing thousands of kilograms …
The glory of the island originates from these stone idols. It was completely incomprehensible how they appeared on an island lost in the ocean with sparse vegetation and a "wild" population. The weight of the stone colossi reaches 20 tons. Someone hewed them out, dragged them to the shore, put them on specially prepared pedestals and crowned them with weighty headdresses. But what if the island is a fragment of a huge sunken mainland, the statues are the remains of a former great civilization, and the locals are the feral descendants of a once powerful people?
True, the great navigator James Cook, who visited the mysterious Easter Island in 1774, guessed how it was possible to raise multi-ton idols and crown them with stone caps. There are many stones around. It is possible to build an embankment from them, on which it is not very difficult to drag the monolith with the help of levers and ropes, and then, tilting it, gradually put it upside down.
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And yet, this guess did not explain the main thing: what kind of island civilization was this, 4,000 km from the coast of South America, and 2,000 km from the nearest inhabited island? The total area of the island is 160 km², it resembles a triangle with the longest side of 20 km. There is not a single tree on it, and a small population lives in the Stone Age, has only the simplest tools and is not familiar with writing. True, they have preserved plaques, most of them in the form of fish with scratched marks. However, what the tablets meant and what was inscribed on them, none of the natives could explain.
The local population told only fairy tales about themselves and their island. According to them, once the island was large, many people lived on it. However, after the great flood and volcanic explosions, almost the entire island sank into the abyss.
The members of Cook's expedition learned that this piece of land is of volcanic nature. In three corners of the island there are large volcanic cones, and on the entire surface there are dozens of small ones.
1786 - the island was briefly visited by the expedition of J. La Perouse. They sowed seeds, brought poultry and goats ashore. But these plants could not take root, and the islanders quickly ate the living creatures. La Pérouse noted that the stone sculptures are made of volcanic rock, beautiful and light.
As you can see, Europeans who visited Easter Island were often interested in the famous local statues only for selfish purposes, trying to find treasures in them or under them. Perhaps that is why so many Easter monuments were tumbled down and split. The same applies to stone pedestals, platforms - ahu, the remains of which (more than 300) are scattered along the coast. The length of the largest destroyed ahu to date was 160 m, and on its central platform, about 45 m long, there were 15 statues.
Why the first ahu were built (their age is about 700-800 years) remains a mystery to this day. Subsequently, they were often used as burial places and perpetuating the memory of the leaders. In total, about 600 large statues were found on the island, of which a fourth part remained unfinished. The statues were carved directly into the rock, and then they were lowered down the slopes. For some unknown reason, the islanders suddenly stopped work on the construction, transportation and installation of the statues.
The more carefully the travelers and scientists investigated the island, the more mysteries appeared. By itself, the discovery of the island by Europeans can hardly be called a major geographical achievement. However, the study of its origin, settlement by people, the formation and flourishing of local culture, and then its relatively rapid decline - all this opened up a vast field for scientists of various specialties and was in the full sense of the word a discovery that arouses interest and heated debate to this day. For example, systematic archaeological excavations on the island were started in the middle of the 20th century by a Norwegian expedition led by Thor Heyerdahl. Around the same time, more or less detailed geological studies were carried out there.
In our time, it was absolutely precisely established that there was no continent in the central part of the Pacific Ocean. On Easter, a volcanic catastrophe could occur, as a result of which part of the island plunged into the sea. But there is no reason to believe that this part was large and that most of the islanders died as a result of a riot of natural elements (volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, Tsunami ramming waves).
More terrible blows fell on the islanders after their acquaintance with Europeans, and already in the 19th century. For example, the American sealers on the schooner "Nancy" captured about 25 men and women from Easter Island, who later chose to die by throwing themselves into the sea. Then the American whalers from the Pindos vessel captured about 30 young islanders, mocked them, and then, forcing them to swim to the shore, they shot everyone in the water. And half a century later, at the end of 1862, six Peruvian ships captured almost all the men from the island and took them into slavery, sending them to work in the mines. Only 15 of them returned home after misfortunes and illnesses, bringing the smallpox virus here. Half of the local residents died from the epidemic.
As you can see, the transition of the islanders from the Stone Age to the era of capitalism turned out to be disastrous for them. Only at the end of the 19th century, the British rented the island from the Chilean government, brought cattle, horses, and sheep there. But the local population is still in poverty, content with the meager income from tourism.
According to archaeological data, in the distant past, the island experienced happy times. Before the arrival of humans, it was covered with lush forests. Humans settled there about 1,500 years ago. They were courageous and skillful sailors from the islands of Eastern Polynesia. This mysterious Easter Island was larger than the present one, there were many marine life in the coastal waters, and birds nested on the rocks. The island's population grew steadily.
500 years have passed. The islanders settled in their land. They built boats for long voyages and fishing. Around that time, they developed the sweet potato, a sweet potato native to South America and widespread in the Inca empire. Naturally, these tubers could not end up on the island: they drown in water and cannot withstand a long journey. Who could have brought them to the island?
Thor Heyerdahl, a supporter of the hypothesis of the settlement of Oceania from the east, from South America, tried to prove that it was these settlers who brought sweet potatoes with them, and also arranged ahu in the manner of pyramids and carved idols from the rocks. There is a lot of strong evidence against this hypothesis. The culture and languages of the inhabitants of Oceania have a lot in common with each other (Polynesian roots) and practically nothing - with the culture and languages of the inhabitants of South America.
It was the Polynesians, not the Incas, who were excellent sailors and had reliable ships. Moving from the mainland towards the open ocean, you can only stumble upon the island in two or three months, and even then by a lucky chance. On the contrary, the path from the islands of Eastern Oceania to the east will necessarily lead to the shores of South America. Polynesian seafarers, as you can see, were able to go this way, get acquainted with an unknown civilization, acquire sweet potato tubers and return to their homeland.
Were such expeditions regular? Unlikely. They took place, as most researchers believe, not later than the X century. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain why the Polynesians brought only sweet potatoes to their islands, neglecting such a "grain" crop as corn, which the ancient Peruvians began to use from the 8th century and subsequently constantly increased its sowing and improved its condition, growing larger and larger cobs. The starting point for travel to the continent, judging by the available data, was the Marquesas Islands. From here to the coast of Peru about 4,000 miles. With an average speed of 5-7 mph, the Polynesian expedition could cover this distance in about a month.
The most convincing proof of the likelihood of the "discovery of America" by the Oceanians (even earlier than it was done by the Vikings and Columbus) was the French scientist and brave traveler Eric Bishop. Beginning in 1934, he went out into the ocean many times on homemade floating craft, made after the type of ancient ships and rafts. He went from Polynesia to the shores of South America and in the opposite direction, repeatedly suffered shipwrecks, but fanatically believed in his idea: the Polynesians sailed to modern Peru and back.
Only in the second half of the XX century, he was able to prove from his own experience that this kind of travel is possible. At the age of 70, he took another trip on his raft, safely reached Peru, but on the way back he died on the high seas.
“The Polynesians,” wrote Bishop, “have become a kind of amphibian people, and this phenomenon is unique in the entire history of mankind. It is enough to read a few legends and myths of Polynesia, and it immediately becomes clear that their heroes operate in an extraordinary geographic environment. They are fighting not with fabulous terrestrial monsters, but with giant sharks and sea turtles, with bloodthirsty eels and a huge tridacna, which swallows whole ships with the entire crew."
However, Easter Island glorified not the travels of Bishop or the research of scientists, but the popular books and films of Thor Heyerdahl and Erich von Daniken. The latter shocked the most respectable audience with tales about space aliens. One of their earthly bases, according to his version, was Easter Island. Otherwise, they say, it is impossible to explain the local ancient structures. Only powerful aliens were capable of such a titanic act. It is impossible, in his words, "with the help of the most primitive tools to make these colossal figures from volcanic stone, hard as steel."
True, it should be noted: the tools of the Stone Age craftsmen were not so primitive, and relatively soft volcanic tuffs served as the source material for the statues. But cosmic fantasies applied to the history of the mysterious Easter Island actually have a certain reason. Here we are faced with a rather indicative and instructive geographic and ecological model of global civilization.
About this at the Moscow World Geological Congress in 1982, he made an interesting report “History of Easter Island. Global generalizations”scientist Ch. M. Love from America. Of course, this real scientist did not refer to any aliens. All available facts support the idea of settling Easter Island by settlers from Eastern Polynesia around 500 AD. “Rapid and widespread construction of complex ahu using blocks weighing up to several tons,” Love wrote, “did not begin until AD 1050. …
The availability of timber resources allowed the construction of pole houses, fishing canoes, and levers and sleds that led to the flourishing of megalithic religious architecture. The construction of complex ahu, the creation and installation of huge figures symbolizing the ancestors, peaked around 1440 AD. Over the next 200 years, most of the island's woody vegetation was destroyed. Soil preservation and fertility declined, the number of canoes decreased, and the main resources of the sea became unavailable.
The depletion of natural resources has changed the social situation on the island. Wars began, things began to come to cannibalism. The culture fell into decay. The local population declined rapidly. If before it reached 10,000, now it did not exceed two.
Perhaps it was then that the islanders began to overthrow monuments to their ancestors. (According to the Soviet geologist F. P. Krendelev, grounded in his monograph "Easter Island", many idols of the island could have fallen during a strong earthquake. This does not fundamentally change the picture painted by Love. The natural disaster could serve as a signal for the Pasquans to destroy their cultural values, the overthrow of idols who did not justify their hopes for a prosperous life.) True, the construction of new ahu continued, but often due to the destruction of old ones and using relatively small blocks that were able to move several people without the help of levers and lay down (sled).
"The importance of Easter Island's history," Love concluded, "lies in examining the dynamic equilibrium it has achieved, and the changes that have taken place in the remarkably vibrant and mobile Polynesian society as it faces continuous resource dwindling and increasing environmental scarcity."
Probably, giant ahu and majestic stone statues of the island were built in honor of the heroic ancestors who discovered and mastered this piece of land lost in the ocean. But the very glorification of ancestors required enormous efforts (in those days, perhaps, the surplus of the population did not harm, but made it possible to use free labor). The last trees were used for levers, sleds, runners for transporting boulders. The bare, de-vegetated slopes of the mountains were eroded; rains and winds washed away and blew away the remnants of fertile soil. There was nothing to build boats not only for long-distance sea expeditions, but also for fishing. The lack of natural resources undermined the economic foundations of society and caused acute social conflicts …
Isn't it true that all this reminds us of what is happening today on our planet - a tiny island of life in the endless space desert. Its natural resources are limited, and people use them wastefully, leaving a huge amount of waste, destructive to all living things.
Depletion of material resources is not so bad. When people are concerned only with satisfying their ever-growing material needs, they are increasingly moving away from spiritual values. They lose their orientation in time, forget about the precepts of their ancestors and the need to wisely use the benefits of nature, taking care of their renewal.
So, in the second half of the XX century, there was another geographic and ecological discovery of Easter Island - a natural model for the development of a closed civilization with limited natural resources. Will this object lesson be useful to mankind? Do people realize that their salvation lies in the limitation of material needs and that the modern decline of science and culture in general is a threatening sign of an approaching global cataclysm?
R. Balandin