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The Mysteries of Easter Island
by Jean-Michel Schwartz
Foreword by Sam Sloan
Easter Island is famous for its 887 monumental statues. Nobody really
knows who made those statutes, or how or why. New Theories are being
advanced, new studies made and new books published about this all the
time.
Anybody who claims to know the answers to these questions probably
really does not know, or at least not for sure.
Easter Island is the world's most isolated inhabited island. Its
closest inhabited neighbor is Pitcairn Island, 2,075 km (1,289 mi) to
the west, with fewer than 100 inhabitants. Easter Island's latitude is
close to that of Caldera, Chile, and it lies 3,510 km (2,180 mi) west
of continental Chile at its nearest point (between Lota and Lebu).
Isla Salas y Gómez, 415 km (258 mi) to the east, is closer but is
uninhabited.
It has been suggested that the pirate Edward Davis or Davies, who
conducted raids in 1680-1688, may have been the first European to
visit Easter Island. The first–recorded European contact with the
island was on April 5 (Easter Sunday), 1722, when Dutch navigator
Jacob Roggeveen visited the island for a week and estimated a
population of 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants.
The most popular theory about the colonization of Easter Island is the
Kon-Tiki Theory advanced by Thor Heyerdahl in his book published in
1947. So much has been said and written about this theory and it has
been so widely publicized that a majority of the general population
believes that it has been proven. However, this theory is bunk. No
qualified researcher takes it seriously.
Thor Heyerdahl's theory is that Easter Island was populated by Native
Americans who sailed from what is now Chile. He claims that the winds
blow to the West and thus the winds could have carried a sail boat
like the Kon-Tiki there.
One problem with this theory is that the Ocean Currents flow in the
opposite direction. A man in a canoe paddling around Tahiti, if he got
lost or swept away by the currents, would go East and might wind up at
Easter Island or in Chile. He could eat fish from the sea along the
way.
This brings up the related question of how did Chile get populated. It
is almost universally agreed that most Native Americans got to America
by crossing what is now the Bering Strait around 14,000 years ago and
over the next thousand years making their way down to the bottom of
South America.
The current wisdom is all Native Americans alive today are descended
from a relative handful of families who crossed the Bering Strait. A
new study of DNA patterns throughout the world suggests that North
America was originally populated by no more than 70 people. Most
experts agree that, around 14,000 years ago, a group of humans crossed
the land bridge that connected what is now Siberia in Russia with
Alaska. This does not eliminate the possibility that some inhabitants
might have reached here in other ways, but did not survive until
today.
Although that is how most Native Americans got here, there remains the
possibility that a few of them got here in other ways. If Easter
Island was reached by small boat from Polynesia, as almost all
researchers now believe, then by the same route they could have and
probably would have researched Chile too.
This debate goes on and on and will probably never be completely
solved in our lifetimes.
Easter island is about 24.6 km (15.3 mi) long by 12.3 km (7.6 mi) at
its widest point; its overall shape is triangular. It has an area of
163.6 square kilometres (63.2 sq mi), and a maximum altitude of 507
meters (1,663 ft). There are three Rano (freshwater crater lakes), at
Rano Kau, Rano Raraku and Rano Aroi, near the summit of Terevaka, but
no permanent streams or rivers.
Estimated dates of initial settlement of Easter Island range from 300
to 1200 A.D., approximately coinciding with the arrival of the first
settlers in Hawaii.
I personally believe that, while Easter Island may have been colonized
in that time range, it was far less isolated than is otherwise
believed. I believe that there was regular commerce and interchange of
peoples with both Tahiti and Chile even in relatively recent but pre-
Columbian times. I believe that people have been regularly traveling
back and forth two thousand miles by canoe, even though it seems
impossible.
I base this on the fact that when the Captain James Cook arrived in
Easter Island in 1774, one of his crew members, a Polynesian from Bora
Bora, was able to communicate with the Rapa Nui. The language most
similar to Rapa Nui is Mangarevan with an 80% similarity in
vocabulary. A 1999 voyage with reconstructed Polynesian boats was able
to reach Easter Island from Mangareva in 19 days.
Languages diverge more rapidly than that. Take English for example. If
we could being back to life a man who lived in England one thousand
years ago, we would not be able to understand even one word of what he
says. It is not even necessary to go back that far. If we travel to
Leeds, England or even to Birmingham, we understand nothing of what
they are saying.
The fact that the Easter Islanders could be understand by a man from
an island more than two thousand miles away shows that there was
relatively recent exchanges between those islanders.
With all the books having been written about Easter Island, why have I
chosen to reprint “The Mysteries of Easter Island” by Jean-Michel
Schwartz?
The answer is I like the book and it is hard to find. It is the only
book I have found that adequately explains how the giant statues were
created and how they were transported. Basically, the statues were cut
from the lips of the three volcanoes on the island. This still does
not answer the question of how they were brought down to the water's
edge.
I first read this book a dozen years ago. When I tried to find it
again recently, I could not. Eventually, I bought all the books about
Easter Island until finally I found it. The main problem was that
there are so many books about Easter Island and some of them bear
exactly the same name, “Mysteries of Easter Island”.
This book was first published by Robert Laffont in France in 1973 as
Nouvelles recherches sur l'île de Pâques. Transport des statues -
déchiffrement de l'écriture rongo-rongo.
It was translated into English and first published in the USA in 1975.
Jean-Michael Schwartz also wrote another book in 1979. This one is
entitled “Secrets of Easter Island”. However, “The Mysteries of Easter
Island” and “Secrets of Easter Island” are exactly the same book. Not
a singe word inside the books is changed. They are just copies of each
other. The only difference is the title and the picture on the front
cover.
Sam Sloan
San Rafael California
July 24, 2011
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