Roggeveen may have been the first, but he was by no means the last person to wonder how these statues had been erected. Indeed, the mystery of the Easter Island moai—what they meant, why they were carved, why their production abruptly ceased (there are half-finished moai in the quarry that are still attached to the rock), but especially how they were maneuvered into place—has inspired all kinds of speculation. People have tried to show how the statues might have been moved using only locally available materials: rocking them from side to side and walking them forward; sliding them on banana palm rollers; dragging them along on sledges suspended under wooden frames. The main problem, as Roggeveen noted in 1722, is the absence of everything that might have been needed to move a ten- or twenty- or thirty-ton block of stone: wheels, metal, draft animals, cordage, but most obviously timber.
Although Roggeveen found the island essentially barren of trees, modern studies of pollen found in sediment cores and archaeological finds of fossil palm nuts, root molds, and fragments of charcoal show that Easter Island was once home to a variety of tree species. Some twenty-two now vanished species have been identified, including the oceanic rosewood, the Malay apple, and something resembling the Chilean wine palm, which on the South American mainland grows to a height of sixty-five feet. Some of these trees would have produced edible fruit, others would have been good for making fires, at least two are known to have been suitable for making canoes, and still others produce bark that is used for making rope in other parts of Polynesia. Taken together, they would have constituted an entire arboreal foundation for human existence, not to mention a habitat for many now extinct species of birds.
Exactly what happened to all these trees is unknown, and there is a vigorous debate about the cause of what has been described as “the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world.” One argument points to the island’s ecological fragility and its vulnerability to changes brought about by humans. Sediment cores on Easter Island reveal dramatic increases in erosion and charcoal particles around A.D. 1200. This is often taken as a proxy for human activity in the Pacific, where slash-and-burn agriculture was widely practiced, and it has been used to support the argument that Easter Island’s ecological collapse began with the arrival of the first Polynesian settlers.
According to this view, the original colonizers began felling trees and clearing land for gardens and plantations as soon as they arrived. On a different island—one that was wetter, warmer, younger, larger, or closer to other landmasses—such activities might have altered the island’s ecology without destroying it. But Easter Island is a uniquely precarious environment. The slow-growing trees were not quickly replaced, while the loss of the canopy exposed already poor soils to “heating, drying, wind, and rain.” This, in turn, led to erosion, the loss of topsoil, and a general decrease in the island’s fertility. Each step in the degradation of the environment led to the next, and once the damage reached a certain level, there was no going back. Others—partly in response to the disturbing image of some desperate and improvident Easter Islander chopping down the last palm tree—have argued that the island’s deforestation was caused not by the islanders themselves but by their commensals, in particular the Polynesian rat. It was the rat, they argue, with its taste for nuts, seeds, and bark, its lack of predators, its climbing ability, and its fast rate of reproduction, that spelled doom for the virgin forests on Rapa Nui.
But however it came about, the loss of trees must have reached catastrophically into every aspect of the islanders’ lives: no shade, no nuts, no bark for cloth or cordage, no wood for houses or fuel. One of the most disturbing implications is that without wood, the inhabitants of Easter Island would have had no way to make canoes, especially the large, oceangoing kind they would have needed if they ever wanted to leave. For an island off the beaten track, with no near neighbors, this was a potentially ruinous reality. If one consequence of deforestation was that it brought to an end the age of monumental sculpture, an even more poignant implication is that it also spelled isolation from the rest of the world.
FOLLOWING THEIR BRIEF stop at Easter Island, Roggeveen and his men set sail again to the northwest, and May found them wandering among the northern Tuamotus. The hazards of this archipelago were forcefully brought home to them when one of the ships, the Afrikaansche Galei, ran aground on the atoll of Takapoto—the very island that, in one of history’s little jokes, Schouten and Le Maire had named “Bottomless.” Not so bottomless after all, as it turned out. Sailing on, Roggeveen came to the uplifted coral island of Makatea, where he found people who seemed “in all respects similar to those of Paaslant” (a version of the Dutch name for Easter Island), and then to Samoa, at the western edge of the Polynesian Triangle, where he again observed how “like the Paaschlanders in sturdiness and robustness of body, also in painting themselves,” the islanders were.
Thus, by 1722, there was finally enough history between Europe and the peoples of the remote Pacific for someone to begin thinking about the big picture. Europeans were still fixated on Terra Australis Incognita, but another poser had at last occurred to them. “To make an end and conclusion of all the islands which we have discovered and found to be peopled,” wrote Roggeveen, “there remains merely the presenting of the following speculative question, which seems to me must be placed among those questions which exceed the understanding, and therefore are to be heard, but answered with silence.” This question, which is almost completely obscured by Roggeveen’s tortured syntax—a sign perhaps of how difficult it was for him even to think—was, in essence: Who are all these people and how did they end up here?
Roggeveen appears to have been the first European to note the similarity of one group of Polynesians to another, but what interested him most was the question of how they had gotten to the islands. The problem, as Roggeveen saw it, was one of isolation and distance, something he now understood from hard personal experience—having rounded the Horn in mid-January, he did not reach the far side of the Pacific until the following September. On the grounds that the mysteries of navigation had only recently been unraveled, Roggeveen argued that no one could possibly have sailed such distances in the days before the Spanish and Portuguese. To suggest otherwise, he argued, “would resemble mockery rather than serious thought.”
This left only two possibilities. First, that the islanders of the remote Pacific had been brought there by the Spanish and left as colonists, though it was hard to imagine why the Spanish would go to the trouble of setting up “colonies of Indians in these distant regions” when there was nothing obvious to be gained by it. Then, too, the Spanish had always claimed that the islanders were already there when they arrived. That left just one possible solution, in Roggeveen’s view: that “the Indians who inhabit these newly discovered islands,” the people we now know as Polynesians, had not in fact come from anywhere but had been created in situ by God.
It is probably safe to say that the suggestion that Polynesians were autochthonous—that is, that they had first sprung into being on the islands on which they lived—was almost as absurd in 1722 as it seems to us today. But it does suggest how perplexing Europeans found the issue of Polynesian origins. In truth, it was not yet entirely clear how very puzzling a problem this was, since large swaths of Polynesia had yet to be discovered. Although European explorers had been crisscrossing the ocean for more than two centuries, long-standing political rivalries meant that knowledge of the region was still largely piecemeal—the Spanish knew some things, the Dutch knew others, no one was interested in sharing information, and everyone remained dazzled by visions of Terra Australis Incognita. All this, however, was about to change.