EASTER ISLALND

JANUARY 21, 2014

The ship could only get close to the island and could not anchor in the 4,000 feet of water. So the ship’s tenders were used to take us ashore. The island is made up of three inactive volcanos that came together to form the island.  The island was bigger than I thought it would be. It is approximately 15 miles long by 8 miles wide and it has been described as a triangle.  There are three freshwater crater lakes.

 

The first humans to reach the island came from another island in Polynesia, sometime between 600 and 900 AD. It was a distance of over 2,000 miles that a group of Polynesians voyaged, bringing with them everything necessary to start a new society on this uninhabited island: animals, plants, a genetically viable human population, with the knowledge and cultural beliefs to lay the foundations for a thriving community on this Polynesian outpost.

 

Ancestor worship was common throughout Polynesia.  On Easter Island when a chief or important member of a tribe died, a statue was commissioned from the quarry and transported across the island back to his or her village, where it was erected in such a way as to overlook the village and their descendants. The carving of the statues, called “moai”, lasted from approximately 1000-1600 AD. They were all craved in the quarry and then transported.  They weighed tons and it has not been determined for sure what method they used to transport them the six to ten miles. The resources on the island became scarce and the villages started fighting with one another. In this civil war they would turn over each other’s moai. That’s why there are so many destroyed today. Although there are 887 total on the island which includes all, even unfinished ones.

 

There are 5,000 people living on the island and 5,000 horses.  The horses are wild and run free.  The people cannot contain them and feed them so they let them go and find their own food. They seem happy and well fed. In 1888 the island was annexed as a special territory of Chile although it is 2,180 miles away.