Wow, I think as we pedal down the deserted road. If you are really worried about World War III – and want to avoid nuclear fallout – then this is the place to be.
You have never seen a landscape so charming or so lonely. It is only seven in the afternoon and there is still a lot of light in the day, but not a single car passes us. Mile after mile we see no human habitation, only cows grazing in the highland pastures. The wind is gentle, the grass is lush, and the sky is gray.
This is Chile’s Easter Island, but it could be the west coast of Ireland, except for these strange green conical volcanoes, hundreds of meters high. To our right is the south coast, with its turquoise Pacific waves crashing against the black volcanic rock of the coast.
If the Polynesian islands were a solar system, this would be Pluto. If they were the dots on the old Central Line subway map, then this would be Ongar. My wife Carrie and I have arrived at the last bus stop in the world, at the end of the great beyond, a little pain in the ass of nothingness.
We are about 2,500 miles from mainland Chile and about 7,000 miles from New Zealand. It’s the loneliest place on the planet, except, of course, we’re not alone.
Out of the corner of my eye, I detect a human form; and then another, and another. Here are finally the quirky people I’ve been waiting my whole life to meet face to face.
We dismounted, opened a rickety wooden door and walked among cows and lupins towards the shore, until we were only a few meters away. You’re not supposed to get too close to the gods of Easter Island, not these days. There are signs on the cut grass.
But we felt drawn as if by instinct and, without precisely disobeying the signs, we walked towards the coast, leaving the enormous figures on our right, until we found ourselves in a dark place, between the statues and the sea.
Boris Johnson visits Easter Island (above) with his wife, Carrie. “You’ve never seen a landscape so lovely or so lonely,” he says. “If you are really worried about World War III and want to avoid nuclear fallout, then this is the place to be.”
Statue selfie: Boris and his wife Carrie
There is a long stone ledge carved into the rock, about 6 feet high and 6 feet wide, so close to the shore that you can feel the spray; and now the gigantic divinities are invisible above us as we walk behind the altar, for about 50 feet, until we can go no further, so we turn and walk out among them – purely by mistake, I want you to know.
We have gone out to the sacred precinct and I cannot contain my curiosity. I reach out to touch one of the fallen statues, or moai, its colossal forehead buried in the grass, its earlobe as high as us; and when I look down I see that we are actually standing on one of them. Beneath our feet, almost completely buried, is the shape of a human face.
There is an eye socket that dwarfs Carrie’s foot; and another; and his nose, and – well – as you can imagine, we jumped off this dazzling god like a pair of scalded cats.
So I apologize to the people of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, for accidentally invading this sacred site; and yet I can’t help but feel that if it were a sin, it is forgivable.
It cannot be said that religion is practiced today, or even understood. Cows roam freely between these altars. It was not the Europeans who overthrew these divinities. It was not us who humiliated the gigantic humanoids.
They were the inhabitants of Easter Island themselves. It was they who exalted the moai and who brought them down, and all my life I have wondered why.
My obsession skyrocketed when I was about ten when I read Thor Heyerdahl’s Aku Aku, in which the great Norwegian explorer argued (unconvincingly, they say) that Easter Island had been colonized from Peru. My research continued at Oxford, where during my otherwise completely dissipated first year of study, the only lecture I attended was on Easter Island, although it was completely irrelevant to my actual curriculum.
There, at the Pitt Rivers Museum, I learned what has been the dominant theory for decades. It was an ecocide, the professor said, an environmental catastrophe. It’s an idea that has been echoed in many books, including The Breakdown of Jared Diamond.
Remote: Rano Kau volcano on the southwestern tip of Easter Island
Boris reveals he has long been obsessed with why the people of Easter Island tore down their statues
The gist of the matter is that for hundreds of years the islanders were so obsessed with their statue-building cult that they became increasingly ambitious and competitive. That’s why they needed more and more wooden scaffolding and more rollers to put the 14-ton anthropomorphs in place.
So they cut down trees, and without them the earth was washed away – and lo! Humanity was punished for overdevelopment. Crops failed, the population dwindled to almost nothing, and giant statues were toppled by time and tsunamis.
For generations, that has been the moral of Easter Island: that human activity can trigger a sudden ecological disaster that endangers our own civilization.
Yes, the fate of the Easter Islanders has been presented as a lesson for the entire human race, a warning about the dangers of anthropogenic climate change. The message of Easter Island, according to this reading, is that by damaging the environment, we can endanger the entire future of humanity.
Well, that may very well be true, as a general proposition. But as an explanation for what happened to the people of Easter Island, I now think it’s probably nonsense.
For the better part of two days, we’ll bike across a large portion of the beautiful island: a triangle in which the hypotenuse is just 14 miles long. We swam at Anakena, with its rose-gold sand and clear, blue, but not exactly tropical, water.
We looked from a respectful distance at many of the other reconstructed man-mountain monoliths. And after much conversation with locals, especially Ricky, the Explora hotel’s attentive guide, I can see why so many academics now reject the ecocide theory.
Explora is a beautiful wooden structure overlooking the south coast, where breakfasts are generous and archeology is taken seriously. After spending more than ten years showing people around and listening to theories, Ricky has formed an opinion.
The Explora hotel “is a beautiful wooden structure overlooking the south coast, where breakfasts are generous and archeology is taken seriously.”
Easter Island is one of the most remote islands in the world. Its nearest inhabited neighbor is Pitcairn Island, more than 1,200 miles away.
So, this is what I think really happened. It seems that the Polynesians first came to this island about 800 years ago. You can imagine they were aware of how far they had come. So they dug these statues out of the volcanic tuff, to honor the genius of their seafaring ancestors, and rocked them into place; not on rollers, but swinging them upright like a wardrobe swings on the floor, pulling ropes and singing shanties.
And for centuries, because they were so far away from the rest of humanity, they happily enjoyed their worship.
They dressed the statues with feathers; They were given white coral eyes; They chanted its praises and each year added more until there were about a thousand spread across the island.
Things seemed to be going well. Easter Island is temperate and fertile, and they had a large number of chickens, which they kept in elaborate stone coops. The population increased and prospered, until many thousands lived on the island, and it does not appear, judging from the human remains, that they were especially violent towards each other.
So what went wrong? At some point in the 17th century, the rate of statue production suffers a sharp decline. It was a period – as Ricky remembers – that coincided with the mini ice age.
Could it have been that after centuries of practicing the same religion (thanking and propitiating their ancestors) they began to worry that it simply wasn’t working? They were carving larger and larger moai, some of them heavier than a Boeing 737; and yet the weather was getting colder.
Then, in 1722, something truly devastating happened. A Dutchman named Jacob Roggeveen made landfall and was the first European to discover the place. As they looked at that enormous European ship, they realized a terrible truth: that their seafaring ancestors (the gods in these statues) were not so special after all.
A catastrophic period of doubt and recriminations followed.
As with medieval Christianity, as with Islam, they decided that somehow their sufferings were caused by their dependence on carved images. In a fit of puritanical iconoclasm, they – or some of them – decided to tear down these masterpieces.
The happy island was mired in a struggle between those who still clung to the old faith and those who believed that the old idols had manifestly failed and were disrupting the relationship between man and god, and that it was time for a new and purer one. . religion.
That’s my assumption and I bet I’m right. It was not ecocide. It was religious strife, civil war, and a collapse of trust and leadership. Yes, folks, the only lecture I attended in an entire year of taxpayer-funded drunkenness and debauchery in college turned out to be completely wrong.
It wasn’t poverty; It wasn’t an illness; It was not a bad harvest; It wasn’t famine. It was certainly not some environmental problem related to soil erosion that caused the collapse of the Easter Island culture.
It was politics that destroyed this amazing civilization, as it almost always happens. And that is the real lesson for the human race.