EASTER ISLAND? 
By ALFRED M&TRAUxX 
Assistant Director, Institute of Social Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution 
[With 4 plates] 
A treeless volcanic rock, scarcely 13 miles long and 7 miles wide, 
slowly being eaten away by the waves and lost in the great emptiness 
of the Pacific Ocean—2,000 miles off the coast of Chile and 1,500 miles 
from the nearest Polynesian archipelago—this is Easter Island, the 
most isolated spot ever inhabited by man. Today it supports a mere 
handful of natives, mostly half-castes, and many of them lepers. 
These 450 people, now under Chilean rule, are the only descendants 
of the men who created there one of the most original civilizations 
that have left a trace behind. Yet they have all but forgotten their 
past. 
For two centuries, the name of the island has been almost synony- 
mous with mystery. In the world of ethnologists it occupies a place 
much like that of isles of fancy in children’s imaginations. 
The sense of mystery which still surrounds this lonely rock was 
first aroused on Easter Sunday, 1722, when the Dutch Admiral Rog- 
geveen, in command of three frigates cruising about the Pacific in 
search of the fabulous Davis Land, saw the dome-shaped peaks of its 
volcanoes jutting above the horizon. From the decks of their ships his 
sailors, as they drew nearer, could discern all along the cliffs of this 
unknown shore an army of gigantic statues, which completely over- 
shadowed a small band of naked and noisy savages on the beach 
below. The visit of the Dutch discoverers did not last long, but they 
carried back to Europe the strange tale of a solitary, desolate island 
guarded by colossal stone images, far too heavy and impressive to 
have been carved and erected by the few primitive people they found 
living there. 
Later in the eighteenth century, and afterward, Easter Island was 
visited in succession by several other great navigators: Cook, La 
Pérouse, Kotzebue, Beechey. They, too, saw with amazement the 
stone monsters, measured them, and even sketched them. To their 
1 Reprinted by permission from The Yale Review, Summer 1939, with revisions and addi- 
tions by the author. The illustrations did not appear in The Yale Review. 
435 
