436 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
minds also, the contrast between the monuments, indicative of a 
flourishing and skillful population, and the desolation they found 
about them was a peculiar enigma. They spoke of cataclysms, of 
volcanic eruptions, that might have changed the course of the island’s 
history, but these were pure guesses based on superficial observation. 
In the first half of the nineteenth century, a different group of visi- 
tors appeared. These were the whalers, most of them enterprising 
New Englanders in pursuit of business and adventure in the South 
Seas. A few echoes of their experiences come to us in indirect ways. 
Thus we know that the captain of one of these ships kidnapped several 
men who afterward escaped and tried to swim back to their island 
although they were 3 days out. It is not surprising that relations 
between the whalers and the natives were far from cordial. Too often 
the ships’ officers resorted to impressing the islanders into their serv- 
ice. Such incidents explain the hostility shown to some European 
navigators between 1820 and 1830 when they attempted to land. But 
these brief visits of Yankee sailors were not without benefit to the 
study of Easter Island. Thanks to their collecting instinct, numerous 
precious specimens of its early art have been well preserved in the Pea- 
body Museum at Cambridge and the Peabody Museum at Salem. In 
Cambridge, besides various wood and stone carvings, there are two 
images brought from the island, made of bark stuffed with bulrushes, 
which represent a branch of its artistic tradition otherwise entirely 
unknown. They are covered with painted designs that reproduce, 
with fine and precise workmanship, the elaborate patterns used in 
tattooing up to a hundred years ago. In this respect the old Easter 
Islanders rivaled the achievements of the Marquesans. 
In 1859 a frightful disaster befell the islanders when Peruvian 
blackbirders attacked the island and kidnapped the king, a large 
number of the nobles and priests, and many hundred commoners, all 
of whom were carried off to the guano islands of Peru to work as 
slaves. Most of the people died within a short time. When at last the 
few survivors were repatriated by a French ship, they spread among 
the remaining islanders the smallpox and tuberculosis contracted in 
Peru. Thus within a few years most of the native population and 
with them the vital links with the past were wantonly destroyed. 
The mystery of Easter Island became still deeper when, in 1864, 
the first Christian missionaries (members of the French Order of the 
Sacred Heart) arrived and tried to obtain from the natives details 
about the origin of the statues, and the methods that had been used to 
transport them—since many of them had obviously been moved from 
the place where the stone was quarried. Their answers to questions 
of this kind were unilluminating and showed that they had only a 
vague tradition of what had happened before their time. Their ig- 
norance, combined with the state of primitive poverty into which they 
