446 | ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
wood, wrapped around with strands of hair, which a missionary had 
brought from Easter Island as a gift from the natives to the head of 
their new church, he was puzzled by the rows of small designs he 
noticed on it. These he took to be hieroglyphs, and his view has been 
shared by all the later students of the problem. The so-called “hiero- 
glyphs,” cut in the wood with a shark’s tooth, are realistic or conven- 
tionalized drawings of various subjects, including apparently geo- 
metrical figures. Many of them represent men, animals, plants, and 
other familiar forms reduced to their essential features with no unnec- 
essary detail to blur the image. They run up and down the tablets 
in rows so arranged that when the reader arrives at the bottom of 
one row, he has to turn the tablet upside down to see the designs of 
the next one in a normal position. These images, or characters, are 
among the masterpieces of primitive graphic art that have come down 
to us. They are outlined with an exquisite grace. The symbols are 
uniform in style suggesting an established and highly developed 
aesthetic tradition. 
Unfortunately, the discovery of this remarkable work was not fol- 
lowed up by scientific inquiries at a time when they might have borne 
fruit. When, finally, in 1914 Mrs. Katherine Routledge, the distin- 
guished English anthropologist, tried to obtain a key to its meaning 
from the last native who had been trained in the old chanters’ school, 
it was already too late. He died of leprosy a few days after his first 
interview with her. The modern natives know nothing of the matter. 
They tell merely vague tales of the tablets, saying that they are magical 
objects which have the power to cause death. 
The supposed substance of the rows of designs on some of the tablets 
was dictated in the Easter Island dialect to Jaussen by a native named 
Metoro. But when Metoro’s words were translated it appeared that 
they were only a simple description of the designs, not their actual 
content, as had been hoped. 
Other attempts at interpretation have been undertaken but with 
even less success. The most serious was that of an American naval 
officer, W. J. Thomson. In 1886 he tried to obtain the text of what 
was inscribed on the tablets from an elderly native. This man un- 
doubtedly had some knowledge of the characters, but he had become 
a good Christian and was afraid of jeopardizing his chances in another 
world by touching the tablets or even looking at their pagan symbols. 
In order to resist the temptation, he ran away and hid in a cave, where 
Thomson finally captured him. There he was “stimulated” by flattery 
and a few drinks to what was thought to be a revelation of these secrets 
of the past. At any rate, he began to chant old Polynesian hymns, 
which he said were the texts of the tablets. Thomson and his col- 
leagues noticed, however, that their informant was paying no atten- 
