EASTERN PACIFIC EXPEDITION 429 



I am sending this by a Chile man-of-war we found 

 here ; she leaves to-morrow for Valparaiso, twenty days' 

 passage. As the Chilians only send the vessel once a 

 year, it was quite a hit to enable me to give signs of 

 life. 



During the five days that the Albatross lay off Easter 

 Island, Agassiz was as eager in the study of the myste- 

 rious images and the remnant of the native population 

 as in collecting the fauna and flora of this isolated 

 oceanic island. 



The origin of these colossal statues is an unsolved 

 mystery, though it seemed probable to Agassiz that the 

 immediate ancestors of the present inhabitants were the 

 sculptors of the images. Some of the natives pretend 

 that the carvers were their great-great-grandfathers. If 

 so, the unambitious and indolent natives must be a great 

 contrast to their sturdy and industrious ancestors, who 

 somehow accomplished the Herculean, if somewhat mis- 

 guided, task of encircling the island with a series of 

 massive platforms surmounted by these rude Goliaths. 



He found that the natives had long abandoned the 

 houses of their ancestors, built of stone slabs against 

 the hillside, for steep-roofed thatched huts. These in 

 their turn had of late years been replaced by rude hovels 

 of rough boards, built under the direction of a Danish 

 carpenter, from a shipload of lumber wrecked on the 

 island. A number of families often occupied one of these 

 shanties, where at night men, women, and children would 

 lie down like dogs in a kennel, with about the same 

 ideas of the comforts of life. 



Agassiz concluded that the population of this island 

 in 1860, shortly before a large number of them were 



