What happens when a person really wants to visit distant islands?
"Bad leader" of the so-called "long-eared". Rapa Nui (Paradise Lost) is a scene from a very realistic 1994 feature film.
To the eyeballs stuffing their holds with hateful sadness,
Swallowed in full by the wind of the sea and the salt of the mists,
Someday I will moor to the warm Easter Island,
I will become a stone statue among the idols.
Stein Christina
Swallowed in full by the wind of the sea and the salt of the mists,
Someday I will moor to the warm Easter Island,
I will become a stone statue among the idols.
Stein Christina
History around us. And it happened that once upon a time, and even a very long time ago, namely in 1687, land was noticed from the ship of the pirate Edward Davis, who was in the Pacific Ocean. Its coordinates were determined inaccurately, but many believe that it was just the mysterious and mysterious Easter Island.
Today we will make a short excursion to one very interesting place. Everyone knows this place, but few Russians have been there. This place is Rapa Nui, the legendary Easter Island. The photos were taken by a man, our compatriot, who visited this island. About it will be in PS In the meantime, let's look at the photos. And immediately before us are the gigantic statues that glorified Easter Island
Then, on April 5, 1722, from the Dutch ship Jacob Roggeven, they also noticed land on the horizon, and since that day was the Christian Easter holiday, the newly discovered land was named in honor of it ... Easter Island. Roggeven landed on it, determined that two or three thousand natives live on it, looked with surprise at the huge stone statues and ... went on.
View of the island from space. In the lower left corner, the Poike Peninsula and the moat running across it are clearly visible.
Then, on March 12, 1774, the famous English navigator James Cook moored to the island, later eaten in Hawaii. He found the island deserted and noticed that the statues of Easter Island were identical to those found in the province of Manta (Ecuador), and also compared them with the monuments in Tiahuanaco.
Flag of Rapa Nui
They also amazed Captain La Perouse, who went to the Pacific Ocean to discover new lands and sailed from one misfortune to another. However, until he finally got lost in its open spaces, he still managed to describe these stone statues, and then, having discovered the La Perouse Strait, he even transmitted information about his discoveries to St. Petersburg and Paris. Our Russian sailors also visited there. But who, in fact, has not been there? But no one showed much interest in the idols there until Thor Heyerdahl, who visited this island in the 1950s of the last century. Moreover, he not only “discovered” Easter Island to the world, but also tried to experimentally prove how the statues were cut out of the mountain massif, how they were dragged around the island and installed on the base.
Fifteen "silent" and a horse! The most famous "alley" of Easter idols
He wrote about all this and much more in the book Aku-Aku, in which he suggested that Easter Island was inhabited by people from Ancient Peru. He motivated this not only by the similarity of the buildings on the island and local statues with the Inca ones, but also by the fact that the totora reed growing on the island near the volcanic lakes of Rano Raraku and Rano Kau is found on the continent only on the high-altitude lake Titicaca.
One of the volcanic lakes. Totora grows here
Deciding to test this hypothesis, in 2015 the Norwegian Torgeir Higraff and other members of the expedition on two Kon-Tiki 2 rafts, similar to the rafts of the ancient Incas, set off from the coast of Peru to Easter Island. And having covered a distance of two thousand nautical miles, they reached Easter Island, that is, they confirmed that such a journey was possible.
Let's go to see the moai...
Moreover, it was possible to confirm it by studying the DNA of the inhabitants of South America, Polynesia and the natives of Easter Island. Genomic variation was analyzed in 807 males and females from 17 island populations from across Polynesia and also from 15 Pacific Coast Native American groups. And it turned out that in Eastern Polynesia, before the settlement of Easter Island around 1200, there was one single contact between Polynesians and Native Americans of the Senu Indian people from modern Colombia.
Most of the idols, up to half of which have gone into the ground, are installed on the slopes of the Rona-Raraku volcano
Well, the legends of the island tell us that once on the island (the natives called it Rapa Nui) there lived two different peoples - the “long-eared”, an elite that had a fairly high culture and writing, and the “short-eared” subordinate to them, who, according to At the direction of the "long-eared" people, stone statues of moai were cut down and installed around the island.
On the slopes of Rano Raraku
In the 20th-XNUMXth centuries, the island was covered with dense forests, which proves the analysis of its soils. So there was enough wood for the construction and transportation of statues at that time. By the way, it is a delusion that they are looking at the ocean. In fact, they all turn their "faces" into the interior of the island. Some are up to XNUMX meters high! Moreover, some moai are even taller because of the red stone caps on their heads.
The higher up the mountain, the more statues
According to legend, moai were only cut down by people with the help of stone axes, and then they “went on their own” to the installation site. Thor Heyerdahl managed to lift one overturned moai with ordinary levers made of logs and a pile of stones. But exactly how it happened, no one knows. It is interesting that in the quarries of the island there are several unfinished idols, as if they were suddenly abandoned to make them.
The size and weight of the "crowns" on the heads of the statues are simply amazing. Or maybe this is how the islanders depicted hairstyles? First they put moai, then they put a “crown” on her head
However, tourists on the island still have something to see. Only at the foot of the Rano Raraku volcano there are about 300 (!) Moai of different heights and stages of readiness. And on the ritual site-ahu called Tongariki, right in front of the ocean, 15 statues of various sizes lined up in a row.
And this is also Rano Raraku, or rather, one of the moai that stands there
There is another interesting tourist site on the island - "a large earthen stove of long-eared". This "furnace" is located on the Poike Peninsula. In fact, this is ... a moat that has been heavily covered over the past centuries. Nevertheless, it is clearly visible even from space. And he appeared like this...
We continue to move along the road around the Rano Raraku volcano ...
Since there was little suitable land for agriculture on the island, primarily because of the abundance of stones scattered over it, the "long-eared" ordered the "short-eared" to clear the entire territory of Rapa Nui from them. And they were only doing that, that they were catching fish and cutting down moai. But there was nothing to do - the "long-eared" ordered, and they had to obey. We started from the Poike peninsula, where all the “long-ears” then moved. And, I must say, there really are no stones in the soil, and right behind the moat, which Thor Heyerdahl also noted.
Quarry, but you can't go there!
But so that no one would get to them there, the "long-eared" ordered to cut down the last trees and turn them into firewood, with which they laid this same moat. There were no trees, there was nothing to make new boats from, and the old ones quickly fell into disrepair. Hunger began, and the patience of the "short-eared" burst. During some holiday, when most of the "long-ears" left their stronghold, the "short-ears" rebelled and began to kill them. They ran to save themselves on the Poike, but the rest lit a ditch to fence off the rebels, and the “short-eared” threw all the “long-eared” who fell into their hands into this “furnace”, and then, when the fire went out, they crossed the ditch to the peninsula and killed all the survivors, including women and children, although it seems that one of them even escaped, he was spared and subsequently allowed to breed.
They cut out the face and ... abandoned it. Why? It's just that no one knows
Well, if we turn to the data of science, then on the basis of glottochronological and radiocarbon analyzes it turned out that the island was inhabited by people in 300-400 years (or about 900 years) by settlers from Eastern Polynesia, possibly from Mangareva Island. As a result of intensive deforestation over several centuries, the forests on the island disappeared completely by about 1600. The consequence of this was wind erosion of the soil, lack of food, famine and cannibalism.
Another quarry...
Interestingly, wherever the Polynesians swam, they always took three animals with them: a dog, a pig and a chicken. So on Rapa Nui, initially only chickens are found. Most likely, they subsequently simply ate both pigs and dogs, but the chickens managed to survive and multiply, and even become a symbol of well-being.
Defeated giant
Together with the first people, rats also came to the island, which the Rapanui people eventually began to consider a delicacy. But these were black rats, brought on large pirogues by the legendary king of Hotu-Matu'a and his tribesmen, and Europeans brought gray rats on their ships.
Another defeated giant
Another truly amazing creation of the islanders was the kohau-rongo-rongo tablets, on which the writing was applied. That is, Easter Island turned out to be the only place in the Pacific where people managed to create their own writing. Thor Heyerdahl tried to decipher it, asked the natives to read these tablets, but nothing came of this venture. Most likely, the Paschalians had long forgotten this script, but they were simply ashamed to admit this to such a good foreigner, so they led him by the nose. Maybe he will figure it out and go away?
Tablet kohau-rongo-rongo. National Museum of Natural History in Santiago. Photo by Dennis Jarvis
There were also those who began to declare that he had read these tablets. For example, this phrase:All the fish in the sea copulated with the birds in the sky, and thus the light of the world was born.". Just wonderful, isn't it?
And for some reason they didn’t bring it down
And, of course, there were those who immediately decided that Easter Island is a “piece” of the giant continent Mu (or Mo?), which died in the waves of the Pacific Ocean after the second satellite, smaller than the Moon, fell to Earth. Everything seemed to point to this: both huge moai statues and rongo-rongo tablets. The idea was immediately picked up by writers - A. Tolstoy mentioned the sunken mainland of the Zemze tribe in the novel "Aelita", A. Kazantsev - in the novel "Faetes", and Guy Petronius Amatuni even wrote a novel about the discovery of a sunken ship of aliens on Earth, whose statues began to be cut down made of stone, the inhabitants of the island of Pito Kao, in which Easter Island is absolutely guessed.
The first edition of the book by P. G. Amatuni "The Secret of Pito-Kao" in the Rostov book publishing house, 1957
It turned out that it can in no way be a “fragment” of the mainland, since it is located on the top of a huge mountain formed from volcanic lava, since this mountain is nothing more than an ancient extinct volcano that last erupted on 3, 4,5, or even 5 million years ago. And according to geological studies, Easter Island has never been part of a sunken mainland.
Looking at them, it's time to sing: "Fifteen men for a dead man's chest, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!"
Well, that's all. Our journey is over. We looked at the most important mysteries of Easter Island, lost somewhere in the ocean at the “end of the Earth”. At one time, I really wanted to go there, but ... it didn’t work out.
Lonely moai. All "friends" from him, though not far, but unattainable
PS But it happened to visit the writer Denis Kashcheev there, who just took all these photos in 2014. Also here - a man had a dream to go there, and he has already visited in our time. I flew from Moscow via Los Angeles and Santiago, with stops here and there. Back - through Santiago and Paris, already without stops. And I met him “on the Internet”: I went to the author.today website, where my works of art are posted, and drew attention to his book “Back to Pioneer Summer”. Novel NF about "popadantsev", but I don't like those. Usually the heroes know everything about them, remember everything, and before they get to the past, they begin to change it. And this book not only did not cause rejection in me, but on the contrary, I read it downright with pleasure. Firstly, it takes place in a pioneer camp (!) in 1985 - it was nice to remember how I myself was once a counselor in the same camp. And secondly, the story itself is really exciting. Well, it was nice, of course, to find out that today our people can easily go to Easter Island like that. Dreams are finally coming true, aren't they?
Tourists and moai…
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