On Easter Day, 1722, Dutch sailors were exploring the vast reaches of the south Pacific far to the west of Chile and below the Tropic of Capricorn when they came across a barren island.
From a distance, it appeared to be nothing more than sand dunes rising from the waves but as the sailors approached they realized it was a
substantial island totally devoid of trees.
What was even more amazing was that the island was covered in statues - massive heads rising from platforms all over the island. Over a thousand moai - some as large as a Dutch house - stared out over the surrounding seas with sightless eyes.
The population was maybe a thousand islanders living in caves and rock houses. The Dutch were amazed.
"We could not comprehend how it was possible that these people who are devoid of heavy thick timber or strong rope nevertheless had been able to erect such images, which were fully thirty feet high." (from the Journal of Jacob Roggeveen)
Captain Cook confirmed this assessment finding "no wood for fuel, nor any fresh water worth taking on board."
He further described the canoes of the islanders as made from scraps of wood and jetsam stitched together with shoe leather. For a culture that travelled the oceans, these were the worst canoes in the Pacific.
The islanders were effectively trapped on their single island.
The mystery of Easter Island - or Rapa Nui as the Polynesians called the place - intrigued Europeans for centuries.
Where did these statues come from?
Why? And where were the carvers?
The mystery spawned numerous
explanations, including the notion put forward in the 1970s that the statues were tributes to aliens that had visited and left.
The real story is a little more interesting and a lot more tragic. Pollen studies from soil deposits in the crater lakes on the island reveal that the island was once lush with vegetation and well watered. Thick groves of Chilean wine palms, a tree that can grow as large as an oak, covered the island.
Then, in the fifth century, islanders arrived in their big catamarans from the Marquesas or Gambiers. They brought with them their usual stock of crops and animals: chickens, dogs, edible rats, sugar cane, bananas, sweet potatoes and mulberry for making bark cloth.
They prospered. By the 11th century, the population had grown to approximately 10,000 individuals which was a fairly large number for island only 64 square miles.
But even with a climate that did not support much agriculture, the islanders had an abundance of sea food and life was fairly good.
They developed a fairly complex society that appears to have been organized into clans with priests, nobles, and commoners. There may have even been a king of the island.
In any case, each clan began to honour their ancestors with stone statues carved from the soft volcanic tuff found in the island's craters.
Wood to transport the statues was not a problem. Scaffolding, rope, rollers - all could be made from the abundant forests of the island.
Each generation of statues got
bigger, more elaborate, more impressive requiring more wood, more rope, and more manpower to move them from the craters to their altars.
Soon trees were being cut faster than they could grow. The island's forests were disappearing. A process that was exacerbated by the rats that the islanders brought with them as the rats ate the seeds and seedlings before they could sprout.
By the early 1400s, the layers of soil that have been found in the crater lakes changed.
Tree pollens were no longer being deposited in the sediment. The forests were gone - felled by humans and rats.
Life on the island slowly spiralled downward. Canoes eventually could not be repaired and the surrounding seas became foreign territory.
Food grew scarce and the population dwindled. Easter Island society
collapsed.
From a thriving society that had lasted centuries it became a shadow of its former self.
And yet, on an island where from the height of Terevaka an islander could survey their whole world, the islanders cut the last tree. Knowing full well that it was the last tree, it was taken down in the name of progress.
The people of the island had been seduced by a pathological drive towards progress - progress at any cost - even to the last tree.
When I read letters to the editors commenting that environmentalists are radicals or that we can't stop progress or that we will always use fossil fuels and must have pipelines, I think of the people of Rapa Nui and wonder if they thought that their progress was
unstoppable, too.
And whether we are destined to
repeat their tragic history.
