Traces of denser population and of civilization

In the small Louisiade group there is a network of roads far closer than is wanted by the present population. On Pitcairn's Island, now deserted, there are the stone foundations of morais, stone-axes, and in the caves skeletons lying near drawings of the moon, stars, birds, and so on; ancient fortifications crown the hills of Rapa, while in Huahine in the Windward Islands a dolmen, built on to a morai in terraces, is found beside a road of Cyclopean stones. The ruins of Nanmatal in Ponapé consist of square chambers, fenced with pillars of basalt and separated from each other by channels. There are eighty of these stone islets; some of them having undoubtedly once served as sepulchral monuments. Among these ruins the tomb of the kings of Matalanim rises, on a base 6 feet high and 290 feet long by 230 broad, to a height of about 30 feet, with walls 10 feet thick, formed of basalt columns.

Sepulchral monument in Ponapé, Caroline Islands.
(From a photograph in the Godeffroy Album.)
[Click on picture for higher resolution]

The most classical instances of this wealth of relics left by a more numerous and more active generation are preserved in Easter Island. There the gigantic stone images are something wonderful. Their great number is no less astonishing than their size and the comparative high level of their workmanship. Even now they are reckoned at several hundreds; their height is nearly 50 feet, while in one case the breadth across the shoulders is not less than 10 feet. Many of them have been thrown down and half-buried in rubbish; but others stand on broad platforms built of hewn stone. Originally many are said to have had head-coverings of reddish stone; cylinders, according to Cook's description, of 5 feet diameter. Some have hieroglyphics carved on their backs. These images, weighing many tons, must at one time have been lowered down the mountain with hawsers, and prepared, that is, engraved, in pits below.

Naturally these images, whose number, size, and clever workmanship contrast so strangely with the smallness of the island, and the state of extreme simplicity in which the first Europeans found the islanders, have given rise to many speculations as to their origin. Even so sober a judge as Beechey declares it to be simply impossible that the Easter Islanders can have executed these works; both the sculpturing and the erection of them, he thinks, far exceeded any capacity of theirs. What makes it yet more difficult to answer these questions is the ignorance in which we are as to their age, as to the reason why so many have been thrown down, and, lastly, as to their object. Earthquakes of course may have thrown them down; but no observer, old or recent, has been able to divine the purpose they served. The impression of decadence which one receives from the sight of such mighty works among a race now so scanty, feeble, and impoverished, is strengthened when we find that Easter Island shows masonry adapted to various purposes in the shape sometimes of staged platforms, sometimes of huts, above or below ground, and with or without interior ornament in colour.