The crazy competition to make the largest statue on Easter Island (and its fatal outcome)

—On April 5, 1722, on a windy and rainy morning, so the story goes, the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen sighted an island at 27 degrees south latitude. At that time, Roggeveen was 63 years old and an expert navigator , capable of profiting from his discoveries and who had not yet tired of crossing the emptiness of the Pacific in search of new islands. He had left Chile seventeen days earlier to sail through the frightful silence of the ocean. At that time, Roggeveen did not know it with the same precision we have today, but when he sighted it, it was 3,700 miles west of the nearest coast of Chile, and 2,100 miles east of the Polynesian Pitcairn Islands. He had just discovered for the West the most remote island , the one that in more than one sense remains the island of distance , destined to test how far men can lose themselves without knowing it, without realizing it, almost with innocence. April 5, 1722, is Easter Day. Roggeveen names it Easter Island.

We're in the harbor, below deck, on a tugboat. Outside, everything is light: the gentle rain, the brief gusts of the mistral, even the clouds, which occasionally break through to reveal distant wisps of intense blue. The Pilot talks while bustling around at the control panel. At times, he goes down to the engine room, is silent, leaves, then re-enters... He seems to be following a precise route he knows by heart. I look at him. When he asks for them, I hand him the tools.

—I bet you're wondering why I don't leave these tasks to the maintenance team... a legitimate question, but look, you have to know the boat well, you have to have touched it completely, if possible... only then can you stay calm when the sea out there is hell... And besides, only then can you understand the infinite nuances of your voice , your tiredness, your tension, your cries for help...

Outside, the downpour lashes the deck with brief bursts of rain. The Pilota stops for a moment. His hands are stained with grease. He picks up a glass of rum, also stained with grease.

—The most fantastic tale of Easter Island also reveals its history in the most convincing way.

It is the minute-by-minute chronicle of the beginning of the end of their civilization. Nothing more. It has been told a thousand times, but even more times it has been forgotten. Generally speaking, the truth is not liked , but when, by its nature, it is admonitory, then the truth is avoided or annihilated... Because, as Pinocchio warns us, after giving the talking cricket a good hammer blow, you feel better, right?

I refill your glass.

—It all stems from the mystery represented by the hundreds of enormous statues , four to six meters tall, present on the island. The moai . They are male torsos with long ears. Impassive, enormous, mute faces. Roggeveen found almost all of them collapsed , in the middle of an island that from a distance seemed like a desert. In fact, the island was almost deserted , covered by undergrowth that could not be called vegetation, with a few scrawny inhabitants , brutalized people, incapable of building a canoe that would keep the water from the Pacific out. Those people did not seem to have either the culture or the technology necessary to build and raise those mysterious moai.

"If that was so, then who had conceived and sculpted them in the rock? With what technology had they transported them for kilometers and then erected them along the entire coast? And why? What meaning could there be for these gigantic sculptures raised on stone pedestals that, without exception, face inland, with their backs to the sea ? As you can imagine, this great mystery unleashed the most banal fantasies over the centuries. It was the Egyptians, some claimed; no, other more realistic ones countered, so to speak, it was the Incas, because they were closer... And as it could not be otherwise, the inescapable solution to every archaeological enigma, which warns us that the great sculptors were aliens, technologically advanced extraterrestrials whose spacecraft also became stranded on the island before being rescued from space... And so, to kill boredom, they sculpted the moai."

The pilot suddenly falls silent, concentrating on sorting out something on the dashboard. Then he holds the screwdriver in his hand and resumes his story.

—Naturally, the story is different, and no less disturbing , by the way. It's told in a book by Jared Diamond , who speaks more languages ​​than anyone I've ever met. He told it to me himself in a bar in Los Angeles, in his well-traveled, spicy Portuguese.

"According to an oral tradition that has come down to us, back in 900 AD, formidable Polynesian sailors from Mangareva, perhaps from Pitcairn or Henderson, south of the Marquesas Islands, arrived on the island in the retinue of Hotu Matu'a , the Great Father, who had sailed in a canoe with his wife, six children and the entire family. They had not taken the wrong route, it was not a storm that had scattered Hotu Matu'a's canoes across the vastness of the Pacific. No, it was a full-fledged migration. The unsurpassed Polynesian navigators knew how to read a large number of signals in the sea that we, with our devices, cannot even imagine. The island, which seen from the sky is a triangle with three volcanoes at the vertices , and which now looks like a stealth - the ultra-modern bomber invisible to radar - stranded on the surface of the sea, is rich in vegetation. When Hotu Matu'a and his men arrived, it was populated by sea and land birds. The Polynesians, for their part, disembark with the chickens they had brought as provisions for the voyage. Perhaps even with stowaway rats, which quickly descend ashore from the canoes and multiply.

"On the island, among the dense vegetation, there is a giant whose existence precedes, and in a certain sense gives rise to, the other stone colossi. It is a type of palm tree, the largest in the world , reaching twenty meters in height and which on the island once had a trunk more than two meters in diameter. Perhaps, after so much sailing, the Polynesians believed they had arrived at a garden that was not of this world. Because, after so much sailing, can you imagine the intoxication that the murmur of the wind must have transmitted to them in the generous shade of those giant palm trees? The island must have seemed to them a goal achieved... The fact is that Hotu Matu'a and his people disembark, prosper and live every day in the shade of the giant palm trees that protect them even from the hurricane-force winds of the ocean and from the rains, incessant at that latitude.

" Jared suspects that on the island's 71 square kilometers, at its peak, more than fifteen thousand people may have lived together. They quickly divided into eleven or twelve clans, each with its own territory, wider along the coast, perhaps due to navigation and fishing, and narrower inland. Like a cake, divided into twelve good portions. The clans were governed by eleven or twelve priestly castes and by eleven or twelve elites.

"At a certain point, they start building these huge statues representing their ancestors . They place them on large pedestals, behind which they cremate the dead. As time goes by, the chiefs and priests compete with each other and perhaps even argue openly. They all want to have the tallest statue , the most imposing moai. They then invent the pukao , a kind of red cylinder placed in later times on the heads of the statues to make them appear even taller. And so on ad infinitum, if the world can bear infinity. One of the last statues to be erected is Paro , ten meters high and weighing 75 tons. There is another, unfinished, twenty-one meters high and weighing 270 tons. They could never have erected it... The senseless competition for prestige between chiefs and priests requires wood for the mechanisms, because they already have tools, ropes, and strong men.

Forests had to be deforested to expand agriculture , to manufacture increasingly larger and more powerful artifacts.

Until one day, someone on the island, probably unaware of what they were doing, cut down the last tree , the last enormous palm tree.

"The land becomes barren, the birds become extinct, there is no wood left to make deep-sea canoes with which to fish and, perhaps, think of escape. The wind and the rains rage, violent and destructive over everything. Only the meager shadow of the enormous silent statues remains. It is not enough. The worse things get, the more certain they are that it is necessary to build even taller moai to obtain the aid of the gods and the favor of their ancestors. Towards the mid-1600s, resources are finally exhausted. The islanders, too far from the rest of the world to be able to move elsewhere and who in any case do not have the means to do so, succumb to cannibalism . It seems that one of the most serious insults was: "I have a piece of your mother's flesh stuck between my teeth." The islanders, who despite everything perhaps wanted, although unable, to continue building moai, set about tearing down the upright ones . End of story... Yes, Of course, then there's the well-known arrival of civilization, with its deportations, epidemics, slavery, the usual... By the end of the 19th century, only 111 individuals remained on the island. Individuals, not people.

The Pilot finally takes a break from his work, looks at me, and tells me with a grimace that the thing is now working properly.

—The great moai looked into the interior of the island. Some were also endowed with eyes, eyes of white coral, with pupils of red scoria. The priests guarded these eyes, which they placed on the faces of the moai in certain rites and ceremonies. Blind priests guarding the eyes of blind idols who turned their backs on the sea and the world. A futile final rebellion of the warriors. Everything implodes and falls: idols, priests, and warriors . Doesn't the story of Easter Island lost in the ocean remind you a bit of that of a small planet lost in space, also populated by idols and priests and, above all, by inhabitants whose technology is insufficient to flee to another place?