Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island

PREFACE

Long ago, it feels, when skies were blue and seas were calm, I sat on a rock listening to two men. We were three archaeologists, surrounded by stone—sand, rubble, great boulders of varied colors and textures. Many of the pieces, now scattered and distant from where they had once been, were carved. In an explosive parody of Shelley's Ozymandias, broken heads with noses longer than we were tall lolled everywhere in the hot dust. This was Easter Island in 1994. By chance my unplanned visit, with backpack and mountain bike, came when a four-year-long project to rebuild Tongariki, its greatest monument, was in full swing. Fifteen of the island's famous statues had stood there in a row on a massive, long platform of paved black rubble. The tallest was 9 meters (30 feet) high. When first seen by Europeans, all fifteen lay face down, like a row of fallen bowling pins. In 1960 the entire scene, thousands of tons of walling, statues, and debris—and the remains of many people who had been buried there—had been swept inland by a tsunami that cast fish, octopus, and lobsters among the ruins, and went on to wreak havoc as far away as Hawai'i and Japan.

Now Tongariki was being put back together by a Japanese crane company, working with local archaeologists. It is the largest of more than 150 similar monuments around the shore of this small island, which boasts nearly 1,000 statues. Who, I thought, would not want to know more?

My companions told me about the restoration. They told me about Easter Island—or, to give it its modern Pacific name, Rapa Nui—its Polynesian people and its ancient remains. But nothing caught my curiosity as much as the story of an English couple who had been there on the day the First World War began. Though I had never heard of Katherine and Scoresby Routledge, their visit was well known on the island, where it was said they had conducted the best statue survey and collected important histories. But none of this, I was told, had ever been published. At first it had been thought that all of Katherine's records had been destroyed in a fire in Jamaica. Then when they were found—thousands of pages of notes and diaries—no one could read her handwriting. That was when I decided to write this book.

Who was Katherine Routledge? My quest brought ever more surprises as I leafed through piles of rarely seen manuscripts in archives across England. Progress was slow. I edited a magazine for twenty years. I wrote other books. It became clear that my subject was not just an unknown amateur anthropologist—and her overlooked husband, Scoresby. It was Rapa Nui. Why had the lifework of this woman, who seemed to have understood the place like no other outsider, vanished? The loss of this perspective mattered because, I realized, the story being told of the island's ancient past, even today, is profoundly wrong.

That story had been fueled by prejudice that grew on the back of a shocking history of European cultural destruction, by slavery, murder, introduced diseases, and interfering missionaries, to the point where a population of thousands had all but disappeared. The final indignity was the island's takeover by a British overseas business that forced survivors into a walled ghetto to protect the company sheep. The wall came down in 1966 (only twenty-three years before the Berlin Wall fell, which had been up for less than half the time). By then it had been reinforced with barbed wire, and Islanders needed a written pass from the Chilean navy to leave its gates, which were locked at night.

It seemed to me that had Katherine Routledge's research become fully public, the false narratives would never have been born. And the reason her work had not been made available turned out to have a shocking twist. The book in your hands is my attempt to expose these events, and offer an alternative history of the early Islanders' extraordinary achievements as well as of their eventual downfall.

There is no shortage of disingenuous nonsense about the ancient past, from pointy hills in Bosnia claimed to be giant pyramids, to Black Africans said to have settled in Mexico millennia before the arrival of Europeans. In 2024 a Netflix series proposed Rapa Nui's statues had been raised twelve thousand years ago by a global civilization that was wiped out by a cataclysmic flood. When I talk of the island's false narratives, I do not mean such demonstrable claptrap. I mean a dominant theory of history that has had the support of many academics, writers, and podcasters, and could well have been true.

That theory argues that Islanders let their population outgrow their home's capacity to support them. In the quest for food they overfished the sea and destroyed soils, and in desperate religious turmoil they cut down all the trees to move statues. Society collapsed in a fit of war and cannibalism. When Europeans first saw Rapa Nui, it is said, they witnessed the result: a devastated land with few people, who could not have created the island's spectacular archaeological legacy.