Easter Island

Blog hiatus #2 is now over: just got back from a week in South America, having visited Santiago and Easter Island. Perhaps I should clarify – three and a half days of actually seeing stuff, two and a half of traveling. Not that I can complain: you would hope there is some time and difficulty involved in reaching the most remote inhabited place on Earth.

Easter Island is pretty much as middle-of-nowhere as you can get, 2500 miles from mainland Chile, 1500 miles from other Polynesian islands. It was settled around the year 400. It is absolutely amazing to me that people even found the place, it's a proverbial needle in a haystack. In order to find Easter Island, Polynesian explorers would have had to row in exactly the right direction for about 2 weeks. Storms or rogue ocean currents could have altered the trajectory beyond repair at any time. How many other expeditions set off with the hopes of finding land only to be disappointed? And why did these people feel the need to row for weeks? As far as I can tell, there was no particular hardship they were fleeing; it was merely a case of looking for something new and exploring their greater surroundings. I'm impressed.

So the island was settled around 400, and was on its own until the mid 1700s, when Europeans found the place. During that time, society rose and fell, wars began and ended, and statues were carved. The inhabitants were profoundly isolated, not only geographically, but also philosophically, I would think. Imagine you were born on an island that is roughly 8x15 miles, with absolutely nothing else around except for water. The island is all that you would know - to you, the several thousand others on the island are the only other humans in the universe. Your piece of land is all that there is, the limit of everything worthwhile in your world. With no trade or flux of ideas and people, there was no sense of anything larger going on in the world. It must have been quite a shock to see a ship full of Europeans come sailing in.