Easter Island (19 page)

A great many canoes came off to the ships; these people showed us at that time their great cupidity for every thing they saw; and were so daring that they took the seamen’s hats and caps from off their heads, and sprang overboard with the spoil; for they are surpassingly good swimmers as would seem from the great numbers of them who came swimming off from the shore to the ships. . . .

As to their seagoing craft, they are of poor and flimsy construction; for their canoes are fitted together of a number of small boards and light frames, which they skillfully lace together with very fine laid twine. . . . But as they lack the knowledge, and especially the material, for caulking the great number of seams for their canoes, and making them tight, they consequently leak a great deal.

In the morning we proceeded with three boats and two shallops, manned by 134 persons, all armed with musket, pistols, and cutlass . . . we proceeded in open order, but keeping well together, and clambered over the rocks, which are very numerous on the sea margin, as far as the level land or flat, making signs with the hand that the natives, who pressed round us in great numbers, should stand out of our way and make room for us . . . we marched forward a little, to make room for some of our people who were behind, that they might fall in with the ranks, who were accordingly halted to allow the hindmost to come up, when, quite unexpectedly and to our great astonishment, four or five shots were heard in our rear, together with a vigorous shout of “’
t is tyd, ’t is tyd, geeft vuur” [It’s time, it’s time, fire!].
On this, as in a moment, more than thirty shots were fired, and the Indians, being thereby amazed and scared, took to flight, leaving 10 or 12 dead, besides the wounded. . . .

Roggeveen, it seemed, had no further explanation for the violence.

Greer closed the book and set it down. How often in the history of the world, she wondered, had the same story unfolded? An armed exploring party goes ashore and opens fire. The
moai,
the
rongorongo,
the floral extinction: None of it really mattered. Easter Island was like every other landmass in the world—when after centuries of isolation it met the rest of the world, the world struck it down. But what could be done? Wasn’t all prehistory and history—speciation, human migration, exploration—just an elaborate game of musical chairs? A border was crossed, a colony taken, an island explored. A snake stowing away on flotsam made it to a new shore, a breadfruit tree in the arms of a naturalist crossed the ocean, a prehistoric mammoth traversed a continental land bridge. The music played, positions changed, and in the end, a chair was taken away. A resource was removed and somebody was left standing. Extinction, genocide, survival of the fittest. Someone always had to leave the game.

Greer felt a familiar gloominess coming over her. She usually shook it away with a walk on the beach or a trip to the movies, but now she had to try to sleep it off. She shoved the books to the foot of the bed, turned off the light, and closed her eyes. The sounds of the night—moth wings batting her window, laughter from somewhere down the street—intensified. Turning onto her stomach, Greer held one of the pillows over her head to muffle the sounds, but still her mind prowled.

She directed her thoughts to Roggeveen and retraced his narrative. With what had the islanders constructed their canoes? What had been the effect of the exchange of goods on the isolated population? Would a population capable of building and transporting giant statues “lack” the knowledge of caulking a canoe? What was the psychological effect of the violence of Roggeveen’s men?

A rustling of leaves from the courtyard distracted her, and once more Greer turned over, adjusted the quilt, and settled on her side with the pillow held against her ear. For the past few months, it was either insomnia or utter exhaustion. And after a day in the crater and drinks with the researchers, she should have been exhausted.

She began whispering the families in Urticales.

Urticaceae, nettle.
Urtica dioica,
stinging nettle.
Boehmeria nivea,
China grass.

Ulmaceae, elm.
Ulmus americana. Ulmus parvifolia. Ulmus rubra. Ulmus alata. Ulmus procera.

Moraceae, mulberry . . .

Mulberry. Greer stopped. Mulberry included the famous strangler fig of the Amazonian rain forest. As a small sprout, it would climb the trunk of a nearby tree, leeching water and minerals from the bark, struggling to reach sunlight. Once the roots of the fig took hold, they thickened and hardened, grew branches and leaves, enmeshing the host tree, strangling it to death. In the end, the fig looked monstrous—bulbous, contorted—its roots fused like tumors onto its lifeless host. If you cut through the trunk, which Thomas had done in the front of his classroom the first time she’d ever seen one, you could see the victim within.

“And there it is. Nature isn’t always beautiful,” Thomas had announced as he pointed to a cross section of tangled roots. His eyes scanned the class. “One must never romanticize the natural world. What’s important is to see it clearly, to see what’s there, not what you would like to see. Plants have no inherent beauty, no inherent innocence. The
Artemisia absinthium
releases poison from its leaves—one rainfall and all other neighboring plants are dead. This is neither an act of goodness nor of evil. It’s simply a mechanism developed by a particular organism to ensure its survival. The world’s largest flower is produced by
Rafflesia arnoldii,
a parasitic plant of the Malay Archipelago. It lives inside climbing vines, then breaks through the bark of the host, expanding into a twenty-pound, three-foot flower that smells, quite unbeautifully, like rotting flesh. This is and will always be the difference between botanists and the rest of the populace, and you must remember it—we will look at a plant and we will see a complex narrative of need and fulfillment, of adaptation and mutation. Everybody else—your parents, your friends, your roommates—will see just something colorful. Something for the garden or a window box. They will see something that their dear benevolent Judeo-Christian God placed before them for their delight.”

Thomas had perfected the pragmatic-scientist role, and liked to make a strong impression on first-year botany students. But Greer, when she watched him that day, didn’t yet understand the drama of it, of him. He simply seemed an impossible cynic, a man who had looked in microscopes so long he could no longer see the beauty of the natural world. Never, she told herself, would she become like him: a hardened scientist. But something in his cynicism had challenged her, made her want to show him the world was, in fact, beautiful. And the day after the lecture, in a gesture that began their courtship, she slipped beneath his office door a passage from Whitman’s
Song of Myself,
a poem she had always loved.

As she lay in bed, what Thomas said about the strangler fig now struck Greer as eerie. She’d heard him say it a dozen times, he said it to every intro class he’d taught while they were married. It was his favorite speech. But she’d never imagined his beliefs went beyond the natural world, that they could seep into his life, their marriage.

Greer felt a strange sickness rise in her stomach. She threw the covers back and stepped out of bed. On the desk sat the small seed stranded in its liquid universe. Eight years. She shouldn’t have brought it here.

She slipped on her sandals, pulled a skirt over her nightdress, then grabbed a flashlight and left her room. The porch was silent, but as she moved quietly across the courtyard, she noticed, among the foliage, a flash of white: There, before the Virgin Mary statue, Mahina was kneeling in prayer. Her eyes were closed, her hands clasping what seemed to be a photograph.

This was where Mahina found peace. Prayer was how people made sense of the past. But Greer belonged to no church, no faith, and on nights like this, when she couldn’t sleep, she was simply left with a sense of aloneness.

Greer tugged open the door to the main building, and walked into the night toward the lab.

10

I
n the shadow of the ancient Polynesians, the Germans made their way across the Pacific: Eniwetok, Fanning Island, Samoa, Bora Bora, Tahiti.

They took coal where they could, feeding the ships’ bunkers at anchor beneath the blazing sun. At night, they lived in the pitch black of their cruisers—a single lantern could reveal them to a passing boat. Without activity or diversion, they were left only to thoughts of those who pursued them.

The ships of the British and French navies far outnumbered theirs; and the Allies had endless secure harbors for provisioning. With Japan now in the war, the odds against them became impossible.

At the Admiralty in Berlin, hope for von Spee’s survival was waning. Kaiser Wilhelm, his sympathy ignited for this lonely commander, tried to send words of encouragement: “God be with you in the impending stern struggle.” But von Spee, beyond range of the radio transmitter at Tsingtao, never received the message. He was operating in solitude, without the means to contact his country, his supply ships, or the other German warships in his squadron.

He needed to find a rendezvous point, a spot in the Pacific where he could try to bring the squadron together. He would have to break radio silence for this, risk the interception of the message in the hope of uniting his forces. But it was necessary.

The only question was where. Studying the map, searching for a safe harbor, he soon found the perfect place, a place he had once read about, where Captain Cook had voyaged, where strange giant statues lined the shore. A place that was the farthest one could get from the rest of the world: Easter Island.

—Fleet of Misfortune: Graf von Spee and the Impossible Journey Home

11

On a thin strip of sand on the island’s northern coast they make their camp.

Everything stowed in the hold must be rowed ashore through the rough surf. As the schooner heaves above the ocean, Elsa steadies herself and drowsily unties the crates and bags and buckets.

The previous night has drained her. The native visitors—forty of them, she finally counted—refused to disembark until they tired of their ceremony of welcome. This involved an elaborate exchange of wood carvings and sweets, bananas and tobacco, taro and tea. In the flurry of excitement, Edward’s hat was swapped for a frantic chicken; then, moments later, the chicken’s forlorn owner snatched it back. But when Alice carried Pudding’s cage on deck, when a wave of awed whispers swept the visitors, the owner of the chicken came forward, suggesting, through a series of arm-flapping gestures, an exchange of chicken for parrot. Then Edward stepped in. “Not for eating. It is a pet. A friend.
Un amigo.
” His refusal clearly offended the group, but soon Alice began blowing kisses to Pudding, who said
superior bird,
and the affront was lost in their amazement. One of the men, his arms covered thickly with tattoos, wearing a red hat with brass buttons, then began to conduct a song. But he cut it short with a grunt of disdain when the younger boys, sidetracked by the discovery of Elsa’s corset, garbled the words.

In a mixture of Spanish and Tahitian, Edward tried to rally workers for the next day. “
Carry? Llevar?”
As the islanders stared, he dramatically lifted a box full of tinned meats. “See:
Ca-rry. Work. Anga?”

“Tangata rava-anga,”
said Elsa.

A young boy with thick, cowlicked hair stepped forward and took the box from Edward.

“Maururu,”
somebody mumbled.
Thank you.

“Well, it is to be expected,” Edward said, near dawn, when the islanders slipped gracefully over the gunwale and into their canoes, calling
iorana
as they studied their lapfuls of biscuits and beans and cigarettes, the slim daggers of their boats stabbing toward the coast. A month’s supplies had been lost in the greeting. “It is the best way to gain their trust. You’ll see. They will no doubt extend the traditional courtesy of hosts. It was the same, at first, with the Kikuyu.”

Now it is morning and Kierney and Eamonn have to make off quickly in search of the Chilean Company ship, which anchors by the village at the island’s opposite side. Exhausted, nervous, Elsa stands on the schooner’s deck and bids them good-bye. She does wish they could stay, if only for a few days. As they lob their bags into the dinghy, she gives them extra stores of tea and coffee. “Are you sure you’ll be able to find the ship? Maybe you should wait and we can all find it together. To be safe.”

“If there’s one thing I know how to find, Mrs. Beazley,” Eamonn says, climbing down into the dinghy, “it’s a boat I’m suppos’d to be on.”

A duffel then comes hurling over the gunwale and thumps into the dinghy. “To the sea, again!” Kierney hollers from behind. He jogs along the deck, clutches the gunwale, and vaults himself onto the ladder. Pausing, he looks past Elsa to where Edward and Alice, belowdecks, are unpacking a crate. He grins and whispers, “It ain’t too late to sneak off with us.”

“Are you suggesting,” she laughs, “that I just traveled twenty-three hundred miles to head right back to Valparaíso?”

“We could have some fun.” He winks. “You need some fun.”

“Kierney, after all these months, have you still no sense of propriety?”

As he stares at her, she feels a blush crawl down her face. “Seems not,” he says, snatching the tins of tea and coffee at her feet. “But I got first-rate vision.” He laughs and leaps into the dinghy. “Best o’ luck to Captain Beazley and the two Mrs. Beazleys!”

Edward appears on deck. “Ah, the men are ready? Excellent.” He eases himself down the ladder, pushes the dinghy off, and rows toward the shore. Elsa watches the two men jump onto the beach and dart up the embankment, duffels slung over their shoulders, arms spilling with tins. At the top of the hill, a half-dozen islanders mounted on horses are monitoring the activity. Kierney and Eamonn, gesturing and pointing to the sea, approach them. Soon they each hand over the tins she has just given them, and mount the horses behind the islanders, wedging their duffels in their laps. The overweighted animals plod along the coast, receding in the distance, and then out of sight.