Lost Gods of Easter Island Attenborough's Passion Projects

I've been making natural history films for over 60 years,

and in the process I've been to some very interesting places.

But every now and again I've been allowed to make a film

about my other enthusiasms.

About the history of exploration,

about tribal objects, or the life of a great scientist.

You could call them my Passion Projects.

I have to say, I've always been a collector, initially of fossils.

And I think a lot of people have the collecting urge.

And many naturalists have it.

It's quite an important thing for naturalists to have

because, whether it's flowers or butterflies or fossils,

if you collect things, you start to classify them

and you start to work out why this is different from that

and whether that is more like something else.

And so you get the notion of families and so on.

And also you look at the objects with some degree of attention.

So it's quite useful training.

I have got one or two things that I brought back for my collection,

but one or two of them have led me to new adventures.

When I was in Madagascar in... the late '60s, I suppose,

one of the stories I knew that we would want to feature was

a story about the elephant bird -

a giant extinct bird which laid huge eggs,

and which many people think were the origin

of the legends of the Roc,

which was so big

that it picked up elephants in its talons and carried them away.

And when we got to Madagascar, I was very keen on seeing

if I could find fragments of this egg.

And, amazingly, we went down there and yes, we did,

and I started very excitedly collecting

these little bits of eggs.

And eventually a little boy brought to us some big fragments.

They looked to me as though different pieces fitted together.

So I started to do that, and then eventually...

..I put together this.

That gives you a real idea of what an elephant bird's egg was like -

very thick and very tough.

And it's one of the things I cherish.

Anyway, some years ago, this giant egg

set me off on a new investigation.

A film director, television director friend, said,

"Why don't we make a programme entirely based on this,

"on the aepyornis egg?"

Which, if that meant going back to Madagascar, that suited me.

It turned into a detective story -

trying to find out what kind of creature

the elephant bird really was.

But most of all, I wanted to know exactly how old my egg was.

Here, in the basement of the archaeological department

at Oxford University, there's a carbon dating apparatus which can

accurately find the age of ancient objects - natural and man-made.

But I've been told that Thomas Higham,

who took the sample from my egg, has got a result.

You took a tiny bit of this.

A very small amount from the back.

A very small amount.

And, tell me, come on, what's the answer?

Well, our date suggests that this egg is 1,300 years old.

-No!

-Yes.

Say it again. 1,000...

1,300 years old.

And that puts it at what date?

About 700, 600-700 AD.

And did that surprise you?

I thought it was quite a lot younger

than I thought it would be, actually.

-Oh, you thought it would be older?

-I did.

And I say that because I checked back on all the other

eggshell dates that we've dated from Madagascar from this species,

and the youngest date that we've ever got is about 900 AD.

So this, in fact, was one of the last of the elephant birds?

I think within 100 to 200 years, perhaps, yes.

Ah.

The chick that came out of this was one of the last.

Absolutely amazing.

So there we have it.

My egg is 1,300 years old, and one of the most recent eggs

of its kind that the university has dated.

But that doesn't mean it was the last ever laid, and it could be that

some of these astounding creatures lived on until much more recently.

But what we have discovered is that elephant birds and human beings

did manage to live alongside one another for hundreds of years.

For me, this egg is a reminder of

how easy it is for a species to disappear...

..to be exterminated, as human beings take over.

The unravelling of the story of one of my favourite objects was,

in the end, to throw a different light on the relationship

between humans and the natural world.

I found this object, extraordinary figure, in New York.

It was at an auction in New York.

And it is very, very strange.

The auctioneer said that it came from Easter Island,

and the estimate they gave as to how much it was going to fetch

was so low that it seemed as though

they really thought that it was a forgery.

But I thought it was possibly very old.

And then I saw one or two cues

and started to do some research, and that led me

to an absolutely fascinating story as to what this actually represents,

and who even collected it.

Would you believe that was possible?

Well, it's a line of deduction

which did lead to an extraordinary story.

We called the film The Last Gods Of Easter Island.

This strange figure appeared in a New York auction room

some ten years ago.

The auctioneer said it came from Easter Island, but they gave it

a value far lower than that of a genuine old Easter Island piece.

Maybe they thought it was carved for tourists,

or perhaps they weren't even sure how genuine it was.

But I thought it had a strange, almost hypnotic, power,

and I bought it.

But who had made it? And where? And when?

And what did it represent?

In trying to find the answer to those questions,

I set off on a long trail of detection

which took me back to the 18th century,

to the great days of the European exploration of the Pacific,

to the ancient beliefs of the Polynesians,

and eventually to one of the great wonders of the world -

Easter Island.

2.5 million years ago,

the waters in the middle of the eastern Pacific began to boil.

Lava spewed up from the ocean floor.

As the eruptions continued over centuries, an island grew.

Today it measures only 14 miles by 7.

It's one of the most isolated fragments of land

in all the oceans of the world.

South America lies 2,500 miles away to the east.

Tahiti, in the centre of the Pacific,

3,000 miles to the west.

It's a barren, rocky place.

Hardly a tree to be seen.

There are still three huge volcanic craters on the island,

all now inactive.

The one on the western corner

has pools of fresh water lying all over its floor.

The island's flanks descend so steeply into the ocean

that no fringing coral reefs have been able to grow,

and the Pacific breakers crash directly onto its narrow beaches.

Landing is extremely difficult, and at some times, impossible.

Nonetheless, about 1,500 years ago,

human beings did manage to reach it.

And here, in isolation, they developed an extraordinary culture -

they carved gigantic figures of stone.

Today, these statues are among the most famous images in the world,

immediately recognisable everywhere, and used in advertisements

and cartoons as the symbol of all that is most remote and exotic.

Europeans didn't discover the island until a Dutchman,

Jacob Roggeveen, arrived here on Easter Day 1722.

He made a brief note of the huge statues in his journal,

but he didn't stay long, for soon after he landed a fight broke out.

A dozen of the islanders were shot dead, and Roggeveen sailed away.

52 years later, Captain Cook arrived

and made the first detailed survey of the island.

14 years after him, a Frenchman, Laperouse, landed there

and wonderingly measured the statues.

His artist, confronted with such strange images,

found it difficult to record them objectively,

and perhaps unconsciously gave them European features.

Some stood 30 feet tall and weighed 60 tons.

But who would had carved them?

How had they been transported and directed?

The islanders met by the visiting Europeans seemed to have

none of the necessary skills.

So began the mystery of Easter Island.

Later visitors invented their own explanations.

One claimed that such colossal statues could only have been put up

by a race of giants, now extinct,

who stood 12 feet tall

and were endowed with superhuman strength.

By the 19th century,

European artists who had never been to the island

were portraying the people as degenerate savages

who conducted unspeakable rites for the stone idols.

In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl left the west coast of South America

on his raft, the Kon-Tiki,

and sailed toward the island

to prove his theory that the islanders had come from Peru,

bringing with them the Incas' famous skills in working stone.

In more recent times, some writers have seriously

suggested that the only possible explanation was that

the statues had been raised by people arriving from outer space.

But the islanders also carved small wooden figures, like mine.

What could be the connection between the great stone monoliths

and these relatively tiny carvings?

Today they still carve wooden figures for sale to visitors.

It seems that they've been doing this for 150 years or more.

Some of them are fairly crude, some less so.

But it seemed to me that mine was much more powerful

and certainly older than any of these.

But was it?

One of the best collections of early figures

still untainted by the demands of tourism is in London.

So off I went with my figure to the Museum of Mankind -

the ethnographic department of the British Museum.

In its hall stands one of the very few stone figures

to have left the island,

collected by a British warship in 1868.

But it was the wooden figures that I had come to see.

This is some kind of grotesque monster -

half-reptile, half-human.

Its head appears to be like a lizard's,

and yet it has what seem to be wings.

A fattish body, human buttocks and legs,

but then a long tail that projects beyond the legs.

This, on the other hand, does seem to be a human being -

it's got a very human face.

But it's a human being wearing a bird costume of some kind,

because he's got a mask with a bird's beak on his head,

and instead of arms, what appear to be wings,

but then again, very human-looking legs.

And then there are much more naturalistic human figures.

This is a female.

A flat, plankish body, but overall human proportions,

fairly naturalistic.

Most common of all are the figures of men.

This is a particularly fine one.

We know from museum records that it was collected in 1820.

It's the body of a normally-proportioned man,

but one who is half-starved.

For his ribs are very prominent,

he has a more or less naturalistic face with a goatee beard,

a smile showing the teeth, but very long ears,

and legs of normal proportion.

But none of these seem to me

to have the characteristics that set my figure apart.

They don't have the goggling eyes,

the crest,

the toothless smile stretching from ear to ear,

and this enormously elongated body,

with elongated arms

and fingers that are also equally elongated.

I looked, not only here,

but in catalogues of museums around the world.

There was only one place in the world where

I could find an equivalent figure.

To see that I'd have to go to Russia.

St Petersburg - the old capital of Russia.

Once the home of the Tsars, and still today one of the

country's great cultural centres, rich in art galleries and museums.

I was heading for one of the oldest museums - the Kunstkamera -

founded by Peter the Great and now the main anthropological museum.

Here are gathered the art and the artefacts

that have been brought back by Russia travellers and explorers

from all parts of the globe.

Their Pacific collections are not huge,

but I had seen from the museum's catalogue that they included

two strange wooden figures from Easter Island,

one of which has an exceedingly long, thin body.

And they had them out ready for me.

And here it is.

So how close is the resemblance between this and my figure?

Museum regulations here require you to put on gloves

before you touch any of their objects,

so, of course, I did.

Well, the resemblance is astonishingly close.

It has the same goggle eyes -

spheres surrounded by a single ring.

There are three ridges above the eyes,

a mouth which stretches from ear to ear in a toothless smile,

the same rod-like arms,

the same elongated body.

It's surely impossible to believe that whoever carved one

was unaware of the features of the other.

The museum's other figure is of less relevance,

but it's nonetheless very remarkable.

It's a birdman, a bit like the one in the British Museum.

So where did these two Russian figures come from?

Well, the museum records show they were transferred here

from the Maritime Museum of the Admiralty Department in 1824.

So they must have been collected by Russian explorers before that date.

They both belong to a group numbered 736.

Unfortunately there are only two Russian explorers before then

who went to Easter Island.

None of them stayed for any length of time,

and there's no record of either trading for figures.

So, all I can say,

as a consequence of finding the similarity between these two,

is that my figure therefore is probably

early 19th century and no more than that.

So, to some extent,

this identification is something of a disappointment.

I must admit,

I had hoped that it might prove to be somewhat earlier in date.

I'd run out of clues.

My investigations seemed to have come to a dead end.

It seemed that the origin

and identity of my figure would have to remain a mystery.

But then, a stroke of luck.

A couple of years after I bought my figure,

some drawings held by the State Library in Sydney were published.

They had belonged to Captain Cook himself.

After his death they'd passed to his widow, who in turn gave them to

a naval officer who looked after her in her old age.

I had to go to Australia anyway,

so I went to have a look at them.

This is a scene in New Zealand

by the expedition's official artist, William Hodges.

And this too is by Hodges -

a moving portrait of a Maori.

And here is a picture of HMS Resolution - Cook's ship.

And this was drawn, not by Hodges, but by Able Seaman Roberts,

who was the draughtsman on the voyage.

This sketch of the ship was done, one imagines, for his own pleasure.

But his actual job was recording

profiles of coasts and making charts, as has been done here.

These were profiles that were of use to any ship that might try

to follow in Cook's wake.

And as well as those,

he also drew records of some of the objects

that were collected on the expedition.

Here's a club,

and here an axe or an adze,

and a spear.

And here is a drawing by Roberts which,

when I first saw it, made my heart miss a beat.

Because here, correct in every detail,

is a drawing of that

enigmatic, mysterious bird-headed man figure that's in St Petersburg.

Correct even down to the number of ribs on the chest.

And next to it, even more exciting from my point of view,

here is a drawing of that female stick figure,

again correct in every detail.

Even the number of these little two-peg holes in the eye,

which aren't pupils of the eye, but were holes where pegs were

placed to fix a piece of shell, perhaps, to give the eye a glint.

So there can be no doubt whatever

that these are drawings made on Captain Cook's ship in 1774

of objects that are now in St Petersburg.

How on earth could they have got there?

Perhaps the answer to that question would also shed light

on the origins of my figure.

And when I unexpectedly got the chance

to visit Easter Island itself,

I took it.

The first human beings to reach Easter Island sailed there

by canoe about 1,500 years ago.

We now know from genetic and other evidence that they were

Polynesians from islands 1,500 miles away to the west.

The Polynesians were, and still are, superb navigators,

capable of immense voyages over the empty waters of the Pacific.

Today, jet aircraft fly right across the Pacific,

but some do drop down to Easter Island and refuel.

Even with today's high-speed air travel,

it's still a six-hour flight from Santiago in Chile to the island.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to land in Easter Island.

Please return to your seats...

On that first evening I couldn't resist climbing up the flanks

of the volcano to look at the stone statues

which I had read so much about.

It's easy to understand the astonishment of

the first visitors to the islands.

How were these immense sculptures made and moved?

Thor Heyerdahl, in 1955, led a big archaeological expedition

to the island, and spent several months there trying to find out.

He excavated around them.

Some, he discovered, were buried up to their waists

and had strangely elongated fingers.

He showed by practical experiments that carving them

was not as difficult as it might seem -

for the rock is volcanic ash,

and when it's first exposed

it's quite soft and easily cut with stone mauls.

He then showed that in fact it wasn't too difficult to drag

the sculptures from the quarries where they had been carved -

provided that you had enough people.

Later still, American archaeologists transported a replica statue

standing upright, using rollers,

though there were no trees on the island

to provide rollers in Cook's time.

But, whichever way they were moved,

these investigations made it clear

that large teams of people were needed,

and that implied that there must have been

at one time a flourishing and coherent community,

who would work together to create these astonishing monuments.

Captain Cook arrived here in his ships,

the Adventure and the Resolution,

on the second of his great voyages of exploration,

on Sunday, March 13th, 1774.

He anchored about a mile out there,

and two men from the island

paddled out in a canoe with plantains for food.

Cook noticed with surprise that their canoe was wretchedly small,

and certainly not suitable for travel farther out to sea.

We know just how small because a member of his expedition

made a quick sketch of it.

The following day, Cook found an anchorage,

and went ashore to trade for food and water.

He distributed gifts of one kind and another,

including bronze medals with the head of George III on one side

and his two ships on the other.

In return, he got sweet potatoes and more plantains.

The following morning,

an exploration party left the ship and landed here on the west coast.

It included two young lieutenants -

the expedition's official artist, William Hodges,

and their official naturalist, a German called Johann Forster.

Cook wasn't with them because he had been feeling unwell,

as he had been for some time.

It wasn't long before the party encountered a group of islanders,

and Hodges sketched their portraits.

A man in a feathered headdress with pierced and distended earlobes.

And a woman with tattoos on her forehead, wearing a straw hat.

But the encounter was uneasy.

An islander snatched one of the party's bags and ran off with it,

so one of the lieutenants fired a warning musket shot over his head.

The man dropped the bag and they retrieved it.

Johann Forster, in his journal,

says that one of the islanders was armed with,

"A kind of battle-axe with a head carved on each side

"and black flints instead of eyes,"

much like the one shown in the drawing that's now in Australia.

They went on to inspect and measure the great stone heads.

Many of them, like those, had already fallen

and had clearly done so some time earlier.

So whatever the beliefs that had led the islanders to set them up,

those beliefs were clearly no longer strongly held.

But some of them were still standing,

and Hodges went on to paint them.

Cook's men asked about the statues and were told,

as far as they could understand,

that they did not represent gods - they were not worshipped -

they were memorials to great chiefs.

So, although later visitors may have thought it necessary

to invoke giants or spacemen as the creators,

the islanders themselves were perfectly clear -

then, as now - that the figures had been carved by their ancestors.

In the afternoon, Captain Cook felt a little better,

so he too came ashore.

And with him came Johann Forster's assistant - his son, Georg -

and a young Polynesian lad, 18-year-old, who the expedition

had brought with them from Tahiti,

3,000 miles away to the west.

His name was Mahine,

and he is to become a very important character in this story.

We can get some idea of his personality from William Hodges'

revealing portrait of him.

Cook started to barter for food.

The people seemed to him to be wretchedly impoverished.

He couldn't imagine how they could have had the technology

to erect and carve those gigantic stone statues.

What they wanted mostly, it seemed,

was cloth, for they were almost naked.

In exchange, they offered small wooden figures.

And Georg Forster describes those figures in considerable detail.

There were several human figures made of narrow pieces of wood

about 18 inches to two feet long,

and wrought in a much neater and more proportionate manner

than we could have expected,

after seeing the rude sculpture of the statues.

They were made to represent persons of both sexes

and the features were not very pleasing,

and the whole figure was much too long to be natural.

However, there was something that was characteristic in them

which showed a taste for the arts.

The wood, of which they were made, was finally polished,

close-grained and of a dark brown.

I could hardly have hoped for a more accurate description

of the St Petersburg figure, or indeed of mine.

Cook and Forster apparently didn't think very much

of these wooden carvings.

But Mahine, the young Tahitian interpreter,

thought they were rather good. Much better, he said,

than the sort of thing they carved back home in Tahiti.

Just the thing for mementos.

So he bartered for and acquired several.

And he also got an extraordinary wooden hand

with extremely elongated fingernails.

But Cook was in urgent need of more fresh water and food

than the islanders could supply.

So, after five days,

he left and sailed back to Tahiti.

Onboard ship, it seems that the naturalists,

who had been charged with making representative collections

of everything they found,

rather regretted not collecting anything much

from Easter Island.

Johann Forster persuaded Mahine to give him the wooden hand.

And on the return of the expedition, he presented that to

the British Museum, where it now is.

But Mahine wouldn't be parted from those wooden figures,

much too long to be natural.

So it seems likely that they got one of the ship's draughtsmen

to draw a record of them.

And that is the sheet that is now in the library in Sydney.

Five weeks later, Cook's ships dropped anchor again in Tahiti.

The expedition's scientists prepared to make astronomical observations,

which were one of the main objectives of the voyage.

William Hodges painted the magical scenery.

And the crew, after so long at sea, rested and relaxed.

And there Mahine left them,

taking his mementos of Easter Island with him.

Once again, it's Georg Forster in his journal who tells us

what happened next.

Old Mahine's relations - who were extremely numerous -

expected presents as their due.

As long as the generous youth had some of those riches left,

which he had collected at the peril of his life

on our dangerous and dismal cruise,

he was perpetually importuned to share them out.

And though he freely distributed all he had,

some of his acquaintances complained that he was niggardly.

So now, here was first-hand direct eyewitness evidence that

the St Petersburg wooden figures had left Easter Island with Cook.

But how could they have got to Russia?

Well, in the first part of the 19th century,

Russian explorers were very active in the Pacific.

And 46 years after Cook had been in Tahiti,

on the July 21st, 1820,

the Russian Admiral Bellingshausen

landed there in his ship, the Vostok.

By now, European missionaries had converted the King of Tahiti

and many of his subjects to Christianity,

and their appetite for European things was huge.

The king, Pomare, wanted, above anything else, European cloth.

He pleaded so persuasively for it,

offering all kinds of his own possessions in exchange,

that Bellingshausen eventually had to surrender

the sheets from his own bunk.

On the last day of his visit,

trading reached fever pitch,

as Bellingshausen records in his journal.

The king and all the other islanders arrived in the morning

to do business and brought all sorts of handmade goods

which we purchased

and later placed in the Museum of the Imperial Admiralty.

So, once again,

the Museum of Ethnography in St Petersburg

should have the answer.

If Pomare had used the Easter Island figures for trade,

then Bellingshausen must have, understandably,

regarded them as part of his Tahitian collection.

But did the museum receive the objects

brought back by Bellingshausen?

Yes, indeed.

And here they still are in that big lot number 736.

This is a pandanus mat.

Mats are of great importance,

they're almost sacred, in Polynesia.

And in giving this, King Pomare was making a great gift.

He offered it to Admiral Bellingshausen

as a present to the Russian emperor,

saying, rather disarmingly and modestly,

"I'm sure you have better things,

"but this is the work of my subjects and I offer it to you."

And with it there's a superb Tahitian drum, a Tahitian God,

a Tahitian coconut splitter

and, in the same group,

the two figures from Easter Island.

Since King Pomare and many of his subjects were now Christian,

it's hardly surprising that they were quite happy that

some of their pagan idols, such as this, should be carried away

by Admiral Bellingshausen, as well as the two odd figures that had

been lying around on the island for the past 50 years.

And what does this tell us about MY figure?

It certainly has all the stylistic features of the one that

I now knew for certain had been collected by Mahine.

But could it be a deliberate copy made at some other time

in some other place?

Could it, in short, be a forgery?

Well, in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew,

there are scientists who can identify wood very precisely.

And I took my figure there.

The expert at doing this is Dr Paula Rudall.

She took a tiny shaving from the figure

and prepared it for examination under the microscope.

We think it's made of wood from the toromiro tree, which of course

is the only native hardwood tree on the island.

We think that because we've cut sections of it from that fragment

that we took from the carving and looked at the anatomical characters,

and it matches our reference material in every respect.

What kind of characters are those?

Well, if you'd like to look at the slide,

the sorts of things we're looking at are the thickness of the fibres.

-You can see it's a very dense wood with very thick-walled fibres.

-Yes.

And those sorts of characters, together with the shape

and size of the raise, which we look at in cross-section like this

and also in longitudinal section.

Those tell us the pattern of the wood and help us to identify it.

And have you seen anything like that before?

I mean, does it match anything in particular?

Well, actually, yes,

because we looked at the Easter Island hand

from the British Museum fairly recently

and it's a very close match to that, almost identical.

So we can be fairly certain that they're the same wood.

Well, that's wonderful news for me.

Thank you very much.

So now I knew that my figure must have come from Easter Island,

for the toromiro tree grew nowhere else, and the islanders always

preferred its dense hardwood for their carvings,

if they could get it.

But when did my figure leave the island?

Could it possibly have been among those collected by Mai?

Now another fact about toromiro wood becomes crucial.

Not only did it grow nowhere else except on Easter Island,

but over the decades it became rarer and rarer,

and by 1956 all that was left

was a single dying stump inside one of the craters.

The islanders had run out of carvable toromiro wood

long before that.

And soon afterwards, even that lone survivor had died.

Toromiro was extinct on the island.

But photographs of the St Petersburg figure weren't published until 1973,

so no Easter Islander in recent times could have been aware

of the appearance of that strange figure.

And by the time pictures did reach here,

there was no toromiro wood from which to carve.

The long trail of detection seemed to be over.

The identity of the wood proved that my figure had been

carved on Easter Island, and the similarity with the female figure

in St Petersburg meant that it was either carved by someone

familiar with the style of that figure,

or that it was among those that Mahine had carried away with him.

But if that was so, how could it have got from Tahiti to

the United States, where, 200 years later,

I found it in an auction room?

That, at any rate, wasn't difficult to explain.

During the 19th century, whaling ships from the United States

were frequent visitors to Tahiti and Hawaii.

It would have been easy enough for one of the sailors to

have bought it in Tahiti and taken it back to America

as a memento of his adventures in the Pacific.

But two further questions remain to be asked.

First, why were these extraordinary figures carved?

And second, why were no more carved to replace those

that Mahine took away with him on Cook's ship?

To answer that we have to go back to Easter Island.

When the first Polynesian colonists arrived 1,500 years ago,

the island was thick with forests of palms.

The palm trees gave them enough timber to build canoes,

so they were able to fish way out to sea,

and in first centuries after their arrival they were well fed -

their numbers grew.

By the 10th century there were enough of them

to allow the people to indulge their taste for statuary,

and celebrate their great men with the huge stone statues.

It seems that the first colonisation, however,

was something of a fluke.

At any rate, no other colonists came from the Polynesian islands

away to the west, and this extraordinary culture

developed in its own amazing way in isolation.

But one headland on the island supplies important evidence

of the people's last cults and beliefs.

I'm at the south-west corner of the island

on the top a 1,000-foot-high cliff.

And purely by chance, Captain Cook happened to have landed

at a beach only a little way up the coast.

And up here there are the remains of 50-odd stone houses

that were once a great ritual centre.

This is the sacred village of Orongo.

Its site is dramatic indeed.

From the few surviving traditions, we have some idea

of the beliefs of those early Easter Islanders.

Not surprisingly for a people who were imprisoned in a tiny island

thousands of miles away from anywhere,

they worshipped birds,

that had such an enviable freedom of the skies.

And in particular, judging from these carvings on the rocks,

they worshipped the frigatebird,

that still has the freedom of these skies.

They were perhaps the more mysterious, the most sacred

because the islanders never saw them come down from the skies.

The frigates never nested on the island,

and they got their food by stealing it from other birds in the air.

No wonder the marooned islanders thought them

magical and imbued with power.

And among those carvings of supernatural birds,

occasionally, a staring mask with goggling eyes,

which the islanders say represent the creator spirit Makemake.

Just offshore from Orongo lie three small rocky islets

that were especially valuable to the people,

for there, boobies and terns regularly nested

in considerable numbers.

The birds arrived in September,

and their appearance was a sign of the renewal of fertility -

when fresh food - eggs - became available once more.

Every year, each chief sponsored a youth in a race

to collect the first egg.

The youths swam across,

supporting themselves on rafts of reeds.

And the first to collect an egg

swam back carrying the egg in a headband.

Daringly, he climbed up these huge cliffs.

He raced up this slope, carrying the egg and presented it to

his sponsor - the Great Man -

who waited for him inside one of these huts.

And as he presented the egg to him,

so that Great Man became sacred - taboo.

For the next year, he would live in seclusion.

He wouldn't feed himself - that would be done by an attendant.

He didn't cut his hair, he didn't cut his fingernails,

which grew to an extraordinary length.

He was the representative on earth of Makemake,

the great creator god - the god of fertility.

His clan now ruled for the next year.

And he himself remained magically powerful for the rest of his life.

When he died his body was buried on a platform in his clan's territory

and a stone figure put up in his memory

to stand alongside those of his predecessors,

so he continued to gaze over the land that was once his

and protect it with his mana - his supernatural power.

Now, the meaning of those elongated fingernails becomes clear.

They were as he grew them during his year of sacred power.

But that extraordinary culture didn't last.

And this barren landscape explains why.

As the numbers of people grew,

so they started to cut down the forest that had once covered

their island, in order to make fields in order to grow crops.

When they cut down the last tree, they lost the timber

to make oceangoing canoes.

The people were marooned on their island.

Nonetheless, their numbers continued to grow.

Soon they had far outstripped the land's capacity to feed them all,

and, faced with starvation, warfare broke out.

One clan attacked another and overturned the great stone statues

to which they thought their rivals owed their power.

And by 1774 the population had reached the depths of poverty

and wretchedness in which Cook found them.

The past glories of their culture were eventually forgotten.

Destitute and quarrelling among themselves over dwindling

supplies of food, they no longer worked together in teams to carve

and transport the giant stone statues.

Perhaps by now they had even forgotten how to do so.

Eventually, even the birdman ceremonies were abandoned.

The cult houses up here at Orongo,

where once the sacred chiefs had lived, surrounded by ritual

and hidden from the eyes of the common people, now stood deserted.

When Cook arrived and started to barter, what more likely

than that the islanders should have gone up to the cliffs

immediately behind the beach,

anxious to get things to exchange for Cook's cloth and nails,

and gathered up the last remaining figures, the wooden figures,

that lay outmoded and discarded in the cult houses?

That would explain why no more exist today.

The islanders didn't carve any replacements

because the cults were out of fashion.

And no models remained on the island for future generations to copy.

But what did these figures actually represent?

The wooden hand, with its enormously elongated fingers, clearly relates

in some way to the rituals connected with the great chiefs

with their uncut fingernails.

The birdman in St Petersburg is the frigatebird god,

with its characteristic hooked beak,

whose image is carved all over the rocks at Orongo.

And the figure in the British Museum represents

a man in a bird mask,

perhaps a priest dancing to honour the frigatebird god.

And what of these two human figures?

Made to represent both sexes,

as Georg Forster described them,

"About 18 inches to two feet long.

"Much too long to be natural,

"and wrought in a much neater and more proportionate manner than

"we could have expected after seeing the rude sculpture of the statues."

Well, there are a number of odd things about both of them

that set them apart from all other surviving figures.

Their eyes are not set in eye-shaped sockets like those

of the giant stone statues or the wooden starving men.

They're circular, surrounded with a ring.

And they protrude,

just like the mask of Makemake engraved on the rocks at Orongo.

And the hands.

The female's body is so worn that you can't see them,

but on the male figure they're still plain -

hugely elongated, as by now you might expect,

but with not five but six fingers.

And an unhuman-like number of fingers elsewhere in Polynesia

is used to indicate a god.

So now I knew.

The goggling eyes and the six-fingered hands made it

clear that this figure represents a supernatural being.

And the resemblance of its face to the mask with the staring eyes

engraved on the rocks of Orongo suggest that this is Makemake.

If that is so, then this is the most complete image of him

to have survived.

Doubtless, when the people looked at their barren fields

on their once-fertile island

they had stripped of its trees,

they thought he had deserted them.

So they could have had little hesitation in exchanging

his image with Captain Cook and Mahine for some nails

and a few strips of cloth.

But in fact, of course, it was they who had betrayed him.

After the film was shown, I got a telephone call

from an anthologist friend of mine,

who said that there were two French anthropologists,

the Orliacs, husband and wife,

who were THE experts on wooden sculptures -

as against the big stone things -

the wooden sculptures from Easter Island.

And they would very much like to come and see this figure.

Would I agree to show it to them?

I have to say that I had some inhibitions.

I thought they're going to come along and they're going to say,

"Oh, yes. Well, it's interesting,

"but it's not really old," or something.

And there were things I was worried about.

I mean, it's quite light up here where it's obviously been handled,

but here it is rather dark, and I didn't know

if that was something a forger had put on it or something.

Anyway, the two French experts came up,

and I give it to them,

and Michel Orliac took it,

and he took in his hands like this,

and he started looking at it, and he didn't say anything.

And it seemed like an age,

and I was wondering what on earth he was thinking.

And eventually he said, "The Easter Islanders

"painted their figures,

"and they used a brown paint or they used a black paint.

"And the black was reserved for THE most important

"and sacred figures,

"and yours is black.

"And it has all the characteristics of at least

"the early 18th century, if not earlier.

"And this is one of the earliest figures from Easter Island

"in private hands,

"and probably one of the earliest wooden figures known."

So that was a huge relief.

And confirmed everything I could have wished.

And I only wish I could find another.