Group Reads Discussion - The Mystery of Easter Island

[SRC Moderator, Moderator]

This is the discussion thread for the Spring 2024 Group Read The Mystery of Easter Island: The Story of an Expedition in the category Gutenberg Classic. Please post your comments here. This thread is not restricted to those choosing this book for task 20.10, feel free to join in the discussion. Warning- spoilers ahead!

The requirement for task 20.10: You must participate in the book's discussion thread below with at least one post about the contents of the book or your reaction to the book after you have read the book.

[Molly]

I was excited to see that this book was selected for the task because I had read Undreamed Shores: The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology by Frances Larson earlier in the year, which detailed the studies of female anthropologists in the early 1900s, including those of Katherine Routledge. The book discussed her first journey to Africa with her husband, their subsequent voyage to Easter Island, and finally his theft of her generational wealth and forced institutionalisation until her death. For the fascinating and groundbreaking history of her life, I was keen to read this book.

It was originally researched over 100 years ago, and some of the passages are outdated, politically incorrect in current times, and a little bit dry, but overall the experience of reading such a detailed journey about one of the first academically recognised female anthropologists on a groundbreaking expedition to Easter Island was educational, interesting, exciting, and offered a time capsule into another world not so far from our own.

Something that stood out to me was how far we have come in 100 years. It took them 14 months to make the voyage from England to Easter Island, and the tale of their travels over those 14 months is fascinating (though sometimes described in more detail than is to be desired). Their ship, Mana, travelled over 100,000 miles through the course of its journey. I think that is pretty extraordinary.

The behaviour of her staff at time made me giggle, like the American cook who jumped overboard in Hawaii because he wanted to galivant in Honolulu. Her relations to and descriptions of the people she met were filled with curiosity and interest (if you can get past the dated views she held intrinsically), and you could tell she really respected some of the “informants” as she described her trusted advisors on Easter Island.

The interaction with WWI was also fascinating, in a time when they hardly knew what was going on due to being so remote.

My interest in the book was mainly due to Katherine herself, so I will admit I skimmed over Katherine’s dastardly husband’s description of some of the aspects of sailing home (which she did not write as she took the journey overland through the USA and then by a steamer). The paragraphs of him discussing how they caught a turtle off the coast of Mexico were not exactly enthralling to me.

Katherine’s life was fascinating, and she was quite the character herself, who ultimately spent the last years of her life in quite tragic circumstances. She was on the island at a time when their history was literally dying out. A "leper" who passed away while she was on the island was her greatest source of knowledge on their engraved wooden tablets. Her research led the way for further study into Easter Island, and the following quote from her book stood out to me the most, in a world where history was experienced and shared orally only:

"Ten years ago more could have been done; ten years hence little or nothing will remain of this source of knowledge."

A fantastic book for a number of reasons, but certainly not for everyone, and I would not have enjoyed it or appreciated it so much without the context I got from Undreamed Shores.

[Nick]

Nick KY

Katherine Routledge, the wife of the leader of a British expedition to Easter Island in 1915, on board the ship built especially for that purpose, the Mana, writes of the expedition with grace and wonder. She is a first class British anthropologist, with all the prestige and also the condescension that carries. Still, this is an amazing achievement of documentation.

The first sentence of the Preface describes a parlor conversation between two women of Victorian England. One is the author, relating one of the many adventures on her accompaniment of the expedition to Easter Island. This colonialist attitude pervades the prose of the authors account of the sixteen months on Easter Island. The colonial attitude is present in what the expedition was told by Chileans about the native population of the island, the Kanaka—that they were harsh tempered and lazy and prone to freely steal from each other and white visitors (141). The author is quick to put these comments into the category of exaggeration. But the expedition was also dependent on the labor of the inhabitants to meet the needs of the servant class the visitors were used to – especially in terms of basic survival needs such as the gathering of water or heating stones for cooking. Water was collected from a crater which caught the rain, and there was very little wood or brush material to use as kindling.

The island was harsh and lonely, and the massive statues were simply stated as a part of that loneliness, their mystery lost in the wind. The wind was everything there, with its constant buffeting of the fragile land. The general feeling of the place is one of unknowing and emptiness that comes from isolation in the wild elements of wind and sea. “The dweller there is ever listening for he knows not what, feeling unconsciously that he is in the antechamber to something yet more vast which is just beyond his ken” (p. 133).

The politics of visitors is paramount to the author’s discussions. The French carpenter who lives on the island with his native wife tells of American visitors who arrive in such a disheveled state that they have to be nursed back to health. A visit from Germans is looked on with distrust as the German ships do not unload or trade with the natives. Then upon departure the Germans deposit their captured British and French prisoners on the island.

The native population viewed the prehistoric statues that we today associate with Easter Island as a natural occurrence, as commonplace as grass or water. They even wondered in disbelief about far away lands that did not have them (168). But aside from having something to do with burials, their purpose and origins were unknown. The terraces on which they stood were used contemporarily for burials also, the same purpose it was understood they had been built for. The book has a significant number of photographs of the statues, but only a few were found standing upright. Still, the ones that are upright are spooky and astounding.

The reader marvels at Mrs. Routledge's description of the voyager there and certain side excursions made to places like Pitcairn Island on their return. These introductory and final chapters of the book are great reading.

[Hannah]

I gave it a good shot but had to DNF... Yes, of course this book is written in a different time and place, but the racism just seeped through the entire book. It was too off-putting.