By the time European explorers, slavers and missionaries arrived in the 18th century to deliver the final blows, the island was in miserable shape. There were no trees. Food was scarce. Many animal species were extinct.
Modern archaeological theory holds that Polynesians, sailing from the settled islands far to the west, happened upon lonely little Easter Island just once. Their descendants lived in isolation for centuries. Almost all the statues faced inward, toward the people who built them, not out to sea, whence no one ever came.
Giant sculptures dominate the landscape and add some unsolved mystery to Easter Island, Chile.
(Walter Bibikow - Taxi/Getty Images)
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What that means: The people of Easter Island destroyed themselves.
Humans felled the trees to farm and support the moai building-and-moving business. At the height of this culture, according to the best guesses, there were 6,000 to 8,000 inhabitants. With not enough food, wars erupted. It's easy to imagine how, amid chaos and deprivation, people could have toppled the moai that were in some way responsible for the whole mess. And, indeed, it seems the toppling was done with spite, even hatred: In many cases, the necks of the statues were deliberately broken, their eyes gouged out.
As if there hadn't been suffering enough, in 1862 Peruvian slavers came. Slaves who were eventually returned to the island brought smallpox. By the beginning of the 20th century, Easter Island had about 200 inhabitants. They were restricted to the tiny village of Hanga Roa, while the rest of the island was leased to a British sheep farming company. The sheep ate the last of the shrubs and grass, and the winds blew away whatever fertile soil remained.
Today, tourism is about the only industry. People now travel those once unimaginable distances to see the statues, scores of which have been hoisted up again by archaeologists intent on proving one or another theory.
Easter Island, also called Isla de Pascua in Spanish and Rapa Nui in the native tongue, now has about 3,500 residents. They're descended from the remaining Rapa Nui people as well as mainland Chileans. They almost all live in Hanga Roa, a seaside village of colorful one- and two-story buildings, perhaps six or 10 sprawling blocks long and half as wide, with some paved roads. The roads are heavily traveled -- even though the distances are short and you can walk just about everywhere in town, residents drive a lot.
The story we heard -- who knows whether it's true? -- is that the filming of the 1994 Kevin Costner-produced flop movie "Rapa Nui" (no, you didn't see it) brought so much cash to a place where there's not much to buy that everyone ordered cars from the mainland.
The night we arrived on Easter Island, after a 5 1/2-hour flight from Santiago, we wandered to the bar of our hotel, a cluster of cottages backing onto the ocean road. In a mix of my shaky Spanish and her shaky English, the owner and I reviewed the basics -- where we were from, how long we were staying. And then she took out a big coffee-table book of photos to show me where we would be going.
As the book made clear, we would see moai.
