Word: islanded
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Capuchin priest who lived on Easter Island and wrote two books on the subject before he died last January...
Yankee Potshots. Maziere begins his tale with an indignant account of Easter Island's sufferings in recent centuries. The island was discovered on Easter Sunday, 1722, by a Dutch admiral named Roggeveen, who was intrigued by the stone giants and observed that although some of the natives were obviously Polynesian, others had white skins and red hair. He also let his men shoot down a few indigenes after a minor misunderstanding. Subsequent Western visitors apparently felt free to kill any native on whim. In 1811, an American whaler added a touch of Yankee ingenuity. Some island girls were lured...
...Peru introduced the islanders to another benefit of civilization. A thousand of them were carried off to slave labor in the guano quarries. Five months later, when Britain and France protested the atrocity, Peru graciously shipped all 15 survivors home. They brought smallpox with them and an epidemic swept the island. By 1870, an original population of 5,000 had been reduced to exactly...
Legends, transmitted through an oral tradition, are notoriously unreliable. Yet those confided to Maziere seemed to yield strong evidence that Easter Island has passed through three epochs. In the first, the island was inhabited by "the Others," who, according to native tradition, "were yellow, very big, with long arms. They came by boat from a land that lies beyond America." It was the yellow men, Maziere believes, who created the first stone giants, the finest sculptures on the island. In the second epoch, which in Maziere's rough chronology began in the 13th century, the island was invaded...
...first clue to the sacramental significance of the figures. After a careful survey of the slopes of Rano-Raraku volcano, where 193 modi are still standing (83 have fallen), Maziere was intrigued by the fact that each giant faces in a slightly different direction. Then an old islander informed him that "each modi looks at a part of the world over which he has power and for which he is answerable." The old name of the island, he reminded Maziere, was Te Pito Te Henua-The Navel of the World...