Easter Island (6 page)

The windowless building sat before her like a giant gray brick. Little had been done to disguise its utilitarian purposes. No guava or cypress trees here, no nasturtiums or daisies. In white letters,
SOCIEDAD DE ARQUEOLOGÍA DE AMÉRICA DEL SUR
fringed the building’s upper edge. Greer had arranged her lab in advance through SAAS, which had built this work space for researchers on the island a few years earlier. It was a bit of a scam, really—scientists paid for their own space and equipment yet had to acknowledge themselves as guests of the society in publications. Permission to do work on Easter Island was mainly the decision of the Chilean government, a lead society member.

Greer entered the building onto a long, bare corridor. Hand-lettered nameplates marked each workroom, and midway, on the right, hung her own:
DR. FARRADAY.
She opened the door and flipped the light switch up and down a few times before the three fluorescent bulbs flickered to life. Her crates were neatly stacked, the corer balanced atop them. Otherwise, the lab was nearly empty. The porous cement walls had been painted white, the rough floor, a shade of pink—coral, perhaps—in what seemed an amusing attempt at cheer. Two long metal tables, a wooden stool tucked beneath each, lined opposite walls. In the corner was a metal sink, a green garden hose snaking from its plastic pipe to a water source outside. Beside it stood a small white refrigerator for her core samples. A column of bare shelves rose above one of the metal tables. On the top shelf sat one dusty beaker—the only scientific instrument in the room—like a skull in a Renaissance painting, a reminder:
Science is here.

There was certainly sufficient space for her equipment. She looked down at her crates; she needed something—a crowbar, a hammer—to pry them open. Nothing like that in her gear. And the building seemed deserted. She glanced at her watch: six-thirty. First thing in the morning she could ask Ramon for a lever and come back. She set her groceries on the table at the far end, took one last look around the cavernous room, and turned to leave. As she tried to close the door, it caught on an envelope on the floor. It contained a note:

Doctor Farraday:

I have been a fan of your work for a very long time and I look forward to meeting you. I am in the last office on the right side of the hall. Also, we all have dinner at the Hotel Espíritu Thursdays 8 pm. You must join us and tell everyone about your work here. Iorana! Welcome!

Vicente Portales

Greer slid the note back inside the envelope, shut the door behind her, and tiptoed to the end of the hall. The last nameplate on the right read
DR. PORTALES.
Beneath it sat the crate she had seen on the airplane:
PORTALES.
Now she recalled the name. When she was taking samples with Thomas in Belize, she’d read about his work on Mayan hieroglyphics. But what stood out in the article was that he was young and already held a world record of some sort, something to do with hot air balloons, or mountain climbing. Something athletic.

Greer pulled a pen from her pocket, pressed the envelope against the corridor’s cement wall, and wrote
Thanks, but I’m busy settling in.
She slid it beneath Dr. Portales’s door.

She walked back to her own office, took the nameplate down, and between the words
DR
. and
FARRADAY
, she added, in small letters, the word
GREER
.

A dinner would have been nice, but it wasn’t Greer he had invited. And soon Dr. Portales would realize she was not the Dr. Farraday whose work he admired, but his widow.

Greer turned and walked down the dark corridor. A sudden fatigue had descended upon her, as though she had been swimming for hours and her hand had just touched land; more than anything, she wanted to sleep.

4

T
he warship’s interior was draped in velvet, the stateroom laid with Persian carpets, the steel walls hung with gilt-framed watercolors of the Bois de Boulogne. On the tables sat glasses of champagne, splayed decks of cards, jade ashtrays spilling cigarettes, cups of jasmine tea. On a bench beneath a map of the Kaiser’s Pacific coaling stations lay an onyx chessboard, the king stranded in eternal checkmate. The rooms were thick with smoke, with people, with laughter. At that very moment, a
Kapitänleutnant
was telling a joke:
So there’s a Brit, a German, and a Chinaman and the genie tells them each to make a wish. . . .

We’ve heard this before!
someone hollered. It was always the Brits, the Germans, and the Chinamen—the usual crowd on the warships at Tsingtao Harbor, in China’s Yellow Sea.

Not this one . . .

All right, all right, go ahead. . . .

Then into the smoke-filled room floated the forgotten sound of the wireless, the radio’s ancient crackle. There was a shuffle, and soon an officer broke into the festivity. The phonograph’s needle was lifted.

The archduke’s assassination, he said, it has begun a war.

There was a moment of silence as they all looked at one another. What these men had spent years been practicing for, what they had spent the past month anticipating, had now arrived.

So the British stood and dusted their lapels. The Chinese set their cups down. A strange energy pervaded the room—a game, they all knew, had begun. And, like children agreeing to close their eyes and count to ten while someone hides, they extended politenesses. Hands were shaken, apologies offered. In German and English and Chinese, good-byes were said. Soon the Germans, hundreds of men barely twenty years old, were left amid the silence of their festooned warship, imagining, no doubt, that awful sound—one-two-three-four-five—unsure, though, who was counting and who was supposed to hide. They were in China, thousands of miles from Germany, from home. What did this mean?

For this answer, the men looked to Vice Admiral Graf von Spee, striding into the abandoned elegance, the halted party of peacetime, in his gold-trimmed uniform.

“Men,” he said. “Prepare the ship. Strip it for war and await further orders.”

So the tapestries were hauled down, the carpets pulled from the floors. Into the bay they tossed everything: armchairs, sofas, pianos, paintings. The men, leaning over the gunwale, watched as porcelain vases bobbed across the harbor, as guitars and mandolins cartwheeled in the whitecaps. These waters, in which their ships had been moored for years, now seemed foreboding. It was only a matter of time before the British tried to begin a blockade and sink them at anchor, then only a matter of time before the Russians, the French, and the Japanese, perhaps, began the hunt as well.

They knew they must escape—but to where?

Amid the chaos, someone in the wardroom, a young officer with foresight, surveyed the now-naked room of steel and said to his friends beside him, “And so history is written.”

Von Spee, studying his logbook, heard this and looked up. With a hint of that arrogance for which he was famous, he said to his men: “And so we will write it.”

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

5

Data Compiled for Professor Edward Beazley
by the Royal Geographical Society
Lowther Lodge, Kensington Gore

Te Pito O Te Henua, Known as Rapa Nui;
Commonly Called Easter Island,
South Pacific Ocean
Latitude 28°10'S, Longitude 109°30'W

1722 (Easter Day): Admiral Jacob Roggeveen (Netherlands):
First documented contact with a naked population of mixed race who worshipped huge statues, “squatting on their heels with heads bowed down. . . . The stone images at first caused us to be struck with astonishment because we could not comprehend how it was possible that people who are destitute of heavy or thick timber, and also of stout cordage, out of which to construct gear, had been able to erect them; nevertheless some of these statues were a good thirty feet in height and broad in proportion.” Some natives were noted as having slit earlobes hanging to their shoulders, which they could tie up over the edges of their ears. Inhabitants were described as cheerful, peaceful, and well mannered, but expert at thievery. They swam and paddled to the ship in frail canoes.
Through a misunderstanding, one native was shot aboard ship and a dozen were shot ashore. A tablecloth and several hats were recorded missing from the admiral’s ship.

1770: Don Felipe González (Spain):
Reported that the natives had their own script. He estimated a population of three thousand, but no children were to be seen. He noted large statues speckling the coast. A declaration addressed to His Majesty Carlos III of Spain was presented to natives who signed their names (in the form of birds and curious figures) “with every sign of joy and happiness.” The island was renamed San Carlos Island. After four days the Spaniards left and never returned to their “territory.”

1774: Captain James Cook:
Reported a decimated, poverty-stricken population of approximately 600 men and 30 women. Noting several heaps of stones in front of narrow descents, Cook suspected a network of underground caves in which natives were hiding. The natives refused access to these areas. The colossi were no longer venerated, and most looked to have been toppled. A Tahitian on board partially able to understand native dialect determined that the colossi were not divine images but memorials to deceased persons.

Cook noted in his journal: “We could hardly conceive how these islanders, wholly unacquainted with any mechanical power, could raise such stupendous figures. . . . They must have been a work of immense time, and sufficiently show the ingenuity and perseverance of the islanders in the age in which they were built; for the present inhabitants have most certainly had no hand in them, as they do not even repair the foundations of those going to decay.”

The expedition left with a small supply of sweet potatoes.

1786: Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse (France):
Noted approximately two thousand people on the island; Frenchmen were admitted to caves and subterranean passages where women and children had been hiding; it is believed the peaceful conduct of Captain Cook allowed for this access. Attempts to introduce pigs, goats, and sheep unsuccessful.

1864:
Brother Eugène Eyraud, a French Catholic missionary, settled on the island; it is believed that the majority of the population converted to Christianity. No statues were in upright position.

1877:
Population: 111 (reports of a smallpox epidemic related to raids by Peruvian slavers).

1886:
Visitation by George S. Cook, Surgeon, United States Navy, aboard the USS
Mohican.

1888:
Annexation by Chile.

The Society wishes these questions pursued by investigators:

How were the colossal statues crafted? Transported? Were they made by ancestors of current inhabitants or an earlier, vanished race?

What caused the uniform collapse of the colossi?

Is the script noted by González related to other known writing? What has been recorded in this script?

Are natives related to other Polynesians or to South Americans?

What is the diet?

What is the family structure? The current ratio of men to women?

Is or has polygamy been practiced?

It is March 1912.

Through the gray Atlantic the White Star liner steams forward. Three thick chimneys crown the boat. Just beyond the compass bridge, past the captain’s quarters, Alice and Elsa share a small wood-paneled cabin. Their new leather vanity cases rest on the dresser; on the butler table sits Pudding’s cage. The room is elegant, tidy. It is in Edward’s cabin, one door down, that they have jammed the crates of tents and saddlery and reference books. “Our equipment is rather important, and we can’t have it walloped around in the cargo bay,” he explains to any passengers who see him emerging, harried, from this maze of gear. Brushing off his jacket, he says, “We are going on an expedition.”

In fact, at any opportunity, Edward speaks of the trip. At breakfast, at tea, as he passes the sugar across the finely laid table, he says, “Did we mention that after this we are making our way to the South Pacific?” Sometimes he asks, “Do you have family in Boston?” or “Is it business that takes you to Massachusetts?” merely to await the same question, so that he can respond, “Boston is a mere starting point for us!” He converses with architects, with American steel magnates, with lonely Cambridge dowagers, displaying with strangers, notes Elsa, an ease he is unable to muster with her.

On the fifth day, when they awake to thunderclouds bruising the horizon, they retreat to the red-carpeted lounge for a game of bezique. There they are approached by an elderly man who announces that he is Andreas Lordet of Belgium, that he is an experienced traveler, that for three years he administered the famous Lemaire copper mine in the Congo, and that he intends, for a brief interval, to join them.

The man sits; he looks wearily at the rain-smeared windows. He is waiting, he says, for his wife to join him. Then slowly, meticulously, he scans them: Edward first, then Elsa, then Alice. His eyes rest a moment on Alice, intrigued by the wad of playing cards held tightly in her hand, and by the way she holds the cards out in front of her, as though unsure of whether to offer them, magicianlike, or to embrace them. With a quick flash of his wrinkled hand, he summons the waiter and orders a gin.

“Congo,” Edward says. “I myself spent extensive time in German East Africa. I am an anthropologist and we are now, all of us, in fact, beginning an expedition to Easter Island.”

“Ah, yes. Anthropology,” the man ponders. “Hmmmph.” His eyes close, opening only when he hears the waiter approach with his drink. “
Merci
,” he tells the man, followed by a long swallow of gin.