Windswept volcanic rocks assaulted at every angle by the ferocity of the Ocean in which it lies, Easter Island has kindled the imaginations of Europeans with its unexplained humanoid statues since it was given its name by Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen who sighted it in April 1771. The mysterious megaliths on Rapa Nui (the Polynesian name for the island), which admittedly reassembles silent Gods watching over their subjects have been a source of shrouded mystery for many European writers. Long trying to locate answers for the megaliths and the foreboding ecological disaster that left the island a desert in the ocean, Europeans have thought up many possible theories, some bordering on the extremes of human imagination.

From passable and more prevalent theories of a once highly intelligent Polynesian civilisation who arrived by ocean voyaging boats, certain experts have invoked the extraordinary hypothesis that the island was an extra terrestrial colony, or a gateway to a parallel universe. The mystery of the island has influenced many European writers, such as Pierre Loti who wrote in his book, L'Ile de Pâques: “In the middle of the Great Ocean in a region where no one ever passes, there is a mysterious and isolated island, empty and moving vastness surrounds it. “It is planted with tall, monstrous statues, the work of some now vanished race, and its past remains an enigma.”

According to the author of “The Enigmas Of Easter Island, Island On The Edge” Paul Bahn, the island is not such a mystery, the megaliths were built by islanders from the soft volcanic rock of which the island has a plentiful supply, to commemorate ancestors or solemnize their death. As for the reasons for erecting these megaliths, Bahn believes the islanders had simply little else to do on their island but to carve rock.

Bahn who considers the island’s art as being based upon a “birdman cult” describes the engravings on wooden panels discovered by French missionary resident Eugène Eyraud as not the work of extra terrestrials but the recently deciphered Rongorongo script. The Rongorongo script displays many familiar symbols that although may appear to be simplistic in nature, are objects that are important to the everyday existence of a Polynesian islander; such symbols include fish nets, boats, birds, fish and human figures.

The objects represented by hieroglyphs represent an island community that was not only literate and intelligent enough to compose writing, but a people who lived in harmony with nature in an environment rich in natural resources. Promise of virgin and fertile land attracted Polynesians from long distances, who are estimated to have arrived in small numbers between 400 and 1000 AD and whose population peaked in later centuries as high as 20,000. But why did this number decline by the 18th century and the island fall into a barren state or neglect?

Researcher Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii believes that the early Polynesians were themselves responsible for the ecological ruination and destruction of their island, as the inhabitants began shaving the land of all its trees to build canoes around 1200AD. Hunt claims that the early Polynesians must have brought rats with them, as the island’s rat population multiplied as much as 20 million in the 13th and 14th centuries, eating away at the subtropical plant life. After the forest had been depleted, the rat population naturally declined to around a million, but as can be expected the devastation caused by the vermin had detrimental effects on the islanders who Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen claimed during his visit in 1721, numbered less than a thousand and had only enough food supplies for themselves.

In 1774, British explorer Captain James Cook observed that the inhabitants appeared poverty stricken and were inclined to swindle. He noted in his diary: “The inhabitants of this island do not exceed six or seven hundred souls, and about two-thirds of those we saw were males. “There can be few places which afford less convenience for shipping than it does. “Here is no safe anchorage, no wood for fuel; nor any fresh water worth taking on board, nature has been exceedingly sparing of her favours to this spot.” With its comatose landscape long devoid of palm trees and wildlife, the island had reached a serious point of degeneration. In later years, French navigator and humanist explorer, Jean François Galaup, Comte de la Pérouse who visited the island with his team of French Royal gardeners realised the scarcity of plant life and trees brought seeds of cabbages, carrots, beetroots, maize and pumpkins to the islanders. Seeds of lemon and orange trees were also given to the poverty stricken islanders as well as pigs, sheep and goats.

The 19th century marked the near extermination of the islanders as private Russian and American adventurers and whalers keen on profit at all costs captured many islanders to use as slaves for seal-hunting. The final nail was hammered into the coffin in 1862 when a Peruvian ship almost cleared the island of its menfolk by carrying them away as slaves to be sold to guano mining companies in Peru. Nearly all of these unfortunate islanders never returned, dying from poor working conditions, exhaustion or disease in the mines. In later years the Bishop of Tahiti, used his influence to repatriate some islanders to Easter Island, about one hundred returned, but of these eighty-five died from disease en route.

The unexciting but blunt truth is that Easter Island is no enigma, no runway for extra terrestrials and no gateway to Nirvana, but rather a centre of a highly culturally sophisticated and advanced Polynesian civilisation that brought on its own demise by a nescience of physical facts. With the seeds of destruction sown by the early Polynesians, who over-stretched the agricultural resources of the island, for centuries the growing population of rats uncontested by any predators ate their way through the islands palm seeds and plants.