Why We Are Destroying Statues

In March 1774, the ships Resolution and Adventure, sailing through the remote southern Pacific under the command of Captain James Cook, landed on the shores of Easter Island. The crews obtained some much-needed supplies by trading with the Rapa Nui, the island’s few thousand Polynesian inhabitants who subsisted mainly off of gardening and fishing. They were only the third European expedition ever to make contact with the isolated landmass, but reports from a Dutch encounter half a century earlier had given Cook’s crew some idea of what to expect: a rugged landscape, with only a few freshwater springs and scattered stands of palms. Neither were the mariners surprised by the island’s most striking feature—namely, the hundreds of moai, or monu­mental stone statues, that studded the shores and hillsides. As a detach­ment of Cook’s crew, guided by several locals, set off on an inland trek, however, they sighted something that previous foreign visitors had not: near a small freshwater well, the Scottish naturalist Johann Forster noted “several large statues, which had been overturned.” On their return trek to the British ships, the party encountered “another huge statue,” apparently the largest on the island at over twenty-seven feet, “which lay overturned.”1