Horizons

Standing eternally with their stout backs to the sea, these dark stone gods protect us from the world’s evil.

When the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen spotted the island on Easter Sunday 1722, it was the remotest inhabited spot on the face of the earth. The 2,000 islanders were forced to hack out a living in a barren land, surviving on chickens (and perhaps rats) carried to this forsaken spot by their ancestors.

It wasn’t always that way. The first (and only) wave of settlers arrived in double-hulled canoes in the fourth century A.D. (as determined by radiocarbon tests on reeds from a grave) at a fertile oasis in the desert sea. The thickly forested island was a breeding ground for many species of birds; and it was so hospitable to human life that the seaborne population (perhaps as few as a 100 people) grew to around 15,000 souls by 1400 A.D.