Books: At the Navel of the World

MYSTERIES OF EASTER ISLAND by Francis Maziere. 224 pages. Norton. $6.95.

An Athens in Antarctica might be easier to explain than the riddling ruins on Easter Island. More than 2,000 miles from the coast of Chile, still farther from the reefs of Tahiti, Easter is the world's most isolated islet: a tiny (45.5 sq. mi.) blob of wind-scraped lava jutting from the gray Pacific like a roost for passing frigate birds. Yet on its stony surface, dozens of enormous statues, known in local dialect as modi, stand and stare. Some of them rear up to a height of 40 feet; many of them wear a subtle expression that presumably only sophisticated sculptors would attempt or could achieve; the best rank among the greatest sculptures of all time. What men produced these monsters? Where did these men come from? Where did they go? How and why did they shape their scoriae colossi?

In this century, a series of expeditions, including one in 1956 led by Norway's ever-enterprising Thor Heyerdahl, have attempted unsuccessfully to answer these familiar questions. The latest expedition was led by a French ethnologist, Francis Maziere, who in 1963 took himself, his Polynesian wife and an adventurous friend to Easter Island for a nine-month stay. In this translation of his absorbing though frequently perfervid text, Maziere describes discoveries that seem to open a crack into the heart of the prehistoric puzzle. In doing so, however, he had inadvertently generated another mystery: were the discoveries made by Maziere, or did he borrow some of his facts from Father Sebastian Englert, a

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 aboard. After the crew had made a night of it, the girls were forced to swim for shore while the mate took potshots at their bare backs.

In 1862, 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 111.