The following is my translation of an article called: 'Die Rätsel der Osterinsel' von T. Kellen. It appeared in a German popular science magazine, Kosmos Handweiser für Naturfreunde 1923, Heft 4, Seiten 102-108. I'm not aware of any previous translation.
No great effort has been put into transposing the style of the original article, and I've not found confirmation concerning the use of the name Papagonei for Easter Island. Other names have been standardised to current forms when possible; eg. Mas a Fuera is used instead of Mas a Fuero from the original.
Some information will undoubtedly be long past its sell-by date. For example, it's now known that trees were not always largely absent from the environment. Several other points mentioned also require caution. As is mentioned in the article, people on Easter Island developed a form of writing at some stage: "It is a strongly developed picture script that obviously had something to do with an earlier population..." While obvious to some, it's not certain this was the work of an earlier population. It could perhaps be an indigenous development set off by the arrival of literate Europeans with curious habits. There's no clear evidence showing how old that script is.
With regards to New Guinea: "The leader of a research expedition organised, in 1889, by a Dutch newspaper, came across the unmistakable remains and traces of earlier agriculture in Dutch New Guinea, when he pressed into the heart of a highland area far from the nearest human settlement of today." It wasn't until the 1930s that the highland areas began to be flown over by aeroplanes, and earlier assumptions were shown to be wrong. Population levels there turned out to be far higher than was anticipated, and farming was (and still is) the main source of food. While the origins of agriculture on New Guinea date back many thousands of years, similar methods are still in use today. Rather than being "far from the nearest human settlement", the highlands were home to most people.

Trevor Dykes.

The riddles of Easter Island by T. Kellen
Easter Island lies in the great confusion of islands of the Pacific Ocean and it is the most easterly inhabited island, whereas the rocky ones Salas and Gomez are somewhat further east but uninhabited. Both those islands belong to far distant Chile on the west coast of South America.

Many have read Chamisso's poem 'Salas y Gomez' possibly without knowing where those islands are. The author was there himself on his voyage around the world, and landed on Easter Island too, which is also known from the reports of other travelling discoverers. Recently, it has been stated from various parties that Easter Island, as a consequence of the earthquake which sought out Chile during the night from the 10th to 11th of November 1922, had sunk into the sea. This conclusion was based on the fact that a message sent to a telegraph station there received no reply. Furthermore, the captain of a passing ship stated that he was no longer able to see the island. Newer reports, however, do not confirm this, and we may therefore assume that the island still stands.

Easter Island offers much that is ethnologically remarkable. It is the most easterly of the Polynesian islands and is also called Waihu, Teapi, Papagonei or Rapanui (Rapa Nui). It lies on the southern longitude of 27° 10' and western latitude 109° 26', and has an area of 118 square kilometres but, contrary to previous periods, it is now only sparsely populated. According to the most recent figures there were 150 inhabitants, so almost a square kilometre is available for each resident. The landing place is Cook Bay. Chile took possession of the island in 1888 as a penal colony.

It is an island of volcanic mountains with steep, poorly accessible cliffs. The earlier residents were said to have similarities with Tahitians. Various fruits and sugar cane were planted. The completely treeless island should now be able to feed rather many animals.

The island was rediscovered on Easter Day of 1712 (thus its name) by the Dutchman Roggeveen, and his companions included the German Behrens, but it had already previously been visited by Mendana in 1566 and Davis in 1688, only then to be forgotten. Cook landed in 1774 and gave a picture of its inhabitants in his account of his voyage, but today they have a less savage expression of face. He was followed by La Pérouse in 1786, who also provided a fine account of the island.

The German poet, Adalbert von Chamisso, who was of French descent, took part in the discovery expedition on the brig Rurik in the years of 1815-1818 (Captain Otto von Koßebua), which sailed round the world, and the diary he kept, with illustrations as well as comments, was published. Chamisso writes: "The 28th March 1816 was the day of joy; the first meeting made with people of this attractive tribe, and the first wonderful purpose of the voyage to reach fulfilment! - As with a wide, gorgeously greened dome Easter Island lifted itself from the sea, the variously coloured compartments of fields on the slopes bore witness to the state of the culture, smoke rose from the hills; as we neared the beach of Cook Bay the people gathered themselves together; as two boats (they appeared to possess no more) left from the beach and approached us - I was as happy as a child; older, only in the sense that I was also delighted by knowing how much I could still find delightful. The passing moments of our landing attempt were soon over and, surrounded by the excitement and noise of child-like people, it was like being in a thrall. I more gave away all iron, knives, scissors, all that I had brought, than I traded it and only, I know not how, received a fine fishing net in exchange."

Chamisso added more detail in the second part of his account. In that he states:

"Easter Island rises majestically from the waves, with its wide domed spine being triangular, the angle provided by a pyramid-like mountain. This is reflected on a smaller scale by the wonderfully quiet profile of O-Waihi. It appears to be completely clad with fresh green, the earth everywhere, even on the steep slopes of the mountain, divided into straight fields, which are pleasing through their various arrays of colour, and in which many yellow blossoms stand. We were astonished that these volcanic stones were covered with wondrous soils given the shortage of wood and water! We believe that we could distinguish some of the local sculptured columns, which raise so much wonder, through the telescope on the southeastern coast. In Cook Bay on the west coast, which is where we had lowered anchor, there used to be examples of such busts marking the landing place, and which Lisiansky had also seen, but they are no longer present.

"Two canoes (we only saw three on the whole island) were encountered by us, each crewed by two men, but the men did not dare to board our ship. They circled a boat we then sent out and barter trading opened while afloat. The unfaithfulness of one of the traders was strictly punished. We let a second boat into the sea so as to attempt a landing. Numerous people waited peacefully, happily, noisily, impatient, child-like and chaotically on the shore. To agree with La Pérouse, that these people children are to be pitied and are not as restrained as their brothers, would not reflect our impression. It may have been this opinion which made dealings with them more difficult. We neared the beach. Everything let rip, yells and cries, peace signs, threatening stones and shots, symbols of friendship were exchanged. Finally, swimmers dared to reach us by the dozen and bartering began, during which they were very talkative. All -with repeated calls: Höe! Höe!- coveted knives or iron in exchange for fruits and roots and the fine fishing nets which they offered to swap. A short while later we stood on the land.

"These people, who have been described as so unfortunate, appeared to us to have beautiful expressions, a pleasing and imposing physiognomy, a well built, slim and healthy build of body, and to attain old age without becoming decrepit. The eyes of an artist would rejoice indeed at seeing a still more beautiful nature than can be known from the bathing places in Europe offered by his own school. The blue wide lines of tattoos artistically follow the run of the muscles, and they present a pleasing effect on the brown background of the skin. There appears to be no shortage of tapa cloth. White or yellow coats are generally made from it. Reefs of fresh leaves are worn in the sometimes long and sometimes short hair. Head dresses of black feathers are rarer; we noticed delicate necklaces which were decorated with a polished muscle. No ugly or off-putting mutilations were apparent to us. The only intrusions were that ear lobes were bored through, and enlarged ones were pressed together, but the hole was fully filled and invisible. The incisor teeth were often broken out. A few young people differed from the rest in that their skin was much lighter. Only a few of the women, those with dark red coloured faces, were without attraction and appeal and, as it appeared, without respect from among the men. Some of them held a baby to the breast. Therefore, we came to no conclusion about the actual relative numbers of both sexes.

If we compare our own experiences with the reports of Cook, La Pérouse, Lisiansky, then the assumption arises that the population of Easter Island has increased and the conditions of the islanders have improved. Whether the well intentioned objectives of the humane Louis 16th have been achieved, who sought to ensure through La Pérouse that these people should receive our domestic animals, useful plants and fruit trees, was something we could not learn, and we must doubt it; we saw only the products recorded by Cook, bananas, sugar cane, roots and very small chickens. -As we raised the anchor one evening refreshing clouds touched the heights of the island.- We have presumed to identify the reason for the somewhat uncertain reception which we received on Easter Island, and have since learned to look more at ourselves to explain the cause, in that we call these people savages."

As to the meaning of that final comment, Chamisso gave a longer explanation in his diary, and the essentials are as follows. An unnamed American, Captain of the Beautiful Ranch, had discovered a genus of seal in the year 1800 on the island of Mas a Fuera, west of Juan Fernandez (the famous island of Robinson Crusoe), and the Russians name these seals kotick (sea cats). The pelts of these animals were sold in China for very high prices and, consequently, the American was passionate to hunt. The dubious American had to remain under sail before the island as there was no safe anchorage. As he did not have enough crew to enable some to hunt, he sailed to Easter Island in order to shanghai men and women, whom he wanted to take to Mas a Fuera to systematically catch the kotick. However, the natives of the island staged resistance, and it was only after a bloody struggle that he was able to lead some off. While underway the men leapt overboard and he decided against trying to recapture them, as they dived under on each occasion. He left them instead to their fate and took the women to Mas a Fuera. He returned a number of times to Easter Island to capture people. This is said to be the reason why the natives were ill-disposed towards landings on their island for many years.

Chamisso also stressed that it is a mistake to call the South Sea islanders savages, as the index by which we judge our own culture (the various inventions, the coinage, writing and so on) cannot simply be transferred onto "these remote human families of island life, who live beneath this sunny sky with no yesterday or tomorrow, and live for the moment and the enjoyment".

In the subsequent time Easter Island has been approached by various war ships (an English, a Chilean and two French). Especially noteworthy was a visit by a German gunboat Hyäne (1882), the captain of which, Lieutenant Captain Geiseler, had been asked to investigate the island by wish of the Ethnology Department of the Royal Museum of Berlin. The report resultant from that to the Admiralty appeared in print under the title of 'Easter Island, a site of prehistoric culture in the South Sea'. It is a rich collection of notices obviously written with copious effort, but they do not really address the relevant problems. Nevertheless, the material does contain something of worth, the carefully executed lithographic plates (with the original drawings be J. Weißler), and five pictures from those are reproduced here in a smaller size.

The German researcher, Dr Walter Knoche, who visited the island about ten years ago, put the number of inhabitants at that time at 228 whereas, in the year 1870, it still stood at 600. He said that earlier, it was ten times more but, in the middle of the last century, Peruvian pirates had plagued them. At the time Peru imagined that the French government would return surviving islanders from the guano excavations of the Chinca Islands, but they had fallen victim to the pox and many died. As this epidemic broke out leprosy also arrived, probably via Tahiti, and more than 10% of the islanders fell victim to that.

The population is pure Polynesian as judged by the physical build and language. Dr Knoche believes that they probably arrived between 1300 and 1600 AD from one of the Oceanic islands belonging today to France; namely that they have ethnographical connections with the Marquesan groups. Their language is described as being similar to Hawaiian.

Legends say that two large canoes arrived commanded by Hot-Matua; in these boats were also chickens, bataten, used for the preparation of the tapa cloth from the paper mulberry trees, James roots and so on; in short, all the products belonging to the natives before the arrival of the Europeans; botanical research showed that all plants reached the entirely volcanic island from elsewhere; the wild occurring species on the currents of the sea and air, the domestic plants came with the people. Indeed, we also know that those Oceanians transported their entire households, many foodstuffs, fire etc. in their seaworthy boats, and that is the only way to account for the habitation of remote archipelagos such as, for example, the Hawaii group.

Wood has apparently always been short on Easter Island, so no extensive sea voyages were possible. That explains why Roggeveen only found a few self-built canoes. It is also not to be assumed that there were some connections or other between Polynesia and South America for, apart from anything else, the harbours on the west coast of South America have evidence of only very little shipping in earlier days.

On the other hand, it is certainly possible that occasional, isolated Oceanians may have reached there, and some few of their words have been preserved in Chile and Bolivia.

Very recently investigations have been undertaken on Easter Island as, it was believed, a prehistoric culture must have ruled. An Australian professor named Brown had maintained, that Easter Island was the centre or an island empire in the Pacific Ocean four or five hundred years ago, and much of the island then sank due to a powerful oceanic earthquake. As this empire would have lain over 40 hours voyage from the coast of Chile, it cannot be ruled out that an earthquake could have occurred which went unnoticed on the mainland; but these assumptions have been criticised by others, although it is accepted that volcanic islands, and others, could earlier have been somewhat larger.

Shortly before the outbreak of the World War, the British Museum of London sent a sail schooner on a research visit to Easter Island, the members of which then remained for ten months. According to their report, the German naval unit, which was subsequently destroyed near the Falkland Islands, and the cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich had both sought out the island in order to replenish provisions.

If the stone monuments were known to Chamisso, and his report confirms that they were, then the briefness of his stay may have given him little opportunity to look into the matter. It could also be that he regarded them as nothing more than mere curiosities.

More attention has been paid by other researching travellers to these stone monuments which occur all over the island, around 500 giant images hewn out of the lava of an extinct volcano, certainly five to ten metres in height, with a few even reaching 23 metres, sometimes still standing and others lying prone on the ground. Precisely as was the case for the dolmens earlier, these have provided the occasion for contradictory interpretations (Celtic sacrificial altars for the druids, gravestones of chieftains), and all kinds of suggestions have been made. Dolmens are not just found in Western Europe, but also in other parts of the world with savage peoples. Dolmens and sculptured monuments, which are obviously in stark contrast to the wooden huts of South Sea natives of today, are not only found on Easter Island, but rather they occur across the entire breadth of the great ocean including the coral island of Ponape, not all that far from the coast of Japan, in the area of which they are especially numerous and varied. It soon seemed evident that these stone constructions, which are far beyond the present technological capacity of the natives, could be the graves of chieftains and idols for ancestor worship, or may have been houses and fortifications, or perhaps even distribution channels for water, quays or even streets. All these in a naturally primitive form which completely forbids comparisons with the architecture of the American Mayas, Aztecs and Ketschues. However, they remain more than enough of a riddle. How could one manage to erect basalt columns and lava blocks weighing two to four tons? That is a question which still remains puzzling despite the explanation attempted by Geiseler.

The natives name the stone monuments moais. They also do not appear to have a precise account for their origin or purpose. All they know to report from their legends is as follows: The land was previously (meaning prior to the arrival of the Polynesians) settled by the Long Ears. They erected the monuments and demanded help for this from the newly arrived Short Ears. When the Short Ears had increased sufficiently in number, they rose up against the original inhabitants of the island, defeated them, killed them all and burned them in a trench. On orders from their queen they then brought the sculptures down.

Dr Knoche assumes that the monoliths were depictions of ancestors, and were raised above family graves. He believes that the first inhabitants of the island came from the west. The name Long Ears comes from the size of the ear lobes, which hung down to the shoulders, a custom which was later adopted by the Short Ears but then given up again. This kind of extension is not Polynesian, but rather indicates Melanesian connections; also the building of stone houses, as was usual in the past on Easter Island, is a practice found in areas beyond the actual Polynesian islands.

However, it is difficult to say anything exact about the first residents; maybe it was a population which arrived from the west, today's island world of the East Pacific.

Although the religion of the natives plays no significant role, one does find small stone idols from older times, and wooden idols which may have been produced as barter goods for strangers. Their main god is Make-Make, the Creator, who is depicted in the form of a chiselled sea bird. As this deity eats the souls of the deceased, should they have done evil, the bodies were not buried but rather left below one of the fallen monuments so that, should Make-Make come, they would not be able to escape him. Only the elite were interred in special stone buildings, but these had to have two openings through which the soul could be released should it be followed.

As well as the imposing stone monuments, subterranean homes and passages with unusual paintings have also been discovered here and there on Easter Island. These also led to conclusions that the earlier residents had a distinct culture.

Another puzzle posed by Easter Island is the question of a picture script found there, and examples can be seen on some of the columns and on wooden boards. It is a strongly developed picture script that obviously had something to do with an earlier population, but nobody has yet been able to decipher it, which is understandable enough, as the Hieroglyphics of Egypt had much stronger affinities for European academics, and it took centuries until they were decoded, and that might not yet have happened if it had not been for the discovery of the Rosetta Stone with its three languages. The picture tables of Easter Island provide no obvious key for clarity concerning their origins. The script presumably did not develop on the island itself as, among the hieroglyphic-like symbols can be found pictures of snakes, while no snakes at all occur either on the island itself or in the neighbouring sea. Perhaps later, something will be found on other islands, or in Australia or America, which will enable this puzzle to be understood.

The script was usually written with sharp splinters of volcanic glass on flat wood, and only rarely was it chiselled in a more permanent form. The wooden boards have been interpreted by Geiseler as registers of descendants. One also finds script symbols on wooden breastplates, which were worn earlier by kings or chieftains, and are decorated at both ends with carvings of gods.

Was there previously in the South Sea, centuries and longer before the arrival of the Europeans, a considerably more highly developed culture with the denser population level? There are good reasons for believing there used to be a larger population. The leader of a research expedition organised, in 1889, by a Dutch newspaper, came across the unmistakable remains and traces of earlier agriculture in Dutch New Guinea, when he pressed into the heart of a highland area far from the nearest human settlement of today. Nevertheless, it appears to have escaped his attention that this could have resulted from an only temporary increase in population, which gave the misleading appearance of a much higher cultural level. He expresses himself on this theme as follows: "The in many cases not to be underestimated, rather, the truly astonishingly impressive cultural achievements of the greatest natural peoples, have always been, as they arose on a much more limited foundation when compared to our European culture, more episodic and, therefore, short lived. When one just considers the drum language of the Cameroon negroes, this enabled an excellent system of long distance communication when Europe did not yet know the inventions of the telegraph and telephone (see Weule). When one encounters the bronze sculptures of the Benin negroes, which are reminiscent of the heights of classical Greece, then there is hardly anything in our modern technology which is worthy of being placed alongside them. Dozens of similar examples could be cited. These are all, however, sparks of culture which are quickly followed by darkness. Also the Polynesians of the South Sea, comparable with the Malays, succeeded with voyages of distance and endeavour long before Columbus. Why then should not these Polynesians, who are still in their way masters of art with their unsophisticated stone tools, once not have tried living in primitive constructions of stone, as may not have been the case for old German tribes but, in still earlier times, was done by the builders of dolmens? Every culture is, as is not only shown by the ruins in the South Sea but also by evidence on American ground, somewhat transitionary. Should we be tempted to hold our broadly based European culture as indestructible, because it has been an uninterrupted ascent since the Dark Ages and the fall of the classical Greco-Roman culture, then the World War and its consequences have taught us that would be a mistake. We are unmistakably in a time of cultural decline and, if rather than a sense of common good, predatory self-serving interests are allowed to prevail, one does not need an all too fanciful bent of mind in order to imagine that, as is today the case for Memphis, Babylon, Persepolis and so on, then desert sands and grass could one day grow over Berlin, Paris, London and New York."

That may sound very pessimistic, and we do not wish to believe in such possibilities in the foreseeable future, but it can naturally not be ruled out that, in lands which today receive none of our attention, a new culture will arise which could not only cast that of old Europe completely into the shadow, but also that of the younger America. Cultural lands can culturally sink and submerge just as a stretch of land can be destroyed by an earthquake, or an island can be swallowed by the sea.

An index of more of my translations of old Kosmos articles can be found at:

Kosmos Translations Archive

A number of Mesozoic (and post-Mesozoic) location summaries can be found at Localities.