Tag
#pacific
2 articles
The Moai of Easter Island: The Statues That Walked
Rapa Nui — Easter Island — is one of the loneliest places inhabited by human beings, a small volcanic triangle in the southeastern Pacific more than three thousand kilometres from the coast of Chile and some two thousand from the nearest inhabited island. On this remote speck of land, a Polynesian society created one of the most recognisable bodies of monumental art in the world: the moai, nearly a thousand colossal stone figures, carved from volcanic rock and raised on stone platforms to gaze inland over the people they were made to protect. For centuries, outsiders looked at these statues on their treeless island and asked how so 'primitive' a people could have made and moved them — a question that led, at its worst, to fantasies of lost continents and ancient astronauts, and, more insidiously, to a powerful modern morality tale in which the islanders supposedly destroyed their own environment, felled their last tree to haul their idols, and collapsed into famine and war: a cautionary fable of self-inflicted ecological ruin. Both the wonder and the warning turn out to be built on misunderstanding. The moai are unmistakably the work of the Rapanui themselves; recent experiments suggest they were 'walked' upright to their platforms, exactly as island tradition always said; and the story of ecological suicide has been steadily dismantled, revealing instead a resilient people whose real catastrophe came not from within but from the arrival of outsiders. This is the story of the statues that walked.
Amelia Earhart and the Speck in the Pacific
On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart — the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo, the most celebrated aviator on earth — took off from Lae, in New Guinea, with her navigator Fred Noonan, bound for a flat coral speck in the central Pacific called Howland Island. It was the most dangerous leg of an attempt to circle the globe near the equator: more than 2,500 miles of open ocean to a target a mile and a half long and twenty feet high, which they had to find by dead reckoning and the stars after a night and a morning over featureless water. A United States Coast Guard cutter, the Itasca, waited off Howland to guide them in by radio and to lay a column of smoke. It was never needed. Through the morning the Itasca's crew heard Earhart's voice growing tense as she searched for an island she could not see — 'We must be on you but cannot see you… gas is running low' — and then, in her last understood transmission, a line of position and the words that she was running north and south along it. After that there was silence. The largest air and sea search in American history to that date found nothing: no plane, no wreckage, no bodies. Earhart and Noonan were declared lost, and in the decades since, their disappearance has hardened into the most enduring mystery in the history of flight, fought over by three incompatible theories — that they ran out of fuel and sank near Howland; that they came down as castaways on a different island and died there; and that they fell into Japanese hands and never came home. This article sets out what is actually known about the flight and its final hours, and weighs the rival explanations — the plausible, the contested, and the long-debunked — against the evidence.
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