Birdman 8

             “A myth is the name of a terrible lie told by a smelly little brown person
               to a man in a white suit with a pair of binoculars.”
                                                                                                David Antin


And the Myth of the Birdman Cult gave way underneath them all.
The hardships that the Rapanui had brought upon themselves, were about to be dwarfed by the shipfuls of sorrow the rest of the world was about to unload on them. Rongeveen’s men had shot a dozen locals stone cold, before he even hit the beach. Whalers brought smallpox and leprosy and tuberculosis and venereal disease, and blackbirders plundered and kidnapped the survivors. In 1804, the American ship Nancy abducted 12 men and 10 women as slaves to work in Mas Afuera, in the Juan Fernández Islands, where our first story began. The Polynesians jumped ship after 3 days, drowning in the direction of home. In 1822, an American whaler skipper seized a group of girls, and threw them overboard next day. One of the officers shot one, for sport. In December 1862, Peruvian slave raiders struck. Violent abductions continued for months, capturing around 1,500 men and women, half the island’s population. They carried off paramount chief Kaimakoi, together with his son and all those who knew how to read and write the Rongorongo script, to Peru’s guano islands. When the blackbirders were finally forced to repatriate the people they had kidnapped, they disembarked carriers of smallpox together with a few survivors on each of the islands, unleashing devastating epidemics all the way to the Marquesas. Easter Island’s population was reduced to the point where the dead were not even buried.
By 1900 there were only 214 inhabitants on the island, 84 of them children. The missionaries took care of them, and what remained of their collective memory. In the end it was disease and enslavement, genocide not ecocide, which caused the physical demise and cultural ruination of the Rapanui.
But the forests of 21 tree species, including the largest palms in the world at the time, Alphitonia zizypoides, and Elaeocarpus rarotongensis, that had grown 50 feet and more, were still gone, replaced by introduced weeds and grassland and erosion. Carpetbaggers and missionaries would buy up the ‘newly available lands of the deceased,’ exile even more of the Rapanui, and turn the island into a sheep ranch.
The worst of these was Jean-Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier, a French artillery officer in the Crimean War, who abandoned his wife and young son in France, and was subsequently arrested in Peru for arms dealing. By the time he arrived on Easter Island in 1868, he had amassed huge gambling debts, and burnt his boat to the waterline. A year later he kidnapped Koreto, the wife of a Rapanui, and married her. With rifles, a cannon, and some hut burning, he and his supporters managed to acquire all the land, apart from what the missionaries had around Hanga Roa, and ran the island as its ‘governor,’ appointing Koreto as Queen. By the time that Dutrou-Bournier had moved his natives to Tahiti to work on the plantations, and the missionaries had evacuated theirs to the Gambiers, to prevent him from recruiting even more, in less than a decade there were just over a hundred, or around 3 per cent, of the original Polynesians left alive, mostly older men. In 1876, the megalomaniac murderer himself was murdered, in an argument over a dress, or perhaps for his other habit of abducting pubescent girls.
The man who would take over Dutrou-Bornier’s kingdom was more benevolent. Alexander Ariipaea Vehiaitipare Salmon Jr. was the son of an English Jewish merchant, Alexander Soloman, and a Pōmare dynasty Tahitian princess, Oehau. While one of his sisters was becoming Queen of Tahiti, another had married a Scottish merchant named John Brander. Alex inherited his father’s business interests, co-owned with Brander as the Maison Brander copra and coconut oil plantations in Tahiti, the Marquesas, and the Cook Islands, one of which would acquire the sheep station on Easter Island.
In October 1878, he set off with twenty Tahitian workers, and a number of Rapanui whose indentures had expired, to manage the wool exports. He introduced the coconut, developed a tourist industry, and encouraged the manufacture of Rapanui artworks, including imitation rongorongo tablets, which he helped them sell to passing ships for good prices. Alex also sent three genuine Rongorongo inscriptions to his niece’s husband, Heinrich August Schlubach, the German consul of Valparaíso, which are now kept in Vienna and Berlin.
When the British and German and American archeological expeditions came to the island in 1882 and 1886, Alex provided his services as a guide, translator, and hotelier. As owner of nearly all the island, and the sole source of employment, Alex was its de facto ruler, a fact not lost on Dr. Cooke, the surgeon of the USS Mohican.

               ‘Mr Salmon, who is guide, philosopher, and friend to these people,
                unites in his person (and being a giant in stature, he can well contain
                them) the duties of referee, arbiter, judge. They entertain the greatest
                respect for him; evince the utmost affection; look up to him as their
                master; go to him with all their troubles; refer to him all their disputes
                and grievances. His word is law, and his decisions final and
                undisputed.’

Salmon was one of the few honest men that had ever set foot on Rapa Nui, with a sincere interest in the welfare of the people. He worked to repatriate Rapanui workers from the inherited copra plantations in the Society Islands. Under his patronage, the population and culture started to recover, albeit with a Tahitian influence so strong, that the language spoken by the surviving natives would be more intelligible in today’s Pape'ete market, than to any of the ariki nobles on Hotu Matu'a’s first expedition to the island.
Alex sold his holdings to the Chilean government on January 2, 1888 and signed as a witness to the cession of the island. His return to Tahiti was scarred by his arrest and imprisonment for assault and battery, resulting in his departure for the remote Tuamotus, where the original double-hulled canoes had left for Rapa Nui. Here he collected oral histories, at the very same time and place that Robert Louis Stevenson was inventing his own account of In the South Seas.