There was one thing worse than ignoring facts and that was to try to explain them away because they did not fit in with foregone conclusions

Suddenly we saw them. The giants. Aletti had been silent as we approached, and merely pointed as he held the foliage aside. They stared at us from the thickets with round eyes as big as life belts and grotesque mouths drawn out in diabolical grins wide enough to swallow a human body. Bulkier than gorillas and nearly twice the height of a man, they had impressed every one of the few travelers who had so far been lucky enough to visit the locality. The giants of the cliff-girt Puamau Valley displayed such a contrast to the lazy people down on the beach that the question inevitably came to mind: Who put these red, stone colossi there, and how? They must have weighed many tons.

 I had read about large stone monuments in the Marquesas group, but it is one thing to read a couple of lines and another to stumble unexpectedly on large stone monuments in human form standing among the forest foliage.

 We approached the tallest, which stood on an elevated stone platform. It took two of us to measure its fat belly, and with a deep pedestal sunk into the platform masonry the image was some ten feet tall, carved entirely from one block of red stone, a kind of stone that did not exist anywhere locally.* Aletti told us that the quarries were far up the valley, where some unfinished blocks of this very same tuff had been discovered, together with the hard basalt adzes used in carving them.

*A detailed description with illustrations of this and all the other monuments of the Puamau temple terraces is to be found in T. Heyerdahl, "The Statues of the Oipona Me'ae, With a Comparative Analysis of Possibly Related Stone Monuments," in Reports of the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Easter Island and the East Pacific—Ed. Heyerdahl and Ferdon, Vol. 2, Report 10, Monograph of The School of American Research and the Kon-Tiki Museum, 1965.

 The red statues had obviously been raised on some outdoor temple ground. We found that there were walls and terraces everywhere, as we began looking around in the underbrush, and a few statues lay half buried in the ground, their heads or arms broken by force. There were also huge, round heads gazing at us from between creepers and ferns, heads that had been carved as independent stone images without busts or bodies. The strangest of all the sculptures was a bulky giant carved as if in a swimming position, with stunted arms and legs stretched out fore and aft, the whole resting on a short pedestal extending from the abdomen into the ground as part of the same piece.

 Aletti had read in his father's books that this temple site had been used until only fifty years before for cannibal festivities, when Kekela, a Hawaiian missionary, had converted the three local tribes to Christianity and planted coffee shrubs at the temple site. In fact, most of the underbrush that had overgrown the image area was still sprinkled with red coffee berries.

 Three scientists had visited these images. F. W. Christian and K. von den Steinen in 1894 and 1896, and Ralph Linton in 1920, when Henry Lie was already living there. They had all been told different tales and been given different names for the statues by the local natives, who admitted to Henry Lie that they actually knew nothing. All they knew was what they had admitted also to Linton: the statues were already there when their own ancestors had arrived on the island and driven an earlier people away into the mountains. Who these earlier people were, nobody could tell, although certain traditions maintained that the old Naiki tribe had absorbed their blood.

 There are incidents in everyone's life that may be casual and yet prove to have vital consequences in future development, even to the extent of sidetracking an entire life. My introduction to the Puamau stone giants during an attempt to return to nature later resulted in switching me onto a new track that was to guide my destiny for many eventful years to come. It set me asail on rafts, led me into continental jungles, and made me excavate Easter Island monuments as high as buildings of several stories. All in an effort to solve a mystery that puzzled me from the day I began to suspect that an enterprising people with the habit of creating stone colossi had reached the eastern headland of Hivaoa before the Polynesian fishermen arrived. The Polynesians, too, were full of vigor in earlier times, but their bent was generally to the sea, to the warpath, and to wood carving. These stone monuments seemed to have a different story to tell. It made good sense that the people down on the beach did not give the credit of carving them to their own kin.

 In the evening, Henry Lie was back with us and, placing a stack of books next to the bright kerosene lamp, he began to turn pages that I had read before but to which I had not given adequate attention. He reminded me that throughout Polynesia there were persistent traditions to the effect that another people had been living on the islands when the ancestors of the present population arrived. Everywhere within the Polynesian triangle, which extends from Easter Island in the east to Samoa and New Zealand in the west and to Hawaii in the north, the learned men of the tribes agreed: an industrious people with reddish hair and fair skin, claiming descent from the sun god, were found on the various islands and were expelled or absorbed by the newcomers. The traditional memory was still so vivid that the first Europeans were mistaken for returning groups of this early fair people. Captain Cook lost his life in Hawaii when the mistake was finally realized. He was not as lucky as Cortez and Pizarro, who conquered the vast Aztec and Inca empires in Mexico and Peru due to the same strange belief in an earlier visit by white-skinned culture-bringers who had taught sun worship and erected giant stone statues before they left for the Pacific.

 "The old Polynesians were ancestor worshipers; therefore they were addicted to genealogies and knew the names of their forefathers back to the day of their landing," said Henry Lie. "Here in the Marquesas they even had their genealogies preserved by a complicated system of knots on strings, like the quipu of Peru. There is no reason to doubt their claim that their ancestors found these islands already inhabited."

 "But by whom?" I asked "There are four thousand miles from here to South America and twice that far from here to Indonesia; so, by whom?"

 Henry Lie ran his hand through his thin, blond hair. "Not by the Vikings," he laughed. "And not by people walking on imaginary land bridges which every geologist knows never existed in the Polynesian part of the ocean. But by sailors who came from a treeless country where they were used to quarrying rocks and to carving in stone. The Polynesians themselves must have come from forest-covered coasts, since they were great wood-carvers. They carved totem poles and sculptured the bows and sterns of their canoes. They would pick up a pebble, and chop and grind it into a tool or a little image, but no man ever saw a Polynesian heading for a cliff to detach a monolith and carve it into human form. No indeed! And they have never claimed to have tried. Would you like to try?"

 I admitted that it was not easy. And besides, it evinced something more than mere expertise. I knew of no stone-age people in any European country who had even tried it. Nor in Africa either, apart from Egypt.

(...)

 "You were discussing our statues," he said. "Look at this."

 He found the page and pointed. I was amazed. He was showing me the picture of a giant statue of the same type we had seen that very morning, similarly standing unroofed among the jungle foliage. The colossal head, making up a third of the total size, the ridiculously stunted legs, the intentionally grotesque round face, with huge eyes, a flat nose, and the enormous mouth grinning from ear to ear, were strikingly similar.

 "And look at the arms with bent elbows and hands clasping the belly: every single statue and image on this island has that special pose," the little man added enthusiastically.

 I closed the book to look at the title. It was a book about travels in South America. I read the caption to the picture carefully. The large statue was from San Agustin, in the northern Andes, due east of the Marquesas. There were numerous other, similar statues in the same area, and I knew that large stone monuments in human form were scattered from there in a continuous belt down to Tiahuanaco, the main pre-Inca cult center near the shores of Lake Titicaca. Some of them were found right down on the Pacific coast below San Agustin. None had been carved by present-day Indians in any of these localities. The European conquistadors had discovered these bulky stone men abandoned everywhere in the jungle or on the pampas as relics of lost and unknown artists. The greatest concentration was at the main pre-Inca cult site of Tiahuanaco. Here the primitive Aymara Indians living near the ruins told the Spaniards, when they arrived, that the sculptures had not been made by their own ancestors, but by white and bearded foreigners resembling the Spaniards. Preaching the worship of the sun, these people had followed their leader on a final migration northward to the Pacific coast at Manta, in Ecuador, where all Inca traditions confirmed their arrival from Tiahuanaco and claimed that the foreigners had embarked on balsa rafts and disappeared forever, westward into the Pacific Ocean.

 I looked at the three men beside me around the kerosene lamp. The young and refined, island-born Aletti, who had never gone to school but had been taught to read and write by his father. The happy little Frenchman, who greedily piled corned beef and onions on his bread while he licked his thumb to turn pages of learned books. Our calm Norwegian host, leaning over the table in a singlet revealing a workman's muscles and a pink skin except for the shoulders, which were coffee-colored from upright exposure to the tropical sun. There was nothing in Lie's appearance that seemed to match his great devotion to books. How he had assembled his stacks of fine literature since he stole ashore with empty hands and scanty schooling remained a mystery. He had never been away except for a short visit to Tahiti to select his present wife. Here he and his Robinson Crusoe friend were sitting in a hidden corner of a remote island expounding to me interesting observations that no professor had pointed out.

 One by one, I examined the other pictures of San Agustin statues which showed some peculiar resemblance to the abandoned monuments up in the valley.

 South America. But it was too far away for oversea contact. Yet Indonesia was double that distance in the opposite direction and showed no similar relics. Not even the mainland of Asia beyond could muster anything to match the Puamau images.

 The old Frenchman snapped the book shut triumphantly, as if closing a jewelry box after letting me admire the treasure. I did not know what to believe. It was safest to believe in my own trained teachers who followed the textbooks written by accepted authorities. They all agreed that, before the days of European sailing ships, no craft could have reached these islands except from Asia and Indonesia, since American Indians had no real boats. I was trained to believe in the authorities. Yet I believed in my own eyes too. And the authorities could not always be trustworthy, for they did not even agree among themselves as to where in Asia to locate the Polynesian origins. Some proposed Java, some China, India, or even such distant places as Egypt or Mesopotamia. Even Scandinavia. Yet, in fact, none of them had found a single trace of Polynesian passage through the buffer territory separating Polynesia from Indonesia: the island world of the hostile and very ancient Austro-Melanesian and Micronesian tribes which alone was four thousand miles wide, or just as wide as the open ocean space between South America and the Marquesas group. Besides, who was to say for sure that only one landing had taken place on these islands?

 When Terai came back from the last of the village houses, we all went to bed. Early next morning, he was on his little stallion ready to return into the highlands for a descent into Hanaiapa, on the north coast; the many other valleys were no longer inhabited. Henry Lie insisted that we should remain with him, and I was too fascinated by the developing riddle of the stone giants to want to leave. Lie was familiar with Terai's ointment and took charge of our treatment.

(...)

It would be tempting to consider the masses of human bones stacked like rubble into the crevices on the summit as the remains of the vanished stone-carvers. But this could hardly be so, since the bones, although stained green and eroded, could hardly date back more than one or two generations. That would place them at the end of the nineteenth century, when the last cannibal ceremonies took place in front of the grinning images. Lie had known people who still recalled the last of these cannibal feasts. Conspicuous at the image site was a large altar stone with the face of a one-eyed god incised on a projecting corner, and its flat surface dotted with cup-shaped depressions. Our companion insisted that they had been filled with human blood during sacrifices.

 The prone image, looking more like a swimming beast than a human being, was particularly fascinating. It represented perfection of design and workmanship in stone. Only the best professional stone sculptor could create a work so masterly and so symmetrical, streamlined, and polished. I knew of nothing similar, since I had not personally inspected the hundreds of statues abandoned in the South American jungle at San Agustin. Not until I got there, years later, did I come face to face with two big stone statues of the very same, remarkable type: beast-like images with diabolic human faces, stretched out on their bellies in a swimming position, with stunted hands reaching forward along the face. The South American statues were identified as representing the swimming cayman god. But in Polynesia there were no caymans or other large reptiles.

 To check every detail, I tore away the turf that obscured the short ventral column supporting the prone image. Aletti helped me with his knife. To our surprise, the reliefs of two squatting human figures with hands above their heads appeared, and between them, two large quadrupeds in profile, each with an eye, a mouth, erect ears, and a tail.

 Two quadrupeds! Here was something for a detective. Every student of Polynesia knew that the Polynesians had no quadrupeds other than dogs and pigs, and that dogs for some reason were not present on the Marquesas Islands when the Europeans arrived. But this was certainly no pig, as it had a very long and thin tail standing straight up, with only a slight curve at the top, just as the tail can sometimes stand erect on a cat. A cat? No, for there were no felines in Polynesia. Not in any part of Oceania, Australia included. A dog, then? The early artist must have known the dog. And yet, the Polynesian dog had a bushy, curly tail, not a thin stick standing erect like this. Anyhow, it was a new discovery, and even the local people came up to gaze at it in amazement. They had not observed these reliefs when they had re-erected the statue, which, until a few years before, had been lying at an angle upside down, obviously overturned.

 Not until years later did I find the sequel to our discovery. More than forty years earlier, Von den Steinen had removed the finest of the large, loose stone heads and taken it to the Volkerkunde Museum in Berlin. I had in fact seen it there during my studies before I went to the Marquesas, but the head had not meant enough to me to take a second look at its neck. I did, when I came back years later, and then I noticed the relief of two squatting human figures and two long-tailed quadrupeds, corresponding exactly to my discovery on the island. Von den Steinen had noticed these animals only on the head he brought with him, and here they were, so well preserved that one could see long claws on the feet and tuft-like whiskers at the snout, increasing the resemblance to a feline. But as cats were unknown and neither dogs nor pigs had such tails, Von den Steinen concluded that the animals were meant to be rats, the only other mammal known to the Polynesians.*

*K. von den Steinen, Die Marquesaner und Ihre Kunst, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1925-28). Rats? But no artist, however bad, would depict a rat with an erect tail and with a head raised proudly above the level of the back. Pairs of rats are depicted nowhere on ancient monuments of deities or heroes, but a pair of lions was the royal symbol carved at the base of the oldest statues of the Hittites and other early cultures in the Mediterranean world. And a pair of pumas is carved in relief at the very base of the red stone statue at Tiahuanaco, representing none less than the white and bearded sun king, Kon-Tiki, the South American master stone sculptor, who, according to Inca traditions, left for the Pacific. Felines yes, but not rats.

 As the curious natives came up the valley with Henry Lie and the little Frenchman, they all had to revise their former belief that the swimming statue represented a woman giving birth to a child. According to Henry Lie, until quite recent years women had secretly brought food offerings to place before this image when they were expecting a child. The local people had re-erected this statue only a few years earlier, as it had been lying capsized in the bushes, overturned either by their own ancestors or by the missionary, Kekela. The three scientists who had been here before had therefore seen the statue upside down and had not recognized the reliefs. They had interpreted the projecting ventral cylinder as the child coming out of the womb of a struggling goddess, although they were unable to detect either a head or limbs on the cylindrical baby, which, besides, emerged from the region of the navel rather than from between the groins. Linton, in fact, began to doubt the natives' words, and claimed that this image differed so much from all the rest that it could scarcely be identified as human. He had no alternative suggestion, however, but admitted: "... It is evident that the artist worked on a preconceived plan and was a master of design and execution." *

*R. Linton, Archaeology of the Marquesas Islands, B. P. Bishop Museum Bull., No. 23, p. 162 (Honolulu, 1925).

 Henry Lie and the old Frenchman both realized that stone statues of any form had a very limited distribution in the hemisphere covered by the vast Pacific Ocean. Such monuments were present only on a few islands, which happened to be those directly facing South America: Easter Island, the Marquesas, Pitcairn, and Raivavae. The biggest and most numerous were on tiny Easter Island, all alone in the vast ocean space, halfway between South America and the other Polynesian groups. Since nothing similar was found on any of the tens of thousands of islands elsewhere in the Pacific, the distribution was so specific that it called for some explanation. And since the people who had erected these stone monuments were thought to have come from the part of the Pacific where there were none, the idea was interpreted as an innovation on the islands farthest from Asia. Finally, since Easter Island was farther from Asia than even the Marquesas group, the idea was thought to have originated in the Marquesas and been spread by aboriginal seafarers from there to that last outpost before the American mainland. There, on Easter Island, the statues had reached enormous proportions only because the island was treeless and the Polynesian wood carvers had been obliged to look for another material. Although starting as a theory, this explanation was accepted by almost everybody when it was published as "the simple truth" by the leading authority on Polynesian culture, Sir Peter Buck, even though he had never seen any of these statues.*

*P. H. Buck, Vikings of the Sunrise, p. 232 (New York, 1938); A. Metraux, Ethnology of Easter Island, B. P. Bishop Museum Bull., No. 160, p. 308 (Honolulu, 1960).

 Lie and the old Frenchman did not trust any authorities. They did not want to discard evidence they themselves could see and touch, in favor of postulates made simply to suit a theory. Had I been close enough to see the landscape of Motane, the island we had passed coming from Fatu-Hiva in the lifeboat? No? Well, that island was today completely treeless too, and yet, not long ago, it had been covered with forest, like Fatu-Hiva and Hivaoa. Man had caused the island to turn into a desert. How could we know that Easter Island had always been as treeless as it is today? Crowded with monuments, that tiny island must once have been overpopulated, and the forest could have been cleared away. Besides, argued Henry Lie, there were hundreds of treeless islands off Norway as well. Even Iceland and the Shetlands were barren, but this did not inspire the settling Viking wood carvers to erect stone images. And who could say, even without looking at them, that the group of stone statues up in the Puamau Valley were older than the hundreds of gigantic monuments on Easter Island?

 Until a riddle is solved, every piece of evidence deserves a fair trial, the old Frenchman said wisely, and with a raised finger he added pompously that there was one thing worse than ignoring facts and that was to try to explain them away because they did not fit in with foregone conclusions.

 "Easter Island is just as far from this island of ours as it is from South America," he went on. "If anyone could cross the empty ocean from here to Easter Island with the knowledge of how to carve stone monuments, they could have crossed as easily from South America."

 Aletti handed him a school atlas. Nobody protested, for he was right. Besides, it was getting late.

 When the lamp on the central table had been blown out, I lay awake for hours on Henry Lie's iron bed, trying to collect my thoughts in the midst of a snoring choir. It was my dream to come back to Hivaoa one day, properly equipped, and start professional excavations up in the valley. No archaeologist had as yet thought of digging in any part of the Marquesas group, not even on famous Easter Island or in any other island of east or central Polynesia.

 Dreams are like seeds; they remain as nothing more unless taken into the field and cared for. My dreams in Lie's bungalow were nursed until they grew into reality, and many years later I was to drop anchor in the Puamau bay with my own expedition ship. Together with me on board, all gazing into the mountain-girt palm valley, was a team of professional archaeologists. We had come from Easter Island. We had spent six months excavating in the deep soil which in bygone centuries had accumulated up to the necks of the local stone colossi. Precious, new scientific information had been harvested from below the turf of this, the most remarkable of all Pacific islands. Three different culture periods had been uncovered, deposited in layers one on top of the other. With new and solid information on the age and evolution of the Easter Island stone busts, we had now come to the Marquesas to look for comparable data. From the bridge, I scanned the curving black beach for the familiar sight of the big bungalow and the tiny shack among the palm trunks. Nothing. All was gone.

 We learned from natives ashore that the two houses had been swept into the ocean by a terrific deluge. Furnishings and everything else had been lost. Gone were Lie's books, and gone was his newly started collection of ancient images and relics. The old Frenchman was no more. Lie had moved to the next valley to live as a hermit. We found him there. He had already cleared the jungle and started a big, new plantation, finer than the old one, although his walking was hampered by elephantiasis in both legs. Aletti was his pride and joy; he had grown into a fine young man aspiring to become a supercargo on one of the Tahitian trading schooners.

 Only the bulky red stone giants up in the valley were the same, immobile and unaltered in pose and expression, but again partially hidden by the jungle and the coffee bushes. How long had they been standing like this? How long a time had passed since they were inconspicuous parts of a lichen-covered mountain wall, demanding vision, energy, and skill from the men who quarried them into blocks and lugged them through a jungle—full of wood—to shape them into stone men, carved according to a preconceived plan? Venerated by their creators, feared by their enemies, detested and harmed by the missionaries, and still admired and marveled at by the few modern travelers who had found their way up to look at them, they themselves remained as mute as the jungle trees. But, a few months later, the expedition's archaeologists could speak on their behalf. They excavated carbon from burnt wood inside and under the stone platform on which the monuments had been raised. The structure could thus be dated by a radiocarbon analysis, just as we had been able to date the three superimposed culture periods on Easter Island. The date for the erection of the Hivaoa giants proved to be about A.D. 1300. At that time, the stone workers of Easter Island's Middle Period had long since been at work erecting the giant busts that were to make the island famous. Before then, however, the Early Period Easter Islanders had left behind a large number of much older stone men, which, down to the last details, were replicas of the oldest statues from Tiahuanaco, in South America. Stone statues were therefore raised on the island nearest America centuries before any statues had been erected in the Marquesas. What was more, pollen deposited in layers in the Easter Island bogs proved that the island had formerly been wooded, like all other islands in the warmer zone of the Pacific. The first human settlers had destroyed the forest to get space for their vast stone quarries, fields of American sweet potatoes, and extensive villages consisting of non-Polynesian houses of stone. No sooner were excavations attempted on these islands than the whole picture became the converse of all that had been supposed previously merely to conform with vested theories.

 None of this was known to any of us as Liv and I saddled our horses and bade farewell to Henry Lie and his family after our first encounter. We rode over to salute the cheerful little Frenchman, then we followed in Terai's long since obliterated tracks up the winding cliff-side path into the highlands.

Thor Heyerdahl

Fatu-Hiva ...