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Easter Island: Early Witnesses
George Cooke
710
inferred from the state cuts contained in these
pages, is never an elaborate one, it may readily
be seen that they never suffer for lack of food of
some sort, the principal items being sugar cane,
taro, and sweet potatoes. Then, too, they are not
heavy eaters, and gluttony with its attendant
corpulency, so common in some of the other
islands, is quite unknown here.
There are no fences or inclosures of any sort
about their houses, which stand in the open field,
with the grass growing to the doors, and nothing
of an offensive nature was observable in the
vicinity.
POPULATION, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS.
It is difficult to obtain accurate information
regarding the population of the island prior to
the year 1860. That a numerous people must have
existed here during the days of the image builders
seems to be well attested by the works they have
left behind them; the multitudes of colossal stone
images and crowns; the numbers and vast size of
the platforms on which these stood; the great
paved areas beside them, which afforded room for
large assemblages; the masses of foundation stones
scattered over the island, many of which, still in
position, show the strange shapes given to the
houses which were erected upon them, and even
admitting that these antiquities, and the work
of fashioning them, covers a period of many years,
the fact remains, nevertheless, that the immense
labor involved, aided merely by the rude stone
implements, which alone they were known to possess,
must have necessitated
the employment of a vast number of laborers.
These, with their families, those engaged in the
cultivation of the soil, in fishing and
otherwise providing food, the aged and infirm,
and those employed in other pursuits, must have
made up an aggregate much larger than would at
first sight appear.
With reference to the length of time covered by
these works, it would seem, from the large number
of images still to be seen on Rana Roraka, both
inside the crater and on its outer slope - some
finished, others only partly so, and others still
in the quarries - that there was a large amount of
work in process of execution at the same moment,
and that, judging from the condition in which it
was found, some sudden calamity must have
overtaken the workmen, causing all labor to cease
abruptly.
Indeed in respect to the astonishing number of
volcanic stones so evenly scattered over the
surface of the island, especially on the eastern
half, it does not seem reasonable to suppose that
they were there when the place was densely
populated, of which latter circumstance there can
scarcely be a doubt. This remark applies with
especial force to the great plain at the foot and
to the westward of Rana Roraka, where a large town
is supposed to have existed, inhabited in part, it
may be presumed, by the great numbers of workmen
employed in the quarries of that mountain.
Admitting this to be true and associating this
with the fact that large numbers of the images
seen in this vicinity are in
710