Sacred Texts -- Pacific Islander Religions

Te Pito Te Henua, or Easter Island: Language

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This is an 1891 naval expedition report by William J. Thompson, drawn from the USS Mohican's visit to Easter Island, focusing on the rongorongo tablets — the island's enigmatic incised wooden writing system. Thompson documents the scarcity and near-destruction of the tablets, attributing the loss largely to missionaries who ordered them burned to sever native ties to pre-Christian tradition, and traces the scattered surviving specimens held by museums and a bishop in Tahiti. The expedition managed to purchase two tablets and photograph seven others, then attempted to obtain a translation from Ure Vaeiko, an elderly man claiming residual knowledge of the script — who refused on religious grounds until Thompson's party, in a notably candid admission, plied him with alcohol during a rainy night ambush at his home. The resulting "translation" turned out to be unreliable: Ure Vaeiko was reciting legends associated with tablets by name and recognition rather than actually reading the characters, a fraud exposed when substituting a different tablet's photograph produced no change in his narration. Thompson describes the script's distinctive boustrophedon layout — alternating lines read upside-down, requiring the reader to rotate the tablet — and its pictorial, ideographic character, with symbols engraved in protective channeled rows. The report is most distinctive for its frank account of ethically dubious fieldwork methods and its early, careful conclusion that the indigenous knowledge needed to decode the script had been effectively lost.

Te Pito Te Henua, or Easter Island: Language

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