Easter Island

Easter Island (Spanish: Isla de Pascua; Rapa Nui: Rapa Nui) is an island and special territory of Chile in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in Oceania. The island is most famous for its nearly 1,000 extant monumental statues, called moai, which were created by the early Rapa Nui people.

Moai at Rano Raraku, Easter Island

Quotes

• For ever gaze they at the sea and sky,
    For ever hear the thunder of the main,
      For ever watch the ages die away;
  And ever round them rings the phantom cry
    Of some lost race that died in human pain,
      Looking toward heaven, yet seeing no more than they.
  • Frederick George Scott, "Easter Island", in The Unnamed Lake and Other Poems (1897), p. 48

• The statues remained quiescent, the natives did not.
  • Katherine Routledge, The Mystery of Easter Island: The Story of an Expedition, 2nd ed. (London, 1920), pt. 2, ch. 11

• Polynesian Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean as the Earth is today in space. When the Easter Islanders got into difficulties, there was nowhere to which they could flee, nor to which they could turn for help; nor shall we modern Earthlings have recourse elsewhere if our troubles increase.
  • Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)