Among Stone Giants: The Life of Katherine Routledge and Her Remarkable Expedition to Easter Island

Natural History, April, 2003 by Laurence A. Marschall

by Jo Anne Van Tilburg Scribner, 2003; $26.00

Almost a century has passed since Katherine Routledge and her husband Scoresby raised the anchor of their custom-built ninety-foot schooner Mana and set sail for adventure. Few Europeans had ever visited Rapa Nui, as the local residents called Easter Island, but all Victorians with an ounce of romance in their soul knew of the island's alluring riddle. Katherine hoped to solve it.

Although Rapa Nui had no trees, it had a forest: hundreds of huge stone statues were scattered across its barren landscape. Who had carved these otherworldly monuments? And what purpose--religious, ceremonial, commemorative--could justify such a large investment of labor and resources? The Routledges, possessed of Katherine's inherited fortune as well as the Victorian mania for collecting, were determined to find out. Their expedition made landfall on Rapa Nui, after an eventful year at sea, on March 29, 1914.

From the start it was Katherine's show. Although she had little formal training in archaeology, she knew what to look for and how to listen. In her party's seventeen months on the island she made drawings and watercolors of each landmark. She sat daily with village elders, compiling notebooks of their replies to her questions about the old ways, the ancient gods, how the island and its people came to be. While Katherine sketched and scribbled, Scoresby collected artifacts from caves and burial sites, and members of the Mana's crew photographed and mapped with military precision. It was the first true attempt to conduct an archaeological survey of the island.

Van Tilburg has dug deeply into Katherine's family records and the notebooks of the Mana expedition to present a convincing picture of science as it was practiced in an era when. natural history was a popular sport of the moneyed class. Because government funding was rare, wealthy amateurs, rather than professional associations and peer reviewers, set research agendas. Today's field-workers may employ far more culturally sensitive and environmentally sound techniques than did the Routledges, who looted gravesites with abandon and spaded like gardeners through delicate layers of artifact-bearing earth. But a well-managed expedition today would be hard-pressed to provide as colorful a cast of characters, or grist for such a lively story.

Scoresby was arrogant and tactless; the crew of the Mana was mutinous (usually in response to Scoresby's outrageous behavior); Katherine was often sidelined by bouts of hallucinations and depression. The islanders staged an armed revolt during Katherine's stay. By the time the couple's seventeen months came to an end, war-torn Europe must have seemed like a haven.

Later archaeological surveys did better work than the Mana expedition, and the history of Rapa Nui has since been convincingly linked to Polynesian cultures to the west, making Easter Island seem a bit less mysterious and remote. But Katherine Routledge's work stands the test of time. In a letter to her mother, written as she was packing to leave the island, Katherine wrote: "If people ask you if we have `solved the riddle,' you can say that we do not claim to have done that, but we have found much that is new & interesting." That is an apt description both of Routledge's work and of Van Tilburg's elegant and compelling biography.

Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, is the W.K. T. Sahm professor of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.