The Mystery of Easter Island - Tapa blanda

"All the seashore is lined with numbers of stone idols, with their backs turned towards the sea, which caused us no little wonder, because we saw no tool of any kind for working these figures." So wrote, a century and a half ago, one of the earliest navigators to visit the Island of Easter in the South-east Pacific. Ever since that day passing ships have found it incomprehensible that a few hundred natives should have been able to make, move, and erect numbers of great stone monuments, some of which are over thirty feet in height;.... What were these statues of which the present inhabitants know nothing? Were they made by their ancestors in forgotten times or by an earlier race? Whence came the people who reached this remote spot? Did they arrive from South America, 2,000 miles to the eastward? Or did they sail against the prevailing wind from the distant islands to the west?...