A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [177]
Where the people of Constantinople confronted crisis by looking back to an old religious practice, the inhabitants of Rapa Nui invented a new one, turning to a ritual that, not surprisingly, was all about scarce resources. The Birdman cult, as it has been called, focused on an annual competition to collect the first egg of the migrating sooty tern from a neighbouring islet. The man who pulled off the feat of bringing an egg back, unbroken, through the sea and over cliffs, would for a year become the Birdman. Invested with sacred power, he would live in isolation, grow his nails like bird talons and wield a ceremonial paddle as a symbol of prestige. Surprisingly, we can tell this story, and the change in religious practice, through our sculpture. Rather than being abandoned along with the other monoliths, Hoa Hakananai’a was incorporated into the Birdman cult, was moved, placed in a hut and now entered a new phase of his life.
The back of Hoa Hakananai’a, with symbols of the birdman cult in low relief
All the key elements of this later ritual are present in our statue, carved on his back. They must have been added several hundred years after the statue was first made, and the carving style here could hardly be more different from that of the front. It is in low relief, the scale is small, and the sculptor has tried to accommodate a large range of disparate details. Each shoulder blade has been turned into a symbol of the Birdman; two frigate birds with human arms and feet face each other, their beaks touching at the back of the statue’s neck. On the back of the statue’s head are two stylized paddles, each with what looks like a miniature version of our statue’s face at the upper end, and between the paddles is a standing bird which is thought to be a young sooty tern, whose eggs were so central to the Birdman ritual. This carving on the back of the statue could never have been very legible as sculpture. We know it was painted in bright colours, so that this cluster of potent symbols could be easily recognized and understood. Now, without its colour, the carving looks to my eyes feeble, fussy, diminished – a confused and timid postscript to the confident vigour of the front.
It is seldom that you see ecological change recorded in stone. There is something poignant in this dialogue between the two sides of Hoa Hakananai’a, a sculpted lesson that no way of living or thinking can endure forever. His face speaks of the hope we all have of unchanging certainty; his back of the shifting expediencies that have always been the reality of life. He is Everyman.
And Everyman is usually a survivor. The Easter Islanders seem to have adapted reasonably well to their changing ecological circumstances, as Polynesians have always had to. But in the nineteenth century there were challenges of a completely different order – from across the sea came slavery, disease and Christianity. When the British ship HMS Topaze arrived in 1868, there were only a few hundred people left on the island. The chiefs, by now baptized, presented Hoa Hakananai’a to the officers of the Topaze. We don’t know why they wanted him to leave the island, but perhaps the old ancestral sculpture was seen as a threat to the new Christian faith. A troop of islanders moved him to the ship, and he was taken to England to be presented to Queen Victoria, and then sent to be housed at the British Museum. He faces south-east, looking towards Rapa Nui, 14,000 kilometres (8,500 miles) away.
Hoa Hakananai’a now stands in the gallery devoted to Living and Dying, surrounded by objects that show how other societies in the Pacific and the Americas have addressed the predicaments that confront humanity everywhere. He is a supremely