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Trade within Southeast Polynesia continued from about A.D.1000 to 1450, as gauged by artifacts in radiocarbon-dated archaeological layers on Henderson. But by A.D. 1500, the trade had stopped, both in Southeast Polynesia and along the other spokes radiating from Mangareva’s hub. Those later archaeological layers on Henderson contain no more imported Mangareva oyster shell, no more Pitcairn volcanic glass, no more Pitcairn fine-grained basalt for cutting tools, and no more Mangareva or Pitcairn basalt oven stone. Apparently the canoes were no longer arriving from either Mangareva or Pitcairn. Because trees on Henderson itself are too small to make canoes, Henderson’s population of a few dozen was now trapped on one of the most remote, most daunting islands in the world. Henderson Islanders confronted a problem that seems insoluble to us: how to survive on a raised limestone reef without any metal, without stones other than limestone, and without imports of any type.

They survived in ways that strike me as a mixture of ingenious, desperate, and pathetic. For the raw material of adzes, in place of stone, they turned to shells of giant clams. For awls to punch holes, they fell back on bird bones. For oven stones, they turned to limestone or coral or giant clamshell, all of which are inferior to basalt because they retain heat for less time, tend to crack after heating, and cannot be reused as often. They now made their fishhooks out of purse shell, which is much smaller than black-lipped pearl oyster shell, so that it yields only one hook per shell (instead of a dozen hooks from an oyster shell) and restricts the types of hooks that can be fashioned.

Radiocarbon dates suggest that, struggling on in this way, Henderson’s population of originally a few dozen people survived for several generations, possibly a century or more, after all contact with Mangareva and Pitcairn was cut. But by A.D. 1606, the year of Henderson’s “discovery” by Europeans, when a boat from a passing Spanish ship landed on the island and saw no one, Henderson’s population had ceased to exist. Pitcairn’s own population had disappeared at least by 1790 (the year when the Bounty mutineers arrived to find the island uninhabited), and probably disappeared much earlier.

Why did Henderson’s contact with the outside world come to a halt? That outcome stemmed from disastrous environmental changes on Mangareva and Pitcairn. All over Polynesia, human settlement on islands that had developed for millions of years in the absence of humans led to habitat damage and mass extinctions of plants and animals. Mangareva was especially susceptible to deforestation for most of the reasons that I identified for Easter Island in the preceding chapter: high latitude, low ash and dust fallout, and so on. Habitat damage was extreme in Mangareva’s hilly interior, most of which the islanders proceeded to deforest in order to plant their gardens. As a result, rain carried topsoil down the steep slopes, and the forest became replaced by a savannah of ferns, which were among the few plants able to grow on the now-denuded ground. That soil erosion in the hills removed much of the area formerly available on Mangareva for gardening and tree crops. Deforestation indirectly reduced yields from fishing as well, because no trees large enough to build canoes remained: when Europeans “discovered” Mangareva in 1797, the islanders had no canoes, only rafts.

With too many people and too little food, Mangareva society slid into a nightmare of civil war and chronic hunger, whose consequences are recalled in detail by modern islanders. For protein, people turned to cannibalism, in the form not only of eating freshly dead people but also of digging up and eating buried corpses. Chronic fighting broke out over the precious remaining cultivable land; the winning side redistributed the land of the losers. Instead of an orderly political system based on hereditary chiefs, non-hereditary warriors took over. The thought of Lilliputian military