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By Root 2134 0

dictatorships on eastern and western Mangareva, battling for control of an island only five miles long, could seem funny if it were not so tragic. All that political chaos alone would have made it difficult to muster the manpower and supplies necessary for oceangoing canoe travel, and to go off for a month and leave one’s garden undefended, even if trees for canoes themselves had not become unavailable. With the collapse of Mangareva at its hub, the whole East Polynesia trade network that had joined Mangareva to the Marquesas, Societies, Tuamotus, Pitcairn, and Henderson disintegrated, as documented by Weisler’s sourcing studies of basalt adzes.

While much less is known about environmental changes on Pitcairn, limited archaeological excavations there by Weisler indicate massive deforestation and soil erosion on that island as well. Henderson itself also suffered environmental damage that reduced its human carrying capacity. Five out of its nine species of land birds (including all three large pigeons), and colonies of about six of its species of breeding seabirds, were exterminated. Those extinctions probably resulted from a combination of hunting for food, habitat destruction due to parts of the island being burned for gardens, and depredations of rats that arrived as stowaways in Polynesian canoes. Today, those rats continue to prey on chicks and adults of the remaining species of seabirds, which are unable to defend themselves because they evolved in the absence of rats. Archaeological evidence for gardening appears on Henderson only after those bird disappearances, suggesting that people were being forced into reliance on gardens by the dwindling of their original food sources. The disappearance of edible horn shells and decline in turban shells in later layers of archaeological sites on Henderson’s northeast coast also suggest the possibility of overexploitation of shellfish.

Thus, environmental damage, leading to social and political chaos and to loss of timber for canoes, ended Southeast Polynesia’s interisland trade. That end of trade would have exacerbated problems for Mangarevans, now cut off from Pitcairn, Marquesas, and Societies sources of high-quality stone for making tools. For the inhabitants of Pitcairn and Henderson, the results were even worse: eventually, no one was left alive on those islands.

Those disappearances of Pitcairn’s and Henderson’s populations must have resulted somehow from the severing of the Mangarevan umbilical cord. Life on Henderson, always difficult, would have become more so with the loss of all imported volcanic stone. Did everyone die simultaneously in a mass calamity, or did the populations gradually dwindle down to a single survivor, who lived on alone with his or her memories for many years? That actually happened to the Indian population of San Nicolas Island off Los Angeles, reduced finally to one woman who survived in complete isolation for 18 years. Did the last Henderson Islanders spend much time on the beaches, for generation after generation, staring out to sea in the hopes of sighting the canoes that had stopped coming, until even the memory of what a canoe looked like grew dim?

While the details of how human life flickered out on Pitcairn and Henderson remain unknown, I can’t tear myself free of the mysterious drama. In my head, I run through alternative endings of the movie, guiding my speculation by what I know actually did happen to some other isolated societies. When people are trapped together with no possibility of emigration, enemies can no longer resolve tensions merely by moving apart. Those tensions may have exploded in mass murder, which later nearly did destroy the colony of Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn itself. Murder could also have been driven by food shortage and cannibalism, as happened to the Mangarevans, Easter Islanders, and—closer to home for Americans—the Donner Party in California. Perhaps people grown desperate turned to mass suicide, which was recently the choice of 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult near San Diego, California. Desperation