The Mystery of Easter Island: The Story of an Expedition

Easter Island is one of the most remote locations on earth.

Located over two thousand miles off the coast of Chile, the Rapa Nui people live isolated from the rest of the world.

The inhabitants, who had settled on the island at some point between 300 and 1200 A.D., had developed their own unique culture, language, mythology, art and sculpture.

Europeans had first stumbled upon the island and its inhabitants in 1722, yet even by the early twentieth century little was known or understood about Rapa Nui.

Katherine Routledge, a British archaeologist and anthropologist, decided to organize an expedition to the island and record the fascinating way of life and beliefs of the Rapa Nui.

With support from the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the British Museum and the Royal Geographical Society, and a crew borrowed from the Royal Navy, Routledge and her husband set out on their ship, the Mana, on 25th March 1913.

Routledge in her book, The Mystery of Easter Island, documents all the aspects of this lengthy expedition, including the year-long journey travelling across the Atlantic, visiting Madeira, Grand Canary, the Cape Verde Islands, Brazil, Argentina, sailing through the Strait of Magellan, and finally Chile before landing on Easter Island in March 1914.

While on the island Routledge records in brilliant detail how the inhabitants lived, their oral history and legends that had been passed down through generations, their religious beliefs and cults prior to the emergence of Christianity on Easter Island, as well as the famous the prehistoric remains on the island including the huge numbers of Moai statues.

The final section of the book covers the return section of the voyage, visiting Pitcairn Island, Tahiti, the Hawaiian islands, San Francisco, going through the Panama canal, Jamaica and various other Caribbean islands before finally finishing the journey in Southampton.

Katherine Routledge published her survey of Easter Island 1919 as The Mystery of Easter Island, which became a popular travel book in the early twentieth century. She suffered from schizophrenia for most of her life and was eventually institutionalized in 1929 and she passed away there in 1935.