The significance of Basque genes in Easter Island prehistory

Rohert LangdonAustraltan Nat;onal Un;versUy

A Tahitian taxi-driver poses with an iron cannonfrom the Spanish caravel ,..San Lesmes" soon after it

had been recoveredfrom the reefofAmanuAtoll, Tuamotu Archipelago, in 1969 and taken to

Tahiti. Photo: Rohert Langdon

At the Rapa Nui Rendezvous at Laramie, Wyoming, inAugust 1993, it was painfully obvious that Easter Islandscholars are divided into two main ideological camps: thosewho bel ieve that Polynesians were the island's onlyprehistoric inhabitants and those who don't. A book whoserelease was timed to coincide with the Rendezvous sets outthe position of those in the first camp:

... we now know that there had been no previoussettlement of Rapanui before the arrival of EastPolynesians possibly from the Marquesas Islandsand that this one-and-only East Poiynesiansettlement of the island .occurred sometimebetween the first and fourth centuries A.D.Rapanui's unparalleled neolithic attainments ... intheir entirety are local amplifications of an EastPolynesian inheritance (Fischer 1993: 228)

Thor Heyerdahl, doyen of those in the opposing camp,spelled out his position more than 30 years ago For him,Easter lsland's prehistory divides into three periods Early.Middle and Late. with American Indians the island's onlyinhabitants until Polynesians arrived towards the end of theMiddle Period, which is dated at about 1680 AD (Heyerdahl1961494-7)

As a newcomer to internationalconferences on Easter Island, I gavea paper at the Rendezvous in whichI supported arguments for twoprehistoric migrations from South .America. Ho\vever. I pointed outthat most people in both campsseemed not to have heard of myhvpothesis first advanced in 1975that many Easter Islanders at thetime of European contact were ofpart-Spanish descent from the crewof the Spanish caravel San Lesmesthat disappeared on a \'oyage fromthe Strait of Magellan to the EastIndies in 1526. In brief, my case isthat the caravel, with about 53 menon board. including Basques, ranaground on Amanu Atoll, 800 kmeast of Tahiti: that the crew refloated it by pushing their fourheavy cannon overboard; and that they then proceededwestward until reaching the island of Ra'iatca, 200 km NWof Tahiti. There. some of the men settled and marriedPolynesian women. Several generations later, some of theirHispano-Polynesian descendants reached Easter Island byway ofRa'ivavae in the Austral group.

The principal evidence for my Easter Island hypothesis isof two kinds: (I) numerous descriptions of light-featured,

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European-looking Easter Islanders from Roggeveen's timeonwards, and (2) the discovery in 1971 that 18 EasterIslanders with no known non-Easter Island ancestorswere/are carriers of certain genes that are peculiar toEuropeans and especially common among Basques. Thegenes, called A29, B 12, are a closely-linked pair or haplotypein the Human Leucocyte Antigen (HLA) system. They werebrought to light by a team of geneticists led by Professor JeanDausset, of Paris. a co-discoverer of HLA and a 1980 NobelPrizewinner. The team was participating in a worldwideproject to map the distribution of the HLA genes which occurin millions of different combinations and are of (;TUcialimportance in transplantation surgery.

Dausset's team took blood samples from 49 EasterIslanders. They went to considerable pains to try to ensurethat all were of pure Easter Island descent. They weretherefore mystified when 18 proved to be carriers of A29,B12. Dausset thought the explanation might be that, despiteeverything, these 18 islanders might be descended from thenotorious Frenchman J.B.O. Dutrou-Bornier who ran a sheepranch on the island from 1868 until his death in 1876Accordingly, the team said in its report (Thorsby et aI1973)1

I that as the A29, B 12 haplotype was'characteristic of EuropeanCaucasians', the possibility couldnot be excluded that it was due to'recent admixture by foreignvisitors (prior to about 1870)'. Mytheory that the puzzling genescould be traced back to the SanLesmes was put forward two yearslater in my book The Lost Caravel(Langdon 1975) I have sincepointed out in a revised andexpanded version of the book(Langdon 1988a) that the earliestdocumented ancestor of the 18carriers was a red-haired, blue­eyed, European-looking EasterIslander called Pakomio Maoriwho, in 1886, was estimated tohave been born in about 1816.

My explanation for Easter Island's 'Basque' genes canonly be right or wrong. If it is correct, then Polynesians of theearly centuries of the Christian era could not have been theisland's only prehistoric settlers, as one camp of Rapanuispecialists claims. Hence, these genes are potentially crucialfor our understanding of Easter Island's prehistory. So far,however, Dausset and his team and myself are the only oneswho have devoted more than cursory attention to them.

In their book Easter Island, Earth Island (London 1992),

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Bahn and Flenley make out.In the first place, an explosion of knowledge about HLA

since the early 'seventies has made it clear that A29, BI2 ismuch more likely to have reached Easter Island with aBasque or a person of part-Basque descent than otherwise.This is because everyone inherits one of a pair of HLAhaplotypes from each parent and because the A29, B 12haplotype occurs with the greatest frequency in the Basquecountry of Spain and France. In the French Basque villagesof St-Jean-Pied-de-Port and Hasparran, for example, 125people in every thousand, or one in eight, are carriers. In theFrench Basque village of Macaye, 79 in every thousand are.

2

But beyond the Pyrenees. the haplotype quickly becomes lesscommon. In non-Basque Barcelona and non-Basque

Toulouse, the frequencies are only65 and 52 per thousandrespectively. In Madrid, the figureis down to 15. In most of Europeother than France and Spain, thereare no carriers at all (Dausset et al1973, Moreno and Kreisler 1977,Mouzon et al 1980, Prevost et al1984, Ryder et al 1978). Thus,A29, Bl2 is quite properlydescribed as the Basque haplotype-a term that Dausset himself(I 982:215) seems to have been thefirst to use in print.

My idea that Easter Island'sBasque haplotypes can be traced tothe San Lesmes dates back to mid­1974 when I had almost finishedwriting The Lost Caravel. I hadalready deduced from otherevidence that Hispano-Polynesiandescendants of the caravel's crew

had settled on Easter Island when Grant McCall, a colleagueat the Australian National University, who was writing adoctoral thesis on Easter Island in anthropology, gave me anoffprint of the HLA report of Dausset and his colleaguesAfter a professor of genetics had helped me to understand itsthen-esoteric language, it seemed to me that the report hadverified my deductions.

However, the notion that Hispano-Polynesians of 16thcentury descent are among Easter Island's prehistoric settlersdid not fit in with McCall's own ideas, and he sought to castdoubt on my conclusion. He claimed that a genealogy thatDausset & Co. had published showing the familyrelationships of the 49 Easter Islanders they had tested wasnot correct. All the islanders with Basque genes, he said,were descended from one man, Pakomio Maori, through histwo wives, whereas the published genealogy showed that onecarrier was unrelated to him. I could not see that this madeany difference to my conclusion. Even so, a few weeks beforemy book was published, I wrote to one of Dausset'scollaborators, Dr Erik Thorsby, of Oslo, to ask if he couldsupply me with copies of the material on which the published

!'Professor Jean Dausset, a co-discoverer ofthe HLAsystem, checks genealogical details with an,EasterIslander during the HLA testing project on Easter

Island in 1971. Photo: Mme Rose Dausset.

Paul Bahn and John Flenley dismissed 'the Basque story' in17 lines. They claimed that a Basque sailor in one of the'hundreds of whalers' that operated in the vicinity of EasterIsland in the 19th century could have been responsible for thepuzzling genes. Basques, they said, were usually 'pre­eminent in this industry'. This, however, was hardly a well­founded claim. As I have since pointed out in this journal(Langdon 1994), Easter Island waters were and are largelydevoid of whales; no whaling ship is known to have visitedthe island before 1821; and Americans, not Basques, werepre-eminent in the Pacific whaling industry. In response,Balm and Flenley (1994) said that they had merelymentioned the discovery of A29, BI2 as 'an entertainingcuriosity'. In their opinion, it had 'no direct relevance to therise and fall of the island's culture'and they did not propose 'to lose anysleep' over who was 'ultimatelyresponsible' for it on Easter Island.They also made the followingpoints:

(I) A29, BI2 had been'improperly named' the Basquehaplotype because it was 'alsoconunon in the south of France' .

(2) Dausset could not be sure that 'all the islanders in his tests were ofpure Easter Island descent.

(3) A calculation that I made ofthe odds against the haplotype beingintroduced to Easter Island by avisiting Basque of post-Roggeveentimes was irrelevant 'since it seemsthat one did (visit it]'.

(4) In discussing the origin of thehaplotype on Easter Island, I hadignored the 'likelihood' --clearly setout in Easter Island, Earth Island--that an unknownEuropean ship had visited the island before Roggeveen in1722.

(5) A29, B12 was apparently 'peculiar to Easter Island' inthe South Pacific because Dausset's 'most recent campaign'ofHLA testing in the region had seemingly found no trace ofit elsewhere.

(6) Except that the haplotype reached Easter Island before1870, the exact date of its arrival would always remainunknown.

(7) Even if everyone accepted my arguments that thehaplotype reached Easter Island before 1816, 'not muchprogress' could be made in determining its ultimate origin.

The BahnlFlenley claim that the presence of A29, BI2 onEaster Island has 'no direct relevance' to 'the rise and fall ofthe island's culture' is, of course, presumptuous. Unless theyknow who was 'ultimately responsible' for it, they cannotknow whether it is relevant to the island's prehistory or not.Hence, the question of the haplotype's origin must either beresolved or we must all resign ourselves to perpetualuncertainty. In my view, resolving it is not as difficult as

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Pakomio Maori, with hands clasped, was estimated to be about 70 years old whenthis photograph ofEaster Islanders was taken during the visit ofthe USS "Mohican"

to Easter Island in 1886.

genealogy was based. After Thorsby had obliged and McCallhad given me copies of other such material, I became anEaster Island genealogist in my own right. I soon foundmyself in agreement with McCall: all the islanders withBasque genes were descended from Pakomio Maori.However, for the time being, that was virtually all I couldestablish about him. My only clue to his life span was that, in1918, a daughter of his by his first marriage had beenestimated to be 50 years old, i.e. born in about 1868(Bienvenido 1921:74). This meant that Pakomio, himself,could not have been born any later than about 1848-50.

Some 15 months after The Lost Caravel appeared,

received the first of many letters from Dausset. 3 Thorsby, hesaid, had sent him copies of our correspondence and had toldhim of my book. He was 'very interested' in my hypothesis.However, because the A29, BI2 haplotype was 'mainlypresent in the south of France and in the Basque country',and because the name Dutrou-Bornier was 'very common' inthose parts, he thought it 'quite probable' that the genes ofEaster Island's Dutrou-Bornier had been widely spread by thetime the island's population had fallen to I IO in 1877. To mysurprise, Dausset also said that the islanders in whom Basquegenes had been found were known by other islanders to be'impure' and that this probably implied that the impurity was'more recent than the si>..'1eenth century'.

In reply, I sent Dausset details of my genealogicalresearch into Pakomio Maori's family, pointing out that theBasque genes could not derive from Dutrou-Bornier becausePakomio, born at least as far back as 1850, was clearly thecommon ancestor of all the carriers. I also expressed mysurprise at Dausset's statement about the 'impurity' of theislanders tested, saying that this contradicted what his own

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team had stated, namely that it had 'aimed at selection ofindividuals where no known foreign admixture had takenplace, even from other Polynesian islands'.

I then went on to calculate the odds against the Basquehaplotype having been introduced to Easter Island by avisiting Basque sailor ofpost-Roggeveen times rather than bya Hispano-Polynesian descendant of one from the SanLesmes. My calculation was based on six assumptions: (l) anEaster Island population of 2,000, of whom 200 were womenbetween 14 and 25 years of age; (2) that a woman is fertile foronly about 25 days a year; (3) an average crew of 40 men inail ships visiti ng Easter Island after 1722; (4) that half of

every crew had sexual relations withthe women between 14 and 25; (5) that10 per cent of all such sailors wereBasques; and (6) that 8 per cent of allBasques (the rounded Macaye figure)were carriers of A29, B12. On thisbasis, the odds against the Basquegenes being introduced by a visitingsailor of post-Roggeveen times workedout at one in 3,550.

Dausset thought my calculationmost relevant to the question of howBasque genes had reached EasterIsland and published a Frenchtranslation of it several years later(Dausset 1982 :228-30). Meanwhile,he said in a letter:

I must apologize for mystatement that impureindividuals have beenanalyzed in the workpublished in (Thorsby et al1973]. In fact two impureindividuals were tested...butthey were eliminated in the

published analysis.I was glad to see that the genealogy

we made was not perfectly exact and withyour information it is now clear that theA29, B12 haplotype comes from the samesource [i.e. Pakomio Maori] that youdefined so perfectly and the ways inwhich these haplotypes have been spread inthe population studied is now of use. Iagree with your reasoning that thishaplotype arrived in the island before the'reign' of Dutrou-Bornier and in this caseshould have been given by a Europeansailor.

Some months later, in July 1977, Dausset came toAustralia to attend an international immunologicalconference. He took the opportunity to discuss with me thepossibility of carrying out further I-ll..,A tests in Polynesia totry to verify my Easter Island hypothesis. Nothing, however,came of this idea for several years. Meanwhile, I had been

Vol 9 (I) March 1995

Nicolas Pakomio, the youngest childofPakomio Maori, was about 67

when photographed during the visitofthe Canadian Medical ~xpedition

to Easter Island in 1964-65.

awarded a two-year fellowship at the Australian NationalUniversity to carry out further research into 16th centurySpanish castaway influence in the Pacific, and this enabledme to visit Tahiti, Easter Island, Santiago, Washington,Rome and Honolulu in search of further information aboutPakomio Maori and his family.

My research established the following significant points:(a) Pakomio was born in about 1816; (b) he had red hair, blueeyes, a light skin and strikingly European features; (c) hisdaughter Eritapeta (also called Isobel) by his first wife, TeRive Meitota, was born before the Peruvianslave raids of 1862-63; (d) Pakomio wasone of about 1,400 Easter Islanders whowere kidnapped and taken to Peru; (e) hewas one of only IS to survive smallpox andother diseases and be repatriated; (1) heseems to have been a favorite of EasterIsland's first Catholic missionaries of themid-1860s as his baptismal name was thatof Pacome Olivier, their father superior inValparaiso; (g) in 1871, Pakomio andabout 100 of his countrymen accompaniedthe missionaries to Mangareva whenDutrou-Bornier forced them to leave EasterIsland; (h) Pakomio and his second wifeAngata, whom he married in Mangareva,returned to Easter Island in 1879; (i)between 1879 and 1898, the couple hadfive daughters and one son; (j) Pakomiodied in about 1909 or 1910; (k) his Basquegenes were passed down to, and through,five of his children by his two wives; and(I) his daughter Hilaria, born about 1885,inherited his red hair and other lightfeatures.

My discovery that Pakomio had been born in about 1816and had had blue eyes and red hair appeared to eliminate thealready remote possibility that he could have been theoffspring of some visiting Basque sailor of post-Roggeveentimes. On the one hand, no European ships likely to have hadBasques on board had called at Easter Island in or around1816. On the other, as blue eyes and red hair are recessive,those features could only have been manifested in Pakomio ifhis mother had already been a carrier of 50 per cent or moreblue-eye and red-hair genes. And if she was, then she musthave already been of part-European descent.

Only four European ships likely to have had Basques onboard visited Easter Island before 1816. They were theSpanish ships San Lorenzo and Santa Rosalia from Peru in1770 and the French exploring ships Astrolabe and Boussole.under La Perouse, that called in 1786. But even if A29, BI2had been introduced to the island with any of them it wouldstill be necessary to explain why their officers found theEaster Islanders remarkably European-looking, some evenhaving fair, chestnut, red and cinnamon-colored hair. 'If [theislanders] wore clothing like ourselves, they might very wellpass for Europeans,' one of the Spaniards wrote.

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There are also other reasons why Pakomio Maori is mostunlikely to have acquired his Basque genes from anyone inthe ships of 1770 or 1786-or any other ship of post­Roggeveen times. One is that although members of his familyfrequently figured as 'pure-bloods' in censuses and biologicaltests from the 1930s onwards (e.g. Drapkin 1935; Sandovaland Wilhelm 1945; Englert and Cruz-Coke 1975), theircredentials were never disputed until A29, B 12 wasdiscovered. However, the most compelling reason concernsPakomio'sjourney to Peru as one of 1,400 kidnaped laborers.

If he had been the son of a visiting Basquesai lor of 1816 or thereabouts, he, almostcertainly, would have been the only Rapanuicarrier of the A29, B12 haplotype when theslave raids took place. If he had been agrandson or a greatgrandson of a Basquesailor of 1770 or 1786, only a small handfulof other adult islanders could also have hadthose genes. Hence, the odds, in the firstcase, of Basque genes surviVingtransportation to Peru and back would havebeen only one in 1,400. In the second, theodds could not have been better than aboutfive in 1,400. On the other hand, if thehaplotype had been of San Lesmes originand had been introduced to Easter Islandtwo or three generations before Roggeveen,then there could have been scores ofcarriers by the 1860s, thus making theirsurvival in one kidnaped islander a realisticpossibility.

The BahnIFlenley claim that I ignoredthe possibility that the Dutch in 1722 werenot Easter Island's first European visitors is

not correct. In researching The Lost Caravel, I compiled adossier on all ships known to have been lost in the Pacific inpre-Cook times (Langdon 1969) and I kept a sharp look outfor evidence of any ship that might have made anundocumented visit to eastern PolyneSia in that period. I borein mind that such ships had to come from somewhere, had togo somewhere afterwards if not wrecked or otherwisedetained, and had to be owned by someone. The only shipthat I could discover that complied with these criteria was theSan Lesmes.

The Bahn/Flenley case for an unknown ship havingvisited Easter Island before Roggeveen is that the firstislander to go out to Roggeveen's ships displayed 'a friendlynonchalance and curiosity' rather than the 'panic and terror'that should have been expected of someone who had had 'nocontact with the outside world'. This scarcely complies withmy criteria for an unknown ship. In any case, if EasterIsland's first Polynesians had only arrived a few decadesbefore Roggeveen, as Heyerdahl has long claimed, then theislanders of 1722 would have been well aware that othervoyagers might turn up at any time.

The fact that the A29, BI2 haplotype has not been foundin Polynesia other than on Easter Island is hardly surprising.

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Hl.A tests have so far been held on only a few islands, andthose few do not include the one island where the discoveryof the Basque haplotype could probably be assumed, withreasonable certainty, to be traceable to the San Lesmes. Thisis Ra'ivavae. In 1977, when Dausset raised with me thepossibility of seeking to verify my San Lesmes hypothesis byfurther HLA tests, I suggested that Ra'ivavae was the place togo I pressed this in later correspondence, saying that unlikeRa'iatea, another key island in my hypothesis, Ra'ivavae stillhad no air service; it had never had much contact withEuropeans; and reliable genealogies for its people couldprobably still be compiled. In the event, Dausset's proposedproject did not take place until 1983. When it did, Ra'ivavaewas still so far off the beaten track that the researchers had tobe content with taking blood samples on Rurutu, more than200 miles away; on Mangareva; and from six islanders fromAmanu where the San Lesmes ran aground. No carriers ofA29, B 12 were found. Dausset sent me reprints of the team'sreport (Dehay et at 1987) with a letter of 27 June 1988. Hesaid: 'We tried in this new survey to determine how EasterIsland came to be populated. Unfortunately, as you will haveseen from the reprints, we did not really achieve our goal'.

If future HLA research should establish the presence ofAl9, Bil on Ra.'ivavae, the 'exact date' of the haplotype'sarrival on Easter Island will, of course, remain unknown.However, it will already be evident from this article that thehaplotype could not have reached Easter Island beforeEuropeans entered the Pacific in 1521 and that the historicalevidence and the nature of the haplotype itself are against itsarrival with or after Roggeveen in 1722. So both by defaultand in the light of positive evidence for it, we are left withonly the San Lesmes hypothesis.

The San Lesmes hypothesis calls for the establishment ofa Hispano-Polynesian community on Ra'iatea, a voyage ofHispano-Polynesians to Ra'ivavae, the establishment of asecond Hispano-Polynesian community on that island, andfinally a voyage to Easter Island. Because of a1.l this, the A29,B I2 haplotype must obviously have reached Easter Islandmuch nearer to 1722 than to 1521. In other words,somewhere around Heyerdahl's estimated date of 1680 for theend of the island's Middle Period would seem to be just aboutright.

For the purpose of discussion, then, let's assume that aboatload of, say, 30 Hispano-Polynesian men and women,including at least one with Basque genes, did reach EasterIsland in 1680; that American Indians were then the island'sonly inhabitants; and that they had livea in complete isolationsince the start of the Middle Period, some 600 years earlier.What would the consequences have been?

One almost certain consequence is that virtually from themoment the Hispano-Polynesians stepped ashore, theAmerican Indians would have begun to die like flies.Through being of quite different genetic stock, they wouldhave had no inbuilt resistance to even the most triflinginfectious diseases that the newcomers brought with them(Weatherall et at 1988). Nor could they have had anyacquired resistance. So the situation would have been much

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as it was in the New World from 1492 onwards following thearrival of the Spaniards and Portuguese. More appositely, itwould have been much like that on many isolated islands ofPolynesia in the early years of European contact. Anespecially pertinent example is Tupuai in the Austral group,about five miles long by three wide, and about 100 miles fromits nearest neighbors.

When the 25 Bounty mutineers put into Tupuai in May1789 with the idea of establishing a settlement, JamesMorrison, the bosun's mate, noted that it was 'full ofInhabitants for its size', with possibly 3,000 people Afterthree days, the mutineers left to obtain livestock in Tahiti.When they returned, many of the islanders were suffering'Colds, Agues, & Sore Eyes, Running at the Nose &c'through their contact with them. The mutineers did not staylong enough on the second occasion to observe the long-termeffects of these ailments and no other Europeans visited theisland until 1813-14. However, by 1817, a visiting missionaryfound its population 'but small'; and in 1823, a 'fatal disease'was 'raging dreadfully'. In 1828, the population stood at only230, and, three years later, it was down to 182-a drop of 94per cent in the 50 years since the Bounty's visit (McArthur1967:300-1).

If a party of 30 Hispano-Polynesians had precipitated acomparable population decline on Easter Island from 1680,then a community of 10,000 American Indians would havebeen reduced to barely.700 by th.e time of Roggeveen's visitin 1722. Meanwhile, with women among the Hispano­Polynesian immigrants, their minority Polynesian languagewould have easily survived, and, within a few years, couldwell have been looked on as the language of prestige.Intermarriage between the newcomers and those of theoriginal inhabitants who survived their ailments would haveresulted in numerous borrowings from each others'languages. It would also have produced a new ethnic type,with many of the mixed-race people resembling theirEuropean forebears. This, as Dausset (1982:230) hasexplained, is because:

.....a 'stranger' gene spreads easily in an isolatedpopulation since it undoubtedly brings with it someof the famous [hybrid] vigor of the heterozygotes[i.e. carriers of diverse genes] which,unquestionably, has a selective advantage over thehomozygotes [carriers of similar genes] who areinevitably frequent in a population with a high rateof consanguinuity.

But Roggeveen's arrival would no doubt have brought anew outbreak of 'Colds, Agues, & Sore Eyes, Running at theNose, &c'. And these ailments would have most afflicted theislanders with the least resistance to European diseases,namely those with no European genes. So the AmericanIndian population would have gone into another sharpdecline and the percentage of people of part-Europeandescent would have increased correspondingly. And, bearingin mind that a similar process must already have occurredafter the San Lesmes reached Ra'iatea and after its crew'sHispano-Polynesian descendants reached Ra'ivavae, there is

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little doubt that the Easter Island population must havebecome decidedly European-looking by the time of theGonzalez expedition of 1770. Moreover, the newly-'ltroduced Polynesian language, although well laced with

local borrowings, is likely to have become the principallanguage by then.

In fact, most of the words in the 94-word vocabulary thatthe Gonzalez expedition collected are common to thePolynesian languages generally (Corney 1908:109-10). Butfive are unknown in all other Polynesian languages and fivehave cognates only in other Eastern Polynesian languages. 4

On the other hand, the expedition's chief pilot, FranciscoAntonio de Aguera, found the islanders in the vicinity of itsanchorage in La Perouse Bay strikingly European-looking.He wrote:

Their physiognomy does not resemble that of theContinent of Chile, Peru or New Spain [Mexico1in

anything, these islanders being in colour between white,swarthy, and reddish, not thick lipped nor flat nosed,the hair chestnut- coloured and limp, some having itblack, and others tending to red or a cinnamon tint.They are tall, well built and proportioned in all theirlimbs.. ,their appearance being thoroughly pleasingand tallying with Europeans more than with Indians(Corney 1908:96).However, some islanders of predominantly American

Indian descent seem still to have been living in the interior ofthe island at that time. A report written by Senior LieutenantAlberto Olaondo, who was sent there on a reconnoitringmission, suggests this in two ways: the people were moreuniform in their coloration than those on the coast and thecrops they cultivated were mainly of American origin orprovenance. Olaondo described the interior people as 'all ofa brown color, none black', adding that their crops comprisedsugar cane, bananas, manioc, gourds, maize and (white)potatoes (Mellen 1986:228-9).

Of the plants mentioned, maize, manioc and potatoes areall of American origin. As they were not reported on anyother Polynesian islands at the time of European contact, theycould only have reached Easter Island from America. Thegourds and bananas are likely to have come from America,too. Although both are non-American in origin, both hadbeen introduced to South America in prehistoric times and sowere available to be carried to Easter Island from there. Infact, the gourd could hardly have come from anywhere else asit was unknown in Western Polynesia in pre-European times(Whistler 1990). The banana seems likely to have arrivedfrom South America for a variety of reasons, one being thatits name in Eastern Polynesia differs from those used inWestern Polynesia (Langdon 1993 :31-5). The sweet potato,another American plant, was reported on Easter Island byother members of the Gonzalez expedition (Corney 1908: 101,123), while several other such plants, including the capsicum,pineapple, tobacco and 26-chromosome cotton, seem likely tohave been there then, although they were not reported untillong afterwards (Langdon 1988b:329).

The Spaniards of the Gonzalez expedition were the only

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early visitors to Easter Island to mention seeing manioc andOlaondo was the only one to speak of maize and whitepotatoes. Because of this, Bahn and Flenley (1994) havesuggested that their reports are untrustworthy. If the threeplants really had been present in 1770, they said, thenCaptain Cook's companion 1. R. Forster, 'a trained botanist',would surely have seen them only four years later. This,though, is hardly a watertight argument. For one thing,Forster did not visit the region that Olaondo described.Secondly, if Olaondo's people of the interior had, indeed,been the last of Easter Island's American Indians, then they,too, are likely to have fallen victims to the 'Colds, Agues, &Sore Eyes ... &C.' that he and his men undoubtedly carriedwith them. Thereafter, maize, manioc and white potatoesmight wel! have fallen out of cultivation through neverhaving gained the favor of the Hispano-Polynesianimmigrants.

Forster, himself, it seems, would have been quiteamenable to these ideas. During his visit to Easter Island, hewrote in his journal that certain stone-lined wells he saw were'by no means the work of the present race of Inhabitants, nomore than the large Stone-Images erected to the Memory oftheir Chiefs & Heroes, & which are the only remains of theirformer Grandeur, & more happy State of the Isle'. He alsospeculated that 'a civil or external war, a great mortality, toogreat luxury, or some other disaster' had reduced theislanders to the small number that he and his companionssaw. 'The highest hills', he added, 'have vestiges of theirbeing formerly cultivated all over. which confirms mysuspicion of their former great felicity, & opulence' (Hoare1982:476).

In a nutshell, if the question of Easter Island's Basquegenes is confronted squarely and ifone tries to explain (ratherthan explain away) many other kinds of evidence, a neatsolution seems to emerge to a threefold mystery: why manyEaster Islanders in early European times were remarkablyEuropean-looking; why they spoke a Polynesian language;and why they lived in an environment that apparently owedmore to South America than anywhere else.But this solution is completely at odds with the recentfindings of a team of scientists who analyzed mitochondrialDNA (mtDNA) from the bones of 12 ancient Easter Islandadults. So a few words are also called for about thosefindings, especially as Bahn (1994) sets great store by them.

The scientists involved in the mtDNA inquiry (Hagelberget at 1994) were headed by Dr Erika Hagelberg of theDepartment of Biological Anthropology at the University ofCambridge. They claimed that their analyses of mtDNA (a)confirmed (sic) the 'Polynesian affinities' of Easter Island'soriginal settlers; (b) pointed to 'a lack of sigpjficant contactbetween Polynesia and the Americas' in prehistoric times;and (c) showed that the prehistoric Easter Islanders derivedfrom the 'identical lineage' of other Polynesians.Unfortunately, the scientists appear to have read far more intothe mtDNA evidence than the evidence itself permits.

The 12 sets of bones from which the scientists extractedtheir mtDNA were excavated by the HeyerdaW expedition to

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Easter Island of 1955-56. They came from two archaeologicalsites, Ahu Vinapu and Ahu Tepeu. According to Heyerdahl(1965:325-7) and his colleague Carlyle Smith (1965:393-6),all bones from Ahu Vinapu plus those from one of two gravesat Ahu Tepeu were from the Late Period of the island'sculture, namely c.1680-1868 AD. The bones from the secondgrave at Ahu Tepeu were attributed to the 'very end of theMiddle Period', c.1100-c.1680 AD, on the basis of aradiocarbon date of 1629 AD obtained from some fa fora

reeds, Scirpus riparius, found with them. However,radiocarbon specialists now believe that aquatic plants areunsatisfactory for dating purposes (Spriggs and Anderson1993 :206). So the 1629 date is suspect and must be discarded.This means that no bones in the mtDNA inquiry are likely tobe older than 300 years and, given Easter Island's dampclimate, all are probably much less.

As the island is thought to have been settled in the firstmillenium of the Christian era, it is obvious that mtDNAfrom post-1680 bones could only 'confirm' the Polynesianaffinities of the original settlers if someone had alreadyshown that those settlers were Polynesians, which is certainlynot the case. It is likewise obvious that only mtDNA from ahuge sample of pre-1680 bones covering the whole periodback to the time of settlement and showing no non­Polynesian affinities could justify the claim of no prehistoriccontact between America and Easter Island. Yet again, asmtDNA is passed down only in the female line, that kind ofevidence simply cannot distinguish between Polynesians ofunmixed descent and Polynesians of San Lesmes descent ontheir male side.

In summary, the mtDNA evidence of Hagelberg ef af doesnot put the slightest dent in the case advanced here: thatEaster Island's last prehistoric settlers were Hispano­Polynesians; that at least one carried the HLA haplotypeA29, B12 common among Basques; and that theirpredecessors were American Indians.

NOTESI. Among human biologists, the first-named author of a paper isnot necessarily the senior or principal author.2. In RNJ 8( I):6, I stated incorrectly that the Basques of Macayehad the highest known frequency of A29, B12.3. Microfilm copies of my correspondence on The Lost Caravel from1967 to 1982 have been deposited in the National Library ofAustralia, Canberra; Mitchell Library, Sydney; State Library ofVictoria, Melbourne; Australian National University Library,Canberra; National Library of New Zealand, Wellington; andUniversity of Hawaii Library, Honolulu. The reels are numberedPMB 551 and PMB 999.4. Rapanui words recorded by the Gonzalez expedition that areunknown, or unknown with similar meanings, in other Polynesianlanguages are: vere 'beard', ngao 'neck', maripau 'testicles', moai

'stone statue' and pare 'tattooing on the arms'. Words with cognatesonly in other Eastern Polynesian languages are: rauoho 'hair', hihi

'eyebrows', vekeveke 'eyelashes'; maro'a 'to rise' and mou 'to besilent' .

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Gill. Rapa Nui Journal, 8(2):40.Bahn, Paul and John Flenley, 1994. Reply to Robert Langdon. Rapa Nui

Journal,8(1):11-12.

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Bienvenido de Estella, Father, 1921. Mis Viajes a Pascua. Editorial Cervantes,Santiago de Chile.

Corney, Bolton Glanvill (ed), 1908. The Voyage of Captain Don FelipeGonzalez... to Easter Island in 1770-1. HaJduyt Society, Cambridge.

Dausset, Jean. 1982. L'hypothese du Pro Langdon: 'La caravelle perdue '.Appendix to E. Thorsby, 1. Colombani, 1. Dausset et ai, Groupe HLA etpolymorphisme des indigenes de l'Ile de Piiques. In Jean Dausset et ai,Nouveau Regard sur l'Ile de Pdques, 213-30. Moana Editeur, Paris.

----- et ai, 1973. Genetic structure and distribution ofHLA antigens in a Basquevillage. In Jean Dausset and Jacques Colombani, 1973.Histocompatibility Testing 1972. Munksgaard, Copenhagen, pp.99-I06.

Dehay, C., et al (inc. J. Dausset), 1987. HLA and non-HLAphenotyping and genotyping in Austral and Gambier PolynesianArchipelagos. Tissue Antigens. 30:49-62.

Drapkin, Israel, 1935. Contribuci6n al estudio antropol6gico y demografico delos Pascuenses. Journal de la Societe, des Americanistes. N.S. 27:265­302.

Fischer, Steven Roger, 1993. Postscript. In Steven Roger Fischer (ed.), EasterIsland Studies: Contributions to the History of RapanUi in Memory ofWilliam T. Mulloy. Monograph 32:228-29. Oxbow Books, Oxford.

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Heyerdahl, Thor, 1961. General discussion. In Thor Heyerdahl and Edwin N.Ferdon (eels), 1961. Reports of the Norwegian ArchaeologicalExpedition to Easter Island and the East Pacific: Archaeology of EasterIsland. Monograph 24, pt.l :493-526. School of American Research andthe Museum ofNew Mexico, Santa Fe.

-----,1965. Addendum. In Heyerdahl and Ferdon 1965:325-26.and Edwin N. Ferdon Jr (eds) 1965. Reports of the NorwegianArchaeological Expedition to Easter Island and the Ellst PaCific:Miscellaneous Papers. Monograph 24, pt 2. School of American Researchand the Museum on New lv1exico, Santa Fe.

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Langdon, Robert, 1969. Euro'pean castaways in the Pacific before CaptainCook. Seminar paper, Department of Pacific History, RSPacS, AustralianNational University, 26 November 1969.

-----, 1975. The Lost Caravel. Pacific Publications, Sydney.-----, 1988a. The Lost Caravel Re-explored. Brolga Press, Canberra.-----, 1988b. Manioc, a Long Concealed Key to the Enigma of Easter Island.

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National University Press, Canberra.Mellen Blanco, Francisco. 1986. Manuscritos y Documentos Espanoles para

la Historia de la Isla de Pascua. Biblioteca CEHOPU, Madrid.Moreno, M. E. and 1. M. Kreisler, 1977. HLA phenotype and haplotype

frequencies in a sample ofthe Spanish population. Tissue Antigens. 9: 105­lO.

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