OBJECT history
The Sole Kavakava to Be Documented
in the Hands of Easter Islanders, 1873
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acquired by crewmembers of the British Topaz (1868)
and subsequently by the Norwegians of the Glitnir
(1869) and the Chileans of the O’Higgins (1870). By
the following year and the expedition of the Flore—a
frigate remembered both for the presence of Midshipman
Julien Viaud (who wrote as Pierre Loti) among
its crew and for its acquisition of the moai head now
at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac—the
objects that were collected were beginning to show a
decline in sculptural quality. When the SS.CC mission
left the island in 1871, those objects that remained
unsold or were considered trophies were moved to
the archbishopric of Tahiti, where some Rongorongo
tablets had already been sent. The collection followed
the congregation’s subsequent moves to Paris
(1888–1892), Braine-le-Comte in Belgium (1903),
and fi nally Rome (1953).
The single most extensive collection of Easter Island
artifacts was assembled by the crew of the Topaz
in the course of its stay on Easter Island from October
The missionaries of the SS.CC congregation established
a church and schools on Easter Island between
1866 and 1871, and they were followed between
1868 and 1876 by the notorious French colonial
adventurer Jean-Baptiste Onésime Dutrou-Bornier.
After the conversion of the island’s population to
Christianity had been completed in 1868, its new
residents found advantage in Easter Island sculptures,
one of the few commodities on the island that could
be traded with the crews of visiting ships, who were
interested in the ceremonial objects and the wooden
“idols” of a cult that had now been abolished: statuettes
of mythical creatures (bird-men, lizard-men), of
animals (fi sh, mollusks, shells, etc.), and of human
beings. There were three main types of the latter:
papa (a fl at female fi gure), tangata (a young man),
and kavakava (an elder).
Most of the objects gathered together at the Hangaroa
Mission by Fathers Hippolyte Roussel and
Gaspard Zumbohm between 1868 and 1871 were
By Michel Orliac
FIG. 1 (above): Group
of Easter Island objects
photographed by Emile Miot
on the deck of the Topaz,
December 1868.
Archives SS.CC. PAQ 5.
Photo: Michel Orliac.
FIG. 2 (right):
Male figure, kavakava.
Easter Island/Rapa Nui.
Wood. H: 49.2 cm.
Ex SS.CC congregation, Viscount
Benoist d’Azy.
Private collection.
© Hughes Dubois.
In 1774, Captain James Cook’s offi cers became
the fi rst outsiders to trade for the wooden carvings
from Easter Island (Rapa Nui) that were to enrich
the curiosity cabinets of Europe. Not long after,
in the early nineteenth century, the Easter Islanders
closed access to their island to outsiders, but trade
remained active as whalers, particularly Americans,
traversed the waters of the Pacifi c by the thousands
until the beginning of the U.S. Civil War. At the end
of 1862, slavers kidnapped half of the island’s people
and sent them to Peru. All of them died there save for
six, who were repatriated in 1864 by Father Eugène
Eyraud of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of
Jesus and Mary (SS.CC). In the course of his precarious
nine-month stay on the island, Eyraud noted the
abundance of sculpted wooden objects and of tablets
with Rongorongo inscriptions: “In all of the houses,
one fi nds small statuettes ..., wooden tablets, and
staffs covered with kinds of hieroglyphic characters.”
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