No taller trees

By the time Dutch Admiral Jacob Roggeveen spotted the island on Easter Sunday in 1722 (there's one secret revealed for you), he found no trees taller than 10 feet. The major obvious fallout from Easter's deforestation was diminution of the food supply. The archaeological record shows that the islanders' diet changed from big porpoises -- which had to be caught far from shore using canoes they no longer had -- to small mollusks gathered from tidal basins; birds were hunted to extinction; and cannibalism became rife. Jared Diamond, who uses Easter as a case study in his book "Collapse," reports that "Your mother's flesh sticks in my teeth" became a common insult.

For the Easter Islanders, there was no escape. "They were trapped," says Mr. Rapu. In or around 1680, we know, civil war broke out. People began tearing down the statues, possibly in deliberate effrontery to leaders they believed had failed them. (A 33-foot tall statue named Paro, dating from about 1620, was one of the last erected and one of the last felled.) The year 1838 offers the last European mention of a standing statue, and in 1868 every moai on Easter Island was either toppled in the dirt or resting stillborn in the quarry. Captain Cook, arriving in 1774, described the islanders as "small, lean, timid and miserable." European diseases arrived soon after, killing more people,

And slave raids in 1862-63 carried off 1,500 Rapa Nui -- half the remaining population -- to the Peruvian guano mines. A handful managed to struggle home a few years later -- and brought the plague with them. By 1872 there were just 111 people on the island. Today, the 3,800 residents in Rapa Nui are citizens of Chile, the islanders having accepted Chilean annexation in 1888. It's been for the most part a happy relationship. Spanish is the island's lingua franca (though Rapa Nui is being revived), and you can have a mean plate of ceviche con coco while you contemplate the fate of the island and its lessons.