There are canals, ditches, tunnels and an 875-yard-long wall, which measures 46 feet 6 inches at its highest point. The rectangular main precinct is arranged in terraces which are also built of perfect basalt squares. The main house that I measured has more than 80 outbuildings. Using the figure of 32,000 as a basis, an estimate of about 4,000,000 basalt columns installed in the 80 minor buildings alone is probably on the low side. A trial calculation is often enough to show up false explanations. Like this one, for example.
At the time when the complex of buildings on Nan Madol was constructed there was a small number of inhabitants on Ponape compared with today. The quarrying work on the north coast was difficult, laborious and boring. Transporting the dressed blocks through the jungle needed a whole army of strong men, and the number of dock laborers who tied the blocks under the canoes was also considerable. Lastly a number of islanders must have been engaged in harvesting the coconut palms, fishing and looking after the daily supply of food. Thus, if every fourth day several tons of basalt blocks reached the south coast for onward transport to Nan Madol, it would have been a gigantic, remarkable achievement, with the “technical” aids available. As there can have been no trade unions in those days, I assume that everybody worked and slaved 365 days a year. If 1,460 basalt blocks a year were landed on Nan Madol, it would have taken 296 years merely to get the material to the building site!
No, human beings have never been so stupid as to submit to such torture pointlessly. If there were basalt quarries on the north coast of Ponape,
why
didn’t they erect the group of buildings on the main island?
Why
did they build on an islet so far away from the quarry?
Is there no convincing explanation?
Nan Madol is by no means a “beautiful” city and it obviously never was. There are no reliefs, no sculptures, no statues or paintings. The architecture is cold and unfriendly. The basalt blocks are piled on top of each other harshly, crudely, threateningly. This is surprising because the South Sea islanders always decorated their palaces and fortresses lavishly. Palaces and fortresses were places in which kings were to be honored or the gods appeased. The Spartan masonry of Nan Madol excludes either of these alternatives. Was it a defense work? The terraces that facilitate the climb up to the buildings reduce that supposition
ad absurdum
. No one ever made things so easy for their enemies In fact, the terraces lead to the center of the plan, to the “well.”
This well is not a well, but the way down to the beginning or end of a tunnel. The fact that today the opening is full of water to barely six feet below the edge proves nothing, for the buildings of Nan Madol continue over the edge of the island and can be followed with the naked eye below sea level until they disappear in the depths
But what was a tunnel doing on a tiny island? Where did it lead?
I first read about this remarkable feature in Herbert Rittlinger’s book
The Measureless Ocean
. Rittlinger, who traveled round the South Seas on a voyage of research, learnt on Ponape that the brilliant and splendid center of a celebrated kingdom had existed there untold millennia ago. The reports of fabulous wealth had enticed pearl divers and Chinese merchants to investigate the seabed secretly and the divers had all risen from the depths with incredible tales. They had been able to walk on the bottom on well-preserved streets overgrown with mussels and coral. “Down below,” there were countless stone vaults, pillars and monoliths. Carved stone tablets hung on the remains of clearly recognizable houses.
What the pearl divers did not find was discovered by Japanese divers with modern equipment. They confirmed with their finds what the traditional legends of Ponape reported: the vast wealth in precious metals, pearls and bars of silver. The legend says that the corpses rest in the “House of the Dead” (i.e. the main house in the complex). The Japanese divers reported that the dead were buried in watertight platinum coffins. And the divers actually brought bits of platinum to the surface day after day! In fact, the main exports of the island—copra, vanilla, sago and mother of pearl—were supplanted by platinum! Rittlinger says that the Japanese carried on exploiting this platinum until one day two divers did not surface, in spite of their modern equipment. Then the war broke out and the Japanese had to withdraw. He ends his story as follows:
“The natives’ stories, encrusted with century-old legends, are probably exaggerated. But the finds of platinum on an island where the rock contains no platinum, were and remain a very real fact.”
All that happened about 1939.
I do not believe in the metal or platinum coffins Hexagonal or octagonal basalt columns, overgrown with mussels and coral, could easily be mistaken for coffins under the water. Never mind. The fact remains that Japan exported platinum from Ponape after its mandate in 1919.
Where did all this platinum come from?
Even if the coffins were an illusion, I am convinced by the divers’ tales of houses, streets and stone vaults on the sea bottom, for one can see these structures in clear water at the edge of the island and recognize clearly how they lead to the so-called well. In my opinion, this was most probably the entrance to a tunnel system covering the island. One point: Nan Madol has nothing in common with the legendary Atlantis that vanished into the sea in 9000 B.C., according to Plato. Here the buildings on dry land exist on the spot where they were laid out ages ago and their continuations under water were planned layouts which were constructed at the same time. There are relics of wonderful buildings here, but there is no miracle.
What does tradition say about the mysterious ruins of Nan Madol?
K. Masao Hadley, Pensile Lawrence and Carole Jencks, research workers living on Ponape, have collected material without attempting to interpret it.
The main building is referred to as the “Temple of the Holy Dove” in the legend. Only three centuries ago, Nanusunsap, the Dove God and high priest, was rowed through the canals in a boat and opposite him sat a dove which he had to look in the eyes all the time. If the dove blinked—and doves do so constantly—the poor high priest had to blink back. A strange conceit.
However, the legends relate that originally the symbol of Nan Madol was not a dove, but a fire-breathing dragon. The stories about the origin of the island and the buildings are woven round this formerly indigenous dragon. The dragon’s mother had excavated the canals with her powerful muzzle and so created the islets. The dragon had a magician as helper and this dragon-magician knew a rhyme with which, thanks to the power of the charm, he could make the basalt blocks fly over from the neighboring island, and then, with the help of another rhyme, use them to make buildings without the inhabitants of Nan Madol lifting a finger.
I was amused by one interpretation of the dragon legend. The archaeologists say that the dragon was not really a dragon, but a crocodile that made its way to Nan Madol by mistake and created a considerable disturbance there. There are crocodiles in the South Seas about 3,000 miles from the island. A crocodile might have lost its way at some time—why not? —but that would still not be a reason for bringing a solitary saurian into the legend and leaving out the actual building of the edifices at Nan Madol, which is far more impressive.
One
crocodile left traces behind in the popular legend, but buildings whose elements are still astonishing and inexplicable today are left unmentioned. The crocodile obviously did not build terraces, houses and tunnels. Or did it?
Naturally there are many more legends about Nan Madol than those of the dove and dragon. In the second volume of his
Results of the South Sea Expedition, 1908-1910
(Berlin, 1936), the German ethnologist Paul Hambruch gives a detailed survey of the sagas, myths and legends of the Caroline Islands. The District Economic Development Office on Ponape sells tourists a brochure containing data about the history and legends for a dollar. If I have concentrated here on the dragon legend, I have a good reason for doing so. It is not because I have found a
unique
key witness for my theory of the gods.
On all the South Sea islands which can show the ruins of ancient buildings and confirm their past in myths, one finds the wild claim that big stones flew through the air to their appointed places. The most prominent of these legends-cum-prophecies (because it is world-famous) concerns Easter Island. In their myths the Rapanui have handed down through the ages the “knowledge” that some 200 colossal statues around the coast of the island landed in their positions “from the air” and “by themselves.”
The dragon and dove legends are found everywhere, naturally in different versions. The mass of additional legendary material is dominated by warlike events, lists of the descendants of ruling royal families, marriages and murders, as well as verifiable historical facts of more recent date. This extensive part of the legends is based on facts; it has a core of reality. That seems only logical to me, for even the boldest imagination needs a spur, a launching pad, as it were, for daring ideas. Thus, when it is dealing with an apparent Utopia, the human imagination tends to use what it has experienced or at least what is conceivable at that time. Now dragons are a global element in myths and legends. The earliest Chinese sagas mention them and they have their natural place in Mayan mythology. These fire-breathing monsters are familiar to every ancient people in the South Sea community, though sometimes in the form of noisy, flying snakes. But they all possess the fabulous art of being able to carry very large and heavy objects over vast distances and setting them up in a prearranged order in a given place. What master builder of our own day would not like to be a dragon with such abilities?
The imaginative early inhabitants built Nan Madol. Not in a day. With the help of a friendly mathematician, I calculated that it would have taken them about 300 years. They toiled with blood, sweat and tears for many generations. Why has not this tremendous achievement by the islanders been recorded and given prominence in established history if—as the archaeologists claim—it only took place 500 years ago? The “proof” of this recent dating is very flimsy. Six years ago some charcoal remains were found under a basalt block near the “well.” Carbon 14 examinations gave a date around A.D. 1300.
Apart from the well-attested inaccuracy of the C 14 method, which presupposes a constant relation of the radioactive isotope of carbon (C) with the atomic weight 14 in the atmosphere, it is much more possible or even probable that later generations lit a fire on the basalt buildings that had already been in existence for a long time. These are not proofs to be taken seriously, they are tricks to bluff us when scholars have nothing else to rely on.
Polynesia (Greek: country of many islands), the archipelago of the eastern ocean, lies in the large triangle between Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand. The original inhabitants of all the Polynesian islands (total area 15,800 square miles) have common sagas and legends; they have common linguistic roots and with only a few variations they have a common appearance. They also have common gods!
The majority of Polynesian specialists—archaeologists, anthropologists and philologists—are united in saying that culture and language spread from East Polynesia. According to this version, the export of culture spread from the group of the nine Cook Islands and their many atolls, from the large island of Tahiti (387 square miles), from the Tuamoto Islands, with approximately 80 atolls, and from the Marquesas and the Mangareva Islands.
I dare not belittle these scientific conclusions, but I have some questions to ask.
How did the East Polynesians cover the vast distance between the islands when they were carrying on their export trade in culture?
There is a theory that they boarded their canoes, rowed into the ocean currents and then drifted. Where did they drift to?
It is half a century since research into marine currents has given us a pretty accurate idea of the directions in which the large strong currents move and which coasts they touch. The map of marine currents shows conclusively that the East Polynesian exporters must have reached New Zealand, the biggest island in the South Pacific, in their primitive canoes
against
the current.
A favorite explanation of this motorless and compassless traffic is that the seafarers between East Polynesia and New Zealand traveled so far in a northerly or southerly direction that they found themselves east or west of their goal—then the clever fellows slipped into the currents at exactly the right place.
That would be all right if the ancient Polynesians had had modern maritime knowledge and navigational aids. What did they know about the precise degree of latitude from which they had to turn off to east or west? And how did they know their goal? Did they know that other islands existed and where they were?
Anyone who assumes that the ancient Polynesians made exact use of the currents—that ran counter to the directions of their expeditions—must be prepared to admit that knowledge of marine currents was familiar to them. If scholars are ready to admit this necessary prerequisite for navigation between the islands, I will gladly support the current theory, but at the same time I must be allowed to ask the question
whence
they acquired this knowledge.
We are concerned here with the export of culture from east to west over vast distances, which I list here according to data supplied by international airlines:
| Easter Island—Tahiti | = | 2,300 miles |
| Tahiti—Fiji | = | 2,670 miles |
| Fiji—Australia | = | 1,865 miles |
| California—Hawaii | = | 2,485 miles |
| Hawaii—Marshall Islands | = | 2,360 miles |
But if in spite of this, a raft or a canoe had landed by chance on the coast of a hitherto unknown island, the bold seafarers (against the current!) would never again have had any communication with their former home; they could not even have sent messages saying that they had landed. If the foolhardy aquanauts had happened to put to sea again from the island they had landed on by chance, they would have got further and further away from their home port. Not even the strongest men could have managed the journey home in canoes. Yet according to science they had another astounding achievement to their credit. They had no women with them, but they not only supplied the islands with culture, but also produced children who then multiplied vigorously. How did they manage that?