Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/370

 338 in the South-East Pacific, remained in its primitive state, save in so far as it was affected by the visits of passing ships, till the year 1863. At that date a large number of its most distinguished inhabitants were carried away by Peruvian slave raiders or died from a subsequent epidemic of small-pox; the following year the first Christian missionary settled on the island; he was rapidly followed by a series of European exploiters and the old order passed. The information which follows was obtained from the few surviving natives who can remember their life in its earlier condition prior to the above events. It is never easy to procure from uneducated persons a straightforward and accurate statement, even when the events in question are recent and well within their knowledge, it is even harder when some of the facts are forgotten or only vaguely remembered, so that a speaker glides almost unconsciously from what is known to what is merely conjectured; the difficulty of research was in this case further augmented through its being begun with preconceived ideas, obtained from the brief allusions of earlier writers, which subsequently proved to be erroneous. The work was necessarily a matter of time; it was not, for instance, till the Expedition had been a year on the island that the story transpired of the bird-man’s residence on Rano Raraku, though once heard it was found to be well known. The whole material available has not yet been examined and some changes may be necessary; what is claimed is that the evidence was very carefully obtained and weighed and that the story as given is believed to be substantially correct; but experience in field work here and elsewhere has induced a firm conviction that accuracy in anthropological work is never more than a comparative term. The account will be given first in general terms, and deviations or exceptions subsequently noted. With regard to the evidence at our disposal, information was obtained from