A View of the Monuments of Easter Island, Rapanui, 18th century, by William Hodges:
“The ancient hereditary kings, the last of whom died in slavery in Peru, were replaced by men whose prowess naked in the raging sea marked them to be temporary sovereigns. But their sovereignty was not an administration of a structured society, which now existed no more; he who brought the first egg of the manu-tara was king, and his sovereignty was as pervasive as he was invisible, until the terns returned to the sea. What he presided over was not a panicky totalitarian culture bent on preserving its sedentary economy from the depredations of yet more rapacious agents of the mercantile societies of the Dutch, English, French, Russians, and Peruvians, but, in its ruins, the liberation of a totally different kind of culture—a culture of pride, daring and chance, violence and eroticism. A culture of birds.”
-Alphonso Lingis, “The Navel of the World”