Behrens’ narrative of the discovery of Easter Island:Two editions, two personalities, two realities

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the figure of Carl Friedich Behrens, a member of the Dutch expedition led by Jacob Roggeveen, who re-discovered Easter Island in 1722. Behrens, a German soldier serving on one of the ships, left a narrative describing the whole journey. The first edition was published in 1737 followed, among others, by a re-published edition made by German anthropologist Hans Plischke that was published in 1923. The important thing is that this version differs from the original to a great extent and the editor did not account for the changes he had introduced into the text: besides grammar and orthography modernization, he omitted certain portions, misinterpreted other ones and added some comments without marking them as his own. As a result, the narrative gives an impression of having been written by another author; Behrens appears as a person with a different character and attitude, weaker, less convincing and even less trustworthy than he really was. This article presents numerous examples of the distortions as a warning against making a scientific or an anthropological use of unreliable editions of source texts, as this may wield a negative influence upon our view and interpretation of the culture we are analyzing.