But of course the greatest mystery of the island, then as now, were the stone terraces and platforms and the gigantic stone statues. The workmanship of the mortarless masonry appeared to the officers of the _Resolution_ to be not inferior to the best stonebuilding work then known in England. The stones were morticed and fitted into one another in a very artful manner. The side walls were not perpendicular, but inclined inwards. The statues were, as a rule, erected on these stone platforms. It is noteworthy that the ears of these stone figures had their lobes prolonged downwards out of all proportion, but resembling closely the artificially elongated ears of the living Easter Islanders. Another puzzle was how the red stone cylinders could have been placed on the tops of the heads of these statues when they stood sometimes 25 feet or more above the ground. It must have required also considerable art to raise these immense carved stones to a perpendicular position. The statues did not seem to be regarded as idols by the people, but as the memorials of dead chiefs, and to have been in some way connected with the burial places of notabilities. The stonework on this island, nearly 1400 miles from the nearest land--Pitcairn--which has also remains of a similar nature, remains one of the world's great unsolved mysteries in the history of the human species, and it is remarkable that such small effort has been made by excavation to find some clue as to the origin and affinities of this vanished race of stonebuilders, whose works stretch across the Pacific from the Ladrone Islands to Easter Island. From Easter Island, Cook proceeded to the Marquezas archipelago, already known through the explorations of the Spaniards. Here the natives were of the usual type of friendly, boisterous thieves, not provoked to much dismay or anger if any of their companions were killed or wounded by the muskets which Cook was obliged to order to be fired at them, to stop their carrying off things of great importance to the ship. All the islands and most of the ports bore Spanish names. The people were Polynesians, but far better supplied with food products than the miserable Easter Islanders. They had pigs, fowls, bananas, yams, numerous edible roots, bread-fruit, and coconuts.