Katherine Routledge

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Katherine Maria Routledge, née Pease (1866-1935) was a British archaeologist who initiated (but did not complete) the first true survey of Easter Island.

She was the second child of Kate and Gurney Pease, and was born into a wealthy Quaker family in Darlington, northern England. She graduated from Somerville Hall (now Somerville College, Oxford, with Honours in Modern History in 1895, and for a while taught courses through the Extension Division and at Darlington Training College. After the Second Boer War, she traveled to South Africa with a committee to investigate resettlement of single working women from England to South Africa. In 1906 she married William Scoresby Routledge. The couple went to live among the Kikuyu people of what was then British East Africa, and in 1910 jointly published a book of their research entitled With A Prehistoric People.

From early childhood, Routledge had suffered from what is today believed to have been the developing stages of paranoid schizophrenia. She had auditory hallucinations and "heard voices." In her recent biography, JoAnne van Tilburg related that Katherine's brother, Harold Pease, also suffered from mental illness, although whether he also suffered from schizophrenia is unclear. Trying to deal with her mental illness, she became involved with spiritualism during her Oxford years and practiced automatic writing.

In 1910 the Routledges decided to organize their own expedition to Easter Island (Rapa Nui). They had a state-of-the-art yacht built and named it Mana. They affiliated with the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the British Museum and the Royal Geographical Society.

They arrived on Easter Island on March 29, 1914. They established two base camps, one in the area of Mataveri and the other at the statue quarry, called Rano Raraku. With the help of a talented islander known as Juan Tepano, Routledge proceeded to interview the natives and catalogue the giant statues. They excavated over 30 statues. She also visited the tribal elders in their leper colony north of Hanga Roa, and collected data on the enigmatic "script" known as "rongo rongo"; van Tilburg credits her with a primary role in assisting preservation of Rapa Nui's indigenous Polynesian culture.

During their stay, a German convoy anchored off Hanga Roa and the Germans established a signal station on the Chilean-Scottish sheep ranch on the island; World War I was going on and the island was neutral territory, but the Germans overstayed their welcome. Routledge complained sharply of this infringement on Chilean territory to the British Consul in London. Routledge also decided to mediate in the native rebellion against the sheep ranch and met a local medicine woman and visionary, Angata.

The Routledges departed the island in August, 1915. She published her findings in a popular travel book, The Mystery of Easter Island, in 1919. Most of her conclusions are accepted today.

After 1925, her schizophrenia got worse and displayed itself in the form of delusional paranoia. She threw Scoresby out of her Hyde Park mansion and locked herself inside. She also hid many of her field notes. Her family blamed Angata, accusing her of being a "witch doctor". In 1929 Scoresby and her family had her kidnapped against her will and confined to a mental institution.

She died institutionalized in 1935. Her husband gave the field notes he found to the Royal Geographical Society. One of his executors found photographs of the Easter Island expedition ten years after his death. Maps of the expedition were found in Scoresby's house in Cyprus in 1961. Family papers and photographs, previously unpublished, including details of her illness, were made public through her recent biography. Archaeology on Easter Island continues to make use of her field notes and ethnographic research.

[edit] Books

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