The world was still recovering from war; the rubble of ruined European cities had not yet been cleared, there were food shortages and everywhere people were trying to pick up the threads of their lives where they had been left five or six years earlier. Thor Heyerdahl was one of those millions. Like so many others, his life and career had been interrupted at a crucial point; he had made the best of frustrating, uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous years through the war and now, in 1946 at the age of thirty-two, was returning to the intellectual quest that was the driving force of his life.
Heyerdahl never considered himself to be an adventurer. ‘I don’t think I’d call myself a real adventurer, although I suppose I’ve become one. I don’t look for adventure for the sake of adventure. The closest I can say that I go to it is that I love nature. I love the wilderness and to be in touch with the wilderness.’
As a boy and young man this took him on long walks and ski treks in the Norwegian mountains. His clear, analytical and intensely inquisitive mind led him into science and his passion for nature channelled him to biology, which he studied at university. It was during his university course that he conceived his scheme to renounce present-day material benefits by going to live for at least a year on a Pacific island without a single product of modern technology. He even set about finding himself a mate to share this return to Paradise, and together they sailed to Tahiti in 1937 and were landed by a copra schooner on the shores of the beautiful and incredibly remote Fatu Hiva, an island in the Marquesas group. Originally, Heyerdahl had intended to deny himself all modern implements, but the South Sea Island chief who had befriended them in Tahiti persuaded him to take along a machete and a metal cooking pot. These were the only concessions they made; they took no drugs, medicines or even matches.
At first it seemed a paradise, a Garden of Eden where bananas and coconuts grew in abundance, where it was always warm and lush and beautiful; but the hand of Western man had already affected the balance of its society. Originally, the island had had a population of several thousand but they had been decimated by white man’s diseases and only a handful of ragged, rather suspicious natives were left. The idyll quickly began to wear thin; the natives did their best to part them from their money and possessions; they were caught in the middle of a feud between a Catholic missionary and a native Protestant pastor whose flock had shrunk to one – his sexton. The natives became increasingly hostile, slipping poisonous centipedes and scorpions into the dried grass of their bedding; soon, they were covered in sores that would not heal; in the rainy season they were permanently soaked to the skin and began to suffer from malnutrition in this island paradise. The bananas were out of season and all the coconuts had been harvested. They ended up hiding in a remote sea cave, afraid for their lives, while they waited for the copra schooner to make its annual visit to the island and carry them away.
But there had been many idyllic moments and it was on Fatu Hiva that the seeds of an idea which was to dominate his life to the present day were sown. Sitting on the beach one moonlit evening, admiring the waves, his wife said, ‘It’s queer, but there are never breakers like this on the other side of the island.’ They were sitting on the windward, eastern shore, and the mighty waves, driven before the prevailing trade wind, had surged all the way across nearly 7,000 kilometres of empty ocean from South America. How Heyerdahl came to use this simple observation as one more link in his theory connecting the old Polynesian god. Tiki, with the legendary Peruvian sun god, Kon-Tiki, is now well known. A world war intervened, however, before he was given his chance to prove that the people with white skins and long beards who had built the monuments in the Andes before the arrival of the Incas and who were said to have fled from them across the Pacific on their balsa-wood rafts could have been the ancestors of the Polynesian islanders.
His research all seemed to be fitting together, but he was unable to persuade any of the academics to take it seriously. They resented the intrusion of this unknown young Norwegian whose only qualification was an honours degree in biology. The main stumbling block was the question of how the South American Indians could possibly have crossed 6,500 kilometres of ocean to the nearest South Pacific island, Easter Island, with its silent guard of huge stone figures. Neither the South American Indians nor the Polynesians had discovered how to make a planked boat with a keel, but the Indians had used big sea-going rafts, driven by sails, for their coastal trade. The wood they used was balsa, very light and buoyant but it also absorbed water and the experts declared that there was no way a balsa-wood raft could stay afloat for more than a few hundred miles without becoming waterlogged and sinking. Therefore, quite obviously, there was no way that the South American Indians could possibly have crossed the Pacific Ocean.
Faced with this impasse, there seemed only one way to prove that at least the journey could have been made. In desperation Heyerdahl decided to build a balsa-wood raft and sail it from Peru to the Pacific Islands. His purpose was to prove his theory possible, but the spirit that drove him on was the same restless, adventurous curiosity that had taken him to Fatu Hiva before the war. He knew practically nothing about the sea or boats, was even frightened of water, but once he had made up his mind he plunged into the planning with a thoroughness that eventually was to ensure his success.
He met a young engineer called Herman Watzinger at the seaman’s hostel in New York where he was living while he tried to win acceptance for his theory. They began talking and Watzinger, having expressed an interest in Heyerdahl’s plans, was promptly invited to join him. Apart from anything else, Heyerdahl probably needed someone close at hand to confide in and share both the work and the rebuffs that inevitably accompany any expedition in its early stages. Slowly, he managed to raise the money, much of it from personal loans which somehow he would have to repay at the conclusion of an expedition which all the pundits guaranteed would fail. He also got together all the food and equipment he reckoned they would need. Here, he was faced with a fundamental decision of whether he should try to reproduce in full the experience of the pre-Incas, carrying only the food he assumed they would probably have used in ancient times. In this instance, influenced perhaps by his experience on Fatu Hiva, he decided against it, feeling that the challenge of sailing a balsa-wood raft across the Pacific was quite enough. They planned, therefore, on using Army processed rations, cooked on a kerosene stove. Initially Heyerdahl did baulk when Watzinger suggested they needed wireless communications, not so much to call for help which, anyway, would not be available in the empty reaches of the Pacific, but to send out reports on their progress and weather information which could be used for meteorological research. Eventually Heyerdahl agreed to this.
He had decided on a crew of six and therefore needed to find four more for the team. On this, his first venture, he wanted people he knew well and immediately invited three old friends. One was Erik Hesselberg, an easy-going giant of a man who had been to navigation school and had sailed several times round the world in merchant ships before settling down as an artist. He would be the only crew member with any experience of the sea. The other two were old friends of Heyerdahl’s wartime days in the Norwegian Resistance, Knut Haugland and Torstein Raaby, both of whom were skilled wireless operators. The sixth place was to be filled only when they reached Peru, by Bengt Danielsson, a Swedish ethnologist who was interested in Heyerdahl’s migration theory and attracted by the romance of the adventure. The team was formed, as in the case of so many ventures, through a combination of personal friendship and chance meetings, and yet it all worked out, mainly through Heyerdahl’s instinctive judgement of personality. He was attracted by people with a sense of humour who were easy going and would fit into a small group, and yet who had the drive and determination to carry a venture through.
At last, in March 1947, Watzinger and Heyerdahl flew down to Lima to start building their raft. They were armed with a host of introductions to important people, ranging all the way up to the president of Peru. Heyerdahl understood the art of personal and public relations. These introductions and his confident but easy manner were to prove invaluable in getting the help he needed to get the project under way. But first he had to get the balsa logs for the raft. The Incas had cut them in the coastal jungle of Ecuador, floating them down the rivers to make up their sea-going rafts on the coast. It seemed simple enough, but Heyerdahl was quickly told that he had arrived at the wrong time of the year. They were now in the rainy season and it would be impossible to reach the jungle where the big tree trunks they would need could be found. They would have to wait another six months for the dry season. He certainly could not afford to do this and so resolved to get into the jungle from the landward side, the Ecuadorian highlands. Eventually, after several misadventures, he managed to reach the jungle and find someone who could guide him to some suitable trees. At last Heyerdahl could feel that the adventure was under way.
They cut twelve large balsa logs near the banks of the Palenque river, tied them together in a rough raft and floated down to the sea where they were loaded on to a coastal steamer and carried to Callao, the sea port of Lima. By going to the president of Peru, Heyerdahl had managed to get permission to build the raft in the naval base. The rest of his team had now assembled in Lima and the next few weeks were spent building their reproduction of a pre-Inca raft.
Sea-going rafts had been in use well into the nineteenth century and so there were plenty of pictures from which to copy the basic designs. Since the Incas had not discovered the use of iron, no nails or wire hawsers were used. They chose nine of the thickest logs for the raft, floating them side by side to see how they fitted naturally into each other, with the longest log of about thirteen metres in the middle and the remaining ones ranked symmetrically at either side to give the effect of a bluntly tapered bow. Deep grooves were then cut in the wood to give both protection to the ropes binding the logs together and also to stop them slipping. At various places where there were gaps between the logs, five solid fir planks were squeezed between them to protrude a metre and a half down into the water to act as a kind of centreboard or keel, to limit sideways drift. This had been a feature of the old Inca rafts. Herman Watzinger, the engineer, supervised the construction of the raft, helped by Bengt Danielsson, who was the only member of the crew who could speak fluent Spanish and thus transmit Watzinger’s instructions to the Peruvian workers.
Heyerdahl put a great deal of thought not only into the seaworthiness of his craft, but also into the little details of day-to-day living on what was to be their tiny world for the months ahead:
‘We gave the little deck as much variation as possible. The bamboo strips did not deck in the whole raft, but formed a floor forward of the bamboo cabin and along the starboard side of it where the wall was open. The port side of the cabin was a kind of back yard full of boxes and gear made fast, with a narrow edge to walk along. Forward in the bows, and in the stern as far as the after wall of the cabin, the nine gigantic logs were not decked in at all. So when we moved round the bamboo cabin we stepped from yellow bamboos and wicker-work down on to the round grey logs astern, and up again on to piles of cargo on the other side. It was not many steps, but the psychological effect of the irregularity gave us variation and compensated us for our limited freedom of movement. Right up at the masthead we placed a wooden platform, not so much in order to have a look-out post when at last we came to land as to be able to clamber up while en route and look at the sea from another angle.’
They were immensely proud of their raft as it took shape in the Naval Dockyard surrounded by submarines and destroyers, the modern weapons of war. Their many visitors were less impressed, however. They were assured the balsa would absorb water and they would sink like a stone before they were halfway. Or the ropes would wear through and the whole thing disintegrate. The dimensions were all wrong. The raft was so small it would founder in a big sea and yet was just long enough to be lifted on the crests of two waves at the same time. So it would break in half and that would be the end of them.
‘Are your parents still living?’ one well-wisher asked Heyerdahl. When he replied that they were, the man commented: ‘Your mother and father will be very grieved when they hear of your death.’
No one gave them any chance of success and the amazing thing is that their morale remained so high. Knut Haugland told me that this was largely the result of the confidence which they all had in Heyerdahl’s planning, judgement and attitude to risk. He did not believe in taking risks – he was convinced that the raft would carry them across the Pacific. Of the team the most seriously worried was Bengt Danielsson, partly perhaps because he had known Heyerdahl for the shortest time but also because he had lost his heart to a local girl. He was tempted to withdraw and it is a tribute to his own courage and Heyerdahl’s personality that he stayed on with the expedition in spite of his doubts.
At last, on 28 April, everything was ready. A huge crowd had assembled around the harbour to watch the send off; dignitaries from the Government and embassies had also joined the throng. The decks of Kon-Tiki were piled high with a chaos of bananas, fruits and sacks of fresh food, purchased at the last minute. There was a babble of excited talk, well wishers thronging the boat, while all of the crew, with the exception of the leader who was weighed down with a sense of responsibility, had gone off for a last drink with friends and sweethearts. The noise on the quay rose to a crescendo; the tug which was going to tow them out to sea had arrived, nosing its way up to the throng of small boats crowded around Kon-Tiki. A motor launch carrying the towrope sidled up to the raft as Heyerdahl, with a nightmare vision of being towed out to the Pacific without a crew, tried to explain with his few available words of Spanish they would have to wait:
‘But nobody understood. The officers only smiled politely, and the knot at our bows was made fast in more than exemplary manner. I cast off the rope and flung it overboard with all manner of signs and gesticulations. The parrot utilised the opportunity afforded by all the confusion to stick its beak out of the cage and turn the knob of the door, and when I turned round it was strutting cheerfully about the bamboo deck. I tried to catch it but it shrieked rudely in Spanish and fluttered away over the banana clusters. With one eye on the sailors who were trying to cast a rope over the bows, I started a wild chase after the parrot. It fled shrieking into the bamboo cabin, where I got it in a corner and caught it by one leg as it tried to flutter over me. When I came out again and stuffed my flapping trophy into its cage, the sailors on land had cast off the raft’s moorings and we were dancing helplessly in and out with the backwash of the long swell that came rolling in over the mole. In despair I seized a paddle and vainly tried to parry a violent bump as the raft was flung against the wooden piles of the quay. Then the motorboat started, and with one jerk the Kon-Tiki began her long voyage. My only companion was a Spanish-speaking parrot which sat glaring sulkily in a cage. People on shore cheered and waved, and the swarthy cinema photographers in the motorboat almost jumped into the sea in their eagerness to catch every detail of the expedition’s dramatic start from Peru. Despairing and alone I stood on the raft looking out for my lost companions, but no one came. So we came out to the Guardian Ries, which was lying with steam up ready to lift anchor and start. I was up the rope ladder in a twinkling and made so much row on board that the start was postponed and a boat sent back to the quay. It was away a good while, and then it came back full of pretty señoritas, but without a single one of the Kon-Tiki’s missing men. This was all very well, but it did not solve my problems and while the raft swarmed with charming señoritas, the boat went back on a fresh search for los expedicionarios noruejjos.’
An hour went by and the other five members of the crew trickled back to the wharf to be ferried out to Kon-Tiki. It was a delightfully haphazard, slightly chaotic departure that underlined the relaxed control Heyerdahl exerted on his team and the free, essentially happy, spirit of the entire enterprise.
Accompanied by a fleet of small boats, the tug towed them out into the bay. Soon they were bucking up and down in the Pacific swell, as the tug hauled them eighty kilometres out, beyond the coastal winds and currents, into the open sea. The tug cast off and the six men were left alone in the empty ocean on a vessel of a design that had last sailed off the coast of South America 200 years before, but had only ventured out into the Humboldt Current on the morning offshore wind and had always returned to land on the evening shore winds. It was, perhaps, a thousand years since a pre-Inca fleet had carried the god-king Tiki and his tall, fair-skinned people in their desperate flight towards the setting sun across the great empty ocean. What did Tiki think he was going to find? How could he know that there was going to be land at the end of the voyage, or was he content to entrust the lives of his people to the sun god whom they were following?
The crew of the modern-day Kon-Tiki raised the mainsail, with its stylised picture of the head of Tiki, and waited for the wind to drive them ever westward. At first hesitantly, and then with a steadily growing strength, the South-East Trades drove them remorselessly into the empty ocean of the South Pacific. That night they saw the lights of two steamers; they signalled with their kerosene lamps but the lookouts were not alert, not expecting to see anyone, let alone a pre-Inca raft heading out into the Pacific. These were to be the last two boats they saw all the way across. They were now totally committed. There was no way they could sail against the wind; all they could do was to sail before it, relying on the constant direction of the South-East Trades to take them to their 6,500-kilometre-distant destination.
That night the seas rose steadily, piled high by the growing wind; great rollers of dark water swept down, so much faster than the raft, curling above the stern, breaking over it and smashing down on to the deck. The two helmsmen, always on duty on the great six-metre steering oar, were learning from scratch how to control this prehistoric boat. They quickly discovered that the best way was to lash a cross-piece on to the handle of the oar so that they had a kind of lever to turn against the immense force of the seas but, as the waves increased, they found that they had to lash the steering oar loosely in position to prevent it being torn from their hands. When the great combers came rolling in from behind, the helmsmen had to leap up and hang on to a bamboo pole that projected from the cabin roof, while the waves surged across the deck beneath their dangling feet, before running away between the numerous gaps and chinks between the logs. Already, quite a few of the prophecies of doom had been laid low. The raft rose and fell easily between the crests and troughs of the waves with the buoyancy of a cork. They could not be swamped because the water simply flowed away through the logs and over the side. The worst that could happen was that the cabin could be swept by a breaker, particularly if they let themselves get abeam to the waves, but provided they kept the stern into the sea, the waves rarely reached the cabin before dissipating.
After three days of battering by heavy seas the wind eased and the waves became more even. The team were able to settle into a steady rhythm of living, though there were still some serious worries. Would the balsa wood become waterlogged? After a week, Heyerdahl surreptitiously broke off a small chunk of wood and dropped it into the sea; it sank like a stone. The prophets of doom might have been right after all. Then he dug his knife into the wood and found that only the outer couple of centimetres had absorbed water and most of the log was still dry. With luck, the sap further in would act as an impregnation and check the absorption.
Another cause for concern was that the ropes holding the raft together might be worn through by abrasion. There was a constant movement and flexing as the raft responded to the contours of the waves, shifting, creaking, water gurgling between the logs. Lying in the little shelter at night it was easy to imagine the constant friction and stress on the cordage, and the consequences if it started to come apart. Each day they examined the ropes, but there was no sign of wear; the balsa wood was so soft that the ropes had cut deep into it, getting their own protection and, at the same time, lubrication from the salt water in the smooth channels they had worn.
Day followed day, with blue skies, the constant wind of the South-East Trades and a blazing sun that dropped over the western horizon each evening, just as it always had done, just as it had led the original Kon-Tiki and his fleet of rafts to their unknown destination.
The modern-day sailors were already beginning to tire of their processed foods, but the sea provided plenty of alternatives. Travelling only just above the sea’s surface, and little faster than the current, weed and barnacles on the undersurface of the raft gave small fish an attractive shelter and it soon became a moving home for fish as well as humans. The variety was incredible. It ranged from clouds of tiny, multishaped and multicoloured plankton to the huge whales which harvested the plankton. They were accompanied by shoals of sardine, dorado (dolphin), schools of porpoise, flying fish, which provided breakfast each morning, and a huge variety they had never seen or heard of before. Some of them were new discoveries. One night, Torstein Raaby, who was sleeping by the entrance of the shelter, was awakened when the lamp by his head was knocked over. He thought it was a flying fish, grabbed for it in the dark and felt something long and slimy that wriggled out of his hand and landed on Herman Watzinger’s sleeping bag. Eventually, when they managed to light the lamp, they saw an extraordinary snake-like fish with dull black eyes, long snout and a fierce jaw, filled with long sharp teeth. Watzinger grabbed it and under his grip a large-eyed white fish was suddenly thrown up from the stomach out of the mouth of the snake-like fish; this was quickly followed by another. These were obviously deep-water fish and, later on, the team were to discover that they were the first people ever to see alive the Gempylus, a deep-water mackerel, though its skeleton had been seen in the Galapagos Islands and on the coast of South America.
A few days later Knut Haugland saw the biggest and ugliest shark he had ever seen. At least fifteen metres long, as it swam round the raft and then started ducking underneath it, its head was near the surface on one side and the tail lashing the water on the other. The head was broad and flat, like a frog, with two small eyes at the side and jaws over a metre wide. If angered, it could undoubtedly have smashed the raft to pieces with its massive tail. It was the very rare whale shark, the biggest of the species, and it circled the craft for over an hour, the crew watching it, apprehensive yet fascinated. At last, as it cruised under the raft and came up the other side, just beneath Erik Hesselberg, he drove a harpoon into its head with all the force he could muster. The shark erupted into fury, lashed the water with its huge tail and plunged into the depths. The strong rope attached to the harpoon parted as if it were cotton and a few moments later a broken-off harpoon shaft came to the surface.
They devised games to lure sharks on to hooks baited with dorado, or they would simply allow the shark to bite through the dorado, which it could do with a single snap of its powerful jaws; as it turned to swim away one of the crew would seize the shark by the tail and heave the tail up on to the stern logs, where it would thrash around until it either managed to heave itself off and regain its freedom, or until they managed to drop a noose over the tail and so caught it until it thrashed away its life.
And the days slipped by with the routine of daily sun shots, the recording of wind speed and weather, the daily radio call, the round of fishing and the turns at the steering. Heyerdahl, as skipper, kept a gentle, unobtrusive but positive control over his little crew, his natural air of authority leavened by a rich sense of humour. They had agreed to various rules which they all enforced: that the helmsmen should always be attached by a rope to the raft and that no one should swim away from the raft for fear of being swept away – they could not possibly sail back against the wind to pick anyone up. Losing someone overboard was a nightmare risk of the voyage and it happened on 21 July, when they were getting close to the Pacific Islands. A gust of wind caught one of the sleeping bags which were hanging out to air; Watzinger dived to catch it, toppled on the edge of the deck, was unable to regain his balance and flopped into the sea:
‘We heard a faint cry for help amid the noise of the waves, and saw Herman’s head and waving arm, as well as some vague green object twirling about in the water near him. He was struggling for life to get back to the raft through the high seas which had lifted him out from the port side. Torstein, who was at the steering oar aft, and I myself, up in the bows, were the first to perceive him, and we went cold with fear. We bellowed “man overboard!” at the pitch of our lungs as we rushed to the nearest life-saving gear. The others had not heard Herman’s cry at all because of the noise of the sea, but in a trice there was life and bustle on deck. Herman was an excellent swimmer, and though we realised that his life was at stake, we had a fair hope that he would manage to crawl back to the edge of the raft before it was too late.
‘Torstein, who was nearest, seized the bamboo drum round which was the line we used for the lifeboat, for this was within his reach. It was the only time on the whole voyage that this line got caught up. The whole thing happened in a few seconds. Herman was now level with the stern of the raft, but a few yards away, and his last hope was to crawl to the blade of the steering oar and hang on to it. As he missed the end of the logs, he reached out for the oar-blade, but it slipped away from him. And there he lay, just where experience had shown we could get nothing back. While Bengt and I launched the dinghy, Knut and Erik threw out the lifebelt. Carrying a long line, it hung ready for use on the corner of the cabin roof but today the wind was so strong that when they threw the lifebelt it was simply blown back to the raft. After a few unsuccessful throws Herman was already far astern of the steering oar, swimming desperately to keep up with the raft, while the distance increased with each gust of wind. He realised that henceforth the gap would simply go on increasing, but he set a faint hope on the dinghy, which we had now got into the water. Without the line which acted as a brake, it would perhaps have been practicable to drive the rubber raft to meet the swimming man, but whether the rubber raft would ever get back to the Kon-Tiki was another matter. Nevertheless, three men in a rubber dinghy had some chance, one man in the sea had none.
‘Then we suddenly saw Knut take off and plunge head first into the sea. He had the lifebelt in one hand and was heaving himself along. Every time Herman’s head appeared on a wave-back Knut was gone, and every time Knut came up Herman was not there. But then we saw both heads at once; they had swum to meet each other and both were hanging on to the lifebelt. Knut waved his arm, and as the rubber raft had meanwhile been hauled on board, all four of us took hold of the line of the lifebelt and hauled for dear life, with our eyes fixed on the great dark object which was visible just behind the two men. This mysterious beast in the water was pushing a big greenish-black triangle up above the wave-crests; it almost gave Knut a shock when he was on his way over to Herman. Only Herman knew then that the triangle did not belong to a shark or any other sea monster. It was an inflated corner of Torstein’s watertight sleeping bag. But the sleeping bag did not remain floating for long after we had hauled the two men safe and sound on board. Whatever dragged the sleeping bag down into the depths had just missed a better prey.’
It had been a narrow escape and everyone was badly shaken, but there was no time to reflect before another storm was upon them. They were hammered by winds and sea for another five days. At the end of it the steering oar was broken, the sail rent and the centreboards below the raft hung loose and almost useless, the ropes that held them tight having parted or lost their tension with the violent motion of the waves. The gaps between the logs were now very much wider and everyone had to be on their guard to avoid catching an ankle in between the constantly flexing logs; but the raft was still sound, the cargo dry and the crew were fit. On 17 July they had their first visit by land-based birds, two large boobies; the flying fish, also, were of a different species, similar to those that Heyerdahl could remember catching off the coast of Fatu Hiva which was now only 500 kilometres to the north.
They began to worry about their landing – probably the most dangerous part of the entire voyage. Heyerdahl had vivid memories of the huge surf smashing against the jagged cliffs of Fatu Hiva. The coral atolls to the south could be even more dangerous, with their widespread reefs like hidden minefields lying just below the surface. If caught on one of these, Kon-Tiki and its crew could be smashed to pieces by the breaking surf while still far out from any island haven. Swept before the wind, their ability to manoeuvre was slight; it was unlikely that they would be able to creep round an island or reef into its sheltered lee.
For a couple of days they headed towards Fatu Hiva, but then a north-easterly wind blew them down towards the Tuamotu atolls. They were now accompanied by the constant scream of sea birds, as they wheeled and dived upon the raft. Land was undoubtedly close by. At last, at dawn on 30 July, they sighted a low silhouette, little more than a faint shadow against the red-gold blaze of the rising sun, on the far horizon. They had passed it during the night; there was no chance of backtracking against the wind; they would have to wait until they were swept on to another island. They were subdued rather than jubilant:
‘No extravagant outbursts were to be heard on board. After the sail had been trimmed and the oar laid over, we all formed a silent group at the mast head or stood on deck staring towards the land which had suddenly cropped up, out in the middle of the endless all-dominating sea. At last we had visible proof that we had been moving in all these months; we had not just been lying tumbling about in the centre of the same eternal circular horizon. To us it seemed as if the island were mobile and had suddenly entered the circle of blue empty sea in the centre of which we had our permanent abode, as if the island were drifting slowly across our own domain, heading for the eastern horizon. We were all filled with a warm quiet satisfaction at having actually reached Polynesia, mingled with a faint momentary disappointment at having to submit helplessly to seeing the island lie there like a mirage while we continued our eternal drift across the sea westward.’
Later that day they sighted another island; having seen early enough this time they were able to head for it. Soon they could pick out the dense palm trees that grew down to the shore, could see the still waters of the lagoon inside the reef, but between them and the end of their voyage was the reef itself, a confusion of white, thundering spray that occasionally cleared to show the jagged brown teeth of coral. If thrown on to this their chances of survival would be slight. Edging in as close as they dared, they could actually see the separate trunks of the trees, the texture of the sand on the beach, so very close to them and yet still unattainable. As they coasted down, parallel to the reef, there was a mixed feeling of holiday excitement tinged with underlying fear. Erik Hesselberg, a big Peruvian sunhat on his head, played the guitar and sang sentimental South Sea songs; Bengt Danielsson prepared an elaborate dinner, which they ate sitting on the bamboo deck under the cloudless blue sky. Somehow, all this emphasised the incongruous menace of the tumbling, crushing surf between them and safety.
It was beginning to get dark and they were very nearly at the end of the island when they spotted some figures among the trees; two canoes came streaking out through the surf and in a few minutes, for the first time in three months, they spoke to strangers – the descendants, perhaps, of Kon-Tiki and the original voyagers. With a mixture of sign language and the few words of Polynesian that Heyerdahl could remember, they indicated that they wanted to find a way in through the reef. The islanders replied by saying ‘Brrrrrr’, indicating that the white men should switch on their engine. They could not conceive that there was none and Heyerdahl had to make them feel underneath the stern to prove that this was the case.
Then they joined in trying to paddle the raft in towards land. Two more canoes came out but, as dusk fell, an offshore easterly built up, slowly pushing them away from the reef. It was now pitch dark; they gathered from the islanders that there were only the four sea-going canoes on the island, although there were plenty of men on shore who could help paddle them in, if only they could get out to the raft. Knut Haugland volunteered to take the rubber dinghy in to collect some more helpers and disappeared into the dark.
But the wind steadily increased in strength as they were blown out from the shelter of the island and they began to wonder if Haugland would ever manage to return. They paddled desperately, but were growing increasingly exhausted. At last, out of the dark came a shout. He had managed to return with some of the islanders, but now it was too late; quite obviously, they would never get to the island. The Polynesians leapt back into their canoes and paddled home into the dark toward the invisible island. It hardly seemed to matter any more, so glad were the crew to be reunited. They had become such a tight-knit little group of over the months, that this seemed the most important thing of all. After all, there were more islands for them to land on.
They sailed on, drifting ever closer to the dangerous reefs of the Takumé and Raroia atolls; then the wind veered to the north, bringing a hope of creeping round to the south of them. They were tense, worrying days, the memory of the breakers smashing down on to the coral reef all too vivid. Now so close to success, they could very easily lose their lives within easy sight of their goal. On the morning of 7 August they sighted some low-lying coral islands in their path; they were being swept inexorably towards them and soon they could see the white chain of breaking surf that barred their way to safety.
The previous days had been spent in preparation for their seemingly inevitable shipwreck, as they packed all their documents and films into waterproof bags, securing them in the cabin which they lashed with a tarpaulin. Also, with great difficulty, they pulled up the centreboards, now encrusted with seaweed and barnacles, through the gaps between the logs to reduce their draft to the minimum. As they worked they drifted ever closer to the crushing breakers. Heyerdahl kept the log almost to the last moment:
‘9.45: The wind is taking us straight towards the last island but one, we can see behind the reef. We can now see the whole coral reef clearly; here it is built up like a white and red speckled wall which just sticks up out of the water in a belt in front of all the islands. All along the reef white foaming surf is flung up towards the sky. Bengt is just serving up a good hot meal, the last before the great action! It is a wreck lying in there on the reef. We are so close now that we can see right across the shining lagoon behind the reef, and see the outlines of other islands on the other side of the lagoon.
‘9.50: Very close now. Drifting along the reef. Only a hundred or so yards away. Torstein is talking to the man on Rarotonga. All clear. Must pack up log now. All in good spirits; it looks bad, but we shall make it!’
Now very nearly among the wild upsurge of breaking waves, to give themselves a few more moments to tap out their position on the Morse key of the radio, they dropped the heavy anchor, attached to their thickest length of rope. It held just long enough to swing Kon-Tiki round, so that the stern was facing the reef, then started dragging along the bottom as the raft was swept inexorably towards the thundering, boiling spray of the great Pacific waves smashing on to the reef.
‘When we realised that the sea had got hold of us, the anchor rope was cut, and we were off. A sea rose straight up under us and we felt the Kon-Tiki being lifted up in the air. The great moment had come; we were riding on the wave-back at breathless speed, our ramshackle craft creaking and groaning as she quivered under us. The excitement made one’s blood boil. I remember that, having no other inspiration, I waved my arm and bellowed “hurrah” at the pitch of my lungs; it afforded a certain relief and could do no harm anyway. The others certainly thought I had gone mad, but they all beamed and grinned enthusiastically. On we ran with the seas rushing in behind us; this was the Kon-Tiki’s baptism of fire; all must and would go well.
‘But our elation was soon damped. A new sea rose high astern of us like a glittering green glass wall; as we sank down it came rolling after us, and in the same second in which I saw it high above me I felt a violent blow and was submerged under floods of water. I felt the suction through my whole body, with such great strength that I had to strain every single muscle in my frame and think of one thing only – hold on, hold on! I think that in such a desperate situation the arms will be torn off before the brain consents to let go, evident as the outcome is. Then I felt that the mountain of water was passing on and relaxing its devilish grip of me. When the whole mountain had rushed on, with an ear-splitting roaring and crashing, I saw Knut again hanging on beside me, doubled up into a ball. Seen from behind the great sea was almost flat and grey; as it rushed on it swept just over the ridge of the cabin roof which projected from the water, and there hung the three others, pressed against the cabin roof as the water passed over them.’
The raft was still afloat, lying in the trough of the breakers just short of the reef. Another wall of water came rolling in, towered above the raft, toppled and smashed down up on it, engulfing the raft, tearing at the men, so tiny and puny, who clung to it. Another and then another wave swept across them and each time they were edged closer to the sharp jaws of the reef, then the biggest wave of all, a sheer green wall curling above them, smashed over the raft, lifting it on to the reef itself, so that the raft was now held immobile against the savage force of the sea. They clung on to their bits of rope, lungs bursting as the sea boiled around them, and then it fell away leaving a momentary lull when they could glimpse then appalling havoc. The cabin was smashed flat, the mast broken like a matchstick but, worst of all, Heyerdahl could see only one other member of his crew:
‘I felt cold fear run through my whole body. What was the good of my holding on? If I had lost one single man here, in the run in, the whole thing would be ruined, and for the moment there was only one human figure to be seen after the last buffet. In that second Torstein’s hunched-up form appeared outside the raft. He was hanging like a monkey in the ropes from the masthead, and managed to get on to the logs again, where he crawled upon the debris forward of the cabin. Herman too now turned his head and gave me a forced grin of encouragement, but did not move. I bellowed in the faint hope of locating the others, and heard Bengt’s calm voice call out that all hands were aboard. They were lying holding on to the ropes behind the tangled barricade which the tough plating from the bamboo deck had built up.’
Wave followed wave. Each time they were pulled a little further over the reef; each time the undertow tore at them, trying to draw them back into the maelstrom of breakers. But the force of the waves began to diminish and soon were just foaming around the stranded raft. They were able to let go their holds, take stock of the damage, and found that the raft was still remarkably intact, with the cabin flattened rather than destroyed, the logs still held together by their bonds.
Exhausted but jubilant, they salvaged vital items of gear and then waded through the still waters behind the reef to a low-lying palm-covered island. Their voyage was over; they had proved that a balsa wood raft could cross the Pacific Ocean.
Heyerdahl wrote: ‘I was completely overwhelmed. I sank down on my knees and thrust my fingers down into the dry warm sand.’
The voyage of Kon-Tiki was the first great romantic venture after the Second World War and it caught the imagination of the entire world, particularly once Heyerdahl had published his book telling the story. There was an element of light-hearted schoolboy adventure in tales of near escapes with sharks and storms, of desert islands and palm trees, combined with the fascination of Heyerdahl’s determination to prove how an ancient legend could actually have been fact. This venture provided the general public with exactly the relief from the drab violence and ugliness of war that everyone wanted.
But Heyerdahl had less success with his fellow scientists, who dismissed his voyage as an adventurous stunt with little relevance to serious scientific proof or study. Part of the reason was because Heyerdahl wrote his popular account first, so that he could pay off the huge debts incurred in making the voyage. His serious study, American Indians in the Pacific, was not finished until 1952. But when confronted by hostile academics, he showed the same implacable but good-humoured determination that he had shown through the frustrations of preparing for and making his voyage. Slowly, he won over the academic world to his view, final victory did not come, however, until after he had mounted another expedition, this time one that was purely scientific, to Easter Island, ‘the navel of the world’, whose strange giants of stone had mystified all the scientists who gazed upon them.
Heyerdahl chartered a trawler and took a team of archaeologists to the island to complete the first comprehensive dig that had ever been made there. Once again he used his breadth of view and intense curiosity combined with a deep humanity to gain a completely original view of what had happened on the island. The story of his discoveries on Easter Island is, intellectually, as exciting an adventure as anything on board Kon-Tiki. As before, he wrote a popular book that deservedly became a huge best seller and then followed it by a serious study, Easter Island and the East Pacific. The academic world was at last convinced that his theory of migration must be correct, giving him their unanimous endorsement at the Tenth Pacific Science Conference in Hawaii in 1961.
But for Heyerdahl the mystery was not completely solved. There was the intriguing similarity between the pyramids and other archaeological remains of Mexico and Peru and those of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. There was no evidence of any such civilisations further north on the American continent, the acknowledged route of countless migratory waves of people who had crossed the Bering Strait from Asia. Was it possible that ancient man had crossed the Atlantic from the Mediterranean? In the case of the Pacific migrationary theory, Heyerdahl had been on his own, but on the Atlantic there were two schools of thought already, the Diffusionists who believed that there must have been some kind of migration direct from Europe to Mexico, and the Isolationists who considered that this was impossible and that the Aztec and Inca civilisations had evolved on their own among the Indians who had originated from Asia. Their strongest argument was that the American Indians had not discovered the use of the ribbed and planked wooden hull, which, of course, both the Phoenicians and Vikings had. On the other hand, both reed boats and balsa rafts were in use in America and had been used on the Nile and in Mesopotamia at the dawn of civilisation.
Heyerdahl was immediately fascinated by the prospect of the practical experiment, of recreating a reed boat and sailing it across the Atlantic. Once again, it was the spirit of science and adventure. On the first attempt they were baulked just short of success, when their boat, Ra I, disintegrated. He returned the following year with a boat whose design they had improved in the light of experience, and this time managed to complete the crossing, reaching the island of Barbados. Also, on Ra II, they took only food which would have been available in ancient times – grain, dried nuts, fruit, olive oil and wine. They ate better than any of them had ever done on previous expeditions!
But still he was not content. Ra II, like Kon-Tiki, had only been able to sail before the wind. It had, therefore, been at the mercy of the wind and currents and could only have made a one-way voyage. Heyerdahl wanted to discover whether these reed boats could have manoeuvred against the wind, whether they could have sailed the high seas, through the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, carrying both merchandise and passengers between the ports of the ancient world. And so Tigris was born.
Tigris was a reed boat built on the banks of the River Tigris, using the reeds of the Marsh Arabs under the direction of a group of Bolivian Indians from Lake Titicaca, the only men who still build and sail boats made from reeds. The boat was a success; she could carry a good load, could sail the seas with and against the wind, but to Heyerdahl’s eyes the real problem derived from the world around them – not from wind and sea, but from what man has done to the land and ocean. They had innumerable narrow escapes when nearly run down by giant tankers, saw hideous slicks of oil and chemicals polluting the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean and were barred from landing anywhere on the shores of the Red Sea because of the conflicts in the area, finally, in protest against unrestricted armament delivery from industrialised nations to a corner of the world where civilisation began, Heyerdahl and his crew decided to burn Tigris, in a dramatic gesture of disillusionment at what man is doing to his planet.
There are so many levels to Heyerdahl’s adventures, the pure, thrilling romantic adventure, the fascinating and practical work of historical detection and, on yet another level, that of social experiment, for on both Ra and Tigris, Heyerdahl sought to affirm his belief that people of different countries and backgrounds can work and live together by selecting an international crew, many of whom he did not even know personally before hand.
For a man who does not consider himself to be an adventurer, Heyerdahl has throughout his life tackled some extraordinarily challenging and potentially dangerous schemes, but has done so, not for the sake of playing a risk game, but rather because he was prepared to accept the risks and then neutralise them as far as he could to attain his end. As an outstandingly bold and innovative man of science and of action, Thor Heyerdahl emerges as one of the great adventurers of the post-war period.