‘Progress is man’s ability to complicate simplicity.’
THOR HEYERDAHL
THOR. THE NORSE god of thunder.
Any Norwegian man given that name has large boots to fill. Enter Thor Heyerdahl.
Some men and women show true grit by enduring hardships that would break most people. Some show it by conquering fear. Some by pushing themselves to do things that appear, to ordinary mortals, impossible.
Thor Heyerdahl did all of these. But he did something else, too. It didn’t involve pain, or endurance or survival. In fact it was relatively simple. And yet, in its own way, it was so gutsy that most of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, would find it almost insurmountably difficult.
By the time you’ve read the story of Thor Heyerdahl and his remarkable seafaring expeditions, I think you’ll understand what I’m talking about.
*
As a kid, Thor Heyerdahl already had the heart and soul of an adventurer. And also the guts. Encouraged by his mother, he set up a little zoological museum in his father’s brewery. The main attraction was a deadly poisonous snake which he’d caught himself.
His love of nature was compounded when he befriended a grizzled old hermit called Ola. Ola lived a solitary life in a nearby valley. His house was an old sheep pen. There was no real furniture – just logs and stones to sit on. He cooked his simple meals on a small fire.
By spending time with Ola, Thor learned a very important lesson. Life is, in its essence, very simple. Humans make it more complicated, but the things we really need to survive are few.
Heyerdahl also learned something of the dangers of the sea at a young age. He would later tell a story about a time when, aged only five, he watched some older boys playing on the ice in his native Norway. He decided he wanted a go, but his game went very wrong and he found himself under the ice.
Surrounded by freezing water, he struggled to make it back to the surface; he became disorientated, and the hole through which he’d fallen had disappeared. He whacked his head against the ice. His lungs burned. Everything was spinning …
And then, suddenly, he was back on the surface, screaming. One of the older boys had managed to grab his ankle and pull him out. He was safe.
You might think that such an event would have scared the young Thor Heyerdahl away from water for the rest of his life. But he wasn’t the kind to give in to fear.
As a young man, Thor studied biology and geography at the University of Oslo. In 1936 he married his wife, Liv, and together they embarked upon a journey to the Polynesian Islands. There, they spent a year on the jungle island of Fatu Hiva. It’s the most remote and isolated of the islands of French Polynesia, almost bang in the middle of the South Pacific, with Asia and Australia to the west and South America to the east.
At first it seemed like paradise. They stripped off their clothes, built a simple home from bamboo and palm leaves, and pulled crayfish from cool, clear streams. But as the months passed, they started to understand the harsh realities of jungle living.
It wasn’t the snakes that got to them, or even the huge, poisonous millipedes. It was the mosquitoes. As the rainy season arrived the insects swarmed around the couple in great, thick clouds. Their skin was crawling with them, and covered in huge, angry welts where the mosquitoes had sucked thirstily on their blood. Massive boils developed on Liv’s legs. When they burst, the boils mutated into agonizing open sores.
They then learned that they were almost certain to become infected with a worm called filaria, which causes elephantiasis.
Leprosy was also rife.
Paradise was turning into hell.
They decided to leave that part of the island, and headed to where the mosquitoes were less numerous, and where simple, tribal people led simple, tribal lives. Thor befriended one tribesman in particular, and through their conversations he learned something profound. So-called ‘civilized’ people think themselves far more advanced than those who still follow the tribal ways. But we dismiss other cultures at our own risk. Perhaps by understanding them, we learn to understand ourselves a little better.
The tough, rugged naturalist was also becoming a dedicated anthropologist. Slowly, the pieces were slotting into place for the expeditions that would make Thor Heyerdahl’s name.
And it all came together when Thor found his way to the neighbouring island of Hiva Oa. It was here that he uncovered a most perplexing mystery.
*
Nestled in the tropical rainforest of Hiva Oa was a collection of very ancient statues. Nobody knew much about them – neither precisely how old they were, nor who had made them. However, Thor did learn something curious: similar statues had been discovered 8,000 kilometres away to the east – across the sea in Colombia, South America.
This was strange. Most people believed that the indigenous Polynesians had originally travelled to that remote part of the South Pacific – by canoe – from Asia. From the west.
Could it be that all the experts were wrong?
The young explorer thought it could.
Thor’s studies were interrupted by the arrival of the Second World War. When the enemy occupied his homeland, he joined a parachute infantry regiment of the Free Norwegian Forces to battle against the evil of the Axis powers. But at the end of the war Heyerdahl resumed his life as a scientist and explorer – and he continued to tout his controversial ideas about the original settlers of Polynesia.
Almost everybody laughed at his theories, but that didn’t put him off. Just because lots of people thought differently, it didn’t mean they were right.
So Thor tried to work out how the early inhabitants of South America would have made the epic journey. The sea vessel favoured by those native South Americans was, anthropologists all agreed, the balsa raft. Have you ever handled a piece of balsa wood? It’s very light, but it’s also incredibly brittle. You could snap a small piece in your hands without any trouble. Surely a material like that would make a terrible boat?
Also, the experts said, balsa wood is absorbent. It might have been all right for pottering round the coastlines of South America, but for a journey of 8,000 kilometres across the South Pacific? No way, they said. It would break up before it even got a quarter of the way there.
Thor Heyerdahl begged to differ. He argued that humans – even primitive ones – were capable of remarkable things. Of great endurance and incredible ingenuity.
Unfortunately, he was young, unknown and unimportant. The experts scoffed at his ridiculous idea that anyone could survive for so long on such a ridiculously unseaworthy vessel.
And so he decided to prove to them that it was possible.
The idea for the Kon-Tiki expedition had been born.
*
In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl travelled to Peru. There, he started building his raft.
To prove his point, he was determined to use only materials that would have been available to those early settlers, five hundred years previously. Thor’s raft was to be constructed solely out of balsa-wood beams lashed together with lengths of hemp rope, a bamboo deck and cabin, and a 29-foot mast made of mangrove wood.
First, though, he had to find the balsa wood. Balsa trees were harvested in the high rainforests of the Ecuadorian Andes, and everyone – everyone – told him that it was impossible to get to the balsa plantations during the rainy season.
Thor didn’t like the word impossible. He set out with one buddy to reach the interior of this rainforest.
Having hooked up with some locals, they had to battle against rain storms so heavy that they turned the dirt tracks leading down from the plateaus of the Andes into torrential flowing rivers.
Then there were the bandits who, in that part of the world, would rob and kill them without a second thought. And, of course, the venomous snakes that seemed to lurk everywhere, along with the scorpions – one of which stung his buddy in the leg.
They finally found the trees they were looking for and, with the help of some locals, cut them down. But how were they going to get them back all the way to Peru?
With the help of their horses, they dragged the trunks (which being freshly cut were still heavy with sap) through the thick, unforgiving jungle towards a great river. Here, they bound the trunks together using the tough stems of climbing plants, and made them into a makeshift raft. They boarded it, and braved the fast flowing waters to head downriver.
The river itself was rife with alligators. When they stopped by the bank for the night, they could hear the screeches of wild cats all around them. Simply sourcing the wood for the Kon-Tiki was turning into an epic adventure all on its own.
Eventually they drifted on the fast current, through the heavy rainfalls and jungle dangers, to civilization, where Thor set about building his raft.
He refused to use any of the technology that had been developed in the construction of the great ocean liners of the twentieth century, or even the wooden-hulled battleships that went before. No wire, no modern rope and no nails.
And if he found himself in trouble in the middle of the Pacific, thousands of miles from help – thousands of miles from anywhere – that was his own lookout.
Five other men made up his crew. Each of them as rugged and courageous as Thor himself. They needed to be. Over the next three months they would be forced to survive with scant supplies on the unforgiving ocean – a place where humans were never meant to live.
The Kon-Tiki set sail on 28 April 1947, blown westwards by the currents and the prevailing winds. So far, so good. But the real test would come when it hit stormy waters.
Storms at sea are terrifying. Not to mention deadly. The crashing waves and high winds of the Pacific had crushed many sturdier vessels than Kon-Tiki. Imagine what they could do to this lightweight, ramshackle raft constructed by a crazy Norwegian who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Thor and his men hit two major storms over the next three months. No doubt the naysaying academics, sitting safely behind their desks, fully expected the elements to send Thor, his crew and his boat down into the depths.
It didn’t happen.
Thor and his men faced up to the storms – one of them lasted for a solid five days – and battled against them. When great walls of white water crashed over their craft, they clung for dear life to the bamboo mast before returning to the Herculean task of steering the Kon-Tiki through the treacherous peaks and troughs, all the time rallying against the howling winds.
And despite the predictions of Thor’s opponents, the Kon-Tiki and its crew proved to be a match for the brutal elements. When the waves crashed over it, the water simply ran down the gaps between the balsa planks. Thor’s theory was proving right.
Of course, it wasn’t just a question of whether the boat would survive. The men on it had to survive too. One of the greatest dangers they faced was the possibility of losing a man overboard. This was just a raft, after all. Amazingly, all six crew members managed to cling to the raft – and to life – during these terrifying storms.
But even when the sea was calm, danger could rear its head at any time. There’s a whole world under the ocean that few of us ever get to see – a home to all manner of deadly creatures, including whales and sharks. As the Kon-Tiki drifted west it passed through shoals of these beasts, that could rear up from the water at any moment and attack the men on the raft, or simply upturn it with a nudge of their massive bodies.
Neither happened. Luck was with the Kon-Tiki expedition – the kind of luck that has a habit of accompanying real backbone.
The men had taken with them a supply of water. But they knew it was never going to be enough.
Throughout their voyage, Thor and his crew had to collect rainwater whenever they could to supplement their rations. And when they managed to catch fish, they used them to get much needed liquid into their parched bodies.
Raw fish is a good source of fluid. You can rehydrate yourself by swallowing fish eyeballs (try to gulp them down whole, if you want to avoid the taste!), and you can also squeeze liquid – as the Kon-Tiki crew did – from their spines and lymph nodes. Sometimes the crew removed the liquid from fish by squeezing lumps of flesh wrapped in a piece of cloth.
When it was searingly hot, they would jump into the water, then lie, draped in damp clothes, under the canopy of the raft to limit their sweating. And then they would slowly dry off to avoid getting wet sores.
But the explorers also learned that sometimes water isn’t enough to quench your thirst. If you’ve been sweating a lot, your body requires salt. So, by mixing a little sea water into their fresh water rations, the dreadful burning in the back of their throats could be eased.
They also learned how to catch sharks.
These sharks were their constant companions, visiting daily and swimming in the wake of the raft. At first, Thor and his men tried to capture them using their harpoons. But these barely pierced the sharks’ tough skins. If they were going to hunt shark, they needed to think a bit smarter.
They had dolphin carcasses on board, which they decided to use as bait. They filled the dolphin’s belly with a load of their biggest fish hooks attached to good, strong line. Then they set the carcass free in the water to tempt the passing sharks.
It worked first time. A shark swallowed the dolphin carcass whole. The dolphin was stuck in the shark, and the hooks were stuck in the dolphin. Thor and his men hauled the shark on to the raft and stayed well clear while it writhed and flapped its immense, sinewy body in a final death dance, suffocating now it was out of the water. When it finally died, they soaked the meat in salt water to make it edible, then ate it.
Using just their guile and the few tools they had to hand, Thor and his men had learned how to conquer the kings of the sea.
Sometimes, alone and with boredom setting in, they developed a more dangerous way of catching sharks, just to keep themselves entertained. If you can grab a shark’s tail fin and lift it out of the water, it becomes paralysed. (If you get it wrong, of course, then the game gets a little edgy!)
The men would sit at the edge of the raft, and wait for one of these powerful beasts to slide past. They’d plunge their hands into the water, grab its tail fin, and yank it above the water line. When the beast froze, they’d haul it on board.
That’s the kind of survival that requires some real grit to practise.
Finally, after 101 days at sea, the raft washed up on the shores of the Polynesian island of Raroia where, after a week, natives from the other side of the island found and welcomed the crew.
Thor Heyerdahl hadn’t proved that the indigenous Polynesians had originally come from South America. He’d simply proved that it was possible. But he’d also proved something else. Something just as important. When it comes to surviving what other people swear blind you can’t survive, then determination and self-belief go a very long way.
*
Thor Heyerdahl’s ballsy seafaring expeditions didn’t end with the Kon-Tiki.
It was known that the ancient Egyptians built very large boats, principally out of papyrus. The accepted – and supposedly unassailable – belief was that such boats could never have travelled very long distances. Certainly, they wouldn’t be up to crossing the Atlantic. The papyrus, surely, would simply dissolve long before the vessel hit land again.
And yet … anthropologists had long known that there were certain similarities between ancient civilizations in Mexico and Peru, and those around the Mediterranean and North Africa. Had they developed independently of each other? Or was it, as Thor Heyerdahl presumed, possible that these papyrus boats were a lot sturdier than all these modern, self-styled ‘experts’ proclaimed?
Would those wily ancient Egyptians really have built these great big ships if they were barely seaworthy?
No prizes for guessing what he did next.
Thor Heyerdahl’s first papyrus ship was called the Ra. Like the Kon-Tiki, it was built using only the materials and techniques that would have been available to ancient civilizations, including highly buoyant reed bundles. It set sail in the spring of 1969 from Safi in Morocco. Its destination: Barbados.
And it nearly made it.
Ra travelled 5,000 kilometres across the Atlantic before the ship started to lose the elasticity it needed to ride over the rolling ocean waves, and the reed bundles on the starboard side of the boat started to disintegrate. They had to abandon ship and were saved by a passing yacht. The Ra had been at sea for fifty-four days. Another seven and they would have arrived in Barbados.
Was Thor disheartened? Absolutely not. Whenever you try something new, or difficult, or heroic, there are going to be setbacks. The trick is to redouble your efforts and throw yourself back into the endeavour with everything you’ve got.
Which is what Thor Heyerdahl did. A year later, a new, improved papyrus boat called the Ra II set sail. It was just 12 metres long and was once again built using primitive materials and methods.
Fifty-seven days later it landed in Barbados.
Admittedly it was covered in barnacles and so waterlogged that, in Thor’s own words, ‘sharks could virtually swim aboard’; and they had spent their last few days at sea sitting on the roof of the bamboo cabin.
But they’d done it.
Thor Heyerdahl had refused to be beaten. And he had refused to give up after his first failed attempt.
Once again, he had proved the naysayers wrong, and shown just what humans can do when they put their minds to it.
*
Cast adrift on tiny rafts in the middle of the boundless oceans, Thor Heyerdahl’s expeditions were both epic and dangerous. Like all great adventurers, he pitted himself against the natural world in the full knowledge that it could chew him up and spit him out at any moment. His only weapons were human ingenuity and his indomitable spirit and determination.
But for me those heroic journeys, amazing though they were, were not his most impressive achievement. I said at the beginning that Thor Heyerdahl managed something many of us find almost impossibly difficult, and it’s this. So often in life, we find people telling us that our ideas are stupid, or that our dreams are impossible. And it’s easy, in the face of that kind of negativity, simply to give up.
Thor Heyerdahl didn’t give up. Nor should you.
Don’t let anyone ever tell you that something can’t be done. What they’re normally saying is that they can’t do it.
That doesn’t mean you can’t.