Reviews of the Week Stone-Age Voyage The Kon-Tiki Expedition. By
Thor Heyerdahl. Translated by F. H. Lyon. (Allen and Unwin. 12S. 6d.) FRIDTJOF NANSEN would have greeted the author of this book as a brother. Like the long drift of the Fram ' in the Polar ice, the crossing of the Pacific on a raft expressed a Norwegian scientist's readiness to risk everything for a theory in which he believed. Thor Heyerdahl, a biologist working in the Marquesas, heard the Polynesian tradition that their islands had been peopled by a mythical hero, Kon-Tiki, who- had come over the sea from the East. Later, in Peru, he found a Tiki identified with Virakocha in legends that told of his defeat on Lake Titicaca and of his dis- appearance overseas to the West. Convinced that both sets of legends referred to the same man and the same sea voyage, and with much other evidence to support him, he came to the conclusion that Polynesia had been reached by a people who migrated from Peru. He wrote a thesis on the subject, but could not persuade anybody to take it seriously. He was told that none of the peoples of South America could have crossed the Pacific for the simple reason that they had no boats. He remembered Pizarro's Ruiz mezting a big raft with a square sail somewhere south of Panama. " Yes," said the scientists, " but who would cross the Pacific on a raft ? " " I will," said Thor Heyerdahl.
He found four other Norwegians and a Swede to go with him, picking his crew on principles that suggest those on which the Bell- man chose a crew to go Snark-hunting, principles completely justified by the result. He chose a refrigerating engineer, a painter who could use a sextant and play the guitar, two wireless experts who had done heroic work in Norway during the German occupation and a Swedish ethnologist who brought 73 books with him and still had three to read when they sighted their first island. They never quarrelled. They kept each other amused, and the presence of each one of them was justified by the work he did. Before their enthu- siasm difficulties and official hearts melted like snow: They had first to get their raft. Heyerdahl knew that he could count on the winds and the currents that had not changed since the time of Tiki, some fifteen hundred years ago. To reproduce the conditions in which he believed the crossing had been made, he had to match those winds and currents with a raft as nearly as possible the same as Tiki's own. Early Spanish explorers had left descrip- tions of such rafts, built of huge balsa-wood logs. The balsa king of Ecuador had no such logs on hand. His brother, however, had a balsa plantation far away in the jungle under the Andes inacces- sible from the coast because of the rains. Undeterred, part of the expedition flew to the Andes, crossed them in a jeep from the other side, and came down to the jungle. They felled nine gigantic logs, giving each its name, and floated them to the sea. They took them to Callao, and there, in the naval harbour, they put together their stone-age raft without the use of metal of any kind. They gave it a square sail with a picture of Kon-Tiki in the middle of it, copied from an ancient carving. The Peruvian Navy towed them to sea, and they were off, and in difficulties at once because, " though the raft was built exactly as the Spaniards described it, there was no one living in our time who could give us a practical advance course in sailing an Indian raft:" Tradition said that its centreboards were used in steering it. Later, they found out how, but to begin with, nearly killed themselves in their struggles with the steering-oar. Five of them were landlubbers pure and simple, and though their navigator-painter-guitarist' had been a sailor, he knew as little as the rest of them about crossing an ocean on a raft.
Presently they were voyaging in comparative comfort. Wind and current behaved as expected. The raft drove steadily westward at an average speed of 424- miles a day. They survived great storms and huge waves, which did not fill or sink their craft, but poured over and through it, without wrecking the thatched shelter in which they slept and worked. They fished and caught strange fishes, one at least new to science. One of the voyagers fell overbbard and, while the raft drove relentlessly on, was heroically rescued by another. " We had a lot of nice things to say to Knut that day, Herman and the rest of us, too." They kept in constant touch with short-wave wireless experts in America and even with one in Norway. This was useful in other ways than that of sending observations home. When they tried to develop films on board, the films were ruined, and through their wireless they learnt that they should not use water above 60 deg., whereas the coolest water they had was 80 deg. Thereupon the refrigeration expert went into their deck shelter with a bottle of carbonic acid and presently came out again with snow on his beard (in the middle of the Pacific) and a useful lump of ice.- They were always-busy, and with each day became more confident of success. On the ninety-seventh day they sighted land for the first time, but failed to bring the raft ashore, though natives came aboard, and one of the party who landed with the natives had difficulty in rejoining them. On the one hundred and first day their 4,300-mile voyage came to an end, when the raft was hurled by huge seas on the Raroia Reef. Vegetable ropes and balsa logs served them to the end. All six voyagers survived, and the Polynesians, seeing as it were their ancient legends come true before their eyes, gave them an ecstatic reception.
The voyage itself is a new honour for Norway, already rich in such exploits, and men of every nation will rejoice in Thor Heyer- dahl's high-spirited, gallant and modest-minded book. At the end of it all its scientific author says quietly that the voyage does not in itself prove his theory, but it does prove that balsa rafts have qualities hitherto unknown to men of our time, and that " the Pacific islands are located well inside the range of prehistoric craft
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