Kon-Tiki – Thor Heyerdahl, 1948 ★★★

Riding the Pacific

In 1947, five Norwegians and a Swede cast themselves 4,300 miles into the world’s largest, stormiest ocean on a raft of wood and hemp to prove a scorned ethnographic theory. Never mind about the theory; their resulting adventure would inspire generations.

For 101 days the Kon-Tiki risked storms, sharks, and ill-advised dingy excursions to make a point. Not about whether ancient Peruvians settled in Polynesia many centuries ago, as Kon-Tiki’s leader Thor Heyerdahl believed, but about the nature of life and man’s place in the world.

“To us on the raft the great problems of civilized man appeared false and illusory – like perverted products of the human mind,” Heyerdahl wrote. “Only the elements mattered.”

Did they ever.

The men of the Kon-Tiki learned how to read the skies for signs of rough seas. They took their bearings from the stars and recorded weather patterns. They befriended pilot fish and a stowaway crab, and even took to playfully grabbing passing sharks by their fins. They got good and sunburned, nearly died when they made landfall, and had a grand old time that Heyerdahl happily relates in this account.

None of the men were sailors, which didn’t matter as the Kon-Tiki couldn’t really be sailed, only rode upon. Heyerdahl explains:

The only thing to do was to go ahead under full sail; if we tried to turn homeward, we should only drift farther out to sea stern first. There was only one possible course, to sail before the wind with our bow toward the sunset. And, after all, that was the object of our voyage – to follow the sun in its path as we thought Kon-Tiki and the old sun worshipers must have done when they were driven out to sea from Peru.

The Kon-Tiki in sight of land. The vessel carried the flags of many nations, including those of Norway and Sweden (homelands of the crew) and France, which administers several territories in Polynesia. Image from https://www.kon-tiki.no/expeditions/kon-tiki-expedition/.

Kon-Tiki, for whom the vessel was named, was a legendary Inca figure whom Heyerdahl believed real and the leader of an expedition to Polynesia centuries before Columbus. After trying and failing to get academia interested in his idea, he opted to prove it by doing it himself.

“Have you noticed that the huge stone figures of Tiki in the jungle are remarkably like the monoliths left by extinct civilizations in South America?” Heyerdahl recalls asking his then-wife.

Heyerdahl figured that such a voyage was possible using the technology of the time. Nine large balsa logs provided the platform, while bamboo and liana vines provided matting and rope. “Not a single spike, nail, or wire rope was used in the whole construction,” Heyerdahl explains.

The fact they actually sailed as far as they did, and survived, proves nothing to me. The Kon-Tiki had to be towed out of the Peruvian port city of Callao by tug, a tool the Incas couldn’t employ, and its final landfall left the crew stranded and nearly killed. I can buy that an ancient boat or two got lost and its crew found new homes across the ocean; a deliberate migration not so much.

The moai, famous head sculptures found on Easter Island, long fascinated Heyerdahl, who spends much of Kon-Tiki analyzing how they came to be. It is another long ethnographic detour the book takes in explaining the purpose of the voyage which goes nowhere. Image from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/norway-will-repatriate-thousands-artifacts-taken-easter-island-180971846/.

What the book does do, and in a way that made it a best-seller and a staple of American middle schools back when I was growing up,  is present a strong case for the fortitude of man, whether ancient or modern. Heyerdahl and his companions are brave and doughty, not to mention curious about the many things there are to discover in a part of the world not only far from land, but any shipping lanes.

…the horizon glided along with us unnoticed as we moved and our own floating world remained always the same – a circle flung up to the vault of the sky with the raft itself as center, while the same stars rolled on over us night after night.

A quiet life it was, but not a lonely one. Throughout the voyage, the crew had plenty of company as the Kon-Tiki became a moving platform of biodiversity. Barnacles grew off its sides and bottom, which in turn attracted fish. One crab took up residency in a hole on deck and became a kind of pet, named Johannes.

Sharks came for the scraps of dinner the crew threw off, and sometimes wound up being dinner themselves. As the sharks were killed, the pilot fish which trailed after them and fed off their leavings transferred their loyalties to the Kon-Tiki:

These queer little fish huddled under our protecting wings with such childlike confidence that we, like the shark, had a fatherly protective feeling toward them. They became the Kon-Tiki’s marine pets, and it was taboo on board to lay hands on a pilot fish.

The legend of the Kon-Tiki has continued through to the 21st century. In 2012 a Norwegian movie, Kon-Tiki, dramatized the expedition and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film. Here the boys do some shark fishing, a popular if dangerous recreation. Image from https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kon-tiki-how-a-crazy-449048.

Even the plankton they netted up for soup offered moments of wonder, as Heyerdahl details the many odd shapes and patterns of their bodies: “There was no end to Nature’s extravagant inventions in the plankton world; a surrealistic artist might own himself bested here.”

As a literary endeavor, Kon-Tiki the book is certainly enjoyable if a little flat. It’s an adventure story in which adventure is nearly entirely absent apart from the fact Heyerdahl and his companions put themselves on this creaking raft in the first place. Other than a man being knocked overboard by a wave, a rough encounter with a whale shark, a close shave with another shark, and a wave-ripped landing, all described in a curious, detached way, what we get is a fairly placid ride.

What was it like for six men traveling in such close quarters and such uncertain circumstances? “No two of these men had met before, and they were all of entirely different types,” Heyerdahl states early on, warning of “the danger of psychological cloudburst” there. But nothing more is ever stated about the interpersonal relations aboard the Kon-Tiki; we don't even get to know any of the men well enough to tell them apart beyond their names. Even Heyerdahl himself is a blank.

Author Thor Heyerdahl carefully manages the water ration aboard the Kon-Tiki. Having fresh water on hand for 101 days might seem a challenge, but Heyerdahl claims with rainwater plentiful this was not so. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/561472278528085040/.

Maybe it was the way they handled their pet parrot that left me cold. Heyerdahl tells us how the bird, which was picked up in Peru, spent his days hanging around the radio playing on the aerials and imitating the radio operator, until one day when she was lost to a wave.

The parrot’s death cast a pall over the crew, Heyerdahl notes, but it was the entirely predictable result of being out on the open sea. Like another anecdote Heyerdahl relates of going out on a rubber dingy to see how the Kon-Tiki looked riding the waves from far away, one gets a careless, reckless vibe from these men. I’m just glad I wasn’t their parrot.

Where Kon-Tiki the book succeeds is in presenting the concept of man finding his place alone in nature; it’s a triumph of perspective. The dingy rides, dangerous as they were, allows Heyerdahl to recount how the raft appeared from a distance “like an old Norwegian hayloft lying helpless, drifting about in the open sea.” Similarly, inside the Kon-Tiki’s small cabin, the ocean appeared uncommonly still and placid even as the raft rolled along the Pacific.

All the time they were in constant motion, as evidenced by the speed the craft was making:

There was not one day on which we moved backward toward America, and our smallest distance in twenty-four hours was 9 sea miles, while our average run for the voyage as a whole was 42½ sea miles in twenty-four hours.

A map of the Kon-Tiki's journey, which culminated when the vessel ran aground in Raroia, a thinly-populated atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago. Image from https://www.kon-tiki.no/expeditions/kon-tiki-expedition/.

Much of the book is concerned not with the voyage at all, but rather the setting-up part. The first three chapters detail Heyerdahl’s theory, the coming together of the six expedition members, and time spent in Peru and Ecuador building the Kon-Tiki and getting government support.

They visit a jungle estate where scorpions are welcome residents for dealing with cockroaches, and share tales about a tribe of headshrinkers. One official gives them Bibles, figuring they need more than human aid. An unnamed ambassador is even grimmer: “Your mother and father will be very grieved when they hear of your death.”

In fact, getting free of Peru’s coastal pull proved quite tricky, even with the tug pulling them along. Once out on the open sea, the trip was easier:

The Kon-Tiki did not plow through the sea like a sharp-prowed racing craft. Blunt and broad, heavy and solid, she splashed sedately forward over the waves. She did not hurry, but when she had once got going she pushed ahead with unshakable energy.

Despite its rough landing at Raroia, the Kon-Tiki was eventually recovered and remains to this day a popular tourist attraction, with its own museum in Oslo, Norway. Image from https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/kon-tiki-museum.

Later Heyerdahl likens the vessel to a “cork steam-roller,” a wonderful description even if it suggests more motive force than Kon-Tiki really possessed. As underwhelmed as I was by Heyerdahl’s silly theory and the largely uneventual nature of the voyage itself, I was continually impressed by his writerly abilities and talent for unique and apt metaphors.

He describes the way the deck of the Kon-Tiki moved as it rolled along, the nine logs individually rising up and down like keys of an instrument. Waves occasionally wash over the raft, sweeping all in their path before draining off the sides:

Long tracks of dead foam lay like stripes to windward down the backs of the long seas; and everywhere, where the wave ridges had broken and plunged down, green patches like wounds lay frothing for a long time in the blue-black sea.

Heyerdahl’s insistence that his expedition served a valid scientific feels more strained now than it did then. But the courage and insights gleaned from his journey remain fresh and relevant, and certainly readable, if not quite as thrilling as you might expect.