Few books have been so long on my to-read list as this, Thor Heyerdah’s epic rafting account, Kon-Tiki. Ever since I first caught scent of adventurers’ tales and travelogues back in high school, I have been on the lookout for Time’s greatest hits, written accounts of the most timeless journeys of them all. Both my parents had long ago recommended this one to me, but only recently did I finally take the time to read it.
Roughly stated, this book tracks Heyerdahl’s attempts at crafting and sailing a simple raft from Peru to Polynesia. He and his six-man crew of scientists and educators sailed this craft across the Pacific Ocean, hoping to prove that the original inhabitants of Polynesia may have arrived there from the East, from the Americas, in rafts like the ones he and his team designed.
What this book ever did for Polynesian (or South American) anthropology in the second half of the 20th century, I’m not certain, but what it did to readers at the time of publication was mind-altering. The possibilities it presented turned worlds upside-down, challenging the very foundations of what most believed to be unshakable facts regarding human history across the continents.
Kon-Tiki was not Thor Heyerdahl’s first book. Already, he had published his island-living journal, Fatu Hiva, and made a name for himself as a breath of fresh and daring air. He was, it seems, an original Indiana Jones, and the publication of Fatu-Hiva likely set him up for life as one of the world’s leading adventure-seeking experts. The initial chapters of this book, however, don’t present Heyerdahl as an aimless thrill-seeker or risk-taking lunatic. He was a thoughtful, articulate, scholarly man whose well-calculated adventures had very precise, ethnographic goals.
In fact, as you read this book, you might get a sense that it’s less an adventure story and more a…what? Research paper? Certainly, it includes many close scrapes and dangerous crises and it’s as colorful as anything you could expect in the years immediately following WWII, yet at its core, the book is nothing more than a theoretical proposition experimented, with the results provided in prose. The scientists are at work, and as part of the job, Heyerdahl needed to leave the boring parts in.
One aspect of this book I really enjoyed was the countless references to the fish they saw and hunted along the way. It reminded me of Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World or, in another way, Steven Callahan’s Adrift (only not in the Atlantic). Other sailing scenes reminded me of the opening chapters of James Michener’s Hawaii, but the fish really “jumped out at me,” much like the fliers did for the Kon-Tiki during mid-night squalls. Although these sailors were able to log and even draw some of the countless species they saw and later to verify their identities by asking some of the island natives they met, I’m sure they wish they had recorded—and perhaps even photographed!—more for the sake of later research. Can you imagine a Field Guide to Pacific Fish drafted from the Kon-Tiki trip? I’d buy that, even today.
Overall, I enjoyed this book immensely, despite its occasionally boring passages. These spots won’t cause me to force another Heyerdahl book onto my reading list anytime soon, though I’m certainly happy finally to have read this one. It goes to show that exploration was still a thing in the late 1940s, so long as the adventurers were willing to prove their mettle through blood, sweart and tears. That’s my kind of book.
©2021 E.T.