Over the next few years, Heyerdahl assembled a theory about the settlement of Oceania based on a mix of his Marquesan insights, observations about the weather, some not very good linguistics, nineteenth-century theories about the diffusion of knowledge, and some dubious Spanish conquistador lore. It had all begun, he argued, high up in the Andes on the shores of Lake Titicaca, on what is now the border of Bolivia and Peru. There, in the days before the rise of the Inca Empire, a remarkable collection of megalithic monuments had been erected by a mysterious people. Almost nothing was known about them save for a garbled conquistador claim that they were led by the high priest and sun king Viracocha—described by Heyerdahl as a tall white man with red hair and a beard—who also went by the name of Kon-Tiki. Around the sixth century A.D., Heyerdahl argued, Kon-Tiki and his followers had been routed by an invading force. Fleeing their high, dry plateau, they descended to the sea and set sail across the Pacific on balsa-wood rafts, becoming the first settlers of Polynesia.
Heyerdahl was, of course, aware of the great mass of evidence that by now linked Polynesia to Southeast Asia—including the Asian origin of virtually all Polynesian food plants and domesticated animals and the well-established linguistic arguments—and in order to account for these inconvenient facts, he posited a second wave of settlement from the Asian side. These secondary immigrants, Heyerdahl argued, had followed something very like the Beringian route proposed by the nineteenth-century missionary William Ellis, traveling north along the Asian mainland and across the Bering Strait to North America, then over the ocean to Hawai‘i, from which they dispersed to the rest of Polynesia. There, he believed, these Asiatic arrivals had mixed and mingled with the red-headed, white-skinned followers of Kon-Tiki, so that when Europeans arrived in the Pacific, the people they discovered in the islands were a combination of these two groups.
Heyerdahl marshaled various bits and pieces of evidence in support of his thesis—the occasional appearance of red-haired Polynesians; the presence of megalithic sculptures on Easter Island; certain cultural similarities between Polynesians and the Kwakiutl and Haida tribes of the Pacific Northwest—but the primary driver of his theory was the direction of the Pacific’s currents and winds. Heyerdahl believed that the human settlement of the Pacific had to have followed the path of these meteorological forces. As he put it, “The decisive factor is not distance but wind and current,” the pattern of which was determined by the rotation of the earth itself.
IN 1947, HEYERDAHL famously put the South American portion of his theory to the test. Together with five other athletic and daring Scandinavians, he built a large balsa-wood raft, which he christened Kon-Tiki, after the mysterious pre-Incan sun king. Measuring thirty by fifteen feet, it was made from nine huge balsa trees, which Heyerdahl and his companions found and felled (with the help of some local labor) in the Ecuadoran jungle and floated down a river to the sea. These were planked over with smaller balsa logs, followed by a layer of split bamboo, which was then covered with reed matting for a deck. Two tall mangrove-wood masts tied together at the top held a bamboo yard from which hung a large square sail printed with an image of the bearded Kon-Tiki. A large wooden steering oar projected from the stern, and, to protect the men from sun and rain, a small bamboo hut was erected on the deck.
The expedition was supported by a remarkable collection of official and semi-official figures from several nations. Heyerdahl had help from members of the Explorers Club, in New York; the research laboratory of the U.S. military’s Air Materiel Command; the Norwegian military attaché in Washington; the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office; the British Military Mission; a Chilean assistant secretary at the United Nations; “the balsa king of Ecuador,” Don Gustavo von Buchwald; and even His Excellency Don José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, president of Peru. Some donated money, others provided advice or material support, including U.S. military gear and rations, which the members of the expedition agreed to test.
On the afternoon of April 28, before a crowd of enthusiastic onlookers, the Kon-Tiki was towed out of the harbor at Callao, Peru. Although no metal had been used in the construction of the vessel, which was held together entirely with rope, the crew did have a compass, a sextant, watches, and charts to work out their position, as well as a radio to keep in touch with the outside world. Fifty miles off the coast, their escort left them; they had been towed out into the middle of the Humboldt Current, which would sweep them along until they hit the westward-setting South Equatorial Current, which would, in turn, pull them to Polynesia.
For the next three months, they lived in a small, self-contained world consisting of six men and a parrot, their raft, and the creatures that surrounded them in the sea. Heyerdahl wrote of the isolation and the way it affected his sense of time: “Whether it was 1947 B.C. or A.D. suddenly became of no significance.” The trade winds blew steadily and they were never becalmed, though about halfway through the voyage they were hit by two ferocious storms, during one of which the parrot was lost overboard. The raft averaged about fifty miles a day, and they never saw another ship or a plane or any other sign of human activity. The sea around them, however, was teeming with life. Every night, flying fish leapt onto the raft, and every morning it was someone’s job to collect them for breakfast. Most of the time, they were accompanied by schools of iridescent mahi-mahi; sharks were also frequent companions. Large squid sometimes floated up from the depths at night, “their devilish green eyes shining in the dark like phosphorus”; whales occasionally sported about the raft; and, once, they were visited by an enormous whale shark, which passed slowly beneath them before one of the crew members gratuitously jabbed it with a harpoon.
The “waves and fish and sun and stars came and went,” and as he floated across the Pacific, Heyerdahl returned to one of his favorite themes. “The closer we came into contact with the sea,” he wrote, “the more at home we ourselves felt.” They were learning “to respect the old primitive peoples who lived in close converse with the Pacific and therefore knew it from a standpoint quite different from our own.” And the conclusion Heyerdahl reached was that “the picture primitive peoples had of the sea was a truer one than ours.” It was much the same view of paradise lost that had inspired him to go to the Marquesas and seek out an untrammeled world, the same mistrust of modernity, the same hunger for a “truer,” more elemental way of life. No doubt the horror of two world wars had something to do with this, inspiring a deep, atavistic longing for some earlier, more innocent time. “Life,” wrote Heyerdahl rather sadly, “had been fuller and richer for men before the technological age.”
When they were still hundreds of miles from Polynesia, the crew of the Kon-Tiki had their first harbingers of land: frigate birds, followed by two boobies. With every passing day, larger and larger flocks of seabirds appeared, hightailing it away to the west as the sun set. The next thing was a “curious stationary cloud” that hung in the sky while “small feathery wisps of wool” blown by the trade winds passed by. They had reached the Tuamotu Archipelago, the screen of atolls between Tahiti and the Marquesas that so many of the early Europeans explorers had found in their path. Beneath the cloud lay Puka Puka—one of Magellan’s Desventurados and the Dog Island of Schouten and Le Maire. Smoke rose above the treetops, and “a faint breath of burnt borao wood” drifted over the water. A little while later, they caught the scent of leaves, greenery, and freshly cut wood. But with no way to steer, they drifted on, and soon the island lay astern.
They drifted past the atoll of Fangatau, from which a number of islanders came out to meet them in canoes. But still they were unable to maneuver the raft against the wind and current. Soon they began to realize what they were facing. Although they could see the quiet waters of the lagoons and the sand beaches and the bright green forests of coconut palms, they could not reach them, kept off as they were by “the viciousness of the red reef.” Canoes could come and go, but it would never be possible to steer the raft through one of the openings into a lagoon.
Then
, on the 101st day of the voyage, the inevitable happened. Stretching across their path like an impenetrable wall was a forty-five-mile section of coral reef. There was no way of getting around it; it was now, Heyerdahl wrote, “a question of saving our lives.” The Kon-Tiki began to pitch up and down as the swell became complicated by waves bouncing back off the coral. Dead ahead they could see “the blue Pacific being ruthlessly torn up and hurled into the air all along the horizon.” Closer and closer until, with a violent blow, the Kon-Tiki crashed onto the outer reef of Raroia and was instantly submerged under a mountain of water as wave after giant wave broke over the raft. Heyerdahl and his companions clung on for dear life and, miraculously, no one was washed overboard and smashed onto the wall of coral. Though the raft was pounded nearly to pieces, it was just buoyant enough to ride up over the reef, allowing the men to scramble off into the lagoon and make their way through shallow water to a little islet. “I shall never forget that wade across the reef toward that heavenly palm island,” wrote Heyerdahl.
When I reached the sunny sand beach, I slipped off my shoes and thrust my bare toes down into the warm, bone-dry sand. . . . Soon the palm-tops closed over my head, and I went on, right in towards the centre of the tiny island. Green coconuts hung under the palm-tufts, and some luxuriant bushes were thickly covered with snow-white blossoms, which smelt so sweet and seductive that I felt quite faint. . . . I was completely overwhelmed. I sank down on my knees and thrust my fingers deep down into the dry warm sand.
FROM A PROMOTIONAL point of view, the voyage of the Kon-Tiki was a roaring success. The story of the expedition, published first in Norwegian in 1948 and translated into English in 1950, sold millions of copies and was eventually reprinted in more than sixty languages, including Mongolian and Esperanto. It was described by the New York Tribune as “great as few books in our time are great,” and by the London Sunday Times as “certain to be one of the classics of the sea.” Praised by Somerset Maugham as both incredible and true, it was also admired by Harry S. Truman, who observed that it was “a wonderful thing to have people in the world who can still take hardship.” A year later, the film Kon-Tiki, based on footage shot aboard the raft, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Soon “Kon-Tiki fever” broke out around the world: there were Kon-Tiki hotels and Kon-Tiki cocktails, Kon-Tiki bathing suits and Kon-Tiki floats. Heyerdahl became a worldwide celebrity, but this did not necessarily translate into academic respectability.
One of the first to pooh-pooh the significance of the voyage was Te Rangi Hiroa. “A nice adventure,” he was quoted as saying. “But you don’t expect anyone to call that a scientific expedition. Now do you?” Much of the initial attention had been focused on technical issues—specifically, whether a balsa-wood raft would make it across four thousand miles of open ocean without either breaking up or becoming waterlogged and sinking. Then there was the question of whether the crew would starve to death or die of thirst; one naval attaché at the dockyard in Callao bet them all the whiskey they could drink for the rest of their lives that they would never reach Polynesia alive. But, while there was some grumbling about the use of modern navigational instruments and cans of preserved food, as well as the fact that they’d been towed out to catch the current, most of the technical questions had been answered by the voyage itself. A balsa-wood raft set adrift on the South American coast could end up in Polynesia, and humans could carry or forage all they needed to stay alive for the three months it would take to get there.
This was really all the general public cared about, but among anthropologists, the larger question was whether the theory behind the voyage made sense. And the answer, at least for the majority, was no. As one critic put it: Heyerdahl’s arguments could not be supported “chronologically, archaeologically, botanically, racially, linguistically, or culturally.” Heyerdahl always insisted that the academy was arrayed against him, but many of his key points were indefensible, and those that were not were often unacceptably stretched. In 1952, he published an eight-hundred-page defense of his ideas, entitled American Indians in the Pacific: The Theory Behind the Kon-Tiki Expedition. Reviews of the volume were harsh. As a writer in the American Anthropologist put it, “The author’s unquenchable enthusiasm for his theories is evident on every page. Again and again the ‘possibility’ cited in one paragraph becomes a ‘probability’ in the next and an established fact half a page later.” Another, writing in American Antiquity, complained that “every straw is seized, bent, and twisted to suit the author’s purposes. Tenuous evidence is pushed beyond reasonable limits; conflicting data are given scant attention or omitted, and the manuscript abounds with incautious statements.”
Many of the things Heyerdahl claimed were simply not true. Polynesians were not sun worshippers; the Tahitian word pahi did not translate as “raft”; the moai of Easter Island were not identical, or even very similar, to the megalithic sculptures of Tiwanaku; the languages of the Pacific Northwest were not related to those of Polynesia. And then there was the cringe-making problem of the “white god” Kon-Tiki. Much of Heyerdahl’s argument rested on the need, as he saw it, to explain the presence of sophisticated megalithic masonry and sculpture on the islands of eastern Polynesia. His solution—the arrival of a mysterious white civilization that then inexplicably vanishes, leaving behind evidence of its superior know-how and taste—is a familiar European fantasy trope of the 1920s and ’30s. Among professional anthropologists of the 1950s, it was impossible to take seriously, and a few were prepared to concede what is now obvious: that it was difficult “to avoid reading racism from this work.”
There was, however, one piece of evidence that no one could argue with, and that was the presence in central and eastern Polynesia of a key American food crop: the sweet potato. This sweet, starchy, nutritious member of the morning glory family, officially known as Ipomoea batatas, was first cultivated by indigenous peoples in the Americas and was already widely established there by the time Europeans arrived. The first European reference to the plant is, in fact, from Christopher Columbus, who brought back a sample for Queen Isabella as an example of the products of the New World.
A century or two later, when they began reaching the islands of Polynesia, European observers found that the sweet potato was an important staple in many of the islands of the central and eastern Pacific. At Easter Island in 1722, Jacob Roggeveen was offered sweet potatoes in trade; in Hawai‘i, one of Cook’s officers reported that they were so plentiful “the poorest natives would throw them into our Ships for Nothing”; and in New Zealand, where many traditional Polynesian food crops would not grow because of the climate, visitors found extensive sweet potato plantations. Indeed, the first “absolute botanical proof” of the plant’s presence in Polynesia—proof that these early observers were not conflating it with the visually similar but botanically distinct yam—is an herbarium specimen collected in New Zealand in 1769 by Joseph Banks.
None of this would be in any way remarkable were it not for the fact that every other Polynesian food crop comes from the opposite side of the Pacific. Assuming that Polynesians carried all their most important plants—bananas, breadfruit, taro, sugarcane, yam, and so on—into the Pacific from Asia, how did they come to be growing the American sweet potato? How, in other words, did the sweet potato get to Polynesia?
Botanists have long argued that the sweet potato could not have dispersed throughout the Pacific without human assistance. It does not float and could not have drifted, nor, as is sometimes the case with plants, does it appear to have been carried in seed form in the guts of birds. Assuming that humans are the vector, there are just three possibilities: the Spanish; indigenous South Americans; or Polynesians. For a while, it was argued that Spanish explorers, who are known to have transported the plant to the Philippines, might have planted the first sweet potatoes in the Marquesas when they discovered the islands in 1595. But this does not seem a very likely origin story, for it is hard to imagine how the plant could have become so widesprea
d in Polynesia just a century or so later. Much more ink has been spilt debating the other two possibilities: that the sweet potato was conveyed to the islands by some unknown indigenous inhabitants of South America, or that it was picked up by Polynesians who reached South America and returned to eastern Polynesia with their prize. Logic favors the seafaring Polynesians with their large canoes and penchant for travel, rather than the coast-hugging South Americans who only had rafts. But there is still no absolutely watertight evidence placing Polynesians on South American shores. Very recently arguments have even been made for the natural long-range dispersal of sweet potato seeds, meaning that there would be no need to invoke a human carrier at all. But nothing about this is settled, and the sweet potato remains just as tantalizing a mystery as it was when Heyerdahl deployed it in support of his views.
INSIDE THE SCHOLARLY community, Heyerdahl’s theories were met with everything from polite skepticism to outright disdain. One of his harshest critics, the anthropologist Robert Suggs, describes the Kon-Tiki theory, with its mishmash of Marquesan, Easter Island, Tiwanakan, and Incan components, and its mysterious vanished race of “white and bearded men,” as about as plausible as the idea “that America was discovered in the last day of the Roman Empire by King Henry the Eighth, who brought the Ford Falcon to the benighted aborigines.” But in the court of popular opinion, Heyerdahl’s ideas lived on—and on. As one historian put it as recently as 2003, “If an opinion poll today asked citizens on the streets, ‘Where did the Polynesians come from?’, it is my bet that . . . the most likely response would be ‘South America.’”
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