Quest for Adventure

by Chris Bonington

  It is very noticeable that fewer new routes are being tackled today. The ascent of new routes, which I believe is at the core of climbing adventure, has always been a minority activity. The vast majority of climbers are happy to follow in the footsteps of others, guide books clutched in their hands. But there is and always has been a small elite who have gone for new routes and unclimbed summits. There are still literally hundreds of unclimbed peaks of between 5,000 and 6,000 metres in Central Asia. There are unclimbed faces and ridges on many of the 7,000-metre peaks. In describing the first ascent of the North Face of Changabang, climbed in 1997, I have tried to capture the magic and challenge of this style of climbing.

  I am still attracted by what seems at first glance to be impossible. To me, the ultimate in adventure is to convert this impossible into the feasible, and this is what all the adventures I have chosen have in common. Together they represent a complex mosaic, the component pieces of which differ enormously in so many ways, but which contribute to a fascinating overall pattern.

  Chris Bonington

  – Chapter 1 –

  Kon-Tiki

  Thor Heyerdahl’s Raft Voyage Across the Pacific, 1947

  The world was still recovering from war; the rubble of ruined European cities had not yet been cleared, there were food shortages and everywhere people were trying to pick up the threads of their lives where they had been left five or six years earlier. Thor Heyerdahl was one of those millions. Like so many others, his life and career had been interrupted at a crucial point; he had made the best of frustrating, uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous years through the war and now, in 1946 at the age of thirty-two, was returning to the intellectual quest that was the driving force of his life.

  Heyerdahl never considered himself to be an adventurer. ‘I don’t think I’d call myself a real adventurer, although I suppose I’ve become one. I don’t look for adventure for the sake of adventure. The closest I can say that I go to it is that I love nature. I love the wilderness and to be in touch with the wilderness.’

  As a boy and young man this took him on long walks and ski treks in the Norwegian mountains. His clear, analytical and intensely inquisitive mind led him into science and his passion for nature channelled him to biology, which he studied at university. It was during his university course that he conceived his scheme to renounce present-day material benefits by going to live for at least a year on a Pacific island without a single product of modern technology. He even set about finding himself a mate to share this return to Paradise, and together they sailed to Tahiti in 1937 and were landed by a copra schooner on the shores of the beautiful and incredibly remote Fatu Hiva, an island in the Marquesas group. Originally, Heyerdahl had intended to deny himself all modern implements, but the South Sea Island chief who had befriended them in Tahiti persuaded him to take along a machete and a metal cooking pot. These were the only concessions they made; they took no drugs, medicines or even matches.

  At first it seemed a paradise, a Garden of Eden where bananas and coconuts grew in abundance, where it was always warm and lush and beautiful; but the hand of Western man had already affected the balance of its society. Originally, the island had had a population of several thousand but they had been decimated by white man’s diseases and only a handful of ragged, rather suspicious natives were left. The idyll quickly began to wear thin; the natives did their best to part them from their money and possessions; they were caught in the middle of a feud between a Catholic missionary and a native Protestant pastor whose flock had shrunk to one – his sexton. The natives became increasingly hostile, slipping poisonous centipedes and scorpions into the dried grass of their bedding; soon, they were covered in sores that would not heal; in the rainy season they were permanently soaked to the skin and began to suffer from malnutrition in this island paradise. The bananas were out of season and all the coconuts had been harvested. They ended up hiding in a remote sea cave, afraid for their lives, while they waited for the copra schooner to make its annual visit to the island and carry them away.

  But there had been many idyllic moments and it was on Fatu Hiva that the seeds of an idea which was to dominate his life to the present day were sown. Sitting on the beach one moonlit evening, admiring the waves, his wife said, ‘It’s queer, but there are never breakers like this on the other side of the island.’ They were sitting on the windward, eastern shore, and the mighty waves, driven before the prevailing trade wind, had surged all the way across nearly 7,000 kilometres of empty ocean from South America. How Heyerdahl came to use this simple observation as one more link in his theory connecting the old Polynesian god. Tiki, with the legendary Peruvian sun god, Kon-Tiki, is now well known. A world war intervened, however, before he was given his chance to prove that the people with white skins and long beards who had built the monuments in the Andes before the arrival of the Incas and who were said to have fled from them across the Pacific on their balsa-wood rafts could have been the ancestors of the Polynesian islanders.

  His research all seemed to be fitting together, but he was unable to persuade any of the academics to take it seriously. They resented the intrusion of this unknown young Norwegian whose only qualification was an honours degree in biology. The main stumbling block was the question of how the South American Indians could possibly have crossed 6,500 kilometres of ocean to the nearest South Pacific island, Easter Island, with its silent guard of huge stone figures. Neither the South American Indians nor the Polynesians had discovered how to make a planked boat with a keel, but the Indians had used big sea-going rafts, driven by sails, for their coastal trade. The wood they used was balsa, very light and buoyant but it also absorbed water and the experts declared that there was no way a balsa-wood raft could stay afloat for more than a few hundred miles without becoming waterlogged and sinking. Therefore, quite obviously, there was no way that the South American Indians could possibly have crossed the Pacific Ocean.

  Faced with this impasse, there seemed only one way to prove that at least the journey could have been made. In desperation Heyerdahl decided to build a balsa-wood raft and sail it from Peru to the Pacific Islands. His purpose was to prove his theory possible, but the spirit that drove him on was the same restless, adventurous curiosity that had taken him to Fatu Hiva before the war. He knew practically nothing about the sea or boats, was even frightened of water, but once he had made up his mind he plunged into the planning with a thoroughness that eventually was to ensure his success.

  He met a young engineer called Herman Watzinger at the seaman’s hostel in New York where he was living while he tried to win acceptance for his theory. They began talking and Watzinger, having expressed an interest in Heyerdahl’s plans, was promptly invited to join him. Apart from anything else, Heyerdahl probably needed someone close at hand to confide in and share both the work and the rebuffs that inevitably accompany any expedition in its early stages. Slowly, he managed to raise the money, much of it from personal loans which somehow he would have to repay at the conclusion of an expedition which all the pundits guaranteed would fail. He also got together all the food and equipment he reckoned they would need. Here, he was faced with a fundamental decision of whether he should try to reproduce in full the experience of the pre-Incas, carrying only the food he assumed they would probably have used in ancient times. In this instance, influenced perhaps by his experience on Fatu Hiva, he decided against it, feeling that the challenge of sailing a balsa-wood raft across the Pacific was quite enough. They planned, therefore, on using Army processed rations, cooked on a kerosene stove. Initially Heyerdahl did baulk when Watzinger suggested they needed wireless communications, not so much to call for help which, anyway, would not be available in the empty reaches of the Pacific, but to send out reports on their progress and weather information which could be used for meteorological research. Eventually Heyerdahl agreed to this.

  He had decided on a crew of six and therefore needed to find four more for the team. On this, his first venture, he wanted people he
knew well and immediately invited three old friends. One was Erik Hesselberg, an easy-going giant of a man who had been to navigation school and had sailed several times round the world in merchant ships before settling down as an artist. He would be the only crew member with any experience of the sea. The other two were old friends of Heyerdahl’s wartime days in the Norwegian Resistance, Knut Haugland and Torstein Raaby, both of whom were skilled wireless operators. The sixth place was to be filled only when they reached Peru, by Bengt Danielsson, a Swedish ethnologist who was interested in Heyerdahl’s migration theory and attracted by the romance of the adventure. The team was formed, as in the case of so many ventures, through a combination of personal friendship and chance meetings, and yet it all worked out, mainly through Heyerdahl’s instinctive judgement of personality. He was attracted by people with a sense of humour who were easy going and would fit into a small group, and yet who had the drive and determination to carry a venture through.

  At last, in March 1947, Watzinger and Heyerdahl flew down to Lima to start building their raft. They were armed with a host of introductions to important people, ranging all the way up to the president of Peru. Heyerdahl understood the art of personal and public relations. These introductions and his confident but easy manner were to prove invaluable in getting the help he needed to get the project under way. But first he had to get the balsa logs for the raft. The Incas had cut them in the coastal jungle of Ecuador, floating them down the rivers to make up their sea-going rafts on the coast. It seemed simple enough, but Heyerdahl was quickly told that he had arrived at the wrong time of the year. They were now in the rainy season and it would be impossible to reach the jungle where the big tree trunks they would need could be found. They would have to wait another six months for the dry season. He certainly could not afford to do this and so resolved to get into the jungle from the landward side, the Ecuadorian highlands. Eventually, after several misadventures, he managed to reach the jungle and find someone who could guide him to some suitable trees. At last Heyerdahl could feel that the adventure was under way.

  They cut twelve large balsa logs near the banks of the Palenque river, tied them together in a rough raft and floated down to the sea where they were loaded on to a coastal steamer and carried to Callao, the sea port of Lima. By going to the president of Peru, Heyerdahl had managed to get permission to build the raft in the naval base. The rest of his team had now assembled in Lima and the next few weeks were spent building their reproduction of a pre-Inca raft.

  Sea-going rafts had been in use well into the nineteenth century and so there were plenty of pictures from which to copy the basic designs. Since the Incas had not discovered the use of iron, no nails or wire hawsers were used. They chose nine of the thickest logs for the raft, floating them side by side to see how they fitted naturally into each other, with the longest log of about thirteen metres in the middle and the remaining ones ranked symmetrically at either side to give the effect of a bluntly tapered bow. Deep grooves were then cut in the wood to give both protection to the ropes binding the logs together and also to stop them slipping. At various places where there were gaps between the logs, five solid fir planks were squeezed between them to protrude a metre and a half down into the water to act as a kind of centreboard or keel, to limit sideways drift. This had been a feature of the old Inca rafts. Herman Watzinger, the engineer, supervised the construction of the raft, helped by Bengt Danielsson, who was the only member of the crew who could speak fluent Spanish and thus transmit Watzinger’s instructions to the Peruvian workers.

  Heyerdahl put a great deal of thought not only into the seaworthiness of his craft, but also into the little details of day-to-day living on what was to be their tiny world for the months ahead:

  ‘We gave the little deck as much variation as possible. The bamboo strips did not deck in the whole raft, but formed a floor forward of the bamboo cabin and along the starboard side of it where the wall was open. The port side of the cabin was a kind of back yard full of boxes and gear made fast, with a narrow edge to walk along. Forward in the bows, and in the stern as far as the after wall of the cabin, the nine gigantic logs were not decked in at all. So when we moved round the bamboo cabin we stepped from yellow bamboos and wicker-work down on to the round grey logs astern, and up again on to piles of cargo on the other side. It was not many steps, but the psychological effect of the irregularity gave us variation and compensated us for our limited freedom of movement. Right up at the masthead we placed a wooden platform, not so much in order to have a look-out post when at last we came to land as to be able to clamber up while en route and look at the sea from another angle.’

  They were immensely proud of their raft as it took shape in the Naval Dockyard surrounded by submarines and destroyers, the modern weapons of war. Their many visitors were less impressed, however. They were assured the balsa would absorb water and they would sink like a stone before they were halfway. Or the ropes would wear through and the whole thing disintegrate. The dimensions were all wrong. The raft was so small it would founder in a big sea and yet was just long enough to be lifted on the crests of two waves at the same time. So it would break in half and that would be the end of them.

  ‘Are your parents still living?’ one well-wisher asked Heyerdahl. When he replied that they were, the man commented: ‘Your mother and father will be very grieved when they hear of your death.’

  No one gave them any chance of success and the amazing thing is that their morale remained so high. Knut Haugland told me that this was largely the result of the confidence which they all had in Heyerdahl’s planning, judgement and attitude to risk. He did not believe in taking risks – he was convinced that the raft would carry them across the Pacific. Of the team the most seriously worried was Bengt Danielsson, partly perhaps because he had known Heyerdahl for the shortest time but also because he had lost his heart to a local girl. He was tempted to withdraw and it is a tribute to his own courage and Heyerdahl’s personality that he stayed on with the expedition in spite of his doubts.

  At last, on 28 April, everything was ready. A huge crowd had assembled around the harbour to watch the send off; dignitaries from the Government and embassies had also joined the throng. The decks of Kon-Tiki were piled high with a chaos of bananas, fruits and sacks of fresh food, purchased at the last minute. There was a babble of excited talk, well wishers thronging the boat, while all of the crew, with the exception of the leader who was weighed down with a sense of responsibility, had gone off for a last drink with friends and sweethearts. The noise on the quay rose to a crescendo; the tug which was going to tow them out to sea had arrived, nosing its way up to the throng of small boats crowded around Kon-Tiki. A motor launch carrying the towrope sidled up to the raft as Heyerdahl, with a nightmare vision of being towed out to the Pacific without a crew, tried to explain with his few available words of Spanish they would have to wait:

  ‘But nobody understood. The officers only smiled politely, and the knot at our bows was made fast in more than exemplary manner. I cast off the rope and flung it overboard with all manner of signs and gesticulations. The parrot utilised the opportunity afforded by all the confusion to stick its beak out of the cage and turn the knob of the door, and when I turned round it was strutting cheerfully about the bamboo deck. I tried to catch it but it shrieked rudely in Spanish and fluttered away over the banana clusters. With one eye on the sailors who were trying to cast a rope over the bows, I started a wild chase after the parrot. It fled shrieking into the bamboo cabin, where I got it in a corner and caught it by one leg as it tried to flutter over me. When I came out again and stuffed my flapping trophy into its cage, the sailors on land had cast off the raft’s moorings and we were dancing helplessly in and out with the backwash of the long swell that came rolling in over the mole. In despair I seized a paddle and vainly tried to parry a violent bump as the raft was flung against the wooden piles of the quay. Then the motorboat started, and with one jerk the Kon-Tiki began her long voyage. My only c
ompanion was a Spanish-speaking parrot which sat glaring sulkily in a cage. People on shore cheered and waved, and the swarthy cinema photographers in the motorboat almost jumped into the sea in their eagerness to catch every detail of the expedition’s dramatic start from Peru. Despairing and alone I stood on the raft looking out for my lost companions, but no one came. So we came out to the Guardian Ries, which was lying with steam up ready to lift anchor and start. I was up the rope ladder in a twinkling and made so much row on board that the start was postponed and a boat sent back to the quay. It was away a good while, and then it came back full of pretty señoritas, but without a single one of the Kon-Tiki’s missing men. This was all very well, but it did not solve my problems and while the raft swarmed with charming señoritas, the boat went back on a fresh search for los expedicionarios noruejjos.’

  An hour went by and the other five members of the crew trickled back to the wharf to be ferried out to Kon-Tiki. It was a delightfully haphazard, slightly chaotic departure that underlined the relaxed control Heyerdahl exerted on his team and the free, essentially happy, spirit of the entire enterprise.

  Accompanied by a fleet of small boats, the tug towed them out into the bay. Soon they were bucking up and down in the Pacific swell, as the tug hauled them eighty kilometres out, beyond the coastal winds and currents, into the open sea. The tug cast off and the six men were left alone in the empty ocean on a vessel of a design that had last sailed off the coast of South America 200 years before, but had only ventured out into the Humboldt Current on the morning offshore wind and had always returned to land on the evening shore winds. It was, perhaps, a thousand years since a pre-Inca fleet had carried the god-king Tiki and his tall, fair-skinned people in their desperate flight towards the setting sun across the great empty ocean. What did Tiki think he was going to find? How could he know that there was going to be land at the end of the voyage, or was he content to entrust the lives of his people to the sun god whom they were following?