Kon-Tiki

by Thor Heyerdahl

  When we hauled in a shark, black slippery remora fish were usually fixed tight to its body. By means of an oval sucking disc on the top of the flat head, they were fastened so tight that we could not get them loose by pulling their tails. But they themselves could break loose and skip away to take hold at another place in a second. If they grew tired of hanging tightly to the shark when their host gave no sign of returning to the sea, they leaped off and vanished down between the chinks in the raft to swim away and find themselves another shark. If the remora does not find a shark, it attaches itself to the skin of another fish for the time being. It is generally as long as the length of a finger up to a foot. We tried the natives’ old trick which they sometimes use when they have been lucky enough to secure a live remora. They tie a line to its tail and let it swim away. It then tries to suck itself on to the first fish it sees and clings so tightly that a lucky fisherman may haul in both fishes by the remora’s tail. We had no luck. Every single time we let a remora go with a line tied to its tail, it simply shot off and sucked itself fast to one of the logs of the raft, in the belief that it had found an extrafine big shark. And there it hung, however hard we tugged on the line. We gradually acquired a number of these small remoras which hung on and dangled obstinately among the shells on the side of the raft, traveling with us right across the Pacific.

  But the remora was stupid and ugly and never became such an agreeable pet as its lively companion the pilot fish. The pilot fish is a small cigar-shaped fish with zebra stripes, which swims rapidly in a shoal ahead of the shark’s snout. It received its name because it was thought that it piloted its half-blind friend the shark about in the sea. In. reality, it simply goes along with the shark, and, if it acts independently, it is only because it catches sight of food within its own range of vision. The pilot fish accompanied its lord and master to the last second. But, as it could not cling fast to the giant’s skin, as the remora does, it was completely bewildered when its old master suddenly disappeared up into the air and did not come down again. Then the pilot fish scurried about in a distracted manner, searching wildly, but always came back and wriggled along astern of the raft, where the shark had vanished skyward. But as time passed and the shark did not come down again, they had to look round for a new lord and master. And none was nearer to hand than the Kon-Tiki herself.

  If we let ourselves down over the side of the raft, with our heads down in the brilliantly clear water, we saw the raft as the belly of a sea monster, with the steering oar as its tail and the centerboards hanging down like blunt fins. In between them all the adopted pilot fish swam, side by side, and took no notice of the bubbling human head except that one or two of them darted swiftly aside and peered right up its nose, only to wriggle back again unperturbed and take their places in the ranks of eager swimmers.

  Our pilot fish patrolled in two detachments; most of them swam between the centerboards, the others in a graceful fan formation ahead of the bow. Now and then they shot away from the raft to snap up some edible trifle we passed, and after meals, when we washed our crockery in the water alongside, it was as if we had emptied a whole cigar case of striped pilot fish among the scraps. There was not a single scrap they did not examine, and, so long as it was not vegetable food, down it went. 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.

  We had in our retinue pilot fish which were certainly in their childhood, for they were hardly an inch long, while most were about six inches. When the whale shark rushed off at lightning speed after Erik’s harpoon had entered its skull, some of its old pilot fish strayed over to the victor; they were two feet long. After a succession of victories the Kon-Tiki soon had a following of forty or fifty pilot fish, and many of them liked our quiet forward movement, and our daily scraps, so much that they followed us for thousands of miles over the sea.

  But occasionally some were faithless. One day, when I was at the steering oar, I suddenly noticed that the sea was boiling to southward and saw an immense shoal of dolphins come shooting across the sea like silver torpedoes. They did not come as usual, splashing along comfortably on their flat sides, but came rushing at frantic speed more through the air than through the water. The blue swell was whipped into white foam in one single turmoil of splashing fugitives, and behind them came a black back dashing along on a zigzag course like a speedboat. The desperate dolphins came shooting through and over the surface right up to the raft; here they dived, while about a hundred crowded together in a tightly packed shoal and swung away to eastward, so that the whole sea astern was a glittering mass of colors. The gleaming back behind them half rose above the surface, dived in a graceful curve under the raft, and shot astern after the shoal of dolphins. It was a devilish-big fellow of a blue shark that seemed to be nearly twenty feet long. When it disappeared, a number of our pilot fish had gone too. They had found a more exciting sea hero to go campaigning with.

  The marine creature against which the experts had begged us to be most on our guard was the octopus, for it could get on board the raft. The National Geographic Society in Washington had shown us reports and dramatic magnesium photographs from an area in the Humboldt Current where monstrous octopuses had their favorite resort and came up on to the surface at night. They were so voracious that, if one of them fastened on to a piece of meat and remained on the hook, another came and began to eat its captured kinsman. They had arms which could make an end of a big shark and set ugly marks on great whales, and a devilish beak like an eagle’s hidden among their tentacles. We were reminded that they lay floating in the darkness with phosphorescent eyes and that their arms were long enough to feel about in every small corner of the raft, if they did not care to come right on board. We did not at all like the prospect of feeling cold arms round our necks, dragging us out of our sleeping bags at night, and we provided ourselves with saber-like machete knives, one for each of us, in case we should wake to the embrace of fumbling tentacles. There was nothing which seemed more disagreeable to us when we started, especially as the marine experts in Peru got on to the same subject and showed us on the chart where the worst area was—right in the Humboldt Current itself.

  For a long time we saw no sign of a squid, either on board or in the sea. But then one morning we had the first warning that they must be in those waters. When the sun rose, we found the progeny of an octopus on board, in the form of a little baby the size of a cat. It had come up on deck unaided in the course of the night and now lay dead with its arms twined round the bamboo outside the cabin door. A thick, black, inky liquid was smeared over the bamboo deck and lay in a pool round the squid. We wrote a page or two in the logbook with cuttlefish ink, which was like India ink, and then flung the baby overboard for the pleasure of the dolphins.

  We saw in this minor incident the harbinger of larger night visitors. If the baby could clamber on board, its hungry progenitor could no doubt do the same. Our forefathers must have felt the same as we did when they sat in their Viking ships and thought of the Old Man of the Sea. But the next incident completely bewildered us. One morning we found a single smaller young squid on the top of the roof of palm leaves. This puzzled us very much. It could not have climbed up there, as the only ink marks were smeared in a ring round it in the middle of the roof. Nor had it been dropped by a sea bird, for it was completely intact with no beak marks. We came to the conclusion that it had been flung up on to the roof by a sea which had come on board, but none of those on night watch could remember any such sea that night. As the nights passed, we regularly found more young squids on board, the smallest of them the size of one’s middle finger.

  It was soon usual to find a small squid or two among the flying fish about the deck in the morning, even if the sea had been calm in the night. And they were young ones of the real devilish kind, with eight long arms covered with suckin
g discs and two still longer with thornlike hooks at the end. But large squids never gave a sign of coming on board. We saw the shine of phosphorescent eyes drifting on the surface on dark nights, and on one single occasion we saw the sea boil and bubble while something like a big wheel came up and rotated in the air, while some of our dolphins tried to escape by hurling themselves desperately through space. But why the big ones never came on board, when the small ones were constant night visitors, was a riddle to which we found no answer until two months later—two months rich in experience—after we were out of the ill-famed octopus area.

  Young squids continued to come aboard. One sunny morning we all saw a glittering shoal of something which shot up out of the water and flew through the air like large raindrops, while the sea boiled with pursuing dolphins. At first we took it for a shoal of flying fish, for we had already had three different kinds of these on board. But, when they came near and some of them sailed over the raft at a height of four or five feet, one ran straight into Bengt’s chest and fell slap on the deck. It was a small squid. Our astonishment was great. When we put it into a sailcloth bucket it kept on taking off and shooting up to the surface, but it did not develop speed enough in the small bucket to get more than half out of the water.

  It is a known fact that the squid ordinarily swims on the principle of the rocket-propelled airplane. It pumps sea water with great force through a closed tube alongside its body and can thus shoot backward in jerks at a high speed; with all its tentacles hanging behind it in a cluster over its head it becomes streamlined like a fish. It has on its sides two round, fleshy folds of skin which are ordinarily used for steering and quiet swimming in the water. But our experience showed that defenseless young squids, which are a favorite food of many large fish, can escape their pursuers by taking to the air in the same way as flying fish. They had made the principle of the rocket aircraft a reality long before human genius hit upon the idea. They pump sea water through themselves till they get up a terrific speed, and then they steer up at an angle from the surface by unfolding the pieces of skin like wings. Like the flying fish, they make a glider flight over the waves for as far as their speed can carry them. After that, when we had to begin to pay attention, we often saw them sailing along for fifty to sixty yards, singly and in two’s and three’s. The fact that cuttlefish can “glide” has been a novelty to all the zoologists we have met.

  As the guest of natives in the Pacific I have often eaten squid; it tastes like a mixture of lobster and India rubber. But on board the Kon-Tiki squid came last on the menu. If we got them on deck gratis, we just exchanged them for something else. We made the exchange by throwing out a hook, with the squid on it, and pulling it in again with a big fish kicking at the end of it. Even tunny and bonito liked young squids, and they were food which came at the head of our menu.

  But we did not run up against acquaintances only, as we lay drifting over the sea’s surface. The diary contains many entries of this type:

  —11/5.Today a huge marine animal twice came up to the surface alongside us as we sat at supper on the edge of the raft. It made a fearful splashing and disappeared. We have no idea what it was.

  —6/6.Herman saw a thick dark-colored fish with a broad white body, thin tail, and spikes. It jumped clear of the sea on the starboard side several times.

  —16/6. Curious fish sighted on port bow. Six feet long, maximum breadth one foot; long, brown, thin snout, large dorsal fin near head and a smaller one in the middle of the back, heavy sickle-shaped tail fin. Kept near surface and swam at times by wriggling its body like an eel. It dived when Herman and I went out in the rubber dinghy with a hand harpoon. Came up later but dived again and disappeared.

  —Next day: Erik was sitting at the masthead, 12 noon, when he saw thirty or forty long, thin, brown fish of the same kind as yesterday. Now they came at a high speed from the port side and disappeared astern like a big, brown, flat shadow in the sea.

  —18/6. Knut observed a snakelike creature, two to three feet long and thin, which stood straight up and down in the water below the surface and dived by wriggling downward like a snake.

  On several occasions we glided past a large dark mass, the size of the floor of a room, that lay motionless under the surface of the water like a hidden reef. It was presumably the giant ray of evil repute but it never moved, and we never went close enough to make out its shape clearly.

  With such company in the water time never passed slowly. It was even more entertaining when we had to dive down into the sea ourselves and inspect the ropes on the underside of the raft. One day one of the centerboards broke loose and slipped down under the raft, where it was caught up in the ropes without our being able to get hold of it. Herman and Knut were the best divers. Twice Herman swam under the raft and lay there among dolphins and pilot fish, tugging and pulling at the board. He had just come up for the second time, and was sitting on the edge of the raft to recover his breath, when an eight-foot shark was detected not more than ten feet from his legs, moving steadily up from the depths toward the tips of his toes. Perhaps we did the shark an injustice, but we suspected it of evil intentions and rammed a harpoon into its skull. The shark felt aggrieved and a splashy struggle took place, as a consequence of which the shark disappeared leaving a sheet of oil on the surface, while the centerboard remained unsalved, lying caught up under the raft.

  Then Erik had the idea of making a diving basket. We had not many raw materials to which we could have recourse, but we had bamboos and ropes and an old chip basket which had contained coconuts. We lengthened the basket upward with bamboos and plaited ropework, and then let one another down in the basket alongside the raft. Our enticing legs were then concealed in the basket, and, even if the plaited ropework above had only a psychological effect on both us and the fish, in any case we could duck down into the basket in a flash if anything with hostile intentions made a dash at us, and have ourselves pulled up out of the water by the others on deck.

  This diving basket was not merely useful but gradually became a perfect place of entertainment for us on board. It gave us a first-class opportunity to study the floating aquarium we had under the raft floor.

  When the sea was content to run in a calm swell, we crawled into the basket one by one and were let down under water for as long as our breath lasted. There was a curiously transfigured, shadowless flow of light down in the water. As soon as we had our eyes under the surface, light no longer seemed to have a particular direction, as up in our own above-water world. Refraction of light came as much from below as from above; the sun no longer shone—it was present everywhere. If we looked up at the bottom of the raft, it was brightly illuminated all over, with the nine big logs and the whole network of rope lashings bathed in a magic light and with a flickering wreath of spring-green seaweed all round the sides and along the whole length of the steering oar. The pilot fish swam formally in their ranks like zebras in fishes’ skins, while big dolphins circled round with restless, vigilant, jerky movements, eager for prey. Here and there the light fell on the sappy red wood of a centerboard which stuck downward out of a chink, and on them sat peaceful colonies of white barnacles rhythmically beckoning for oxygen and food with their fringed yellow gills. If anyone came too near them, they hastily closed their red- and yellow-edged shells and shut the door till they felt the danger was over.

  The light down here was wonderfully clear and soothing for us who were accustomed to the tropical sun on deck. Even when we looked down into the bottomless depths of the sea, where it is eternal black night, the night appeared to us a brilliant light blue on account of the refracted rays of the sun. To our astonishment, we saw fish far down in the depths of the clear, clean blue when we ourselves were only just below the surface. They might have been bonitos, and there were other kinds which swam at such a depth that we could not recognize them. Sometimes they were in immense shoals, and we often wondered whether the whole ocean current was full of fish, or whether those down in the depths had intenti
onally assembled under the Kon-Tiki to keep us company for a few days.

  What we liked best was a dip under the surface when the great gold-finned tunnies were paying us a visit. Occasionally they came to the raft in big shoals, but most often just two or three came together and swam round us in quiet circles for several days on end, unless we were able to lure them on to the hook. From the raft they looked simply like big, heavy, brown fish without any distinctive adornment, but if we crept down to them in their own element they spontaneously changed both color and shape. The change was so bewildering that several times we had to come up and take our bearings afresh to see if it was the same fish we had been looking at across the water. The big fellows paid no attention to us whatever—they continued their majestic maneuvers unperturbed—but now they had acquired a marvelous elegance of form, the equal of which we never saw in any other fish, and their color had become metallic with a suffusion of pale violet. Powerful torpedoes of shining silver and steel, with perfect proportions and streamlined shape, they had only to move one or two fins slightly to set their 150 to 200 pounds gliding about in the water with the most consummate grace.

  The closer we came into contact with the sea and what had its home there, the less strange it became and the more at home we ourselves felt. And we learned to respect the old primitive peoples who lived in close converse with the Pacific and therefore knew it from a quite different standpoint from our own. True, we have now estimated its salt content and given tunnies and dolphins Latin names. They had not done that. But, nevertheless, I am afraid that the picture the primitive peoples had of the sea was a truer one than ours.