Kon Tiki-Thor Heyerdahl

****/*****                                                                                                                                                       Adventure

Kon-Tiki: Across The Pacific By Raft

Thor Heyerdahl

This is an amazing story of a voyage from Peru to Polynesia in a primitive raft. The voyage was conceptualised by Thor Heyerdahl and his friends and it took place in 1947.

Thor Heyerdahl is a zoologist and an amateur ethnologist. His passion is Polynesian islands and before this voyage he once stayed on a south sea island, Fatu Hiva for a year, cut off from the world. He had gone there to study how animals had originated/migrated to these islands, but came back with a controversial theory of how man came to inhabit them. Till then historians believed that earliest settlers to these islands came from South East Asia. But Heyerdahl believed that first man came to these islands from Peru in South America. It is a common folk lore on these islands that their ancestors were white men who came from far off lands in the east under the leadership of Tiki whom they still worship. And this is the folk lore in South America too, where it is believed that Kon-Tiki the King of the prehistoric clan of South Americans was defeated by the mighty Incas and took to the pacific with his peoples in search of a new home. Heyerdahl found much common heritage between the South-Sea islands and South America in form of startling archaeological findings, common mythology, flora and much else. The difficulty was, that no scholar was willing to believe his theory. The biggest obstacle in the acceptance of his theory was the question ‘how the early settlers reached these far-off islands from the Peruvian coast?’ South Americans in prehistoric period had no knowledge of ship craft to undertake the long voyage from their western shores to Polynesia. The only sea crafts known to them were the Balsa wood rafts and it was Heyerdahl’s contention that it was in these rafts that first man had arrived in Polynesia. But the scientific community was not buying such flimsy arguments and ultimately in frustration to prove his point, Heyerdahl planned to undertake a journey from Peru to Polynesia in precisely such a raft.

This book is the absolutely riveting tale of this incredible voyage. There were six men on this voyage and none was a professional seaman except for one who could read sextant and thus chart course of their journey. They went to jungles of Ecuador to fetch balsa wood and then constructed the raft without using any nails or synthetic ropes, as it would have been constructed in prehistoric South America. Heyerdahl tells the tale of his 101 days’ saga on pacific in his primitive raft with utmost honesty and an alluring verve. There is incredible romance and drama in this travel which saw these six brave men sailing more than 4000 sea miles in a raft and braving danger every hour. Writing is smooth, coherent and almost lyrical. The imminent dangers are recounted as matter-of-factly occurrences and not overdramatized. Prose is highly readable, succinct and the book on whole is unputdownable. Original book is in Norwegian and translator F. H. Lyon has done a commendable job.

Dec 09