m
iipip^ji'^^ 1
II: '^f^^^^^-A^ ' mm
$&>*',: ^Is^^mmmi ,fevj:ml, Msf
fe-95
"One of the great .jilv- urcs
of our tinu'!'--''
KO k OKI
Across 4 lit. Pacific by Raft
By THOR HKYERDAHL
fiictyft illustration by Gordon Grant
"Am going to cross Pacific on a
wooden raft to support a theory that
the South Sea islands were peopled from
Peru, Will you come?.,. Reply at once!'
That is how six brave and inquisitive
men came to seek a dangerous path to
test a scientific theory.
On a primitive raft made of forty-foot
balsa logs and named Kon-Tify in
honor of a legendary sun king, Heyer-
dahl and five companions deliberately
risked their lives to show that the an-
cient Peruvians could have made the
4,300-mile voyage to the Polynesian
islands on similar craft,
Life on the raft was strange and won-
derful. Perhaps the most amazing part
of the whole voyage was that not once
during those roi clays were the men
bored. The always present clanger of
storms (and the storms themselves),
'the eternal, ever-changing sea and sky,
(Continued on the bacf^ "flap)
*Oct. 20, 1947
3 1148 00341 0198
MWWIT 3'0'l'ATC) (>uii,i,),0
HTONK H'i'A'rtlKii ( >!' SlMliAK <"'CTNHTHUc;i'[ON
JTI'ONK rVHAMIDlj OK HIMiLAH CONSTHUCTION
ICON-
TIKI
ACROSS
THE PACIFIC
BY RAFT
ACROU THE PACIFIC BY RAFT
By THOR HEYERDAHL
Translated by F. H. Lyon
RAND MCNALLY & COMPANY
Copyright 1950 by Thor Heyerdahl
V
First Printing, September, 1950
Second Printing, September, 1950
Third Printing, September, 1950
Fourth Printing, October, 1950
Fifth Printing, October, 1950
Sixth Printing, October, 1950
Seventh Printing, November, 1950
Eighth Printing, February, 1951
Ninth Printing, February, 1951
Tenth Printing, June, 1951
Eleventh Printing, July, 1951
Twelfth Printing, August, 1951
Thirteenth Printing, August, 1951
Fourteenth Printing, October, 1951
Fifteenth Printing, February, 1952
Sixteenth Printing, November, 1954
Seventeenth Printing, July, 1956
Eighteenth Printing, December, 1957
Nineteenth Printing, August, 1958
Twentieth Printing, September, 1960
Twenty-first Printing, January, 1962
Twenty-second Printing, February, 1964
Twenty-third Printing, April, 1966
Twenty-third Printing, April, 1966
Twenty-fourth Printing, July, 1967
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 50-9
CONTENTS
Chapter Page
1 A THEORY i 3
2 AN EXPEDITION IS BORN 29
3 TO SOUTH AMERICA 57
4 ACROSS THE PACIFIC 95
5 HALFWAY 727
6 ACROSS THE PACIFIC 269
7 TO THE SOUTH SEA ISLANDS 279
8 AMONG POLYNESIANS 259
Appendix 297
Index 299
LIST
OF PHOTOGRAPHS
Between pages
48-49 Plans being discussed before the start in the Explorers Club in
New York.
Over the Andes for wood our jeep on a mountain road
13,000 feet above sea level.
In the Ecuadorian jungle we found our balsa logs.
The six members of the Kon-Tify expedition.
Building the raft in Peru.
64-65 Kon-Tity ready to start in Callao Harbor.
Erik puts the finishing touch to the raft.
Thank you and good-by!
Under full sail out at sea.
The kitchen department.
11213 Steering watch.
Toward Polynesia in sunny weather.
The cook's first duty in the morning was to collect all the
flying fish which had landed on deck during the night.
A fresh breeze.
View astern from the mast.
Evening.
128-29 An unusual bedfellow.
A bout with a tunny was an exciting sport.
Inside the bamboo cabin we were protected against both wind
and tropical sun.
Watzinger with a bonito.
Beneath Kon-Tiki's bearded face.
Windless weather and tropical heat troubled us very little.
160-61 Hold on, Haugland!
When we were halfway across, we were about 2,000 sea miles
from land both ahead and astern.
Provisions were stored between the logs and the bamboo deck.
The whale shark which paid us a visit.
The dorsal fin projected menacingly from the water when the
monster approached the raft.
Whales often visited us, and the raft seemed pretty small
alongside them.
The raft would certainly have come off badly in a collision
with a whale.
776-77 Catching sharks with our hands.
One strong jerk and the shark is on deck.
A day's catch.
A blue shark with its conqueror.
An idyllic scene.
Heave ho!
208-09 Our daily bread.
Haugland goes down to inspect the lashings on the raft's
bottom.
Where Haugland went down, a shark was hauled up.
Hesselberg making a diving basket.
Studying the chart.
Raaby in the radio corner.
List of Photographs Continued
224-25 The first birds from Polynesia which welcomed us.
Land in sight!
Kon-Tity approaching land.
The first natives coming out.
A reef with a witches' caldron of seething breakers barred
the approach to the island Raroia,
The wreck was washed higher up on to the reef every day.
Salvage work.
Chaos.
256-57 An uninhabited South Sea island, protected by the coral reef,
was our first home across the ocean.
We were able to save most of our equipment and carried it
to the island in our rubber boat, which we had found a long
way in on the reef.
A coconut from Peru was planted on the island where we
had been shipwrecked.
Big fresh green coconuts hung from the trees in clusters.
"All well, all weir
Polynesians arrive.
" Ke-%e-te-huru-huru (Heave ho) !" shouted the natives as they
dragged the raft to land.
Kon-Tify in the Raroia lagoon.
272-7 j The raft arrives at Tahiti in tow of the government schooner
"Tamara."
Tiki was the name of the first great chief on Tahiti.
Teriieroo a Teriierooiterai is the name of the last chief on
Tahiti.
The country which Tiki found.
Hula dance on Tahiti.
A Tahitian belle.
At the White House.
A THEORY
Retrospect -
The Old Man on Fatu Hiva-
Wind and Current - Hunting for
Who Peopled Polynesia? -
Riddle of the South Seas -
Theories and Facts -
Legend of Kon-Tity
and the Mysterious White Men -
War Comes
A Theory
ONCE IN A WHILE YOU FIND YOURSELF IN AN ODD
situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural
way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are sud-
denly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came
about.
If, for example, you put to sea on a wooden raft with a parrot
and five companions, it is inevitable that sooner or later you will
wake up one morning out at sea, perhaps a little better rested
than ordinarily, and begin to think about it.
On one such morning I sat writing in a dew-drenched log-
book:
May //. Norwegian Independence Day. Heavy sea. Fair
wind. I am coo\ today and found seven flying fish on deck,
one squid on the cabin roof, and one unknown fish in Tor-
stems sleeping bag. . . .
Here the pencil stopped, and the same thought interjected
itself: This is really a queer seventeenth of May indeed, taken
all round, a most peculiar existence. How did it all begin ?
If I turned left, I had an unimpeded view of a vast blue sea
13
KON-T1KI
with hissing waves, rolling by close at hand in an endless pur-
suit of an ever retreating horizon. If I turned right, I saw the
inside of a shadowy cabin in which a bearded individual was
lying on his back reading Goethe with his bare toes carefully
dug into the latticework in the low bamboo roof of the crazy
little cabin that was our common home.
"Bengt," I said, pushing away the green parrot that wanted
to perch on the logbook, "can you tell me how the hell we came
to be doing this ?"
Goethe sank down under the red-gold beard.
"The devil I do; you know best yourself. It was your damned
idea, but I think it's grand."
He moved his toes three bars up and went on reading Goethe
unperturbed. Outside the cabin three other fellows were work-
ing in the roasting sun on the bamboo deck. They were half-
naked, brown-skinned, and bearded, with stripes of salt down
their backs and looking as if they had never done anything else
than float wooden rafts westward across the Pacific. Erik came
crawling in through the opening with his sextant and a pile of
papers.
"98 46' west by 8 2 south a good day's run since yesterday,
chaps!"
He took my pencil and drew a tiny circle on a chart which
hung on the bamboo wall a tiny circle at the end of a chain
of nineteen circles that curved across from the port of Callao
on the coast of Peru. Herman, Knut, and Torstein too came
eagerly crowding in to see the new little circle that placed us
a good 40 sea miles nearer the South Sea islands than the last
in the chain.
"Do you see, boys?" said Herman proudly. "That means
we're 850 sea miles from the coast of Peru."
*4
A Theory
"And we've got another 3,500 to go to get to the nearest
islands," Knut added cautiously.
"And to be quite precise," said Torstein, "we're 15,000 feet
above the bottom of the sea and a few fathoms below the
moon."
So now we all knew exactly where we were, and I could go
on speculating as to why. The parrot did not care; he only
wanted to tug at the log. And the sea was just as round, just
as sky-encircled, blue upon blue.
Perhaps the whole thing had begun the winter before, in the
office of a New York museum. Or perhaps it had already begun
ten years earlier, on a little island in the Marquesas group in
the middle of the Pacific. Maybe we would land on the same
island now, unless the northeast wind sent us farther south in
the direction of Tahiti and the Tuamotu group. I could see the
little island clearly in my mind's eye, with its jagged rust-red
mountains, the green jungle which flowed down their slopes
toward the sea, and the slender palms that waited and waved
along the shore. The island was called Fatu Hiva; there was no
land between it and us where we lay drifting, but nevertheless
it was thousands of sea miles away. I saw the narrow Ouia
Valley, where it opened out toward the sea, and remembered
so well how we sat there on the lonely beach and looked out
over this same endless sea, evening after evening. I was accom-
panied by my wife then, not by bearded pirates as now. We
were collecting all kinds of live creatures, and images and other
relics of a dead culture.
I remembered very well one particular evening. The civilized
world seemed incomprehensibly remote and unreal. We had
lived on the island for nearly a year, the only white people
there; we had of our own will forsaken the good things of
KON-TIKI
civilization along with its evils. We lived in a hut we had
built for ourselves, on piles under the palms down by the
shore, and ate what the tropical woods and the Pacific had to
offer us.
On that particular evening we sat, as so often before, down
on the beach in the moonlight, with the sea in front of us.
Wide awake and filled with the romance that surrounded us,
we let no impression escape us. We filled our nostrils with an
aroma of rank jungle and salt sea and heard the wind's rustle
in leaves and palm tops. At regular intervals all other noises
were drowned by the great breakers that rolled straight in
from the sea and rushed in foaming over the land till they
were broken up into circles of froth among the shore boulders.
There was a roaring and rustling and rumbling among mil-
lions of glistening stones, till all grew quiet again when the sea
water had withdrawn to gather strength for a new attack on
the invincible coast.
"It's queer," said my wife, "but there are never breakers like
this on the other side of the island."
"No," said I, "but this is the windward side; there's always
a sea running on this side."
We kept on sitting there and admiring the sea which, it
seemed, was loath to give up demonstrating that here it came
rolling in from eastward, eastward, eastward. It was the eternal
east wind, the trade wind, which had disturbed the sea's sur-
face, dug it up, and rolled it forward, up over the eastern hori-
zon and over here to the islands. Here the unbroken advance of
the sea was finally shattered against cliffs and reefs, while the
east wind simply rose above coast and woods and mountains
and continued westward unhindered, from island to island,
toward the sunset.
16
A Theory
So had the ocean swells and the lofty clouds above them
rolled up over the same eastern horizon since the morning of
time. The first natives who reached these islands knew well
enough that this was so, and so did the present islanders. The
long-range ocean birds kept to the eastward on their daily fish-
ing trips to be able to return with the eastern wind at night
when the belly was full and the wings tired. Even trees and
flowers were wholly dependent on the rain produced by the
eastern winds., and all the vegetation grew accordingly. And we
knew by ourselves, as we sat there, that far, far below that east-
ern horizon, where the clouds came up, lay the open coast of
South America. There was nothing but 4,000 miles of open sea
between*
We gazed at the driving clouds and the heaving moonlit sea,
and we listened to an old man who squatted half-naked before
us and stared down into the dying glow from a little smolder-
ing fire.
"Tiki," the old man said quietly, "he was both god and chief.
It was Tiki who brought my ancestors to these islands where
we live now. Before that we lived in a big country beyond
the sea."
He poked the coals with a stick to keep them from going out.
The old man sat thinking. He lived for ancient times and was
firmly fettered to them. He worshiped his forefathers and their
deeds in an unbroken line back to the time of the gods. And he
looked forward to being reunited with them. Old Tei Tetua was
the sole survivor of all the extinct tribes on the east coast of
Fatu Hiva. How old he was he did not know, but his wrinkled,
bark-brown, leathery skin looked as if it had been dried in sun
and wind for a hundred years. He was one of the few on these
islands that still remembered and believed in his father's and
'7
KON-T1KI
his grandfather's legendary stories of the great Polynesian chief-
god Tiki, son of the sun.
When we crept to bed that night in our little pile hut, old
Tei Tetua's stories of Tiki and the islanders' old home beyond
the sea continued to haunt my brain, accompanied by the muf-
fled roar of the surf in the distance. It sounded like a voice from
far-off times, which, it seemed, had something it wanted to tell,
out there in the night. I could not sleep. It was as though time
no longer existed, and Tiki and his seafarers were just land-
ing in the surf on the beach below. A thought suddenly
struck me and I said to my wife: "Have you noticed that the
huge stone figures of Tiki in the jungle are remarkably like the
monoliths left by extinct civilizations in South America?"
I felt sure that a roar of agreement came from the breakers.
And then they slowly subsided while I slept.
So, perhaps, the whole thing began. So began, in any case, a
whole series of events which finally landed the six of us and a
green parrot on board a raft off the coast of South America.
I remember how I shocked my father and amazed my mother
and my friends when I came back to Norway and handed over
my glass jars of beetles and fish from Fatu Hiva to the Univer-
sity Zoological Museum. I wanted to give up animal studies
and tackle primitive peoples. The unsolved mysteries of the
South Seas had fascinated me. There must be a rational solution
of them, and I had made my objective the identification of the
legendary hero Tiki.
In the years that followed, breakers and jungle ruins were a
kind of remote, unreal dream which formed the background
and accompaniment to my studies of the Pacific peoples. Al-
18
A Theory
though the thoughts and inclinations of primitive man can
never be rightly judged by an armchair student, yet he can, in
his library bookshelves, travel wider beyond time and horizons
than can any modern outdoor explorer. Scientific works, jour-
nals from the time of the earliest explorations, and endless col-
lections in museums in Europe and America offered a wealth of
material for use in the puzzle I wanted to try to put together.
Since our own race first reached the Pacific islands after the
discovery of South America, investigators in all branches of
science have collected an almost bottomless store of informa-
tion about the inhabitants of the South Seas and all the peoples
living round about them. But there has never been any agree-
ment as to the origin of this isolated island people, or the reason
why this type is only found scattered over all the solitary islands
in the eastern part of the Pacific.
When the first Europeans at last ventured to cross this great-
est of all oceans, they discovered to their amazement that right
out in the midst of it lay a number of small mountainous islands
and flat coral reefs, isolated from each other and from the world
in general by vast areas of sea. And every single one of these
islands was already inhabited by people who had come there
before them tall, handsome people who met them on the
beach with dogs and pigs and fowl. Where had they come
from ? They talked a language which no other tribe knew. And
the men of our race, who boldly called themselves the discov-
erers of the islands, found cultivated fields and villages with
temples and huts on every single habitable island. On some
islands, indeed, they found old pyramids, paved roads, and
carven stone statues as high as a four-story house. But the ex-
planation of the whole mystery was lacking. Who were these
people, and where had they come from?
19
KON-TIKI
One can safely say that the answers to these riddles have been
nearly as many in number as the works which have treated
of them. Specialists in different fields have put forward quite
different solutions, but their affirmations have always been
disproved later by logical arguments from experts who have
worked along other lines. Malaya, India, China, Japan, Arabia,
Egypt, the Caucasus, Atlantis, even Germany and Norway, have
been seriously championed as the Polynesians' homeland. But
every time some obstacle of a decisive character has appeared
and put the whole problem into the melting pot again.
And where science stopped, imagination began. The mysteri-
ous monoliths on Easter Island, and all the other relics of un-
known origin on this tiny island, lying in complete solitude
halfway between the easternmost Pacific islands and the coast
of South America, gave rise to all sorts of speculations. Many
observed that the finds on Easter Island recalled in many ways
the relics of the prehistoric civilizations of South America. Per-
haps there had once been a bridge of land over the sea, and this
had sunk? Perhaps Easter Island, and all the other South Sea
islands which had monuments of the same kind, were remains
of a sunken continent left exposed above the sea ?
This has been a popular theory and an acceptable explanation
among laymen, but geologists and other scientists do not favor
it. Zoologists, moreover, prove quite simply, from the study of
insects and snails on the South Sea islands, that throughout the
history of mankind these islands have been completely isolated
from onie another and from the continents round them, exactly
as they are today.
We know, therefore, with absolute certainty that the original
Polynesian race must at some time, willingly or unwillingly,
have come drifting or sailing to these remote islands. And a
20
A Theory
closer look at the inhabitants of the South Seas shows that it
cannot have been very many centuries since they came. For,
even if the Polynesians live scattered over an area of sea four
times as large as the whole of Europe, nevertheless they have
not managed to develop different languages in the different
islands. It is thousands of sea miles from Hawaii in the north
to New Zealand in the south, from Samoa in the west to Easter
Island in the east, yet all these isolated tribes speak dialects of
a common language which we have called Polynesian.
Writing was unknown in all the islands, except for a few
wooden tablets bearing incomprehensible hieroglyphs which the
natives preserved on Easter Island, though neither they them-
selves nor anyone else could read them. But they had schools,
and the poetical teaching of history was their most important
function, for in Polynesia history was the same as religion. The
people were ancestor-worshipers; they worshiped their dead
chiefs all the way back to Tiki's time, and of Tiki himself it
was said that he was son of the sun.
On almost every island learned men could enumerate the
names of all the island's chiefs back to the time when it was
first peopled. To assist their memories they often used a compli-
cated system of knots on twisted strings, as the Inca Indians did
in Peru. Modern scientists have collected all these local geneal-
ogies from the different islands and found that they agree with
one another with astonishing exactness, both in names and
number of generations. It has been discovered in this way, by
taking an average Polynesian generation to represent twenty-
five years, that the South Sea islands were not peopled before
about 500 A.D. A new cultural wave with a new string of chiefs
shows that another and still later migration reached the same
islands as late as about noo A.D.
21
KON-TIKl
Where could such late migrations have come from ? Very few
investigators seem to have taken into consideration the decisive
factor that the people which came to the islands at so late a
date was a pure Stone Age people. Despite their intelligence
and, in all other respects, astonishingly high culture, these sea-
farers brought with them a certain type of stone ax and a quan-
tity of other characteristic Stone Age tools and spread these over
all the islands to which they came. We must not forget that,
apart from single isolated peoples, inhabiting primeval forests,
and certain backward races, there were no cultures in the world
of any reproductive capacity which were still at the Stone Age
level in 500 or noo A.D., except in the New World. There even
the highest Indian civilizations were totally ignorant at least
of the uses of iron, and used stone axes and tools of the same
type as those used in the South Sea islands right up to the time
of the explorations.
These numerous Indian civilizations were the Polynesians'
nearest neighbors to the east. To westward there lived only the
black-skinned primitive peoples of Australia and Melanesia,
distant relations of the Negroes, and beyond them again were
Indonesia and the coast of Asia, where the Stone Age lay farther
back in time, perhaps, than anywhere else in the world.
Thus both my suspicions and my attention were turned more
and more away from the Old World, where so many had
searched and none had found, and over to the known and un-
known Indian civilizations of America, which no one hitherto
had taken into consideration. And on the nearest coast due east,
where today the South American republic of Peru stretches
from the Pacific up into the mountains, there was no lack of
traces if one only looked for them. Here an unknown people
had once lived and established one of the world's strangest
A Theory
civilizations, till suddenly, long ago, they had vanished as
though swept away from the earth's surface. They left behind
them enormous stone statues carved in the image of human
beings, which recalled those on Pitcairn, the Marquesas, and
Easter Island, and huge pyramids built in steps like those on
Tahiti and Samoa. They hewed out of the mountains, with
stone axes, stone blocks as large as railway cars and heavier
than elephants, transported them for miles about the country-
side, and set them up on end or placed them on top of one
another to form gateways, huge walls, and terraces, exactly as
we find them on some of the islands in the Pacific.
The Inca Indians had their great empire in this mountain
country when the first Spaniards came to Peru. They told the
Spaniards that the colossal monuments that stood deserted about
the landscape were erected by a race of white gods which had
lived there before the Incas themselves became rulers. These
vanished architects were described as wise, peaceful instructors,
who had originally come from the north, long ago in the morn-
ing of time, and had taught the Incas' primitive forefathers
architecture and agriculture as well as manners and customs.
They were unlike other Indians in having white skins and long
beards; they were also taller than the Incas. Finally they left
Peru as suddenly as they had come; the Incas themselves took
over power m the country, and the white teachers vanished for-
ever from the coast of South America and fled westward across
the Pacific.
Now it happened that, when the Europeans came to the
Pacific islands, they were quite astonished to find that many of
the natives had almost white skins and were bearded. On many
of the islands there were whole families conspicuous for their
remarkably pale skins, hair varying from reddish to blonde,
KON-TIKI
blue-gray eyes, and almost Semitic, hook-nosed faces. In con-
trast to these the genuine Polynesians had golden-brown skins,
raven hair, and rather flat, pulpy noses. The red-haired individ-
uals called themselves umkehu and said that they were directly
descended from the first chiefs on the islands, who were still
white gods, such as Tangaroa, Kane, and Tiki. Legends of
mysterious white men, from whom the islanders were originally
descended, were current all over Polynesia. When Roggeveen
discovered Easter Island in 1722, he noticed to his surprise what
he termed "white men" among those on shore. And the people
of Easter Island could themselves count up those of their an-
cestors who were white-skinned right back to the time of Tiki
and Hotu Matua, when they first came sailing across the sea
"from a mountainous land in the east which was scorched by
the sun."
As I pursued my search, I found in Peru surprising traces in
culture, mythology, and language which impelled me to go on
digging ever deeper and with greater concentration in my at-
tempt to identify the place of origin of the Polynesian tribal
god Tiki.
And I found what I hoped for. I was sitting reading the Inca
legends of the sun-king Virakocha, who was the supreme head
of the mythical white people in Peru. I read :
.... Virakocha is an Inca (Ketchua) name and consequently
of fairly recent date. The original name of the sun-god Virako-
cha, which seems to have been more used in Peru in old times,
was Kon-Tiki or Ilia-Tiki, which means Sun-Tiki or Fire-Tiki.
Kon-Tiki was high priest and sun-king of the Incas' legendary
'white men' who had left the enormous ruins on the shores of
Lake Titicaca. The legend runs that the mysterious white men
with beards were attacked by a chief named Cari who came
A Theory
from the Coquimbo Valley. In a battle on an island in Lake
Titicaca the fair race was massacred, but Kon-Tiki himself and
his closest companions escaped and later came down to the
Pacific coast, whence they finally disappeared oversea to the
westward. . . .
I was no longer in doubt that the white chief-god Sun-Tiki,
whom the Incas declared that their forefathers had driven out
of Peru on to the Pacific, was identical with the white chief-god
Tiki, son of the sun, whom the inhabitants of all the eastern Pa-
cific islands hailed as the original founder of their race. And the
details of Sun-Tiki's life in Peru, with the ancient names of
places round Lake Titicaca, cropped up again in historic legends
current among the natives of the Pacific islands.
But all over Polynesia I found indications that Kon-TikFs
peaceable race had not been able to hold the islands alone for
long. Indications that seagoing war canoes, as large as Viking
ships and lashed together two and two, had brought Northwest
Indians from the New World across the sea to Hawaii and
farther south to all the other islands. They had mingled their
blood with that of Kon-Tiki's race and brought a new civiliza-
tion to the island kingdom. This was the second Stone Age
people that came to Polynesia, without metals, without the pot-
ter's art, without wheel or loom or cereal cultivation, about
noo A.D.
So it came about that I was excavating rock carvings in the
ancient Polynesian style among the Northwest Coast Indians in
British Columbia when the Germans burst into Norway in 1940.
Right face, left face, about face. Washing barracks stairs,
polishing boots, radio school, parachute and at last a Mur-
KON-TIKl
mansk convoy to Finnmark, where the war-god of technique
reigned in the sun-god's absence all the dark winter through.
Peace came. And one day my theory was complete. I must
go to America and put it forward.
26
2
AN EXPEDITION
II BORN
Among Specialists -The Turning Point -
At the Sailors' Home -
Last Resource - Explorers Clu'b -
The New Equipment - / Find a Companion -
A Triumvirate-
One Painter and Two Saboteurs -
To Washington-
Conference at the War Department -
To QM.G. with Desiderata -
Money Problems-
With Diplomats at UN -
We Fly to Ecuador
An Expedition Is Born
So IT HAD BEGUN, BY A FIRE ON A SOUTH SEA ISLAND,
where an old native sat telling legends and stories of his tribe.
Many years later I sat with another old man, this time in a dark
office on one of the upper floors of a big museum in New York.
Round us, in well-arranged glass cases, lay pottery fragments
from the past, traces leading into the mists of antiquity. The
walls were lined with books. Some of them one man had writ-
ten and hardly ten men had read. The old man, who had read
all these books and written some of them, sat behind his work-
table, white-haired and good-humored. But now, for sure, I had
trodden on his toes, for he gripped the arms of his chair un-
easily and looked as if I had interrupted him in a game of
solitaire.
"No!" he said. "Never!"
I imagine that Santa Claus would have looked as he did then
if someone had dared to affirm that next year Christmas would
be on Midsummer Day.
"You're wrong, absolutely wrong," he said and shook his head
indignantly to drive out the idea.
29
KON-TIKl
"But you haven't read my arguments yet," I urged, nodding
hopefully toward the manuscript which lay on the table.
"Arguments!" he repeated. "You can't treat ethnographic
problems as a sort of detective mystery!"
"Why not?" I said. "I've based all the conclusions on my own
observations and the facts that science has recorded."
"The task of science is investigation pure and simple," he said
quietly. "Not to try to prove this or that."
He pushed the unopened manuscript carefully to one side
and leaned over the table.
"It's quite true that South America was the home of some of
the most curious civilizations of antiquity, and that we know
neither who they were nor where they vanished when the Incas
came into power. But one thing we do know for certain that
none of the peoples of South America got over to the islands in
the Pacific."
He looked at me searchingly and continued:
"Do you know why? The answer's simple enough. They
couldn't get there. They had no boats!"
"They had rafts," I objected hesitatingly. "You know, balsa-
wood rafts,"
The old man smiled and said calmly:
"Well, you can try a trip from Peru to the Pacific islands on
a balsa-wood raft."
I could find nothing to say. It was getting late. We both rose.
The old scientist patted me kindly on the shoulder, as he saw
me out, and said that if I wanted help I had only to come to
him. But I must in future specialize on Polynesia or America
and not mix up two separate anthropological areas. He reached
back over the table.
"You've forgotten this," he said and handed back my manu-
30
An Expedition Is Born
script. I glanced at the title, "Polynesia and America; A Study
of Prehistoric Relations." I stuck the manuscript under my arm
and clattered down the stairs out into the crowds in the street.
That evening I went down and knocked on the door of an
old flat in an out-of-the-way corner of Greenwich Village. I
liked bringing my little problems down here when I felt they
had made life a bit tangled.
A sparse little man with a long nose opened the door a crack
before he threw it wide open with a broad smile and pulled me
in. He took me straight into the little kitchen, where he set me
to work carrying plates and forks while he himself doubled the
quantity of the indefinable but savory-smelling concoction he
was heating over the gas.
"Nice of you to come," he said. "How goes it?"
"Rottenly," I replied. "No one will read the manuscript."
He filled the plates and we attacked the contents.
"It's like this," he said. "All the people you've been to see think
it's just a passing idea you've got. You know, here in America,
people turn up with so many queer ideas."
"And there's another thing," I went on.
"Yes," said he. "Your way of approaching the problem.
They're specialists, the whole lot of them, and they don't be-
lieve in a method of work which cuts into every field of science
from botany to archaeology. They limit their own scope in
order to be able to dig in the depths with more concentration
for details. Modern research demands that every special branch
shall dig in its own hole. It's not usual for anyone to sort out
what comes up out of the holes and try to put it all together."
He rose and reached for a heavy manuscript.
"Look here," he said. "My last work on bird designs in Chi-
nese peasant embroidery. Took me seven years, but it was
3*
KON-TIK1
accepted for publication at once. They want specialized research
nowadays."
Carl was right. But to solve the problems of the Pacific with-
out throwing light on them from all sides was, it seemed to me,
like doing a puzzle and only using the pieces of one color.
We cleared the table, and I helped him wash and dry the
dishes.
"Nothing new from the university in Chicago?"
"No."
"But what did your old friend at the museum say today?"
"He wasn't interested, either," I muttered. "He said that, as
long as the Indians had only open rafts, it was futile to consider
the possibility of their having discovered the Pacific islands."
The little man suddenly began to dry his plate furiously.
"Yes," he said at last. "To tell the truth, to me too that seems
a practical objection to your theory."
I looked gloomily at the little ethnologist whom I had
thought to be a sworn ally.
"But don't misunderstand me," he hastened to say. "In one
way I think you're right, but in another way it's so incompre-
hensible. My work on designs supports your theory."
"Carl," I said, "I'm so sure the Indians crossed the Pacific on
their rafts that I'm willing to build a raft of the same kind
myself and cross the sea just to prove that it's possible."
"You're mad!"
My friend took it for a joke and laughed, half-scared at the
thought.
"You're mad! A raft?"
He did not know what to say and only stared at me with a
queer expression, as though waiting for a smile to show that I
was joking.
An Expedition Is Born
He did not get one. I saw now that in practice no one would
accept my theory because of the apparently endless stretch of
sea between Peru and Polynesia, which I was trying to bridge
with no other aid than a prehistoric raft.
Carl looked at me uncertainly. "Now we'll go out and have a
drink/' he said. We went out and had four.
My rent became due that week. At the same time a letter
from the Bank of Norway informed me that I could have no
more dollars. Currency restrictions. I picked up my trunk and
took the subway out to Brooklyn. Here I was taken in at the
Norwegian Sailors' Home, where the food was good and sus-
taining and the prices suited my wallet. I got a little room a
floor or two up but had my meals with all the seamen in a big
dining room downstairs.
Seamen came and seamen went. They varied in type, dimen-
sions, and degrees of sobriety but they all had one thing in
common when they talked about the sea, they knew what
they were talking about. I learned that waves and rough sea
did not increase with the depth of the sea or distance from
land. On the contrary, squalls were often more treacherous
along the coast than in the open sea. Shoal water, backwash
along the coast, or ocean currents penned in close to the land
could throw up a rougher sea than was usual far out. A vessel
which could hold her own along an open coast could hold her
own farther out. I also learned that, in a high sea, big ships
were inclined to plunge bow or stern into the waves, so that
tons of water would rush on board and twist steel tubes like
wire, while a small boat, in the same sea, often made good
weather because she could find room between the lines of waves
33
KON-TIKI
and dance freely over them like a gull. I talked to sailors who
had got safely away in boats after the seas had made their ship
founder.
But the men knew little about rafts. A raft that wasn't a
ship; it had no keel or bulwarks. It was just something floating
on which to save oneself in an emergency, until one was picked
up by a boat of some kind. One of the men, nevertheless, had
great respect for rafts in the open sea; he had drifted about on
one for three weeks when a German torpedo sank his ship in
mid-Atlantic,
"But you can't navigate a raft," he added. "It goes sideways
and backward and round as the wind takes it."
In the library I dug out records left by the first Europeans
who had reached the Pacific coast of South America. There was
no lack of sketches or descriptions of the Indians' big balsa-
wood rafts. They had a square sail and centerboard and a long
steering oar astern. So they could be maneuvered.
Weeks passed at the Sailors' Home. No reply from Chicago
or the other cities to which I had sent copies of my theory. No
one had read it.
Then, one Saturday, I pulled myself together and marched
into a ship chandler's shop down in Water Street. There I was
politely addressed as "Captain" when I bought a pilot chart of
the Pacific. With the chart rolled up under my arm I took the
suburban train out to Ossining, where I was a regular week-end
guest of a young Norwegian married couple who had a charm-
ing place in the country. My host had been a sea captain and
was now office manager for the Fred Olsen Line in New York.
After a refreshing plunge in the swimming pool city life was
completely forgotten for the rest of the week end, and when
Ambjorg brought the cocktail tray, we sat down on the lawn
34
An Expedition Is Born
in the hot sun. I could contain myself no longer but spread the
chart out on the grass and asked Wilhelm if he thought a raft
could carry men alive from Peru to the South Sea islands.
He looked at me rather than at the chart, half taken aback,
but replied at once in the affirmative. I felt as much lightened
as if I had released a balloon inside my shirt, for I knew that
to Wilhelm everything that had to do with navigation and sail-
ing was both job and hobby. He was initiated into my plans at
once. To my astonishment he then declared that the idea was
sheer madness.
"But you said just now that you thought it was possible," I
interrupted.
"Quite right," he admitted. "But the chances of its going
wrong are just as great. You yourself have never been on a balsa
raft, and all of a sudden you're imagining yourself across the
Pacific on one. Perhaps it'll come off, perhaps it won't. The old
Indians in Peru had generations of experience to build upon.
Perhaps ten rafts went to the bottom for every one that got
across or perhaps hundreds in the course of centuries. As you
say, the Incas navigated in the open sea with whole flotillas of
these balsa rafts. Then, if anything went wrong, they could be
picked up by the nearest raft. But who's going to pick you up,
out in mid-ocean ? Even if you take a radio for use in an emer-
gency, don't think it's going to be easy for a little raft to be
located down among the waves thousands of miles from land.
In a storm you can be washed off the raft and drowned many
times over before anyone gets to you. You'd better wait quietly
here till someone has had time to read your manuscript. Write
again and stir them up; it's no good if you don't."
"I can't wait any longer now; I shan't have a cent left soon."
"Then you can come and stay with us. For that matter, how
35
KON-T1KI
can you think of starting an expedition from South America
without money?"
"It's easier to interest people in an expedition than in an un-
read manuscript."
"But what can you gain by it?"
"Destroy one of the weightiest arguments against the theory,
quite apart from the fact that science will pay some attention
to the affair."
"But if things go wrong?"
"Then I shan't have proved anything."
"Then you'd ruin your own theory in the eyes of everyone,
wouldn't you?"
"Perhaps, but all the same one in ten might have got through
before us, as you said."
The children came out to play croquet, and we did not dis-
cuss the matter any more that day.
The next week end I was back at Ossining with the chart
under my arm. And, when I left, there was a long pencil line
from the coast of Peru to the Tuamotu islands in the Pacific.
My friend, the captain, had given up hope of making me drop
the idea, and we had sat together for hours working out the
raft's probable speed.
"Ninety-seven days," said Wilhelm, "but remember that's only
in theoretically ideal conditions, with a fair wind all the time
and assuming that the raft can really sail as you think it can.
You must definitely allow at least four months for the trip and
be prepared for a good deal more."
"All right," I said optimistically, "let us allow at least four
months, but do it in ninety-seven days."
The little room at the Sailors' Home seemed twice as cozy as
usual when I came home that evening and sat down on the
36
An Expedition Is Born
edge of the bed with the chart. I paced out the floor as exactly
as the bed and chest of drawers gave me room to do. Oh, yes,
the raft would be much larger than this. I leaned out of the
window to get a glimpse of the great city's remote starry sky,
only visible right overhead between the high yard walls. If
there was little room on board the raft, anyhow there would
be room for the sky and all its stars above us.
On West Seventy-Second Street, near Central Park, is one of
the most exclusive clubs in New York. There is nothing more
than a brightly polished little brass plate with "Explorers Club"
on it to tell passers-by that there is anything out of the ordinary
inside the doors. But, once inside, one might have made a para-
chute jump into a strange world, thousands of miles from New
York's lines of motorcars flanked by skyscrapers. When the
door to New York is shut behind one, one is swallowed up in
an atmosphere of lion-hunting, mountaineering, and polar life.
Trophies of hippopotamus and deer, big-game rifles, tusks, war
drums and spears, Indian carpets, idols and model ships, flags,
photographs and maps, surround the members of the club when
they assemble for a dinner or to hear lecturers from distant
countries.
After my journey to the Marquesas Islands I had been elected
an active member of the club, and as junior member I had sel-
dom missed a meeting when I was in town. So, when I now
entered the club on a rainy November evening, I was not a little
surprised to find the place in an unusual state. In the middle of
the floor lay an inflated rubber raft with boat rations and acces-
sories, while parachutes, rubber overalls, safety jackets, and
polar equipment covered walls and tables, together with bal-
loons for water distillation, and other curious inventions. A
newly elected member of the club, Colonel Haskin, of the
37
KON-T1K1
equipment laboratory of the Air Material Command, was to
give a lecture and demonstrate a number of new military in-
ventions which, he thought, would in the future be of use to
scientific expeditions in both north and south.
After the lecture there was a vigorous discussion. The well-
known Danish polar explorer Peter Freuchen, tall and bulky,
rose with a skeptical shake of his huge beard. He had no faith
in such new-fangled patents. He himself had once used a rubber
boat and bag tent on one of his Greenland expeditions instead
of an Eskimo kayak and igloo, and it had all but cost him his
life. First he had nearly been frozen to death in a snowstorm
because the zipper fastening of the tent had frozen up so that
he could not even get in. And after that he had been out fishing
when the hook caught in the inflated rubber boat, and the boat
was punctured and sank under him like a bit of rag. He and an
Eskimo friend had managed to get ashore that time in a kayak
which came to their help. He was sure no clever modern in-
ventor could sit in his laboratory and think out anything better
than what the experience of thousands of years had taught the
Eskimos to use in their own regions.
The discussion ended with a surprising offer from Colonel
Haskin. Active members of the club could, on their next ex-
peditions, select any they liked of the new inventions he had
demonstrated, on the sole condition that they should let his
laboratory know what they thought of the things when they
came back.
That was that. I was the last to leave the clubrooms that eve-
ning. I had to go over every minute detail of all this brand-new
equipment which had so suddenly tumbled into my hands and
which was at my disposal for the asking. It was exactly what I
wanted equipment with which we could try to save our lives
An Expedition Is Born
if, contrary to expectation, our wooden raft should show signs
of breaking up and we had no other rafts near by.
All this equipment was still occupying my thoughts at the
breakfast table in the Sailors' Home next morning when a well-
dressed young man of athletic build came along with his break-
fast tray and sat down at the same table as myself. We began
to chat, and it appeared that he too was not a seaman but a
university-trained engineer from Trondheim, who was in Amer-
ica to buy machinery parts and obtain experience in refrigerat-
ing technique. He was living not far away and often had meals
at the Sailors' Home because of the good Norwegian cooking
there.
He asked me what I was doing, and I then gave him a short
account of my plans. I said that, if I did not get a definite
answer about my manuscript before the end of the week, I
should get under way with the starting of the raft expedition.
My table companion did not say much but listened with great
interest.
Four days later we ran across each other again in the same
dining room.
"Have you decided whether you're going on your trip or not?"
he asked.
"Yes," I said. "I'm going."
"When?"
"As soon as possible. If I hang about much longer now, the
gales will be coming up from the Antarctic and it will be hur-
ricane season in the islands, too. I must leave Peru in a very
few months, but I must get money first and get the whole
business organized."
"How many men will there be?"
"I've thought of having six men in all; that'll give some
39
KON-TIKI
change of society on board the raft and is the right number for
four hours' steering in every twenty-four hours."
He stood for a moment or two, as though chewing over a
thought, then burst out emphatically:
"The devil, but how I'd like to be in it! I could undertake
technical measurements and tests. Of course, you'll have to sup-
port your experiment with accurate measurements of winds and
currents and waves. Remember that you're going to cross vast
spaces of sea which are practically unknown because they lie
outside all shipping routes. An expedition like yours can make
interesting hydrographic and meteorological investigations; I
could make good use of my thermodynamics."
I knew nothing about the man beyond what an open face can
.say. It may say a good deal.
"All right," I said, "We'll go together."
His name was Herman Watzinger; he was as much of a
landlubber as myself.
A few days later I took Herman as my guest to the Explorers
Club. Here we ran straight into the polar explorer Peter Freu-
chen. Freuchen has the blessed quality of never disappearing
in a crowd. As big as a barn door and bristling with beard, he
looks like a messenger from the open tundra. A special atmos-
phere surrounds him it is as though he were going about with
a grizzly bear on a lead.
We took him over to a big map on the wall and told him
about our plan of crossing the Pacific on an Indian raft. His
boyish blue eyes grew as large as saucers as he listened. Then he
stamped his wooden leg on the floor and tightened his belt
several holes.
"Damn it, boys! I should like to go with you!"
The old Greenland traveler filled our beer mugs and began
An Expedition Is Born
to tell us of his confidence in primitive peoples' watercraft and
these peoples' ability to make their way by accommodating
themselves to nature both on land and at sea. He himself had
traveled by raft down the great rivers of Siberia and towed
natives on rafts astern of his ship along the coast of the Arctic.
As he talked, he tugged at his beard and said we were certainly
going to have a great time.
Through Freuchen's eager support of our plan the wheels
began to turn at a dangerous speed, and they soon ran right
into the printers' ink of the Scandinavian Press. The very next
morning there came a violent knocking on my door in the
Sailors' Home; I was wanted on the telephone in the passage
downstairs. The result of the conversation was that Herman
and I, the same evening, rang the doorbell of an apartment in
a fashionable quarter of the city. We were received by a well-
dressed young man in patent-leather slippers, wearing a silk
dressing gown over a blue suit. He made an impression almost
of softness and apologized for having a cold with a scented
handkerchief held under his nose. Nonetheless we knew that
this fellow had made a name in America by his exploits as an
airman in the war. Besides our apparently delicate host two
energetic young journalists, simply bursting with activity and
ideas, were present. We knew one of them as an able cor-
respondent.
Our host explained over a bottle of good whisky that he was
interested in our expedition. He offered to raise the necessary
capital if we would undertake to write newspaper articles and
go on lecture tours after our return. We came to an agreement
at last and drank to successful co-operation between the backers
of the expedition and those taking part in it. From now on all
our economic problems would be solved; they were taken over
4*
KON-TIKI
by our backers and would not trouble us. Herman and I were
at once to set about raising a crew and equipment, build a raft,
and get off before the hurricane season began.
Next day Herman resigned his post, and we set about our
task seriously. I had already obtained a promise from the re-
search laboratory of the Air Material Command to send every-
thing I asked for and more through the Explorers Club ; they
said that an expedition such as ours was ideal for testing their
equipment. This was a good start. Our most important tasks
were now, first of all, to find four suitable men who were will-
ing to go with us on the raft and to obtain supplies for the
journey.
A party of men who were to put out to sea together on board
a raft must be chosen with care. Otherwise there would be
trouble and mutiny after a month's isolation at sea. I did not
want to man the raft with sailors; they knew hardly any more
about managing a raft than we did ourselves, and I did not
want to have it argued afterward, when we had completed the
voyage, that we made it because we were better seamen than
the old raft-builders in Peru. Nevertheless, we wanted one man
on board who at any rate could use a sextant and mark our
course on a chart as a basis for all our scientific reports.
"I know a good fellow, a painter," I said to Herman. "He's a
big hefty chap who can play the guitar and is full of fun. He
went through navigation school and sailed round the world
severaf times before he settled down at home with brush and
palette. I've known him since we were boys and have often been
on camping tours with him in the mountains at home. I'll write
and ask him; I'm sure he'll come."
"He sounds all right," Herman nodded, "and then we want
someone who can manage the,radio."
An Expedition Is Born
"Radio!" I said, horrified. "What the hell do we want with
that? It's out of place on a prehistoric raft."
"Not at all it's a safety precaution which won't have any
effect on your theory so long as we don't send out any SOS for
help. And we shall need the radio to send out weather observa-
tions and other reports. But it'll be no use for us to receive gale
warnings because there are no reports for that part of the ocean,
and, even if there were, what good would they be to us on
a raft?"
His arguments gradually swamped all my protests, the main
ground for which was a lack of affection for push buttons and
turning knobs.
"Curiously enough," I admitted, "I happen to have the best
connections for getting into touch by radio over great distances
with tiny sets. I was put into a radio section in the war. Every
man in the right place, you know. But I shall certainly write a
line to Knut Haugland and Torstein Raaby."
"Do you know them?"
"Yes. I met Knut for the first time in England in 1944. He'd
been decorated by the British for having taken part in the para-
chute action that held up the German efforts to get the atomic
bomb; he was the radio operator, you know, in the heavy water
sabotage at Rjukan. When I met him, he had just come back
from another job in Norway; the Gestapo had caught him with
a secret radio set inside a chimney in the Maternity Clinic in
Oslo. The Nazis had located him by D/F, and the whole build-
ing was surrounded by German soldiers with machine-gun
posts in front of every single door. Fehmer, the head of the
Gestapo, was standing in the courtyard himself waiting for
Knut to be carried down. But it was his own men who were
carried down. Knut fought his way with his pistol from the
43
KON-TIKl
attic down to the cellar, and from there out into the back yard,
where he disappeared over the hospital wall with a hail of
bullets after him. I met him at a secret station in an old Eng-
lish castle; he had come back to organize underground liaison
among more than a hundred transmitting stations in occupied
Norway.
"I myself had just finished my training as a parachutist, and
our plan was to jump together in the Nordmark near Oslo.
But just then the Russians marched into the Kirkenes region,
and a small Norwegian detachment was sent from Scotland
to Finnmark to take over the operations, so to speak, from the
whole Russian army. I was sent up there instead. And there
I met Torstein.
"It was real Arctic winter up in those parts, and the northern
lights flashed in the starry sky which was arched over us, pitch
black, all day and all night. When we came to the ash heaps
of the burned area in Finnmark, frozen blue and wearing furs,
a cheery fellow with blue eyes and bristly fair hair crept out of
a little hut up in the mountains. This was Torstein Raaby. He
had first escaped to England, where he went through special
training, and then he'd been smuggled into Norway some-
where near Tromso. He'd been in hiding with a little trans-
mitting set close to the battleship Tirpitz' and for ten months
he had sent daily reports to England about all that happened
on board. He sent his reports at night by connecting his secret
transmitter to a receiving aerial put up by a German officer. It
was his regular reports that guided the British bombers who
at last finished off the Tirpitz.'
"Torstein escaped to Sweden and from there over to England
again, and then he made a parachute jump with a new radio
set behind the German lines ,up in the wilds of Finnmark.
44
An Expedition Is Born
When the Germans retreated, he found himself sitting behind
our own lines and came out of his hiding place to help us with
his little radio, as our main station had been destroyed by a
mine. I'm ready to bet that both Knut and Torstein are fed
up with hanging about at home now and would be glad to go
for a little trip on a wooden raft."
"Write and ask them," Herman proposed.
So I wrote a short letter, without any disingenuous persua-
sions, to Erik, Knut, and Torstein:
"Am going to cross Pacific on a wooden raft to support a
theory that the South Sea islands were peopled from Peru.
Will you come? I guarantee nothing but a free trip to Peru
and the South Sea islands and back, but you will find good
use for your technical abilities on the voyage. Reply at once."
Next day the following telegram arrived from Torstein:
"COMING. TORSTEIN."
The other two also accepted.
As sixth member of the party we had in view now one man
and now another, but each time some obstacle arose. In the
meantime Herman and I had to attack the supply problem.
We did not mean to eat llama flesh or dried kumara potatoes
on our trip, for we were not making it to prove that we had
once been Indians ourselves. Our intention was to test the per-
formance and quality of the Inca raft, its seaworthiness and
loading capacity, and to ascertain whether the elements would
really propel it across the sea to Polynesia with its crew still on
board. Our native forerunners could certainly have managed
to live on dried meat and fish and \umara potatoes on board,
as that was their staple diet ashore. We were also going to try
to find out, on the actual trip, whether they could have ob-
tained additional supplies of fresh fish and rain water while
45
KON-T1K.I
crossing the sea. As our own diet I had thought of simple field
service rations, as we knew them from the war.
Just at that time a new assistant to the Norwegian military
attache in Washington had arrived. I had acted as second in
command of his company in Finnmark and knew that he was
a "ball of fire," who loved to attack and solve with savage
energy any problem set before him. Bjorn Rorholt was a man
of that vital type which feels quite lost if it has fought its way
out into the open without immediately sighting a new problem
to tackle.
I wrote to him explaining the situation and asked him to use
his tracking sense to smell out a contact man in the supply
department of the American army. The chances were that the
laboratory was experimenting with new field rations we could
test, in the same way as we were testing equipment for the
Air Force laboratory.
Two days later Bjorn telephoned us from Washington. He
had been in contact with the foreign liaison section of the
American War Department, and they would like to know
what it was all about.
Herman and I took the first train to Washington.
We found Bjorn in his room in the military attache's office.
"I think it'll be all right," he said. "We'll be received at the
foreign liaison section tomorrow provided we bring a proper
letter from the colonel."
The "colonel" was Otto Munthe-Kaas, the Norwegian mili-
tary attache. He was well-disposed and more than willing to
give us a proper letter of introduction when he heard what our
business was.
When we came to fetch the document next morning, he
suddenly rose and said he thought it would be best if he came
46
An Expedition Is Born
with us himself. We drove out in the colonel's car to the Penta-
gon building to the offices of the War Department. The colonel
and Bjorn sat in front in their smartest military turnout, while
Herman and I sat behind and peered through the windshield
at the huge Pentagon building, which towered up on the plain
before us. This gigantic building with thirty thousand clerks
and sixteen miles of corridors was to form the frame of our
impending raft conference with military "high-ups." Never,
before or after, did the little raft seem to Herman and me
so helplessly small.
After endless wanderings in ramps and corridors we reached
the door of the foreign liaison section, and soon, surrounded by
brand-new uniforms, we were sitting round a large mahogany
table at which the head of the foreign liaison section himself
presided.
The stern, broad-built West Point officer, who bulked big
at the end of the table, had a certain difficulty at first in under-
standing what the connection between the American War De-
partment and our wooden raft was, but the colonel's well-
considered words, and the favorable result of a hurricane-like
examination by the officers round the table, slowly brought him
over to our side, and he read with interest the letter from the
equipment laboratory of the Air Material Command. Then
he rose and gave his staff a concise order to help us through
the proper channels and, wishing us good luck for the present,
marched out of the conference room. When the door had shut
on him, a young staff captain whispered in my ear:
"I'll bet you'll get what you want. It sounds like a minor
military operation and brings a little change into our daily
office peacetime routine; besides, it'll be a good opportunity of
methodically testing equipment."
47
KON-TIKI
The liaison office at once arranged a meeting with Colonel
Lewis at the quartermaster general's experimental laboratory,
and Herman and I were taken over there by car.
Colonel Lewis was an affable giant of an officer with a sports-
man's bearing. He at once called in the men in charge of
experiments in the different sections. All were amicably dis-
posed and immediately suggested quantities of equipment they
would like us to test thoroughly. They exceeded our wildest
hopes as they rattled off the names of nearly everything we
could want, from field rations to sunburn ointment and splash-
proof sleeping bags. Then they took us on an extensive tour
to look at the things. We tasted special rations in smart pack-
ings; we tested matches which struck well even if they had
been dipped in water, new primus stoves and water kegs,
rubber bags and special boots, kitchen utensils and knives
which would float, and all that an expedition could want.
I glanced at Herman. He looked like a good, expectant little
boy walking through a chocolate shop with a rich aunt. The
colonel walked in front demonstrating all these delights, and
when the tour was completed staff clerks had made note of
the kinds of goods and the quantities we required. I thought
the battle was won and felt only an urge to rush home to the
hotel in order to assume a horizontal position and think things
over in peace and quiet. Then the tall, friendly colonel sud-
denly said:
"Well, now we must go in and have a talk with the boss;
it's he who'll decide whether we can give you these things."
I felt my heart sink down into my boots. So we were to start
our eloquence right from the beginning again, and heaven
alone knew what kind of man the "boss" was!
We found that the boss was a little officer with an intensely
Plans being discussed before the start in the Explorers Club in New York.
From left to right: Chief of Clannfhearghuis, Herman Watzinger, the author,
Greenland explorer Peter Freuchen.
Over the Andes for wopd-our jeep on a mountain road 13,000 feet above sea
level Indians mth pack donkeys, Indian women spinning
and flocks of llamas were the only living creatures we met.
Above: The six members of the Kon-Tity expedition. From left to rio-ht- Knut
Haugland Bengt Danielsson, the author, Erik Hesselberg, Tomem Raabv
Herman Watzinger. ^aauy,
Bdow: Building the raft in Peru. We lashed the nine big balsa logs together
with ordinary hemp ropes, using neither nails nor metal in any form.
An Expedition Is Born
earnest manner. He sat behind his writing table and examined
us with keen blue eyes as we came into the office. He asked us
to sit down.
"Well, what do these gentlemen want?" he asked Colonel
Lewis sharply, without taking his eyes off mine.
"Oh, a few little things," Lewis hastened to reply. He ex-
plained the whole of our errand in outline, while the chief
listened patiently without moving a finger.
"And what can they give us in return?" he asked, quite un-
impressed.
"Well," said Lewis in a conciliatory tone, "we hoped that
perhaps the expedition would be able to write reports on the
new provisions and some of the equipment, based on the severe
conditions in which they will be using it."
The intensely earnest officer behind the writing table leaned
back in his chair with unaffected slowness, with his eyes still
fixed on mine, and I felt myself sinking to the bottom of the
deep leather chair as he said coolly:
"I don't see at all how they can give us anything in return."
There was dead silence in the room. Colonel Lewis fingered
his collar, and neither of us said a word.
"But," the chief suddenly broke out, and now a gleam had
come into the corner of his eye, "courage and enterprise count,
too. Colonel Lewis, let them have the things!"
I was still sitting, half intoxicated with delight, in the cab
which was taking us home to the hotel, when Herman began
to laugh and giggle to himself at my side.
"Are you tight?" I asked anxiously.
"No," he laughed shamelessly, "but I've been calculating that
the provisions we got include 684 boxes of pineapple, and that's
my favorite dish."
49
KQN-T1KI
There are a thousand things to be done, and mostly at the
same time, when six men and a wooden raft and its cargo are
to assemble at a place down on the coast of Peru. And we had
three months and no Aladdin's lamp at our disposal.
We flew to New York with an introduction from the liaison
office and met Professor Behre at Columbia University. He was
head of the War Department's Geographical Research Commit-
tee, and it was he who pressed the buttons which at last brought
Herman all his valuable instruments and apparatus for scientific
measurements.
Then we flew to Washington to meet Admiral Glover at
the Naval Hydrographic Institute. The good-natured old sea
dog called in all his officers and pointed to the chart of the
Pacific on the wall as he introduced Herman and me.
"These young gentlemen want to check up on our current
maps. Help them!"
When the wheels had rolled a bit further, the English Colo-
nel Lumsden called a conference at the British Military Mission
in Washington to discuss our future problems and the chances
of a favorable outcome. We received plenty of good advice and
a selection of British equipment which was flown over from
England to be tried out on the raft expedition. The British
medical officer was an enthusiastic advocate of a mysterious
shark powder. We were to sprinkle a few pinches of the powder
on the water if a shark became too impudent, and the shark
would vanish immediately.
"Sir," I said politely, "can we rely on this powder?"
"Well," said the Englishman, smiling, "that's just what we
want to find out ourselves!"
When time is short and plane replaces train, while taxi re-
places legs, one's wallet crumples up like a withered herbarium.
50
An Expedition Is Born
When we had spent the cost of my return ticket to Norway,
we went and called on our friends and backers in New York
to get our finances straight. There we encountered surprising
and discouraging problems. The financial manager was ill in
bed with fever, and his two colleagues were powerless till he
was in action again. They stood firmly by our economic agree-
ment, but they could do nothing for the time being. We were
asked to postpone the business, a useless request, for we could
not stop the numerous wheels which were now revolving vigor-
ously. We could only hold on now; it was too late to stop or
brake. Our friends the backers agreed to dissolve the whole
syndicate in order to give us a free hand to act quickly and
independently without them.
So there we were in the street with our hands in our trousers
pockets.
"December, January, February," said Herman.
"And at a pinch March," said I, "but then we simply must
start!"
If all else seemed obscure, one thing was clear to us. Ours
was a journey with an objective, and we did not want to be
classed with acrobats who roll down Niagara in empty barrels
or sit on the knobs of flag staffs for seventeen days.
"No chewing-gum or pop backing," Herman said.
On this point we were in profound agreement.
We could get Norwegian currency. But that did not solve
the problems on our side of the Atlantic. We could apply for
a grant from some institution, but we could scarcely get one
for a disputed theory; after all, that was just why we were
going on the raft expedition. We soon found that neither press
nor private promoters dared to put money into what they them-
selves and all the insurance companies regarded as a suicide
KON-TIK1
voyage; but, if we came back safe and sound, it would be
another matter.
Things looked pretty gloomy, and for many days we could
see no ray of hope. It was then that Colonel Munthe-Kaas came
into the picture again.
"You're in a fix, boys," he said. "Here's a check to begin with.
You can return it when you come back from the South Sea
islands."
Several other people followed his example, and my private
loan was soon big enough to tide us over without help from
agents or others. We could fly to South America and start
building the raft.
The old Peruvian rafts were built of balsa wood, which in a
dry state is lighter than cork. The balsa tree grows in Peru,
but only beyond the mountains in the Andes range, so the sea-
farers in Inca times went up along the coast to Ecuador, where
they felled their huge balsa trees right down on the edge of the
Pacific. We meant to do the same.
Today's travel problems are different from those of Inca
times. We have cars and planes and travel bureaus but, so as
not to make things altogether too easy, we have also impedi-
ments called frontiers, with brass-buttoned attendants who
doubt one's alibi, maltreat one's luggage, and weigh one down
with stamped forms if one is lucky enough to get in at all.
It was the fear of these men with brass buttons that decided
us we could not land in South America with packing cases and
trunks full of strange devices, raise our hats, and ask politely
in broken Spanish to be allowed to come in and sail away on
a raft. We should be clapped into jail.
"No," said Herman. "We must have an official introduction."
One of our friends in the dissolved triumvirate was a corre-
An Expedition Is Born
spondent at the United Nations, and he offered to take us out
there by car for aid. We were greatly impressed when we came
into the great hall of the assembly, where men of all nations
sat on benches side by side listening silently to the flow of
speech from a black-haired Russian in front of the gigantic
map of the world that decorated the back wall.
Our friend the correspondent managed in a quiet moment
to get hold of one of the delegates from Peru and, later, one
of Ecuador's representatives. On a deep leather sofa in an ante-
chamber they listened eagerly to our plan of crossing the sea
to support a theory that men of an ancient civilization from
their own country had been the first to reach the Pacific islands.
Both promised to inform their governments and guaranteed us
support when we came to their respective countries. Trygve
Lie, passing through the anteroom, came over to us when he
heard we were countrymen of his, and someone proposed that
he should come with us on the raft. But there were billows
enough for him on land. The assistant secretary of the United
Nations, Dr. Benjamin Cohen from Chile, was himself a well-
known amateur archaeologist, and he gave me a letter to the
President of Peru, who was a personal friend of his. We also
met in the hall the Norwegian ambassador, Wilhelm von
Munthe of Morgenstierne, who from then on gave the expedi-
tion invaluable support.
So we bought two tickets and flew to South America. When
the four heavy engines began to roar one after another, we
sank into our seats exhausted. We had an unspeakable feeling
of relief that the first stage of the program was over and that
we were now going straight ahead to the adventure.
53
1
TO
SOUTH AMERICA
Over the Equator - Balsa Problems -
By Air to Quito - Head-Hunters and Bandidos -
Over the Andes by Jeep -
Into the Depths of the Jungle - At Quevedo -
We Fell Balsa Trees -
Down the Palenque by Raft -
The Beautiful Naval Harbor -
At the Ministry of Marine in Lima -
With the President of Peru -
Daniels son Comes-
Bac\ to Washington -
Twenty-Six Pounds of Paper -
Herman's Baptism of Fire -
We Build the Raft in the Naval Harbor -
Warnings - Before the Start -
Naming of the Kon-Tiki -
Farewell to South America
To South America
AS OUR PLANE CROSSED THE EQUATOR, IT BEGAN A
slanting descent through the milk-white clouds which till then
had lain beneath us like a blinding waste of snow in the burn-
ing sun. The fleecy vapor clung to the windows till it dissolved
and remained hanging over us like clouds, and the bright green
roof of a rolling, billowy jungle appeared. We flew in over the
South American republic of Ecuador and landed at the tropical
port of Guayaquil.
With yesterday's coats, vests, and overcoats over our arms
we climbed out into the atmosphere of a hothouse to meet chat-
tering southerners in tropical clothes and felt our shirts sticking
to our backs like wet paper. We were embraced by customs
and immigration officials and almost carried to a cab, which
took us to the best hotel in the town, the only good one. Here
we quickly found our way to our respective baths and lay down
flat under the cold-water faucet. We had reached the country
where the balsa tree grows and were to buy timber to build
our raft.
The first day we spent in learning the monetary system and
57
KON-TIKI
enough Spanish to find our way back to the hotel. On the sec-
ond day we ventured away from our baths in steadily widening
circles, and, when Herman had satisfied the longing of his
childhood to {ouch a real palm tree and I was a walking bowl
of fruit salad, we decided to go and negotiate for balsa.
Unfortunately this was easier said than done. We could cer-
tainly buy balsa in quantities but not in the form of whole
logs, as we wanted it. The days when balsa trees, were accessible
down on the coast were past. The last war had put an end to
them; they had been felled in thousands and shipped to the
aircraft factories because the wood was so gaseous and light.
We were told that the only place where large balsa trees now
grew was in the jungle in the interior of the country.
"Then we must go inland and fell them ourselves/* we said.
"Impossible," said the authorities. "The rains have just begun,
and all the roads into the jungle are impassable because of
flood water and deep mud. If you want balsa wood, you must
come back to Ecuador in six months; the rains will be over
then and the roads up country will have dried."
In our extremity we called on Don Gustavo von Buchwald,
the balsa king of Ecuador, and Herman unrolled his sketch
of the raft with the lengths of timber we required. The slight
little balsa king seized the telephone eagerly and set his agents
to work searching. They found planks and light boards and
separate short blocks in every sawmill but they could not find
one single serviceable log. There were two big logs, as dry as
tinder, at Don Gustavo's own dump, but they would not take
us far. It was clear that the search was useless.
"But a brother of mine has a big balsa plantation," said Don
Gustavo encouragingly. "His name is Don Federico and he
lives at Quevedo, a little jungle town up country. He can get
58
To South America
you all you want as soon as we can get hold of him after the
rains. It's no use now because of the jungle rain up country."
If Don Gustavo said a thing was no use, all the balsa experts
in Ecuador would say it was no use. So here we were in Guaya-
quil with no timber for the raft and with no possibility of
going in and felling the trees ourselves until several months
later, when it would be too late.
"Time's short," said Herman.
"And balsa we must have," said I. "The raft must be an exact
copy, or we shall have no guarantee of coming through alive."
A little school map we found in the hotel, with green jungle,
brown mountains, and inhabited places ringed round in red,
told us that the jungle stretched unbroken from the Pacific
right to the foot of the towering Andes. I had an idea. It was
clearly impracticable now to get from the coastal area through
the jungle to the balsa trees at Quevedo, but suppose we could
get to the trees from the inland side, by coming straight down
into the jungle from the bare snow mountains of the Andes
range ? Here was a possibility, the only one we saw.
Out on the airfield we found a little cargo plane which was
willing to take us up to Quito, the capital of this strange coun-
try, high up on the Andes plateau, 9,300 feet above sea level.
Between packing cases and furniture we caught occasional
glimpses of green jungle and shining rivers before we disap-
peared into the clouds. When we came out again, the lowlands
were hidden under an endless sea of rolling vapor, but ahead
of us dry mountainsides and bare cliffs rose from the sea of
mist right up to a brilliant blue sky.
The plane climbed straight up the mountainside as in an
invisible funicular railway, and, although the Equator itself was
in sight, at last we had shining snow fields alongside us. Then
59
KON-TIKI
we glided between the mountains and over a rich alpine pla-
teau clad in spring green, on which we landed close to the
world's most unusual capital.
Most of Quito's 175,000 inhabitants are pure or half-breed
mountain Indians, for it was their forefathers' own capital long
before Columbus and our own race knew America. The city
is filled with ancient monasteries, containing art treasures of
immeasurable value, and other magnificent buildings dating
from Spanish times, towering over the roofs of low Indian
houses built of bricks of sun-dried clay. A labyrinth of narrow
alleys winds between the clay walls, and these we found swarm-
ing with mountain Indians in red-speckled cloaks and big
homemade hats. Some were going to market with pack don-
keys, while others sat hunched up along the adobe walls dozing
in the hot sun. A few automobiles containing aristocrats of
Spanish origin, going at half-speed and hooting ceaselessly,
succeeded in finding a path along the one-way alleys among
children and donkeys and barelegged Indians. The air up here
on the high plateau was of such brilliant crystalline clearness
that the mountains round us seemed to come into the street
picture and contribute to its other-world atmosphere.
Our friend from the cargo plane, Jorge, nicknamed "the
crazy flier," belonged to one of the old Spanish families in
Quito. He installed us in an antiquated, amusing hotel and
then went round, sometimes with and sometimes without us,
trying to get us transport over the mountains and down into
the jungle to Quevedo. We met in the evening in an old Span-
ish cafe, and Jorge was full of bad news; we must absolutely
put out of our heads the idea of going to Quevedo. Neither
men nor vehicle were to be obtained to take us over the moun-
tains, and certainly not down into the jungle where the rains
60
To South America
had begun and where there was danger of attack if one stuck
fast in the mud. Only last year a party of ten American oil
engineers had been found killed by poisoned arrows in the
eastern part of Ecuador, where many Indians still went about
in the jungle stark naked and hunted with poisoned arrows.
"Some of them are head-hunters/' Jorge said in a hollow voice,
seeing that Herman, quite unperturbed, was helping himself to
more beef and red wine.
"You think I exaggerate," he continued in a low voice. "But,
although it is strictly forbidden, there are still people in this
country who make a living by selling shrunken human heads.
It's impossible to control it, and to this very day the jungle
Indians cut off the heads of their enemies among other nomad
tribes. They smash up and remove the skull itself and fill the
empty skin of the head with hot sand, so that the whole head
shrinks till it's hardly bigger than a cat's head, without losing
its shape or its features. These shrunken heads of enemies were
once valuable trophies; now they're rare black-market goods.
Half-breed middlemen see that they get down to the buyers
on the coast, who sell them to tourists for fabulous prices."
Jorge looked at us triumphantly. He little knew that Herman
and I that same day had been dragged into a porter's lodge
and offered two of these heads at 1,000 sucres apiece. These
heads nowadays are often fakes, made up from monkeys* heads,
but these two were genuine enough, pure Indians and so true
to life that every tiny feature was preserved. They 'were the
heads of a man and a woman, both the size of oranges; the
woman was actually pretty, though only the eyelashes and long
black hair had preserved their natural size. I shuddered at
Jorge's warning but expressed my doubts whether there were
head-hunters west of the mountains.
61
KON-TIKl
"One can never know," said Jorge gloomily. "And what would
you say if your friend disappeared and his head came into the
market in miniature? That happened to a friend of mine
once," he added, staring at me stubbornly.
"Tell us about it," said Herman, chewing his beef slowly and
with only moderate enjoyment.
I laid my fork carefully aside, and Jorge told his story. He
was once living with his wife on an outpost in the jungle,
washing gold and buying up the take of the other gold-washers.
The family had at that time a native friend who brought his
gold regularly and sold it for goods. One day this friend was
killed in the jungle. Jorge tracked down the murderer and
threatened to shoot him. Now the murderer was one of those
who were suspected of selling shrunken human heads, and
Jorge promised to spare his life if he handed over the head at
once. The murderer at once produced the head of Jorge's friend,
now as small as a man's fist. Jorge was quite upset when he
saw his friend again, for he was quite unchanged except that
he had become so very small. Much moved, he took the little
head home to his wife. She fainted when she saw it, and Jorge
had to hide his friend in a trunk. But it was so damp in the
jungle that clusters of green mold formed on the head, so that
Jorge had to take it out now and then and dry it in the sun.
It hung very nicely by the hair on a clothesline, and Jorge's
wife fainted every time she caught sight of it. But one day a
mouse gnawed its way into the trunk and made a horrid mess
of his friend. Jorge was much distressed and buried his friend
with full ceremonies in a tiny little hole up on the airfield. For
after all he was a human being, Jorge concluded.
"Nice dinner," I said to change the subject.
As we went home in the dark, I had a disagreeable feeling
62
To South America
that Herman's hat had sunk far down over his ears. But he
had only pulled it down to protect himself from the cold night
wind from the mountains.
Next day we were sitting with our own Consul General
Bryhn and his wife under the eucalyptus trees at their big coun-
try place outside the town. Bryhn hardly thought our planned
jungle trip to Quevedo would lead to any drastic change in our
hat sizes, but there were robbers about in those very regions
we had thought of visiting. He produced clippings from local
papers announcing that soldiers were to be sent out, when the
dry season came, to extirpate the bandidos who infested the
regions around Quevedo. To go there now was the sheerest
madness, and we would never get guides or transport. While
we were talking to him, we saw a jeep from the American
military attache's office tear past along the road, and this gave
us an idea. We went up to the American Embassy, accom-
panied by the consul general, and were able to see the military
attache himself. He was a trim, lighthearted young man in
khaki and riding boots and asked laughingly why we had
strayed to the top of the Andes when the local papers said we
were to go to sea on a wooden raft.
We explained that the wood was still standing upright in
the Quevedo jungle and we were up here on the roof of the
continent and could not get to it. We asked the military attache
either (a) to lend us a plane and two parachutes or () to lend
us a jeep with a driver who knew the country.
The military attache at first sat speechless at our assurance;
then he shook his head despairingly and said with a smile, all
right since we gave him no third choice, he preferred the
second !
At a quarter past five the next morning a jeep rolled up to
KON-TIKI
our hotel entrance, and an Ecuadorian captain of engineers
jumped out and reported himself at our service. His orders
were to drive us to Quevedo, mud or no mud. The jeep was
packed full of gasoline cans, for there were no gasoline pumps
or even wheel tracks along the route we were to take. Our new
friend, Captain Agurto Alexis Alvarez, was armed to the teeth
with knives and firearms on account of the reports of bandidos.
We had come to the country peacefully in business suits to buy
timber for ready money down on the coast, and the whole of
our equipment on board the jeep consisted of a bag of tinned
food, except that we had hurriedly acquired a secondhand
camera and a pair of tear-proof khaki breeches for each of us.
In addition, the consul general had pressed upon us his big
revolver with an ample supply of ammunition to exterminate
everything that crossed our path. The jeep whizzed away
through empty alleys where the moon shone ghostly pale on
whitewashed adobe walls, till we came out into the country
and raced at a giddy speed along a good sand road southward
through the mountain region.
It was good going all along the range as far as the mountain
village of Latacunga, where windowless Indian houses clus-
tered blindly round a whitewashed country church with palms
in a square. Here we turned off along a mule track which
undulated and twisted westward over hill and valley into the
Andes. We came into a world we had never dreamed of. It
was the mountain Indians' own world east of the sun and
west of the moon outside time and beyond space. On the
whole drive we saw not a carriage or a wheel. The traffic con-
sisted of barelegged goatherds in gaily colored ponchos, driving
forward disorderly herds of stiff-legged, dignified llamas, and
now and then whole families of Indians coming along the
64
Kon-Tity ready to start in Callao Harbor. Like the Indians' prehistoric vessels
on the west coast of South America, our raft had an open bamboo cabin and two
masts lashed together with a square sail between. The woman secretary of the
expedition, Gerd Void (inset), named the raft by smashing a coconut against
the bow. The raft received the name Kon-Tify in memory of the Peruvian
sun-god, who long ago vanished westward across the sea.
Above: Erik puts the finishing touch to the raft A Peruvian sailor helps him
to fix a tholepin of the hardest wood for the steering oar.
Below: Thank you and good-by! The tug Guardian Rios turns back and
leaves us to our fate.
Under full sail out at sea. Nature was our only teacher, the last raftsmen having
died several hundred years before, and we went through a hard school in our
first weeks in the Humboldt Current off the coast of South America.
The kitchen department. Before our fresh fruit ran out, we had entered waters
where fish abounded. We cooked our food on a couple of primus stoves, which
stood on tlie bottom of a wooden box, and generally had our meals on the star-
board side of the raft in front of the entrance to the cabin. Like our prehistoric
forerunners, we also had with us sweet potatoes and gourds from Peru
To South America
road. The husband usually rode ahead on a mule, while his
little wife trotted behind with her entire collection of hats on
her head and the youngest child in a bag on her back. All the
time she ambled along, she spun wool with her fingers. Don-
keys and mules jogged behind at leisure, loaded with boughs
and rushes and pottery.
The farther we went, the fewer the Indians who spoke Span-
ish, and soon Agurto's linguistic capacities were as useless as
our own. A cluster of huts lay here and there up in the moun-
tains; fewer and fewer were built of clay, while more and more
were made of twigs and dry grass. Both the huts and the sun-
browned, wrinkle-faced people seemed to have grown up out
of the earth itself, from the baking effect of the mountain sun
on the rock walls of the Andes. They belonged to cliff and
scree and upland pasture as naturally as the mountain grass
itself. Poor in possessions and small in stature, the mountain
Indians had the wiry hardiness of wild animals and the child-
like alertness of a primitive people, and the less they could talk,
the more they could laugh. Radiant faces with snow-white
teeth shone upon us from all we saw. There was nothing to
indicate that the white man had lost or earned a dime in these
regions. There were no billboards or road signs, and if a tin
box or a scrap of paper was flung down by the roadside, it
was picked up at once as a useful household article.
We went on up over sun-smitten slopes without a bush or
tree and down into valleys of desert sand and cactus, till finally
we climbed up and reached the topmost crest with snow fields
round the peak and a wind so bitingly cold that we had to
slacken speed in order not to freeze to bits as we sat in our shirts
longing for jungle heat. For long stretches we had to drive
across country between the mountains, over scree and grassy
KON-TIKI
ridges, searching for the next bit of road. But when we reached
the west wall, where the Andes range falls precipitously to the
lowlands, the mule track was cut along shelves in the loose rock,
and sheer cliffs and gorges were all about us. We put all our
trust in friend Agurto as he sat crouched over the steering
wheel, always swinging out when we came to a precipice. Sud-
denly a violent gust of wind met us; we had reached the outer-
most crest of the Andes chain, where the mountain fell away
sharply in a series of precipices to the jungle far down in a
'bottomless abyss 12,000 feet beneath us. But we were cheated
of the dizzy view over the sea of jungle, for, as soon as we
reached the edge, thick cloud banks rolled about us like steam
from a witches' cauldron. But now our road ran down un-
hindered into the depths. Always down, in steep loops along
gorges and bluffs and ridges, while the air grew damper and
warmer and ever fuller of the heavy, deadening hothouse air
which rose from the jungle world below.
And then the rain began. First gently, then it began to pour
and beat upon the jeep like drumsticks, and soon the chocolate-
colored water was flowing down the rocks on every side of us.
We almost flowed down, too, away from the dry mountain
plateaus behind us and into another world, where stick and
stone and clay slope were soft and lush with moss and turf.
Leaves shot up; soon they became giant leaves hanging like
green umbrellas and dripping over the hillside. Then came the
first feeble advanced posts of the jungle trees, with heavy
fringes and beards of moss and climbing plants hanging from
them. There was a gurgling and splashing everywhere. As the
slopes grew gentler, the jungle rolled up swiftly like an army
of green giant growths that swallowed up the little jeep as it
splashed along the waterlogged clay road. We were in the
66
To South America
jungle. The air was moist and warm and heavy with the smell
of vegetation.
Darkness had fallen when we reached a cluster of palm-
roofed huts on a ridge. Dripping with warm water, we left the
jeep for a night under a dry roof. The horde of fleas that at-
tacked us in the hut were drowned in the next day's rain. With
the jeep full of bananas and other tropical fruit we went on
downhill through the jungle, down and down, though we
thought we had reached bottom long ago. The mud grew worse
but it did not stop us, and the robbers kept at an unknown
distance.
Not till the road was barred by a broad river of muddy water
rolling down through the jungle did the jeep give up. We
stood stuck fast, unable to move either up or down along the
riverbank. In an open clearing stood a hut where a few half-
breed Indians were stretching out a jaguar skin on a sunny wall,
while dogs and fowl were splashing about enjoying themselves
on top of some cocoa beans spread out to dry in the sun. When
the jeep came bumping along, the place came to life and some
natives who spoke Spanish informed us that this was the Rio
Palenque and that Quevedo was just on the other side. There
was no bridge there, and the river was swift and deep, but they
were willing to float us and the jeep over by raft. The queer
contraption lay down by the bank. Twisted logs as thick as
our arms were fastened together with vegetable fibers and bam-
boos to form a flimsy raft, twice the length and breadth of the
jeep. With a plank under each wheel and our hearts in our
mouths we drove the jeep out onto the logs, and though most
of them were submerged under the muddy water, they did
bear the jeep and us and four half-naked chocolate-colored men
who pushed us off with long poles.
67
KON-T1KI
"Balsa?" Herman and I asked in the same breath.
"Balsa," one of the fellows nodded, with a disrespectful kick
at the logs.
The current seized us and we whirled down the river, while
the men pushed in their poles at the right places and kept the
raft on an even diagonal course across the current and into
quieter water on the other side. This was our first meeting with
the balsa tree and our first trip on a balsa raft. We brought the
raft safely to land at the farther bank and motored trium-
phantly into Quevedo. Two rows of tarred wooden houses with
motionless vultures on the palm roofs formed a kind of street,
and this was the whole place. The inhabitants dropped what-
ever they might be carrying, and black and brown, young and
old, appeared swarming out of both doors and windows. They
rushed to meet the jeep a menacing, chattering tide of hu-
manity. They scrambled on to it and under it and round it.
We kept a tight hold on our worldly possessions while Agurto
attempted desperate maneuvers at the steering wheel. Then
the jeep had a puncture and went down on one knee. We had
arrived at Quevedo and had to endure the embrace of welcome.
Don Federico's plantation lay a bit farther down the river.
When the jeep came bumping into the yard along a path be-
tween the mango trees with Agurto, Herman, and me, the
lean old jungle-dweller came to meet us at a trot with his
nephew Angelo, a small boy who lived with him out in the
wilds. We gave messages from Don Gustavo, and soon the
jeep was standing alone in the yard while a fresh tropical
shower streamed down over the jungle. There was a festive
meal in Don Federico's bungalow; suckling pigs and chickens
crackled over an open fire, while we sat round a dish loaded
with tropical fruit and explained what we had come for. The
68
To South America
jungle rain pouring down on the ground outside sent a warm
sweet gust of scented blossoms and clay in through the window
netting.
Don Federico had become as brisk as a boy. Why, yes, he
had known balsa rafts since he was a child. Fifty years ago,
when he lived down by the sea, the Indians from Peru still
used to come sailing up along the coast on big balsa rafts to
sell fish in Guayaquil. They could bring a couple of tons of
dried fish in a bamboo cabin in the middle of the raft, or they
might have wives and children and dogs and fowl on board.
Such big balsa trees as they had used for their rafts would be
hard to find now in the rains, for floodwater and mud had
already made it impossible to get to the balsa plantation up in
the forest, even on horseback. But Don Federico would do
his best; there might still be some single trees growing wild in
the forest nearer the bungalow, and we did not need many.
Late in the evening the rain stopped for a time, and we went
for a turn under the mango trees round the bungalow. Here
Don Federico had every kind of wild orchid in the world hang-
ing down from the branches, with half-coconuts as flowerpots.
Unlike cultivated orchids, these rare plants gave out a wonder-
ful scent, and Herman was bending down to stick his nose
into one of them when something like a long, thin, glittering
eel emerged from the leaves above him. A lightning blow from
Angelo's whip, and a wriggling snake fell to the ground. A
second later it was held fast to the earth with a forked stick
over its neck, and then its head was crushed.
"Mortal" said Angelo and exposed two curved poison fangs
to show what he meant.
After that we thought we saw poisonous snakes lurking in
the foliage everywhere and slipped into the house with Angelo's
69
KON-TIKI
trophy hanging lifeless across a stick. Herman sat down to
skin the monster, and Don Federico was telling fantastic stories
about poisonous snakes and boa constrictors as thick as dinner
plates when we suddenly noticed the shadows of two enormous
scorpions on the wall, the size of lobsters. They rushed at each
other and engaged in a life-and-death battle with their pincers,
with their hinder parts turned up and their curved poisonous
sting at the tail ready for the deathblow. It was a horrible sight,
and not till we moved the oil lamp did we see that it had cast
a supernaturally gigantic shadow of two quite ordinary scor-
pions of the size of one's finger, which were fighting on the
edge of the bureau.
"Let them be," Don Federico laughed. "One'll kill the other,
and we want the survivor in the house to keep the cockroaches
away. Just keep your mosquito net tight round the bed and
shake your clothes before you put them on, and you'll be all
right. I've often been bitten" by scorpions and I'm not dead
yet," added the old man, laughing.
I slept well, except that I woke up thinking of poisonous
creatures every time a lizard or bat squeaked and scrabbled too
noisily near my pillow.
Next morning we got up early to go and search for balsa
trees.
"Better shake our clothes," said Agurto, and as he spoke a
scorpion fell out of his shirt sleeve and shot down into a crack
in the floor.
Soon after sunrise Don Federico sent his men out on horse-
back in all directions to look for accessible balsa trees along
the paths. Our own party consisted of Don Federico, Herman,
and myself, and we soon found our way to an open place
where there was a gigantic old tree of which Don Federico
To South America
knew. It towered high above the trees round about, and the
trunk was three feet thick. In Polynesian style we christened
the tree before we touched it; we gave it the name Ku, after
a Polynesian deity of American origin. Then we swung the
ax and drove it into the balsa trunk till the forest echoed our
blows. But cutting a sappy balsa was like cutting cork with a
blunt ax; the ax simply rebounded, and I had not delivered
many strokes before Herman had to relieve me. The ax
changed hands time after time, while the splinters flew and
the sweat trickled in the heat of the jungle.
Late in the day Ku was standing like a cock on one leg,
quivering under our blows; soon he tottered and crashed down
heavily over the surrounding forest, big branches and small
trees being pulled down by the giant's fall. We had torn the
branches from the trunk and were beginning to rip of? the
bark in zigzags in Indian style when Herman suddenly
dropped the ax and leaped into the air as if doing a Polynesian
war dance, with his hand pressed to his leg. Out of his trouser
leg fell a shining ant as big* as a scorpion and with a long sting
at its tail. It must have had a skull like a lobster's claw, for it
was almost impossible to stamp it under one's heel on the
ground.
"A kongo," Don Federico explained with regret. "The little
brute's worse than a scorpion, but it isn't dangerous to a healthy
man."
Herman was tender and sore for several days, but this did
not prevent his galloping with us on horseback along the
jungle paths, looking for more giant balsas in the forest. From
time to time we heard creaking and crashing and a heavy thud
somewhere in the virgin forest. Don Federico nodded with a
satisfied air. It meant that his half-breed Indians had felled a
KON-TIKI
new giant balsa for the raft. In a week Ku had been followed
by Kane, Kama, Ilo, Mauri, Ra, Rangi, Papa, Taranga, Kura,
Kukara, and Hiti twelve mighty balsas, all christened in
honor of Polynesian legendary figures whose names had once
been borne with Tiki over the sea from Peru. The logs, glisten-
ing with sap, were dragged down through the jungle first by
horses and at the last by Don Federico's tractor, which brought
them to the riverbank in front of the bungalow.
The sap-filled logs were far from being as light as corks.
They must have weighed a ton apiece, and we waited with
great anxiety to see how they would float in the water. We
rolled them out to the edge of the bank one- by one; there we
made fast a rope of tough, climbing plants to the ends of the
logs that they might not vanish downstream when we let them
enter the water. Then we rolled them in turn down the bank
and into the river. There was a mighty splash. They swung
round and floated, about as much above as below the surface
of the water, and when we went out along them they re-
mained steady. We bound the timbers together with tough
lianas that hung down from the tops of the jungle trees, so as
to make two temporary rafts, one towing the other. Then we
loaded the rafts with all the bamboos and lianas we should
need later, and Herman and I went on board with two men
of a mysterious mixed race, with whom we had no common
language.
When we cut our moorings, we were caught by the whirling
masses of water and went off downstream at a good pace. The
last glimpse we had in the drizzle, as we rounded the first
headland, was of our excellent friends standing on the end
of the point in front of the bungalow, waving. Then we crept
under a little shelter of green banana leaves and left steering
To South America
problems to the two brown experts who had stationed them-
selves one in the bow and one astern, each holding a huge oar.
They kept the raft in the swiftest current with nonchalant
ease, and we danced downstream on a winding course between
sunken trees and sandbanks.
The jungle stood like a solid wall along the banks on both
sides, and parrots and other bright-colored birds fluttered out
of the dense foliage as we passed. Once or twice an alligator
hurled itself into the river and became invisible in the muddy
water. But we soon caught sight of a much more remarkable
monster. This was an iguana, or giant lizard, as big as a
crocodile but with a large throat and fringed back. It lay
dozing on the clay bank as if it had overslept from prehistoric
times and did not move as we glided past. The oarsmen made
signs to us not to shoot. Soon afterward we saw a smaller
specimen about three feet long. It was running away along a
thick branch which hung out over the raft. It ran only till it
was in safety, and then it sat, all shining blue and green, and
stared at us with cold snake's eyes as we passed. Later we
passed a fern-clad hillock, and on the top of it lay the biggest
iguana of all. It was like the silhouette of a fringed Chinese
dragon carved in stone as it stood out motionless against the
sky with chest and head raised. It did not as much as turn its
head as we curved round it under the hillocks and vanished
into the jungle.
Farther down we smelled smoke and passed several huts
with straw roofs which lay in clearings along the bank. We
on the raft were the objects of close attention from sinister-
looking individuals on land, an unfavorable mixture of Indian,
Negro, and Spaniard. Their boats, great dugout canoes, lay
drawn up on to the bank.
73
KON-TIKI
When mealtimes came, we relieved our friends at the steer-
ing oars while they fried fish and breadfruit over a little fire
regulated with wet clay. Roast chicken, eggs, and tropical
fruits were also part of the menu on board, while the logs
transported themselves and us at a fine speed down through the
jungle toward the sea. What did it matter now if the water
swept and splashed round us ? The more it rained, the swifter
the current ran.
When darkness fell over the river, an ear-splitting orchestra
struck up on the bank. Toads and frogs, crickets and mosqui-
toes, croaked or chirped or hummed in a prolonged chorus of
many voices. Now and again the shrill scream of a wild cat
rang through the darkness, and soon another, and yet another,
from birds scared into flight by the 'night prowlers of the
jungle. Once or twice we saw the gleam of a fire in a native
hut and heard bawling voices and the barking of dogs as we
slid past in the night. But for the most part we sat alone with
the jungle orchestra under the stars, till drowsiness and rain
drove us into the cabin of leaves, where we went to sleep with
our pistols loose in their holsters.
The farther downstream we drifted, the thicker became the
huts and native plantations, and soon there were regular vil-
lages on the banks. The traffic here consisted of dugout canoes
punted along with long poles, and now and then we saw a
little balsa raft loaded with heaps of green bananas bound for
market.
Where the Palenque joined the Rio Guayas, the water had
risen so high that the paddle steamer was plying busily between
Vinces and Guayaquil down on the coast. To save valuable
time Herman and I each got a hammock on board the paddle
steamer and steamed off across, the thickly populated flat coun-
74
To South America
try to the coast. Our brown friends were to follow, drifting
down alone with the timber.
At Guayaquil Herman and I parted. He was to remain at the
mouth of the Guayas to stop the balsa logs as they came drifting
down. Thence he was to take them, as cargo on a coasting
steamer, to Peru, where he was to direct the building of the raft
and make a faithful copy of the Indians' old-time vessels. I my-
self took the regular plane southward to Lima, the capital of
Peru, to find a suitable place for building the raft.
The plane ascended to a great height along the shore of the
Pacific, with the desert mountains in Peru on one side and a
glittering ocean far below us on the other. It was here we were
to put to sea on board the raft. The sea seemed endless when
seen from a plane high up. Sky and sea melted into each other
along an indefinable horizon far, far away to the westward, and
I could not rid myself of the thought that even beyond that
horizon many hundred similar sea plains curved onward round a
fifth of the earth before there was any more land in Polynesia.
I tried to project my thoughts a few weeks ahead, when we
should be drifting on a speck of a raft on that blue expanse be-
low, but quickly dismissed the thought again, for it gave me the
same unpleasant feeling inside as sitting in readiness to jump
with a parachute.
On my arrival in Lima I took the street car down to the port
of Callao to find a place where we could build the raft. I saw at
once that the whole harbor was chock-full of ships and cranes
and warehouses, with customs sheds and harbor offices and all
the rest. And, if there was any open beach farther out, it
swarmed with bathers to such a degree that inquisitive people
would pull the raft and fittings to pieces as soon as our backs
were turned. Callao was now the most important port in a
75
KON-T1KI
country of seven million people, white and brown. Times had
changed for raft-builders in Peru even more than in Ecuador,
and I saw only one possibility to get inside the high concrete
walls round the naval harbor, where armed men stood on
guard behind the iron gate and cast menacing and suspicious
looks on me and other unauthorized persons who loafed past
the walls. If one could only get in there, one would be safe.
I had met the Peruvian naval attache in Washington and had
a letter from him to support me. I went to the Ministry of
Marine next day with the letter and sought an audience of the
minister of marine, Manuel Nieto. He received in the morning
in the elegant Empire drawing room of the Ministry, gleaming
with mirrors and gilding. After a time he himself came in in
full uniform, a short broadly built officer, as stern as Napoleon,
straightforward and concise in his manner of speech. He asked
why and I said why. I asked to be allowed to build a wooden
raft in the naval dockyard.
"Young man," said the minister, drumming uneasily with his
fingers. "You've come in by the window instead of the door.
Ill be glad to help you, but the order must come from the for-
eign minister to me; I can't let foreigners into the naval area
and give them the use of the dockyard as a matter of course.
Apply to the Foreign Ministry in writing, and good luck."
I thought apprehensively of papers circulating and disappear-
ing into the blue. Happy were the rude days of Kon-Tiki, when
applications were an unknown hindrance!
To see the foreign minister in person was considerably harder.
Norway had no local legation in Peru, and our helpful Consul
General Bahr could, therefore, take me no farther than the
counselors of the Foreign Ministry. I was afraid things would
get no further. Dr. Cohen's letter to the President of the republic
To South America
might come in useful now. So I sought through his adjutant
an audience of His Excellency Don Jose Bustamante y Rivero,
president of Peru. A day or two later I was told to be at the
palace at twelve o'clock.
Lima is a modern city, with half a million inhabitants, and
lies spread over a green plain at the foot of the desert moun-
tains. Architecturally, and thanks not least to its gardens and
plantations, it is surely one of the most beautiful capitals in the
world a bit of modern California or Riviera variegated with
old Spanish architecture. The president's palace lies in the mid-
dle of the city and is strongly guarded by armed sentries in
gaily colored costumes. An audience in Peru is a serious busi-
ness, and few people have seen the president except on the
screen. Soldiers in shining bandoleers escorted me upstairs and
to the end of a long corridor; here my name was taken and
registered by three civilians, and I was shown through a colossal
oak door into a room with a long table and rows of chairs. A
man dressed in white received me, asked me to sit down, and
disappeared. A moment later a large door opened, and I was
shown into a much handsomer room, where an imposing per-
son in a spotless uniform advanced toward me.
"The President," I thought, drawing myself up. But no. The
man in the gold-edged uniform offered me an antique straight-
backed chair and disappeared. I had sat on the edge of my chair
for barely a minute when yet another door opened and a servant
bowed me into a large gilded room with gilded furniture and
splendidly decorated. The fellow vanished as quickly as he had
appeared, and I sat quite alone on an antique sofa with a view
of a string of empty rooms whose doors stood open. It was so
silent that I could hear someone coughing cautiously several
rooms away. Then steady steps approached, and I jumped up
77
KON-TIK1
and hesitatingly greeted an imposing gentleman in uniform.
But, no, this too was not he. But I understood enough of what
he said to gather that the President sent me his greetings and
would be free very soon when a meeting of ministers was over.
Ten minutes later steady steps once more broke the silence,
and this time a man with gold lace and epaulets came in. I
sprang briskly from the sofa and bowed deeply. The man
bowed still more deeply and led me through several rooms and
up a staircase with thick carpets. Then he left me in a tiny
little room with one leather-covered chair and one sofa. In came
a little man in a white suit, and I waited resignedly to see
where he intended to take me. But he took me nowhere, only
greeted me amiably and remained standing. This was President
Bustamante y Rivero.
The President had twice as much English as I had Spanish,
so when we had greeted one another and he had begged me
with a gesture to sit down, our common vocabulary was ex-
hausted. Signs and gesticulations will do a lot, but they will not
get one permission to build a raft in a naval harbor in Peru.
The only thing I perceived was that the President did not un-
derstand what I was saying, and he grasped that still more
clearly himself, for in a little while he disappeared and came
back with the air minister. The air minister, General Reveredo,
was a vigorous athletic man in an Air Force uniform. He spoke
English splendidly with an American accent.
I apologized for the misunderstanding and said it was not to
the airfield that I had been trying to ask for admission but to
the naval harbor. The general laughed and explained that he
had only been called in as interpreter. Bit by bit the theory was
translated to the President, who listened closely and put sharp
questions through General Reveredo. At last he said:
7 8
To South America
"If it is possible that the Pacific islands were first discovered
from Peru, Peru has an interest in this expedition. If we can do
anything for you, tell us."
I asked for a place where we could build the raft within the
walls of the naval area, access to the naval workshops, a place
for the storage of equipment and facilities for bringing it into
the country, the use of the dry dock and of naval personnel to
help us in the work, and a vessel to tow us out from the coast
when we started.
"What is he asking for?" the President asked eagerly, so that
I too understood.
"Nothing much," Reveredo answered, looking at me with a
twinkle in his eye. And the President, satisfied, nodded as a
sign of approval.
Before the meeting broke up, Reveredo promised that the
foreign minister should receive orders from the President per-
sonally, and that Minister of Marine Nieto should be given a
free hand to give us all the help we had asked for.
"God preserve you all!" said the General, laughing and shak-
ing his head. The adjutant came in and escorted me out to a
waiting messenger.
That day the Lima papers published a paragraph about the
Norwegian raft expedition which was to start from Peru; at
the same time they announced that a Swedish-Finnish scien-
tific expedition had finished its studies among the jungle In-
dians in the Amazon regions. Two of the Swedish members of
the Amazon expedition had come on up the river by canoe to
Peru and had just arrived in Lima. One was Bengt Danielsson,
from Uppsala University, who was now going to study the
mountain Indians in Peru.
I cut out the paragraph, and was sitting in my hotel writing
79
KON-TIKI
to Herman about the site for building the raft, when I was in-
terrupted by a knock on the door. In came a tall sunburned
fellow in tropical clothes, and, when he took off his white hel-
met, it looked as if his flaming red beard had burned his face
and scorched his hair thin. That fellow came from the wilds,
but his place was clearly a lecture room.
"Bengt Danielsson," I thought.
"Bengt Danielsson/' said the man, introducing himself.
"He's heard about the raft," I thought and asked him to sit
down*
"I've just heard of the raft plans/' said the Swede.
"And now he's come to knock down the theory, because he's
an ethnologist/' I thought.
"And now I've come to ask if I may come with you on the
raft/' the Swede said peaceably. "I'm interested in the migration
theory."
I knew nothing about the man except that he was a scientist
and that he had come straight out of the depths of the jungle.
But if a solitary Swede had the pluck to go out on a raft with
five Norwegians, he could not be squeamish. And not even that
imposing beard could hide his placid nature and gay humor.
Bengt became the sixth member of the crew, for the place was
still vacant. And he was the only one who spoke Spanish.
When the passenger plane droned northward along the coast
a few days later with me on board, I again looked down with
respect on to the endless blue sea beneath us. It seemed to hang
and float loose under the firmament itself. Soon we six were to
be packed together like microbes on a mere speck, down there
where there was so much water that it looked as if it overflowed
all along the western horizon. We were to be part of a desolate
world without being able to get more than a few steps away
80
To South America
from one another. For the time being, at any rate, there was
elbowroom enough between us. Herman was in Ecuador wait-
ing for the timber. Knut Haugland and Torstein Raaby had
just arrived in New York by air. Erik Hesselberg was on board
ship from Oslo, bound for Panama. I myself was en route for
Washington by air, and Bengt was in the hotel at Lima ready
to start, waiting to meet the others.
No two of these men had met before, and they were all of
entirely different types. That being so, we should have been on
the raft for some weeks before we got tired of one another's
stories. No storm clouds with low pressure and gusty weather
held greater menace for us than the danger of psychological
cloudburst among six men shut up together for months on a
drifting raft. In such circumstances a good joke was often as
valuable as a life belt.
Up in Washington there was still bitter winter weather when
I came back cold and snowy February. Bjorn had tackled the
radio problem and had interested the Radio Amateur League
of America in listening in for reports from the raft. Knut and
Torstein were busy preparing the transmission, which was to be
done partly with short-wave transmitters specially constructed
for our purpose and partly with secret sabotage sets used dur-
ing the war. There were a thousand things to prepare, big
and small, if we were to do all that we planned on the
voyage.
And the piles of paper in the files grew* Military and civil-
ian documents white, yellow, and blue in English, Spanish,
French, and Norwegian. Even a raft trip had to cost the paper
industry half a fir tree in our practical age! Laws and regula-
tions tied our hands everywhere, and knot after knot had to be
loosened in turn.
8x
KON-TIKI
"111 swear this correspondence weighs twenty pounds," said
Knut one day despairingly as he bent over his typewriter.
"Twenty-six/' said Torstein drily. "I've weighed it."
My mother must have had a clear idea of the conditions in
these days of dramatic preparation when she wrote: "And I
only wish I knew you were all six safe on board the raft!"
Then one day an express telegram came from Lima. Herman
had been caught in the backwash of a breaker and flung ashore,
badly injured, with his neck dislocated. He was under treatment
in Lima Hospital.
Torstein Raaby was sent down by air at once with Gerd Void,
the popular London secretary of the Norwegian parachute sabo-
teurs in the war, who was now helping us in Washington. They
found Herman better; he had been hung up by a strap round
his head for half an hour while the doctors twisted the atlas
vertebra in his neck back into position. The X-ray picture
showed that the highest bone in his neck was cracked and had
been turned right around. Herman's splendid condition had
saved his life, and he was soon back, blue and green and stiff
and rheumatic, in the naval dockyard, where he had assembled
the balsa wood and started the work. He had to remain in the
doctor's hands for several weeks, and it was doubtful whether
he would be able to make the voyage with us. He himself never
doubted it for a moment, despite his initial rough handling in
the embrace of the Pacific.
Then Erik arrived by air from Panama and Knut and I from
Washington, and so we were all assembled at the starting point
in Lima.
Down in the naval dockyard lay the big balsa logs from the
Quevedo forest. It was really a pathetic sight. Fresh-cut round
logs, yellow bamboos, reeds, and green banana leaves lay in a
82
To South America
heap, our building materials, in between rows of threatening
gray submarines and destroyers. Six fair-skinned northerners
and twenty brown Peruvian seamen with Inca blood in their
veins swung axes and long machete knives and tugged at
ropes and knots. Trim naval officers in blue and gold walked
over and stared in bewilderment at these pale strangers and
their crude vegetable materials which had suddenly appeared
in the midst of their proud naval yard.
For the first time for hundreds of years a balsa raft was being
built in Callao Bay. In these coastal waters, where Inca legends
affirm that their ancestors first learned to sail such rafts from
Kon-Tiki's vanished clan, modern Indians were forbidden to
build such rafts by men of our own race. Sailing on an open
raft can cost human lives. The descendants of the Incas have
moved with the times; like us, they have creases in their trousers
and are safely protected by the guns of their naval craft. Bam-
boo and balsa belong to the primitive past; here, too, life is
marching on to armor and steel.
The ultramodern dockyard gave us wonderful support. With
Bengt as interpreter and Herman as chief constructor we had
the run of the carpenter's and sailmaker's shops, as well as half
the storage space as a dump for our equipment and a small
floating pier where the timber was put into the water when the
building began.
Nine of the thickest logs were chosen as sufficient to form the
actual raft. Deep grooves were cut in the wood to prevent the
ropes which were to f aste$i them and the whole raft together
from slipping. Not a single spike, nail, or wire rope was used
in the whole construction. The nine great logs were first laid
loose side by side in the water so that they might all fall freely
into their natural floating position before they were lashed se-
S3
KON-TIKI
curely together. The longest log, 45 feet long, was laid in the
middle and projected a long way at both ends. Shorter and
shorter logs were laid symmetrically on both sides of this, so
that the sides of the raft were 30 feet long and the bow stuck
out like a-blunt plow. Astern the raft was cut off straight across,
except that the three middle logs projected and supported a
short thick block of balsa wood which lay athwart ship and
held tholepins for the long steering oar. When the nine balsa
logs were lashed securely together with separate lengths of inch-
and-a-quarter hemp rope, the lighter balsa logs were made fast
crossways over them at intervals of about 3 feet.
The raft itself was now complete, laboriously fastened to-
gether with about three hundred different lengths of rope, each
firmly knotted. A deck of split bamboos was laid upon it, fas-
tened to it in the form of separate strips and covered with loose
mats of plaited bamboo reeds. In the middle of the raft, but
nearer the stern, we erected a small open cabin of bamboo canes,
with walls of plaited bamboo reeds and a roof of bamboo slats
with leathery banana leaves overlapping one another like tiles.
Forward of the cabin we set up two masts side by side. They
were cut from mangrove wood, as hard as iron, and leaned
toward each other, so that they were lashed together crosswise
at the top. The big rectangular square sail was hauled up on a
yard made of two bamboo stems bound together to secure dou-
ble strength.
The nine big logs of timber which were to carry us over the
sea were pointed at their forward fnds in native fashion that
they might glide more easily through the water, and quite low
splashboards were fastened to the bow above the surface of the
water.
At various places, where there were large chinks between the
84
To South America
logs, we pushed down in all five solid fir planks which stood on
their edges in the water under the raft. They were scattered
about without system and went down 5 feet into the water, being
i inch thick and 2 feet wide. They were kept in place with
wedges and ropes and served as tiny parallel keels or center-
boards. Centerboards of this kind were used on all the balsa
rafts of Inca times, long before the time of the discoveries, and
were meant to prevent the flat wooden rafts from drifting side-
ways with wind and sea. We did not make any rail or protection
round the raft, but we had a long slim balsa log which afforded
foothold along each side.
The whole construction was a faithful copy of the old vessels
in Peru and Ecuador except for the low splashboards in the
bow, which later proved to be entirely unnecessary. After finish-
ing the raft itself, of course, we could arrange the details on
board as we liked, so long as they had no effect on the move-
ment and quality of the vessel. We knew that this raft was to
be our whole world in the time that lay before us and that, con-
sequently, the smallest detail on board would increase in dimen-
sions and importance as the weeks passed.
Therefore we gave the little deck as much variation as pos-
sible. The bamboo strips did not deck in the whole raft but
formed a floor forward of the bamboo cabin and along the star-
board 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 left to walk along. Forward in the bow,
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
wickerwork down on to the round gray logs astern and up
again on to piles of cargo on the other side. It was not many
KON-TIKl
steps, but the psychological effect of the irregularity gave us
variation and compensated us for our limited freedom of move-
ment. Up at the masthead we placed a wooden platform, not
so much in order to have a lookout 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.
When the raft began to take shape and lay there among the
warships, golden and fresh with ripe bamboos and green leaves,
the minister of marine himself came to inspect us. We were
immensely proud of our vessel as she lay there, a brave little
reminder of Inca times among the threatening big warships.
But the minister of marine was utterly horrified by what he
saw. I was summoned to the naval office to sign a paper freeing
the Navy from all responsibility for what we had built in its
harbor, and to the harbor master to sign a paper saying that, if
I left the .harbor with men and cargo on board, it was entirely
on my own responsibility and at my own risk.
Later a number of foreign naval experts and diplomats were
admitted to the dockyard to see the raft. They were no more
encouraging, and a few days afterward I was sent for by the
ambassador of one of the Great Powers.
"Are your parents living?" he asked me. And, when I replied
in the affirmative, he looked me straight in the eyes and said in
a hollow voice, full of foreboding:
"Your mother and father will be very grieved when they hear
of your death."
As a private individual he begged me to give up the voyage
while there was yet time. An admiral who had inspected the
raft had told him that we should never get across alive. In the
first place, the raft's dimensions were wrong. It was so small
that it would founder in a big sea; at the same time it was just
86
To South America
long enough to be lifted up by two lines of waves at the same
time, and with the raft filled with men and cargo the fragile
balsa logs would break under the strain. And, what was worse,
the biggest balsa exporter in the country had told him that the
porous balsa logs would float only a quarter of the distance
across the sea before they became so completely waterlogged
that they would sink under us.
This sounded bad but, as we stuck to our guns, we were given
a Bible as a present to take with us on our voyage. All in all,
there was little encouragement to be had from the experts who
looked at the raft. Gales and perhaps hurricanes would wash us
overboard and destroy the low, open craft, which would simply
lie helpless and drift in circles about the ocean before wind and
sea. Even in an ordinary choppy sea we should be continually
drenched with salt water which would take the skin off our
legs and ruin everything on board. If we added up all that the
different experts, each in turn, had pointed out as the vital flaw
in the construction itself, there was not a length of rope, not a
knot, not a measurement, not a piece of wood in the whole raft
which would not cause us to founder at sea. High wagers were
made as to how many days the raft would last, and a flippant
naval attache bet all the whisky the members of the expedition
could drink for the rest of their lives if they reached the South
Sea islands alive.
Worst of all was when a Norwegian ship came into port and
we took the skipper and one or two of his most experienced
sea dogs into the dockyard. We were eager to hear their prac-
tical reactions. And our disappointment was great when they
all agreed that the blunt-bowed, clumsy craft would never get
any help from the sail, while the skipper maintained that, if
we kept afloat, the raft would take a year or two to drift across
8 7
KON-TIKl
with the Humboldt Current. The boatswain looked at our lash-
ings and shook his head. We need not worry. The raft would
not hold together for a fortnight before every single rope was
worn through, for when at sea the big logs would be continu-
ally moving up and down and rubbing against one another.
Unless we used wire ropes or chains, we might as well pack
up.
These were difficult arguments to stifle. If only one of them
proved to be right, we had not a chance. I am afraid I asked
myself many times if we knew what we were doing. I could not
counter the warnings one by one myself because I was not a
seaman. But I had in reserve one single trump in my hand, on
which the whole voyage was founded. I knew all the time in
my heart that a prehistoric civilization had been spread from
Peru and across to the islands at a time when rafts like ours
were the only vessels on that coast. And I drew the general con-
clusion that, if balsa wood had floated and lashings held for
Kon-Tiki in 500 A.D., they would do the same for us now if we
blindly made our raft an exact copy of his. Bengt and Herman
had gone into the theory most thoroughly, and, while the ex-
perts lamented, all the boys took the thing quite calmly and had
a royal time in Lima. There was just one evening when Tor-
stein asked anxiously if I was sure the ocean currents went the
right way. We had been to the movies and seen Dorothy La-
mour dancing about in a straw skirt among palms and hula
girls on a lovely South Sea island.
"That's where we must go," said Torstein. "And I'm sorry for
you if the currents don't go as you say they do!"
When the day of our departure was approaching, we went
to the regular passport control office to get permission to leave
the country. Bengt stood first in the line as interpreter.
88
To South America
"What is your name?" asked a ceremonious little clerk, look-
ing suspiciously over his spectacles at Bengt's huge beard.
"Bengt Emmerik Danielsson," Bengt answered respectfully.
The man put a long form into his typewriter.
"By what boat did you come to Peru?"
"Well, you see," Bengt explained, bending over the mild little
man, "I didn't come by boat. I came to Peru by canoe."
The man looked at Bengt dumb with astonishment and
tapped out "canoe" in an open space on the form.
"And by what boat are you leaving Peru ?"
"Well, you see, again," said Bengt politely, "I'm not leaving
Peru by boat. I'm leaving by raft."
"A likely story!" the clerk cried angrily and tore the paper
out of the machine. "Will you please answer my questions
properly ?"
A few days before we sailed, provisions and water and all our
equipment were stowed on board the raft. We took provisions
for six men for four months, in the form of solid little cardboard
cartons containing military rations. Herman had the idea of
boiling asphalt and pouring it so as to make a level layer round
each separate carton. Then we strewed sand on the cartons, to
prevent them from sticking together, and stowed them, packed
close, under the bamboo deck where they filled the space be-
tween the nine low crossbeams which supported the deck.
At a crystal-clear spring high up in the mountains we filled
fifty-six small water cans with 275 gallons of drinking water.
These, too, we made fast in between the crossbeams so that the
sea might always splash round them. On the bamboo deck we
lashed fast the rest of the equipment including large wicker
baskets full of fruit, roots, and coconuts.
Knut and Torstein took one corner of the bamboo cabin for
8 9
KON-TIKI
the radio, and inside the hut, down between the crossbeams, we
made fast eight boxes. Two were reserved for scientific instru-
ments and films; the other six were allotted one to each of us,
with an intimation that each man could take with him as much
private property as he could find room for in his own box. As
Erik had brought several rolls of drawing paper and a guitar,
his box was so full that he had to put his stockings in Torstein's.
It took four seamen to carry Bengt's box on board. He brought
nothing but books but he had managed to cram in seventy-
three sociological and ethnological works. We laid plaited reed
mats and our straw mattres'ses on top of the boxes and then we
were ready to start.
First, the raft was towed out of the naval area and paddled
round in the harbor for a while to see if the cargo was stowed
evenly. Then she was towed across to the Callao Yacht Club,
where invited guests and other persons interested were to be
present at the naming of the raft the day before we sailed.
On April 27, 1947, the Norwegian flag was hoisted. Along a
yard at the masthead waved the flags of the foreign countries
which had given the expedition practical support. The quay was
packed with people who wanted to see the strange craft chris-
tened. Both color and lineaments betrayed that many of them
had remote ancestors who had sailed along the coast on balsa
rafts. But there were also descendants of the old Spaniards,
headed by representatives of the Peruvian Navy and the gov-
ernment, besides the ambassadors of the United States, Great
Britain, France, China, Argentina, and Cuba; the former gov-
ernor of the British colonies in the Pacific; the Swedish and
Belgian ministers; and our friends from the little Norwegian
colony with Consul General Bahr at their head. There were
swarms of journalists and a clicking of movie cameras; indeed,
go
To South America
the only things that were lacking were a brass band and a big
drum. One thing was quite clear to us all if the raft went to
pieces outside the bay, we would paddle to Polynesia, each of
us on a log, rather than dare come back here again.
Gerd Void, the expedition's secretary and contact on the
mainland, was to christen the raft with milk from a coconut,
partly to be in harmony with the Stone Age and partly because,
owing to a misunderstanding, the champagne had been put at
the bottom of Torstein's private box. When our friends had
been told in English and Spanish that the raft was named after
the Incas' great forerunner the sun-king who had vanished
westward over the sea from Peru and appeared in Polynesia
1,500 years ago Gerd Void christened the raft Kon-Tity. She
smashed the coconut (previously cracked) so hard against the
bow that milk and bits of coconut filled the hair of all those who
stood reverently around.
Then the bamboo yard was hauled up and the sail shaken
out, with Kon-Tiki's bearded head, painted in red by our artist
Erik, in its center. It was a faithful copy of the sun-king's head
cut in red stone on a statue in the ruined city of Tiahuanaco.
"Ah! Senor Danielsson," the foreman of our dockyard work-
ers cried in delight when he saw the bearded face on the sail.
He had called Bengt Senor Kon-Tiki for two months, ever
since we had shown him the bearded face of Kon-Tiki on a
piece of paper. But now he had at last realized that Danielsson
was Bengt's right name.
Before we sailed, we all had a farewell audience with the
President, and then we went for a trip far up into the black
mountains to look our fill on rock and scree before we drifted
out into the endless ocean. While we were working on the raft
down on the coast, we had stayed in a boardinghouse in a
9'
KON-TIKI
palm grove outside Lima and driven to and from Callao in an
Air Ministry car with a private chauffeur whom Gerd had con-
trived to borrow for the expedition. Now we asked the chauf-
feur to drive us straight to the mountains, as far in as he could
get in one day. We drove up over desert roads, along old irriga-
tion canals from Inca times, till we came to the dizzy height of
12,000 feet above the raft's mast. Here we simply devoured rocks
and mountain peaks and green grass with our eyes and tried to
surfeit ourselves with the tranquil mountain mass of the Andes
range that lay before us. We tried to convince ourselves that we
were thoroughly tired of stone and solid earth and wanted to
sail out and get to know the sea.
4
ACROSS
THE PACIFIC
A Dramatic Start -
We Are Towed Out to Sea -
A Wind Springs Up -Fighting the Waves-
Life in the Humboldt Current -
Plane Fails to Find Us -
Logs Absorb Water -
Wood against Ropes - Flying Fish for Meals -
An Unusual Bedfellow -
Sna^efish Ma\es a Blunder - Eyes in the Sea -
A Marine Ghost Story -
We Meet the World's Biggest Fish -
A Sea-Turtle Hunt
Across the Pacific
THERE WAS A BUSTLE IN CALLAO HARBOR THE DAY
the Kon-Tify was to be towed out to sea. The minister of ma-
rine had ordered the naval tug Guardian Rios to tow us out of
the bay and cast us off clear of the coastal traffic, out where in
times gone by the Indians used to lie fishing from their rafts.
The papers had published the news under both red and black
headlines, and there was a crowd of people down on the quays
from early in the morning of April 28.
We six who were to assemble on board all had little things to
do at the eleventh hour, and, when I came down to the quay,
only Herman was there keeping guard over the raft. I inten-
tionally stopped the car a long way off and walked the whole
length of the mole to stretch my legs thoroughly for the last
time for no one knew how long. I jumped on board the raft,
which looked an utter chaos of banana clusters, fruit baskets,
and sacks which had been hurled on board at the very last mo-
ment and were to be stowed and made fast. In the middle of the
heap Herman sat resignedly holding on to a cage with a green
parrot in it, a farewell present from a friendly soul in Lima.
95
KON-T1K1
"Look after the parrot a minute," said Herman. "I must go
ashore and have a last glass of beer. The tug won't be here for
hours."
He had hardly disappeared among the swarm on the quay
when people began to point and wave. And round the point
at full speed came the tug Guardian Rios. She dropped anchor
on the farther side of a waving forest of masts which blocked
the way in to the Kon-Tiki and sent in a large motorboat to
tow us out between the sailing craft. She was packed full of
seamen, officers, and movie photographers, and, while orders
rang out and cameras clicked, a stout towrope was made fast to
the raft's bow.
"Un momenta" I shouted in despair from where I sat with the
parrot. "It's too early; we must wait for the others los expedi-
cionarios" I explained and pointed toward the city.
But nobody understood. The officers only smiled politely,
and the knot at our bow was made fast in more than exem-
plary manner. I cast off the rope and flung it overboard with
all manner of signs and gesticulations. The parrot utilized 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 bow I started a wild chase after
the parrot. It fled shrieking into the bamboo cabin, where I got
it into a corner and caught it by one leg as it tried to flutter
over me. When I came out again and stuffed my flapping tro-
phy 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.
96
Across the Pacific
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 a jerk the Kon-Ti%i
began her long voyage.
My only companion was a Spanish-speaking parrot which sat
glaring sulkily in a cage. People on shore cheered and waved,
and the swarthy movie 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
none appeared. So we came out to the Guardian Rios, 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
senoritas but without a single one of the Kon-Tify's missing
men. This was all very well but it did not solve my problems,
and, while the raft swarmed with charming senoritas, the boat
went back on a fresh search for los expedicionarios noruegos.
Meanwhile Erik and Bengt came sauntering down to the
quay with their arms full of reading matter and odds and ends.
They met the whole stream of people on its way home and
were finally stopped at a police barrier by a kindly official who
told them there was nothing more to see. Bengt told the officer,
with an airy gesture of his cigar, that they had not come to see
anything; they themselves were going with the raft.
"It's no use," the officer said indulgently. "The Kon-Tify sailed
an hour ago."
"Impossible," said Erik, producing a parcel. "Here's the lan-
tern!"
"And there's the navigator," said Bengt, "and I'm the steward.'*
97
KON-TIKI
They forced their way past, but the raft had gone. They
trotted desperately to and fro along the mole where they met
the rest of the party, who also were searching eagerly for the
vanished raft. Then they caught sight of the boat coming in,
and so we were all six finally united and the water was foaming
round the raft as the Guardian Rios towed us out to sea.
It had been late in the afternoon when at last we started, and
the Guardian Rios would not cast us off till we were clear of
the coastal traffic next morning. Directly we were clear of the
mole we met a bit of a head sea, and all the small boats which
were accompanying us turned back one by one. Only a few big
yachts came with us out to the entrance to the bay to see how
things would go out there.
The Kon-Tify followed the tug like an angry billy goat on a
rope, and she butted her bow into the head sea so that the water
rushed on board. This did not look very promising, for this was
a calm sea compared with what we had to expect. In the middle
of the bay the towrope broke, and our end of it sank peacefully
to the bottom while the tug steamed ahead. We flung ourselves
down along the side of the raft to fish for the end of the rope,
while the yachts went on and tried to stop the tug. Stinging
jellyfish as thick as washtubs splashed up and down with the
seas alongside the raft and covered all the ropes with a slippery,
stinging coating of jelly. When the raft rolled one way, we
hung flat over the side waving our arms down toward the sur-
face of the water, until our fingers just touched the slimy tow-
rope. Then the raft rolled back again, and we all stuck our
heads deep down into the sea, while salt water and giant jelly-
fish poured over our backs. We spat and cursed and pulled
jellyfish fibers out of our hair, but when the tug came back the
rope end was up and ready for splicing.
9 8
Across the Pacific
When we were about to throw it on board the tug, we sud-
denly drifted in under the vessel's overhanging stern and were
in danger of being crushed against her by the pressure of the
water. We dropped everything we had and tried to push our-
selves clear with bamboo sticks and paddles before it was too
late. But we never got a proper position, for when we were in
the trough of the sea we could not reach the iron roof above us,
and when the water rose again the Guardian Rios dropped her
whole stern down into the water and would have crushed us
flat if the suction had carried us underneath. Up on the tug's
deck people were running about and shouting; at last the pro-
peller began to turn alongside us, and it helped us clear of the
backwash under the Guardian Rios in the last second. The bow
of the raft had had a few hard knocks and had become a little
crooked in the lashings, but this fault rectified itself by
degrees.
"When a thing starts so damnably, it's bound to end well,"
said Herman. "If only this towing could stop; it'll shake the
raft to bits."
The towing went on all night at a slow speed and with only
orie or two small hitches. The yachts had bidden us farewell
long ago, and the last coast light had disappeared astern. Only
a few ships' lights passed us in the darkness. We divided the
night into watches to keep an eye on the towrope, and we all
had a good snatch of sleep. When it grew light next morning,
a thick mist lay over the coast of Peru, while we had a brilliant
blue sky ahead of us to westward. The sea was running in a
long quiet swell covered with little white crests, and clothes and
logs and everything we took hold of were soaking wet with
dew. It was chilly, and the green water round us was astonish-
ingly cold for 12 south.
99
KON-TIK1
We were in the Humboldt Current, which carries its cold
masses of water up from the Antarctic and sweeps them north
all along the coast of Peru till they swing west and out across
the sea just below the Equator. It was out here that Pizarro,
Zarate, and the other early Spaniards saw for the first time the
Inca Indians' big sailing rafts, which used to go out for 50 to
60 sea miles to catch tunnies and dolphins in the same Hum-
boldt Current. All day long there was an offshore wind out
here, but in the evening the onshore wind reached as far out as
this and helped the rafts home if they needed it.
In the early light we saw our tug lying close by, and we took
care that the raft lay far enough away from her bow while we
launched our little inflated rubber dinghy. It floated on the waves
like a football and danced away with Erik, Bengt, and myself
till we caught hold of the Guardian Eios' rope ladder and clam-
bered on board. With Bengt as interpreter we had our exact
position shown us on our chart. We were 50 sea miles from land
in a northwesterly direction from Callao, and we were to carry
lights the first few nights so as not to be sunk by coasting ships.
Farther out we would not meet a single ship, for no shipping
route ran through that part of the Pacific.
We took a ceremonious farewell of all on board, and many
strange looks followed us as we climbed down into the dinghy
and went tumbling back over the waves to the Kon-Ti%i. Then
the towrope was cast off and the raft was alone again. Thirty-
five men on board the Guardian Rios stood at the rail waving
for as long as we could distinguish outlines. And six men sat
on the boxes on board the Kon-Tify and followed the tug with
their eyes as long as they could see her. Not till the black col-
umn of smoke had dissolved and vanished over the horizon did
we shake our heads and look at one another.
700
Across the Pacific
"Good-by, good-by," said Torstein. "Now we'll have to start
the engine, boys!"
We laughed and felt the wind. There was a rather light
breeze, which had veered from south to southeast. We hoisted
the bamboo yard with the big square sail. It only hung
down slack, giving Kon-Tiki's face a wrinkled, discontented
appearance.
"The old man doesn't like it," said Erik. "There were fresher
breezes when he was young."
"It looks as if we were losing ground," said Herman, and he
threw a piece of balsa wood overboard at the bow.
"One-two-three . . . thirty-nine, forty, forty-one."
The piece of balsa wood still lay quietly in the water along-
side the raft; it had not yet moved halfway along our side.
"We'll have to go over with it," said Torstein optimistically.
"Hope we don't drift astern with the evening breeze," said
Bengt. "It was great fun saying good-by at Callao, but I'd just
as soon miss our welcome back again!"
Now the piece of wood had reached the end of the raft. We
shouted hurrah and began to stow and make fast all the things
that had been flung on board at the last moment. Bengt set up
a primus stove at the bottom of an empty box, and soon after
we were regaling ourselves on hot cocoa and biscuits and mak-
ing a hole in a fresh coconut. The bananas were not quite
ripe yet.
"We're well off now in one way," Erik chuckled. He was
rolling about in wide sheepskin trousers under a huge Indian
hat, with the parrot on his shoulder. "There's only one thing I
don't like," he added, "and that's all the little-known crosscur-
rents which can fling us right upon the rocks along the coast if
we go on lying here like this."
101
KON-TIKI
We considered the possibility of paddling but agreed to wait
for a wind.
And the wind came. It blew up from the southeast quietly
and steadily. Soon the sail filled and bent forward like a swell-
ing breast, with Kon-Tiki's head bursting with pugnacity. And
the Kon-Tify began to move. We shouted westward ho! and
hauled on sheets and ropes. The steering oar was put into the
water, and the watch roster began to operate. We threw balls
of paper and chips of wood overboard at the bow and stood aft
with our watches.
"One, two, three .... eighteen, nineteen now!"
Paper and chips passed the steering oar and soon lay like
pearls on a thread, dipping up and down in the trough of the
waves astern. We went forward yard by yard. The Kon-Tify
did not plow through the sea like a sharp-prowed racing craft.
Blunt and broad, heavy and solid, she splashed sedately forward
over the waves. She did not hurry, but when she had once got
going she pushed ahead with unshakable energy.
At the moment the steering arrangements were our greatest
problem. The raft was built exactly as the Spaniards described
it, but there was no one living in our time who could give us
a practical advance course in sailing an Indian raft. The prob-
lem had been thoroughly discussed among the experts on shore
but with meager results. They knew just as little about it as
we did. As the southeasterly wind increased in strength, it was
necessary to keep the raft on such a course that the sail was
filled from astern. If the raft turned her side too much to the
wind, the sail suddenly swung round and banged against cargo
and men and bamboo cabin, while the whole raft turned round
and continued on the same course stern first. It was a hard
struggle, three men fighting with the sail and three others row-
102
Across the Pacific
ing with the long steering oar to get the nose of the wooden
raft round and away from the wind. And, as soon as we got
her round, the steersman had to take good care that the same
thing did not happen again the next minute.
The steering oar, nineteen feet long, rested loose between
two tholepins on a large block astern. It was the same steering
oar our native friends had used when we floated the timber
down the Palenque in Ecuador. The long mangrove-wood pole
was as tough as steel but so heavy that it would sink if it fell
overboard. At the end of the pole was a large oar blade of fir
wood lashed on with ropes. It took all our strength to hold this
long steering oar steady when the seas drove against it, and our
fingers were tired out by the convulsive grip which was neces-
sary to turn the pole so that the oar blade stood straight up in
the water. This last problem was finally solved by our lashing
a crosspiece to the handle of the steering oar so that we had
a sort ojf lever to turn. And meanwhile the wind increased.
By the late afternoon the trade wind was already blowing at
full strength. It quickly stirred up the ocean into roaring seas
which swept against us from astern. For the first time we fully
realized that here was the sea itself come to meet us; it was
bitter earnest now our communications were cut. Whether
things went well now would depend entirely on the balsa raft's
good qualities in the open sea. We knew that, from now on-
ward, we should never get another onshore wind or chance of
turning back. We were in the pada of the real trade wind, and
every day would carry us farther and farther out to sea. The
only thing to do was to go ahead under full sail; if we tried to
turn homeward, we should only drift farther out to sea stern
first. There was only one possible course, to sail before the wind
with our bow toward the sunset. And, after all, that was the
103
KON-TIKI
object of our voyage to follow the sun in its path as we
thought Kon-Tiki and the old sun-worshipers must have done
when they were driven out to sea from Peru.
We noted with triumph and relief how the wooden raft
rose up over the first threatening wave crests that came foam-
ing toward us. But it was impossible- for the steersman to hold
the oar steady when the roaring seas rolled toward him and
lifted the oar out of the tholepins, or swept it to one side so
that the steersman was swung round like a helpless acrobat.
Not even two men at once could hold the oar steady when the
seas rose against us and poured down over the steersmen aft.
We hit on the idea of running ropes from the oar blade to
each side of the raft; and with other ropes holding the oar in
place in the tholepins it obtained a limited freedom of move-
ment and could defy the worst seas if only we ourselves could
hold on.
As the troughs of the sea gradually grew deeper, it became
clear that we had moved into the swiftest part of the Humboldt
Current. This sea was obviously caused by a current and not
simply raised by the wind. The water was green and cold and
everywhere about us; the jagged mountains of Peru had van-
ished into the dense cloud banks astern. When darkness crept
over the waters, our first duel with the elements began. We
were still not sure of the sea; we were still uncertain whether
it would show itself a friend or an enemy in the intimate prox-
imity we ourselves had sought. When, swallowed up by the
darkness, we heard the general noise from the sea around us
suddenly deafened by the hiss of a roller close by and saw a
white crest come groping toward us on a level with the cabin
roof, we held on tight and waited uneasily to feel the masses
of water smash down over us and the raft*
104
Across the Pacific
But every time there was the same surprise and relief. The
Kon-Tity calmly swung up her stern and rose skyward un-
perturbed, while the masses of water rolled along her sides.
Then we sank down again into the trough of the waves and
waited for the next big sea. The biggest seas often came two
or three in succession, with a long series of smaller seas in be-
tween. It was when two big seas followed each other too closely
that the second broke on board aft, because the first was still
holding our bow in the air. It became, therefore, an unbreak-
able law that the steering watch must have ropes round their
waists, the other ends of which were made fast to the raft, for
there were no bulwarks. Their task was to keep the sail filled
by holding stern to sea and wind.
We had made an old boat's compass fast to a box aft so that
Erik could check our course and calculate our position and
speed. For the time being it was uncertain where we were, for
the sky was overclouded and the horizon one single chaos of
rollers. Two men at a time took turns as steering watch and,
side by side, they had to put all their strength into the fight
with the leaping oar, while the rest of us tried to snatch a little
sleep inside the open bamboo cabin.
When a really big sea came, the men at the helm left the
steering to the ropes and, jumping up, hung on to a bamboo
pole from the cabin roof, while the masses of water thundered
in over them from astern and disappeared between the logs or
over the side of the raft. Then they had to fling themselves at
the oar again before the raft could turn round and the sail
thrash about. For, if the raft took the seas at an angle, the
waves could easily pour right into the bamboo cabin. When
they came from astern, they disappeared between the project-
ing logs at once and seldom came so far forward as the cabin
105
KON-TIKI
wall. The round logs astern let the water pass as if through
the prongs of a fork. The advantage of a raft was obviously
this: the more leaks the better. Through the gaps in our floor
the water ran out but never in.
About midnight a ship's light passed in a northerly direction.
At three another passed on the same course. We waved our
little paraffin lamp and hailed them with flashes from an
electric torch, but they did not see us and the lights passed
slowly northward into the darkness and disappeared. Little did
those on board realize that a real Inca raft lay close to them,
tumbling among the waves. And just as little did we on board
the raft realize that this was our last ship and the last trace of
men we should see till we had reached the other side of the
ocean.
We clung like flies, two and two, to the steering oar in the
darkness and felt the fresh sea water pouring off our hair while
the oar hit us till we were tender both behind and before and
our hands grew stiff with the exertion of hanging on. We had
a good schooling those first days and nights; it turned land-
lubbers into seamen. For the first twenty-four hours every man,
in unbroken succession, had two hours at the helm and three
hours' rest. We arranged that every hour a fresh man should
relieve one of the two steersmen who had been at the helm for
two hours.
Every single muscle in the body was strained to the uttermost
throughout the watch to cope with the steering. When we were
tired out with pushing the oar, we went over to the other side
and pulled, and when arms and chest were sore with pressing,
we turned our backs while the oar kneaded us green and blue
in front and behind. When at last the relief came, we crept
half-dazed into the bamboo cabin, tied a rope round our legs,
106
Across the Pacific
and fell asleep with our salty clothes on before we could get
into our sleeping bags. Almost at the same moment there came
a brutal tug at the rope; three hours had passed, and one had
to go out again and relieve one of the two men at the steering
oar.
The next night was still worse; the seas grew higher instead
of going down. Two hours on end of struggling with the steer-
ing oar was too long; a man was not much use in the second
half of his watch, and the seas got the better of us and hurled
us round and sideways, while the water poured on board. Then
we changed over to one hour at the helm and an hour and a
half's rest. So the first sixty hours passed, in one continuous
struggle against a chaos of waves that rushed upon us, one
after another, without cessation. High waves and low waves,
pointed waves and round waves, slanting waves and waves on
top of other waves.
The one of us who suffered worst was Knut. He was let off
steering watch, but to compensate for this he had to sacrifice
to Neptune and suffered silent agonies in a corner of the cabin.
The parrot sat sulkily in its cage, hanging on with its beak
and flapping its wings every time the raft gave an unexpected
pitch and the sea splashed against the wall from astern. The
Kon-Tify did not roll excessively. She took the seas more
steadily than any boat of the same dimensions, but it was im-
possible to predict which way the deck would lean each time,
and we never learned the art of moving about the raft easily,
for she pitched as much as she rolled.
On the third night the sea went down a bit, although it was
still blowing hard. About four o'clock an unexpected deluge
came foaming through the darkness and knocked the raft
right round before the steersmen realized what was happen-
IOJ
KON-TIKI
ing. The sail thrashed against the bamboo cabin and threatened
to tear both the cabin and itself to pieces. All hands had to go
on deck to secure the cargo and haul on sheets and stays in
the hope of getting the raft on her right course again, so that
the sail might fill and curve forward peacefully. But the raft
would not right herself. She would go stern foremost, and
that was all. The only result of all our hauling and pushing
and rowing was that two men nearly went overboard in a sea
when the sail caught them in the dark.
The sea had clearly become calmer. Stiff and sore, with
skinned palms and sleepy eyes, we were not worth a row of
beans. Better to save our strength in case the weather should
call us out to a worse passage of arms. One could never know.
So we furled the sail and rolled it round the bamboo yard. The
Kon-Tity lay sideways on to the seas and took them like a
cork. Everything on board was lashed fast, and all six of us
crawled into the little bamboo cabin, huddled together, and
slept like mummies in a sardine tin.
We little guessed that we had struggled through the hardest
steering of the voyage. Not till we were far out on the ocean
did we discover the Incas' simple and ingenious way of steering
a raft.
We did not wake till well on in the day, when the parrot
began to whistle and halloo and dance to and fro on its perch.
Outside the sea was still running high but in long, even ridges
and not so wild and confused as the day before. The first thing
we saw was that the sun was beating down on the yellow bam-
boo deck and giving the sea all round us a bright and friendly
aspect. What did it matter if the seas foamed and rose high so
long as they only left us in peace on the raft? What did it
matter if they rose straight up in front of our noses when we
108
Across the Pacific
knew that in a second the raft would go over the top and
flatten out the foaming ridge like a steam roller, while the
heavy threatening mountain of water only lifted us up in the
air and rolled groaning and gurgling under the floor? The
old masters from Peru knew what they were doing when they
avoided a hollow hull which could fill with water, or a vessel
so long that it would not take the waves one by one* A cork steam
roller that was what the balsa raft amounted to.
Erik took our position at noon and found that, in addition
to our run under sail, we had made a big deviation northward
along the coast We still lay in the Humboldt Current just 100
sea miles from land. The great question was whether we would
get into the treacherous eddies south of the Galapagos Islands.
This could have fatal consequences, for up there we might be
swept in all directions by strong ocean currents making toward
the coast of Central America. But, if things went as we calcu-
lated, we should swing west across the sea with the main cur-
rent before we got as far north as the Galapagos. The wind
was still blowing straight from southeast. We hoisted the sail,
turned the raft stern to sea, and continued our steering watches.
Knut had now recovered from the torments of seasickness,
and he and Torstein clambered up to the swaying masthead,
where they experimented with mysterious radio aerials which
they sent up both by balloon and by kite. Suddenly one of
them shouted from the radio corner of the cabin that he could
hear the naval station at Lima calling us. They were telling
us that the American ambassador's plane was on its way out
from the coast to bid us a last good-by and see what we looked
like at sea. Soon after we obtained direct contact with the oper-
ator in the plane and then a completely unexpected chat with
the secretary to the expedition, Gerd Void, who was on board.
109
KON-TIKI
We gave our position as exactly as we could and sent direction-
finding signals for hours. The voice in the ether grew stronger
and weaker as ARMY-iip circled round near and far and
searched. But we did not hear the drone of the engines and
never saw the plane. It was not easy to find the low raft down
in the trough of the seas, and our own view was strictly limited.
At last the plane had to give it up and returned to the coast.
It was the last time anyone tried to search for us.
The sea ran high in the days that followed, but the waves
came hissing along from the southeast with even spaces between
them and the steering went more easily. We took the sea and
wind on the port quarter, so that the steersman got fewer seas
over him and the raft went more steadily and did not swing
round. We noted anxiously that the southeast trade wind and
the Humboldt Current were, day after day, sending us straight
across on a course leading to the countercurrents round the
Galapagos Islands. And we were going due northwest so
quickly that our daily average in those days was 55 to 60 sea
miles, with a record of 71 sea miles in one day.
"Are the Galapagos a nice place to go to?" Knut asked cau-
tiously one day, looking at our chart where a string of pearls
indicating our positions was marked and resembled a finger
pointing balefully toward the accursed Galapagos Islands.
"Hardly," I said. "The Inca Tupak Yupanqui is said to have
sailed from Ecuador to the Galapagos just before the time of
Columbus, but neither he nor any other native settled there
because there was no water."
"O.K.," said Knut. "Then we damned well won't go there.
I hope we don't anyhow."
We were now so accustomed to having the sea dancing round
us that we took no account of it. What did it matter if we
7/0
Across the Pacific
danced round a bit with a thousand fathoms of water under
us, so long as we and the raft were always on top ? It was only
that here the next question arose how long could we count
on keeping on top ? It was easy to see that the balsa logs ab-
sorbed water. The aft crossbeam was worse than the others;
on it we could press our whole finger tip into the soaked wood
till the water squelched. Without saying anything I broke off
a piece of the sodden wood and threw it overboard. It sank
quietly beneath the surface and slowly vanished down into the
depths. Later I saw two or three of the other fellows do exactly
the same when they thought no one was looking. They stood
looking reverently at the waterlogged piece of wood sinking
quietly into the green water.
We had noted the water line on the raft when we started,
but in the rough sea it was impossible to see how deep we lay,
for one moment the logs were lifted out of the water and the
next they went deep down into it. But, if we drove a knife
into the timber, we saw to our joy that the wood was dry an
inch or so below the surface. We calculated that, if the water
continued to force its way in at the same pace, the raft would
be lying and floating just under the surface of the water by
the time we could expect to be approaching land. But we
hoped that the sap further in would act as an impregnation
and check the absorption.
Then there was another menace which troubled our minds
a little during the first weeks. The ropes. In the daytime we
were so busy that we thought little about it, but, when darkness
had fallen and we had crept into bed on the cabin floor, we
had more time to think, feel, and listen. As we lay there, each
man on his straw mattress, we could feel the reed matting
under us heaving in time with the wooden logs. In addition to
KON-TIKI
the movements of the raft itself all nine logs moved recipro-
cally. When one came up, another went down with a gentle
heaving movement. They did not move much, but it was
enough to make one feel as if one were lying on the back of
a large breathing animal, and we preferred to lie on a log
lengthways. The first two nights were the worst, but then we
were too tired to bother about it. Later the ropes swelled a
little in the water and kept the nine logs quieter.
But all the same there was never a flat surface on board
which kept quite still in relation to its surroundings. As the
foundation moved up and down and round at every joint,
everything else moved with it. The bamboo deck, the double
mast, the four plaited walls of the cabin, and the roof of slats
with the leaves on it all were made fast just with ropes and
twisted about and lifted themselves in opposite directions. It
was almost unnoticeable but it was evident enough. If one
corner went up, the other corner came down, and if one half
of the roof dragged all its laths forward, the other half dragged
its laths astern. And, if we looked out through the open wall,
there was still more life and movement, for there the sky moved
quietly round in a circle while the sea leaped high toward it.
The ropes took the whole pressure. All night we could hear
them creaking and groaning, chafing and squeaking.' It was
like one single complaining chorus round us in the dark, each
rope having its own note according to its thickness and tautness.
Every morning we made a thorough inspection of the ropes,
We were even let down with our heads in the water over the
edge of the raft, while two men held us tight by the ankles,
to see if the ropes on the bottom of the raft were all right.
But the ropes held. A fortnight the seamen had said. Then all
the ropes would be worn out. But, in spite of this consensus of
112
Steering watch. We divided the day and night into watches of two hours.
Although the waves often towered round us as high as our mast tops, the raft
always rode over them in style. Author at the steering oar.
Above: Toward Polynesia in sunny weather. With the help of ocean currents
and trade winds we moved westward without interruption. Our average speed
was as much as 42/2 sea miles a day.
Below: The cook's first duty in the morning was to collect all the flying fish
which had landed on deck during the night.
Above: A fresh breeze. With a good wind we danced over the waves so that
the raft groaned and creaked; 71 sea miles in a day was our record.
~Below; View astern from the mast. Many thousand tons of water poured in
astern daily and vanished between the logs.
Evening. Watzinger takes the last weather observation; we eat our supper
outside the cabin entrance; the lantern is hung up; and the sun sinks into the
Pacific with a brilliant display of colors.
Across the Pacific
opinion, we had not so far found the smallest sign of wear.
Not till we were far out to sea did we find the solution. The
balsa wood was so soft that the ropes wore their way slowly
into the wood and were protected, instead of the logs wearing
the ropes.
After a week or so the sea grew calmer, and we noticed that it
became blue instead of green. We began to go west-northwest
instead of due northwest and took this as the first faint sign
that we had got out of the coastal current and had some hope
of being carried out to sea.
The very first day we were left alone on the sea we had
noticed fish round the raft, but we were too much occupied
with the steering to think of fishing. The second day we went
right into a thick shoal of sardines, and soon afterward an
eight-foot blue shark came along and rolled over with its
white belly uppermost as it rubbed against the raft's stern,
where Herman and Bengt stood barelegged in the seas, steer-
ing. It played round us for a while but disappeared when we
got the hand harpoon ready for action.
Next day we were visited by tunnies, bonitos, and dolphins,
and when a big flying fish thudded on board we used it as bait
and at once pulled in two large dolphins (dorados) weighing
from twenty to thirty-five pounds each. This was food for
several days. On steering watch we could see many fish we did
not even know, and one day we came into a school of porpoises
which seemed quite endless. The black backs tumbled about,
packed close together, right in to the side of the raft, and sprang
up here and there all over the sea as far as we could see from the
masthead. And the nearer we came to the Equator, and the
farther from the coast, the commoner flying fish became. When
at last we came out into the blue water where the sea rolled
KON-TIKl
by majestically, sunlit and serene, ruffled by gusts of wind, we
could see them glittering like a rain of projectiles which shot
from the water and flew in a straight line till their power of
flight was exhausted and they vanished beneath the surface.
If we set the little paraffin lamp out at night, flying fish were
attracted by the light and, large and small, shot over the raft.
They often struck the bamboo cabin or the sail and tumbled
helpless on the deck. Unable to get a take-off by swimming
through the water, they just remained lying and kicking help-
lessly, like large-eyed herrings with long breast fins. It some-
times happened that we heard an outburst of strong language
from a man on deck when a cold flying fish came unex-
pectedly, at a good speed, slap into his face. They always came
at a good pace and snout first, and if they caught one full in
the face they made it burn and tingle. But the unprovoked
attack was quickly forgiven by the injured party, for, with all
its drawbacks, we were in a maritime land of enchantment
where delicious fish dishes came hurling through the air. We
used to fry them for breakfast, and whether it was the fish, the
cook, or our appetites, they reminded us of fried troutlings
once we had scraped the scales off.
The cook's first duty, when he got up in the morning, was
to go out on deck and collect all the flying fish that had landed
on board in the course of the night. There were usually half a
dozen or more, and once we found twenty-six fat flying fish
on the raft. Knut was much upset one morning because, when
he was standing operating with the frying pan, a flying fish
struck him on the hand instead of landing right in the cook-
ing fat.
Our neighborly intimacy with the sea was not fully realized
by Torstein till he woke one morning and found a sardine on
114
Across the Pacific
his pillow. There was so little room in the cabin that Torstein
had to lie with his head in the doorway, and, if anyone in-
advertently trod on his face when going out at night, he bit
him in the leg. He grasped the sardine by the tail and confided
to it understandingly that all sardines had his entire sympathy.
We conscientiously drew in our legs so that Torstein should
have more room the next night, but then something happened
which caused Torstein to find himself a sleeping place on top
of all the kitchen utensils in the radio corner.
It was a |ew nights later. It was overcast and pitch dark, and
Torstein had placed the paraffin lamp close by his head, so that
the night watches could see where they were treading when
they crept in and out over his head. About four o'clock Tor-
stein was awakened by the lamp tumbling over and something
cold and wet flapping about his ears. "Flying fish," he thought
and felt for it in the darkness to throw it away. He caught
hold of something long and wet, which wriggled like a snake,
and let go as if he had burned himself. The unseen visitor
twisted itself away and over to Herman, while Torstein tried
to get the lamp lighted again. Herman started up, too, and this
made me wake, thinking of the octopus which came up at
night in these waters.
When we got the lamp lighted, Herman was sitting in tri-
umph with his hand gripping the neck of a long thin fish
which wriggled in his hands like an eel. The fish was over
three feet long, as slender as a snake, with dull black eyes and
a long snout with a greedy jaw full of long sharp teeth. The
teeth were as sharp as knives and could be folded back into
the roof of the mouth to make way for what was swallowed.
Under Herman's grip a large-eyed white fish, about eight
inches long, was suddenly thrown up from the stomach and
"5
KON-T1KI
out of the mouth of the predatory fish, and soon after up came
another like it. These were clearly two deep-water fish, much
torn by the snakefish's teeth. The snakefish's thin skin was
bluish violet on the back and steel blue underneath, and it
came loose in flakes when we took hold of it.
Bengt too was awakened at last by all the noise, and we held
the lamp and the long fish under his nose. He sat up drowsily
in his sleeping bag and said solemnly:
"No, fish like that don't exist."
With which he turned over quietly and fell asleep again.
Bengt was not far wrong. It appeared later that we six sitting
round the lamp in the bamboo cabin were the first men to
have seen this fish alive. Only the skeleton of a fish like this
one had been found a few times on the coast of South America
and the Galapagos Islands; ichthyologists called it Gempylus,
or snake mackerel, and thought it lived at the bottom of the
sea at a great depth because no one had ever seen it alive. But,
if it lived at a great depth, it must have done so by day when
the sun blinded its big eyes. For on dark nights Gcmpylus
was abroad high over the surface of the sea; we on the raft
had experience of that.
A week after the rare fish had landed on Torstein's sleeping
bag, we had another visit. Again it was four in the morning,
and the new moon had set so that it was dark but the stars
were shining. The raft was steering easily, and when my watch
was over I took a turn along the edge of the raft to see if every-
thing was shipshape for the new watch. I had a rope round my
waist, as the watch always had, and, with the paraffin lamp
in my hand, I was walking carefully along the outermost log
to get round the mast. The log was wet and slippery, and I
was furious when someone quite unexpectedly caught hold of
116
Across the Pacific
the rope behind me and jerked till I nearly lost my balance.
I turned round wrathfully with the lantern, but not a soul was
to be seen. There came a new tug at the rope, and I saw some-
thing shiny lying writhing on the deck. It was a fresh Gempy-
lus r and this time it had got its teeth so deep into the rope that
several of them broke before I got the rope loose. Presumably
the light of the lantern had flashed along the curving white
rope, and our visitor from the depths of the sea had caught
hold in the hope of jumping up and snatching an extra long
and tasty tidbit. It ended its days in a jar of Formalin.
The sea contains many surprises for him who has his floor
on a level with the surface and drifts along slowly and noise-
lessly. A sportsman who breaks his way through the woods
may come back and say that no wild life is to be seen. Another
may sit down on a stump and wait, and often rustlings and
cracklings will begin and curious eyes peer out. So it is on the
sea, too. We usually plow across it with roaring engines and
piston strokes, with the water foaming round our bow. Then
we come back and say that there is nothing to see far out on
the ocean.
Not a day passed but we, as we sat floating on the surface
of the sea, were visited by inquisitive guests which wriggled
and waggled about us, and a few of them, such as dolphins
and pilot fish, grew so familiar that they accompanied the raft
across the sea and kept round us day and night.
When night had fallen and the stars were twinkling in the
dark tropical sky, a phosphorescence flashed around us in ri-
valry with the stars, and single glowing plankton resembled
round live coals so vividly that we involuntarily drew in our
bare legs when the glowing pellets were washed up round our
feet at the raft's stern. When we caught them, we saw that
KON-T1KI
they were little brightly shining species of shrimp. On such
nights we were sometimes scared when two round shining eyes
suddenly rose out of the sea right alongside the raft and glared
at us with an unblinking hypnotic stare. The visitors were
often big squids which came up and floated on the surface with
their devilish green eyes shining in the dark like phosphorus. But
sometimes the shining eyes were those of deep-water fish which
came up only at night and lay staring, fascinated by the
glimmer of light before them. Several times, when the sea was
calm, the black water round the raft was suddenly full of
round heads two or three feet in diameter, lying motionless
and staring at us with great glowing eyes. On other nights
balls of light three feet and more in diameter would be visible
down in the water, flashing at irregular intervals like electric
lights turned on for a moment.
We gradually grew accustomed to having these subterranean
or submarine creatures under the floor, but nevertheless we were
just as surprised every time a new species appeared. About two
o'clock on a cloudy night, when the man at the helm had diffi-
culty in distinguishing black water from black sky, he caught
sight of a faint illumination down in the water which slowly
took the shape of a large animal. It was impossible to say
whether it was plankton shining on its body, or whether the
animal itself had a phosphorescent surface, but the glimmer
down in the black water gave the ghostly creature obscure,
wavering outlines. Sometimes it was roundish, sometimes oval,
or triangular, and suddenly it split into two parts which swam
to and fro under the raft independently of each other. Finally
there were three of these large shining phantoms wandering
round in slow circles under us.
They were real monsters, for the visible parts alone were
118
Across the Pacific
some five fathoms long, and we all quickly collected on deck
and followed the ghost dance. It went on for hour after hour,
following the course of the raft. Mysterious and noiseless, our
shining companions kept a good way beneath the surface,
mostly on the starboard side where the light was, but often
they were right under the raft or appeared on the port side.
The glimmer of light on their backs revealed that the beasts
were bigger than elephants but they were not whales, for they
never came up to breathe. Were they giant ray fish which
changed shape when they turned over on their sides? They
took no notice at all if we held the light right down on the
surface to lure them up, so that we might see what kind of
creatures they were. And, like all proper goblins and ghosts,
they had sunk into the depths when the dawn began to break.
We never got a proper explanation of this nocturnal visit
from the three shining monsters, unless the solution was af-
forded by another visit we received a day and a half later in
the full midday sunshine. It was May 24, and we were lying
drifting on a leisurely swell in exactly 95 west by 7 south.
It was about noon, and we had thrown overboard the guts of
two big dolphins we had caught earlier in the morning. I was
having a refreshing plunge overboard at the bow, lying in the
water but keeping a good lookout and hanging on to a rope
end, when I caught sight of a thick brown fish, six feet long,
which came swimming inquisitively toward me through the
crystal-clear sea water. I hopped quickly up on to the edge of
the raft and sat in the hot sun looking at the fish as it passed
quietly, when I heard a wild war whoop from Knut, who was
sitting aft behind the bamboo cabin. He bellowed "Shark!"
till his voice cracked in a falsetto, and, as we had sharks swim-
ming alongside the raft almost daily without creating such
7/9
KON-TIK1
excitement, we all realized that this must be something extra-
special and flocked astern to Knut's assistance.
Knut had been squatting there, washing his pants in the
swell, and when he looked up for a moment he was staring
straight into the biggest and ugliest face any of us had ever
seen in the whole of our lives. It was the head of a veritable
sea monster, so huge and so hideous that, if the Old Man of
the Sea himself had come up, he could not have made such
an s impression on us. The head was broad and flat like a frog's,
with two small eyes right at the sides, and a toadlike jaw which
was four or five feet wide and had long fringes drooping from
the corners of the mouth. Behind the head was an enormous
body ending in a long thin tail with a pointed tail fin which
stood straight up and showed that this sea monster was not
any kind of whale. The body looked brownish under the water,
but both head and body were thickly covered with small
white spots.
The monster came quietly, lazily swimming after us from
astern. It grinned like a bulldog and lashed gently with its
tail. The large round dorsal fin projected clear of the water and
sometimes the tail fin as well, and, when the creature was in
the trough of the swell, the water flowed about the broad back
as though washing round a submerged reef. In front of the
broad jaws swam a whole crowd of zebra-striped pilot fish in
fan formation, and large remora fish and other parasites sat
firmly attached to the huge body and traveled with it through
the water, so that the whole thing looked like a curious zoolog-
ical collection crowded round something that resembled a
floating deep-water reef.
A twenty-five-pound dolphin, attached to six of our largest
fishhooks, was hanging behind the raft as bait for sharks, and
120
Across the Pacific
a swarm of the pilot fish shot straight off, nosed the dolphin
without touching it, and then hurried back to their lord and
master, the sea king. Like a mechanical monster it set its ma-
chinery going and came gliding at leisure toward the dolphin
which lay, a beggarly trifle, before its jaws. We tried to pull
the dolphin in, and the sea monster followed slowly, right up
to the side of the raft. It did not open its mouth but just let
the dolphin bump against it, as if to throw open the whole
door for such an insignificant scrap was not worth while. When
the giant came close up to the raft, it rubbed its back against
the heavy steering oar, which was just lifted up out of the
water, and now we had ample opportunity of studying the
monster at the closest quarters at such close quarters that I
thought we had all gone mad, for we roared stupidly with
laughter and shouted overexcitedly at the completely fantastic
sight we saw. Walt Disney himself, with all his powers of
imagination, could not have created a more hair-raising sea
monster than that which thus suddenly lay with its terrific
jaws along the raft's side.
The monster was a whale shark, the largest shark and the
largest fish known in the world today. It is exceedingly rare,
but scattered specimens are observed here and there in the
tropical oceans. The whale shark has an average length of
fifty feet, and according to zoologists it weighs fifteen tons. It
is said that large specimens can attain a length of sixty
feet; one harpooned baby had a liver weighing six hundred
pounds and a collection of three thousand teeth in each of its
broad jaws.
Our monster was so large that, when it began to swim in
circles round us and under the raft, its head was visible on one
side while the whole of its tail stuck out on the other. And so
121
KON-TIKI
incredibly grotesque, inert, and stupid did it appear when seen
fullface that we could not help shouting with laughter, al-
though we realized that it had strength enough in its tail to
smash both balsa logs and ropes to pieces if it attacked us.
Again and again it described narrower and narrower circles
just under the raft, while all we could do was to wait and see
what might happen. When it appeared on the other side, it
glided amiably under the steering oar and lifted it up in the
air, while the oar blade slid along the creature's back.
We stood round the raft with hand harpoons ready for action,
but they seemed to us like toothpicks in relation to the mam-
moth beast we had to deal with. There was no indication that
the whale shark ever thought of leaving us again; it circled
round us and followed like a faithful dog, close up to the raft.
None of us had ever experienced or thought we should experi-
ence anything like it; the whole adventure, with the sea mon-
ster swimming behind and under the raft, seemed to us so
completely unnatural that we could not really take it seriously.
In reality the whale shark went on encircling us for barely
an hour, but to us the visit seemed to last a whole day. At last
it became too exciting for Erik, who was standing at a corner
of the raft with an eight-foot hand harpoon, and, encouraged
by ill-considered shouts, he raised the harpoon above his head.
As the whale shark came gliding slowly toward him and its
broad head moved right under the corner of the raft, Erik
thrust the harpoon with all his giant strength do^n between
his legs and deep into the whale shark's gristly head. It was a
second or two before the giant understood properly what was
happening. Then in a flash the placid half-wit was transformed
into a mountain of steel muscles.
We heard a swishing noise as the harpoon line rushed over
722
Across the Pacific
the edge of the raft and saw a cascade of water as the giant
stood on its head and plunged down into the depths. The three
men who were standing nearest were flung about the place,
head over heels, and two of them were flayed and burned by
the line as it rushed through the air. The thick line, strong
enough to hold a boat, was caught up on the side of the raft
but snapped at once like a piece of twine, and a few seconds
later a broken-off harpoon shaft came up to the surface two
hundred yards away. A shoal of frightened pilot fish shot off
through the water in a desperate attempt to keep up with their
old lord and master. We waited a long time for the monster
to come racing back like an infuriated submarine, but we never
saw anything more of him.
We were now in the South Equatorial Current and moving
in a westerly direction just 400 sea miles south of the Galapagos.
There was no longer any danger of drifting into the Galapagos
currents, and the only contacts we had with this group of is-
lands were greetings from big sea turtles which no doubt had
strayed far out to sea from the islands. One day we saw a
thumping turtle lying struggling with its head and one great
fin above the surface of the water. As the swell rose, we saw a
shimmer of green and blue and gold in the water under the
turtle, and we discovered that it was engaged in a life-and-
death struggle with dolphins. The fight was apparently quite
one-sided; it consisted in twelve to fifteen big-headed, bril-
liantly colored dolphins attacking the turtle's neck and fins
and apparently trying to tire it out, for the turtle could not lie
for days on end with its head and paddles drawn inside its
shell.
When the turtle caught sight of the raft, it dived and made
straight for us, pursued by the glittering fish. It came close up
123
KON-T1KI
to the side of the raft and was showing signs of wanting to
climb up on to the timber when it caught sight of us already
standing there. If we had been more practiced, we could have
captured it with ropes without difficulty as the huge carapace
paddled quietly along the side of the raft. But we spent the
time that mattered in staring, and when we had the lasso ready
the giant turtle had already passed our bow. We flung the little
rubber dinghy into the water, and Herman, Bengt, and Tor-
stein went in pursuit of the turtle in the round nutshell, which
was not a great deal bigger than what swam ahead of them.
Bengt, as steward, saw in his mind's eye endless meat dishes
and a most delicious turtle soup.
But the faster they rowed, the faster the turtle slipped
through the water just below the surface, and they were not
more than a hundred yards from the raft when the turtle sud-
denly disappeared without a trace. But they had done one good
deed at any rate. For when the little yellow rubber dinghy
came dancing back over the water, it had the whole glittering
school of dolphins after it. They circled round the new turtle,
and the boldest snapped at the oar blades which dipped into
the water like fins; meanwhile, the peaceful turtle escaped
successfully from all its ignoble persecutors.
224
HALFWAY
Daily Life and Experiments -
Drinking Water for Raftsmen -
Potato and Gourd Reveal a Message -
Coconuts and Crabs - Johannes -
We Sail through Fish Soup -Plankton -
Edible Phosphorescence -
Encounter with Whales - Ants and Barnacles -
Swimming Pets -
The Dolphin as a Companion -
Catching Shares -
The Kon-Tiki Becomes a Sea Monster -
Pilot Fish and Remora Left Us by Shares -
Flying Squids - Unknown Visitors -
The Diving Basket -
With Tunny and Bonito
in Their Own Element -
The Spurious Reef -
Centerboard Solves a Riddle ~ Halfway
Halfway
THE WEEKS PASSED. WE SAW NO SIGN EITHER OF A
ship or of drifting remains to show that there were other peo-
ple in the world. The whole sea was ours, and, with all the
gates of the horizon open, real peace and freedom were wafted
down from the firmament itself.
It was as though the fresh salt tang in the air, and all the blue
purity that surrounded us, had washed and cleansed both body
and soul. To us on the raft the great problems of civilized man
appeared false and illusory like perverted products of the hu-
man mind. Only the elements mattered. And the elements
seemed to ignore the little raft. Or perhaps they accepted it as
a natural object, which did not break the harmony of the sea
but adapted itself to current and sea like bird and fish. Instead
of being a fearsome enemy, flinging itself at us, the elements
had become a reliable friend which steadily and surely helped
us onward. While wind and waves pushed and propelled, the
ocean current lay under us and pulled, straight toward our goal.
If a boat had cruised our way on any average day out at sea,
it would have found us bobbing quietly up and down over a
727
KON-T1KI
long rolling swell covered with little white-crested waves, while
the trade wind held the orange sail bent steadily toward
Polynesia.
Those on board would have seen, at the stern of the raft, a
brown bearded man with no clothes on, either struggling
desperately with a long steering oar while he hauled on a
tangled rope, or, in calm weather, just sitting on a box dozing
in the hot sun and keeping a leisurely hold on the steering oar
with his toes.
If this man happened not to be Bengt, the latter would have
been found lying on his stomach in the cabin door with one
of his seventy-three sociological books. Bengt had further been
appointed steward and was responsible for fixing the daily
rations. Herman might have been found anywhere at any time
of the day at the masthead with meteorological instruments,
underneath the raft with diving goggles on checking a center-
board, or in tow in the rubber dinghy, busy with balloons and
curious measuring apparatus. He was our technical chief and
responsible for meteorological and hydrographical observations.
Knut and Torstein were always doing something with their
wet dry batteries, soldering irons, and circuits. All their war-
time training was required to keep the little radio station going
in spray and dew a foot above the surface of the water.
Every night they took turns sending our reports and weather
observations out into the ether, where they were picked up by
chance radio amateurs who passed the reports on to the Meteor-
ological Institute in Washington and other destinations. Erik
was usually sitting patching sails and splicing ropes, or carving
in wood and drawing sketches of bearded men and odd fish.
And at noon every day he took the sextant and mounted a box
to look at the sun and find out how far we had moved since
128
Above: An unusual bedfellow
Inside the bamboo cabin we were protected against both wind and tropical
sun. The walls were of plaited bamboo and the roof of banana leaves, so that
we almost felt we were in a virgin forest instead of at sea. From left: Watzinger
Haugland, Raaby, Danielsson, the author.
On opposite page: Watzinger with a bonito. This fish was certainly the best
eating. It sometimes happened that bonitos swam on board with the waves.
Above: Beneath fCon-Tiki's bearded face. The head on the sail was copied
from a stone carving of Kon-Tiki, the prehistoric chieftain who led a fair-
skinned civilized people across the Pacific 1,500 years ago.
Below: Windless weather and tropical heat troubled us very little. When the
sea was calm, we made long trips in our little rubber boat.
Halfway
the day before. I myself had enough to do with the logbook
and reports and the collecting of plankton, fishing, and film-
ing. Every man had his sphere of responsibility, and no one
interfered with the others' work. All difficult jobs, like steering
watch and cooking, were divided equally. Every man had two
hours each day and two hours each night at the steering oar.
And duty as cook was in accordance with a daily roster. There
were few laws and regulations on board, except that the night
watch must have a rope round his waist, that the lifesaving
rope had its regular place, that all meals were consumed out-
side the cabin wall, and that the "right place" was only at the
farthest end of the logs astern. If an important deci$fbn was to
be taken on board, we called a powwow in Indian style and
discussed the matter together before anything was settled.
An ordinary day on board the Kon-Tify began with the last
night watch shaking some life into the cook, who crawled out
sleepily on to the dewy deck in the morning sun and began to
gather flying fish. Instead of eating the fish raw, according to
both Polynesian and Peruvian recipes, we fried them over a
small primus stove at the bottom of a box which stood lashed
fast to the deck outside the cabin door. This box was our
kitchen. Here there was usually shelter from the southeast
trade wind which regularly blew on to our other quarter. Only
when the wind and sea juggled too much with the primus
flame did it set fire to the wooden box, and once, when the cook
had fallen asleep, the whole box became a mass of flames which
spread to the very wall of the bamboo cabin. But the fire on the
wall was quickly put out when the smoke poured into the hut,
for, after all, we had never far to go for water on board the
on-Tity.
The smell of fried fish seldom managed to wake the snorers
I2 9
KON-T1K1
inside the bamboo cabin, so the cook usually had to stick a
fork into them or sing "Breakfast's ready!" so out of tune that
no one could bear to listen to him any longer. If there were no
sharks' fins alongside the raft, the day began with a quick
plunge in the Pacific, followed by breakfast in the open air
on the edge of the raft.
The food on board was above reproach. The cuisine was
divided into two experimental menus, one dedicated to the
quartermaster and the twentieth century, one to Kon-Tiki and
the fifth century. Torstein and Bengt were the subjects of the
first experiment and restricted their diet to the slim little pack-
ages of special provisions which we had squeezed down into
the hole between the logs and the bamboo deck. Fish and
marine food, however, had never been their strong suit. Every
few weeks we untied the lashings which held down the bam-
boo deck and took out fresh supplies, which we lashed fast
forward of the bamboo cabin. The tough layer of asphalt out-
side the cardboard proved resistant, while the hermetically
sealed tins lying loose beside it were penetrated and ruined by
the sea water which continually washed round our provisions.
Kon-Tiki, on his original voyage across the sea, had no as-
phalt or hermetically sealed tins; nevertheless he had no serious
food problems. In those days, too, supplies consisted of what
the men took with them from land and what they obtained
for themselves on the voyage. We may assume that, when
Kon-Tiki sailed from the coast of Peru after his defeat by Lake
Titicaca, he had one of two objectives in mind. As the spiritual
representative of the sun among a solely sun-worshiping peo-
ple, it is very probable that he ventured straight out to sea to
follow the sun itself on its journey in the hope of finding a
new and more peaceful country. An alternative possibility for
130
Halfway
him was to sail his rafts up the coast of South America in order
to found a new kingdom out of reach of his persecutors. Clear
of the dangerous rocky coast and hostile tribes along the shore,
he would, like ourselves, fall an easy prey to the southeast
trade wind and the Humboldt Current and, in the power of the
elements, he would drift in exactly the same large semicircle
right toward the sunset.
Whatever these sun-worshipers' plans were when they fled
from their homeland, they certainly provided themselves with
supplies for the voyage. Dried meat and fish and sweet potatoes
were the most important part of their primitive diet. When
the raftsmen of that time put to sea along the desert coast of
Peru, they had ample supplies of water on board. Instead of
clay vessels they generally used the skin of giant bottle gourds,
which was resistant to bumps and blows, while even more
adapted to raft use were the thick canes of giant bamboos.
They perforated through all the knots in the center and poured
water in through a little hole at the end, which they stopped
with a plug or with pitch or resin. Thirty or forty, of these
thick bamboo canes could be lashed fast along the raft under
the bamboo deck, where they lay shaded and cool with fresh
sea water about 79 Fahrenheit in the Equatorial Current
washing about them. A store of this kind would contain twice
as much water as we ourselves used on our whole voyage, and
still more could be taken by simply lashing on more bamboo
canes in the water underneath the raft, where they weighed
nothing and occupied no space.
We found that after two months fresh water began to grow
stale and have a bad taste. But by then one is well through the
first ocean area, in which there is little rain, and has arrived
in regions where heavy rain showers can maintain the water
KON-TIK1
supply. We served out a good quart of water per man daily,
and it was by no means always that the ration was consumed.
Even if our predecessors had started from land with inade-
quate supplies, they would have managed well enough as long
as they drifted across the sea with the current, in which fish
abounded. There was not a day on our whole voyage on which
fish were not swimming round the raft and could not easily
be caught. Scarcely a day passed without flying fish, at any
rate, coming on board of their own accord. It even happened
that large bonitos, delicious eating, swam on board with the
masses of water that came from astern and lay kicking on the
raft when the water had vanished down between the logs as a
sieve. To starve to death was impossible.
The old natives knew well the device which many ship-
wrecked men hit upon during the war chewing thirst-quench-
ing moisture out of raw fish. One can also press the juices out
by twisting pieces of fish in a cloth, or, if the fish is large, it is
a fairly simple matter to cut holes in its side, which soon be-
come filled with ooze from the fish's lymphatic glands. It does
not taste good if one has anything better to drink, but the
percentage of salt is so low that one's thirst is quenched.
The necessity for drinking water was greatly reduced if we
bathed regularly and lay down wet in the shady cabin. If a
shark was patrolling majestically round about us and prevent-
ing a real plunge from the side of the raft, one had only to lie
down on the logs aft and get a good grip of the ropes with one's
fingers and tots. Then we got several bathfuls of crystal-clear
Pacific pouring over us every few seconds.
When tormented by thirst in a hot climate, one generally
assumes that the body needs water, and this may often lead to
immoderate inroads on the water ration without any benefit
132
Halfway
whatever. On really hot days in the tropics you can pour tepid
water down your throat till you taste it at the back of your
mouth, and you are just as thirsty. It is not liquid the body
needs then, but, curiously enough, salt. The special rations we
had on board included salt tablets to be taken regularly on par-
ticularly hot days, because perspiration drains the body of salt.
We experienced days like this when the wind had died away
and the sun blazed down on the raft without mercy. Our water
ration could be ladled into us till it squelched in our stomachs,
but our throats malignantly demanded much more. On such
days we added from 20 to 40 per cent of bitter, salt sea water
to our fresh-water ration and found, to our surprise, that this
brackish water quenched our thirst. We had the taste of sea
water in our mouths for a long time afterward but never felt
unwell, and moreover we had our water ration considerably
increased.
One morning, as we sat at breakfast, an unexpected sea
splashed into our gruel and taught us quite gratuitously that
the taste of oats removed the greater part of the sickening taste
of sea water!
The old Polynesians had preserved some curious traditions,
according to which their earliest forefathers, when they came
sailing across the sea, had with them leaves of a certain plant
which they chewed, with the result that their thirst disappeared.
Another effect of the plant was that in an emergency they
could drink sea water without being sick. No such plants grew
in the South Sea islands; they must, therefore, have originated
in their ancestors' homeland. The Polynesian historians re-
peated these statements so often that modern scientists investi-
gated the matter and came to the conclusion that the only
known plant with such an effect was the coca plant, which
KON-T1K1
grew only in Peru. And in prehistoric Peru this very coca plant,
which contains cocaine, was regularly used both by the Incas
and by their vanished forerunners, as is shown by discoveries
in pre-Inca graves. On exhausting mountain journeys and sea
voyages they took with them piles of these leaves and chewed
them for days on end to remove the feelings of thirst and weari-
ness. And over a fairly short period the chewing of coca leaves
will even allow one to drink sea water with a certain immunity.
We did not test coca leaves on board the Kon-Tify, but we
had on the foredeck large wicker baskets full of other plants,
some of which had left a deeper imprint on the South Sea
islands. The baskets stood lashed fast in the lee of the cabin
wall, and as time passed yellow shoots and green leaves of po-
tatoes and coconuts shot up higher and higher from the wick-
erwork. It was like a little tropical garden on board the wooden
raft.
When the first Europeans came to the Pacific islands, they
found large plantings of sweet potatoes on Easter Island and in
Hawaii and New Zealand, and the same plant was also culti-
vated on the other islands, but only within the Polynesian area.
It was quite unknown in the part of the world which lay far-
ther west. The sweet potato was one of the most important
cultivated plants in these remote islands where the people
otherwise lived mainly on fish, and many of the Polynesians'
legends centered round this plant. According to tradition it had
been brought by no less a personage than Tiki himself, when
he came with his wife Pani from their ancestors' original home-
land, where the sweet potato had been an important article of
food. New Zealand legends affirm that the sweet potato was
brought over the sea in vessels which were not canoes but con-
sisted of "wood bound together with ropes."
Halfway
Now, as is known, America is the only place in the rest of
the world where the potato grew before the time of the Euro-
peans. And the sweet potato Tiki brought with him to the
islands, Ipomoea batatas, is exactly the same as that which the
Indians have cultivated in Peru from the oldest times. Dried
sweet potatoes were the most important travel provisions both
for the seafarers of Polynesia and for the natives in old Peru.
In the South Sea islands the sweet potato will grow only if
carefully tended by man, and, as it cannot withstand sea water,
it is idle to explain its wide distribution over these scattered
islands by declaring that it could have drifted over 4,000 sea
miles with ocean currents from Peru. This attempt to explain
away so important a clue to the Polynesians' origin is particu-
larly futile seeing that philologists have pointed out that on all
the widely scattered South Sea islands the name of the sweet
potato is fytmara, and \umara is just what the sweet potato
was called among the old Indians in Peru. The name followed
the plant across the sea.
Another very important Polynesian cultivated plant we had
with us on board the Kon-Ti\i was the bottle gourd, Lagenaria
vulgaris. As important as the fruit itself was the skin, which
the Polynesians dried over a fire and used to hold water. This
typical garden plant also, which again cannot propagate itself
in a wild state by drifting across the sea alone, the old Poly-
nesians had in common with the original population of Peru.
Bottle gourds, converted into water containers, are found in
prehistoric desert graves on the coast of Peru and were used
by the fishing population there centuries before the first men
came to the islands in the Pacific. The Polynesian name for the
bottle gourd, fymi, is found again among the Indians in Cen-
tral America, where Peruvian civilization has its deepest roots.
*35
KON-TIKI
In addition to a few chance tropical fruits, most of which
we ate up in a few weeks' time before they spoiled, we had on
board a third plant which, along with the sweet potato, has
played the greatest part in the history of the Pacific. We had
two hundred coconuts, and they gave us exercise for our teeth
and refreshing drinks. Several of the nuts soon began to sprout,
and, when we had been just ten weeks at sea, we had half a
dozen baby palms a foot high, which had already opened their
shoots and formed thick green leaves. The coconut grew before
Columbus' time both on the Isthmus of Panama and in South
America. The chronicler Oviedo writes that the coconut palm
was found in great numbers along the coast *of Peru when the
Spaniards arrived. At that time it had long existed on all the
islands in the Pacific.
Botanists have still no certain proof in which direction it
spread over the Pacific. But one thing has now been discovered.
Not even the coconut, with* its famous shell, can spread over
the ocean without men's help. The nuts we had in baskets on
deck remained eatable and capable of germinating the whole
way to Polynesia. But we had laid about half among the spe-
cial provisions below deck, with the waves washing around
them. Every single one of these was ruined by the sea water.
And no coconut can float over the sea faster than a balsa raft
moves with the wind behind it. It was the eyes of the coconut
which sucked in the sea water so that the nut spoiled. Refuse
collectors, too, all over the ocean took care that no edible thing
that floated should get across from one world to the other.
Solitary petrels and other sea birds which can sleep on the
sea we met thousands of sea miles from the nearest land. Some-
times, on quiet days far out on the blue sea, we sailed close to
a white, floating bird's feather. If, on approaching the little
136
Halfway
feather, we looked at it closely, we saw that there were two or
three passengers on board it, sailing along at their ease before
the wind. When the Kon-Ti^i was about to pass, the passengers
noticed that a vessel was coming which was faster and had
more space, and so all came scuttling sideways at top speed over
the surface and up on to the raft, leaving the feather to sail on
alone. And so the Kon-Tity soon began to swarm with stow-
aways. They were small pelagic crabs. As big as a fingernail,
and now and then a good deal larger, they were tidbits for the
Goliaths on board the raft, if we managed to catch them.
The small crabs were the policemen of the sea's surface, and
they were not slow to look after themselves when they saw
anything eatable. If one day the cook failed to notice a flying
fish in between the logs, next day it was covered with from
eight to ten small crabs, sitting on the fish and helping them-
selves with their claws. Most often they were frightened and
scurried away to hide when we came in view, but aft, in a little
hole by the steering block, lived a crab which was quite tame
and which we named Johannes.
Like the parrot, who was everyone's amusing pet, the crab
Johannes became one of our community on deck. If the man
at the helm, sitting steering on a sunshiny day with his back
to the cabin, had not Johannes for company, he felt utterly
lonely out on the wide blue sea. While the other small crabs
scurried furtively about and pilfered like cockroaches on an
ordinary boat, Johannes sat broad and round in his doorway
with his eyes wide open, waiting for the change of watch.
Every man who came on watch had a scrap of biscuit or a bit
of fish for him, and we needed only to stoop down over the
hole for him to come right out on his doorstep and stretch out
his hands. He took the scraps out of our fingers with his claws
KON-T1K1
and ran back into the hole, where he sat down in the doorway
and munched like a schoolboy, cramming his food into his
mouth.
The crabs clung like flies to the soaked coconuts, which burs
when they fermented, or caught plankton washed on board by
the waves. And these, the tiniest organisms in the sea, were
good eating too even for us Goliaths on the raft, when we
learned how to catch a number of them at once so that we got
a decent mouthful.
It is certain that there must be very nourishing food in these
almost invisible plankton which drift about with the current
on the oceans in infinite numbers. Fish and sea birds which do
not eat plankton themselves live on other fish or sea animah
which do, no matter how large they themselves may be. Plank-
ton is a general name for thousands of species of visible and
invisible small organisms which drift about near the surface
of the sea. Some are plants (/^y/0-plankton), while others are
loose fish ova and tiny living creatures (zoo-plankton). Animal
plankton live on vegetable plankton, and vegetable plankton
live on ammonia, nitrates, and nitrites which are formed from
dead animal plankton. And while they reciprocally live on one
another, they all form food for everything which moves in and
over the sea. What they cannot offer in size they can offer in
numbers.
In good plankton waters there are thousands in a glassful.
More than once persons have starved to death at sea because
they did not find fish large enough to be spitted, netted, or
hooked. In such cases it has often happened that they have liter-
ally been sailing about in strongly diluted, raw fish soup. If, in
addition to hooks and nets, they had had a utensil for straining
the soup they were sitting in, they would have found a nour-
238
Halfway
ishing meal plankton. Some day in the future, perhaps, men
will think of harvesting plankton from the sea to the same ex-
tent as now they harvest grain on land. A single grain is of no
use, either, but in large quantities it becomes food.
The marine biologist Dr. A. D. Bajkov told us of plankton
and sent us a fishing net which was suited to the creatures we
were to catch. The "net" was a silk net with almost three thou-
sand meshes per square inch. It was sewn in the shape of a
funnel with a circular mouth behind an iron ring, eighteen
inches across, and was towed behind the raft. Just as in other
kinds of fishing, the catch varied with time and place. Catches
diminished as the sea grew warmer farther west, and we got
the best results at night, because many species seemed to go
deeper down into the water when the sun was shining.
If we had no other way of whiling away time on board the
raft, there would have been entertainment enough in lying
with our noses in the plankton net. Not for the sake of the
smell, for that was bad. Nor because the sight was appetizing,
for it looked a horrible mess. But because, if we spread the
plankton out on a board and examined each of the little crea-
tures separately with the naked eye, we had before us fantastic
shapes and colors in unending variety.
Most of them were tiny shrimplike crustaceans (copepods)
or fish ova floating loose, but there were also larvae of fish and
shellfish, curious miniature crabs in all colors, jellyfish, and an
endless variety of small creatures which might have been taken
from Walt Disney's Fantasia. Some looked like fringed, flutter-
ing spooks cut out of cellophane paper, while others resembled
tiny red-beaked birds with hard shells instead of feathers. There
was no end to Nature's extravagant inventions in the plankton
world; a surrealistic artist might well own himself bested here.
KON-T1KI
Where the cold Humboldt Current turned west south of the
Equator, we could pour several pounds of plankton porridge
out of the bag every few hours. The plankton lay packed to-
gether like cake in colored layers brown, red, gray, and green
according to the different fields of plankton through which we
had passed. At night, when there was phosphorescence about,
it was like hauling in a bag of sparkling jewels. But, when we
got hold of it, the pirates' treasure turned into millions of tiny
glittering shrimps and phosphorescent fish larvae that glowed
in the dark like a heap of live coals. When we poured them
into a bucket, the squashy mess ran out like a magic gruel com-
posed of glowworms. Our night's catch looked as nasty at close
quarters as it had been pretty at long range. And, bad as it
smelled, it tasted correspondingly good if one just plucked up
courage and put a spoonful of it into one's mouth. If this con-
sisted of many dwarf shrimps, it tasted like shrimp paste, lob-
ster, or crab. If it was mostly deep-sea fish ova, it tasted like
caviar and now and then like oysters.
The inedible vegetable plankton were either so small that
they washed away with the water through the meshes of the
net, or they were so large that we could pick them up with our
fingers. "Snags" in the dish were single jellylike coelenterates
like glass balloons and jellyfish about half an inch long. These
were bitter and had to be thrown away. Otherwise everything
could be eaten, either as it was or cooked in fresh water as gruel
or soup. Tastes differ. Two men on board thought plankton
tasted delicious, two thought they were quite good, and for two
the sight of them was more than enough. From a nutrition
standpoint they stand on a level with the larger shellfish, and,
spiced and properly prepared, they can certainly be a first-class
dish for all who like marine food.
140
Halfway
That these small organisms contain calories enough has been
proved by the blue whale, which is the largest animal in the
world and yet lives on plankton. Our own method of capture,
with the little net which was often chewed up by hungry fish,
seemed to us sadly primitive when we sat on the raft and saw
a passing whale send up cascades of water as it simply filtered
plankton through its celluloid beard. And one day we lost the
whole net in the sea.
"Why don't you plankton-eaters do like him?" Torstein and
Bengt said contemptuously to the rest of us, pointing to a blow-
ing whale. "Just fill your mouths and blow the water out
through your mustaches!"
I have seen whales in the distance from boats, and I have
seen them stuffed in museums, but I have never felt toward the
gigantic carcass as one usually feels toward proper warm-
blooded animals, for example a horse or an elephant. Biologi-
cally, indeed, I had accepted the whale as a genuine mammal,
but in its essence it was to all intents and purposes a large cold
fish. We had a different impression when the great whales
came rushing toward us, close to the side of the raft.
One day, when we were sitting as usual on the edge of the
raft having a meal, so close to the water that we had only to
lean back to wash out our mugs, we started when suddenly
something behind us blew hard like a swimming horse and a
big whale came up and stared at us, so close that we saw a
shine like a polished shoe down through its blowhole. It was
so unusual to hear real breathing out at sea, where all living
creatures wriggle silently about without lungs and quiver their
gills, that we really had a warm family feeling for our old dis-
tant cousin the whale, who like us had strayed so far out to
sea. Instead of the cold, toadlike whale shark, which had not
141
KON-TIKI
even the sense to stick up its nose for a breath of fresh air, here
we had a visit from something which recalled a well-fed jovial
hippopotamus in a zoological gardens and which actually
breathed that made a most pleasant impression on me before
it sank into the sea again and disappeared.
We were visited by whales many times. Most often they were
small porpoises and toothed whales which gamboled about us
in large schools on the surface of the water, but now and then
there were big cachalots, too, and other giant whales which ap-
peared singly or in small schools. Sometimes they passed like
ships on the horizon, now and again sending a cascade of water
into the air, but sometimes they steered straight for us. We were
prepared for a dangerous collision the first time a big whale
altered course and came straight toward the raft in a purposeful
manner. As it gradually grew nearer, we could hear its blowing
and puffing, heavy and long drawn, each time it rolled its head
out of the water. It was an enormous, thick-skinned, ungainly
land animal that came toiling through the water, as unlike a
fish as a bat is unlike a bird. It came straight toward our port
side, where we stood gathered on the edge of the raft, while
one man sat at the masthead and shouted that he could see
seven or eight more making their way toward us.
The big, shining, black forehead of the first whale was not
more than two yards from us when it sank beneath the surface
of the water, and then we saw the enormous blue-black bulk
glide quietly under the raft right beneath our feet. It lay there
for a time, dark and motionless, and we held our breath as we
looked down on the gigantic curved back of a mammal a good
deal longer than the whole raft. Then it sank slowly through
the bluish water and disappeared from sight. Meanwhile the
whole school were close upon us, but they paid no attention to
142
Halfway
us. Whales which have abused their giant strength and sunk
whaling boats with their tails have presumably been attacked
first. The whole morning we had them puffing and blowing
round us in the most unexpected places without their even
pushing against the raft or the steering oar. They quite enjoyed
themselves gamboling freely among the waves in the sunshine.
But about noon the whole school dived as if on a given signal
and disappeared for good.
It was not only whales we could see under the raft. If we
lifted up the reed matting we slept on, through the chinks be-
tween the logs we saw right down into the crystal-blue water.
If we lay thus for a while, we saw a breast fin or tail fin waggle
past and now and again we saw a whole fish. If the chinks had
been a few inches wider, we could have lain comfortably in
bed with a line and fished under our mattresses.
The fish which most of all attached themselves to the raft
were dolphins and pilot fish. From the moment the first dol-
phins joined us in the current off Callao, there was not a day
on the whole voyage on which we had not large dolphins wrig-
gling round us. What drew them to the raft we do not know,
but, either there was a magical attraction in being able to swim
in the shade with a moving roof above them, or there was food
to be found in our kitchen garden of seaweed and barnacles
that hung like garlands from all the logs and from the steering
oar. It began with a thin coating of smooth green, but then the
clusters of seaweed grew with astonishing speed, so that the
Kon-Tify looked like a bearded sea-god as she tumbled along
among the waves. Inside the green seaweed was a favorite resort
of tiny small fry and our stowaways, the crabs.
There was a time when ants began to get the upper hand
on board. There had been small black ants in some of the logs,
KON-T1KI
and, when we had got to sea and the damp began to penetrate
into the wood, the ants swarmed out and into the sleeping bags.
They were all over the place, and bit and tormented us till we
thought they would drive us off the raft. But gradually, as it
became wetter out at sea, they realized that this was not their
right element, and only a few isolated specimens held out till
we reached the other side. What did best on the raft, along with
the crabs, were barnacles from an inch to an inch and a half
long. They grew in hundreds, especially on the lee side of the
raft, and as fast as we put the old ones into the soup kettle new
larvae took root and grew up. The barnacles tasted fresh and
delicate; we picked the seaweed as salad and it was eatable,
though not so good. We never actually saw the dolphins feed-
ing in the vegetable garden, but they were constantly turning
their gleaming bellies upward and swimming under the
logs.
The dolphin (dorado), which is a brilliantly colored tropical
fish, must not be confused with the creature, also called dol-
phin, which is a small, toothed whale. The dolphin was or-
dinarily from three feet three inches to four feet six inches long
and had much flattened sides with an enormously high head
and neck. We jerked on board one which was four feet eight
inches long with a head thirteen and one-half inches high. The
dolphin had a magnificent color. In the water it shone blue and
green like a bluebottle with a glitter of golden-yellow fins. But
if we hauled one on board, we sometimes saw a strange sight.
As the fish died, it gradually changed color and became silver
gray with black spots and, finally, a quite uniform silvery white.
This lasted for four or five minutes, and then the old colors
slowly reappeared. Even in the water the dolphin could occa-
sionally change color like a chameleon, and often we saw a "new
144
Halfway
kind" of shining copper-colored fish, which on a closer ac-
quaintance proved to be our old companion the dolphin.
The high forehead gave the dolphin the appearance of a
bulldog flattened from the side, and it always cut through the
surface of the water when the predatory fish shot off like a tor-
pedo after a fleeing shoal of flying fish. When the dolphin was
in a good humor, it turned over on its flat side, went ahead at
a great speed, and then sprang high into the air and tumbled
down like a flat pancake. It came down on the surface with a
regular smack and a column of water rose up. It was no sooner
down in the water than it came up in another leap, and yet
another, away over the swell. But, when it was in a bad temper
for example, when we hauled it up on to the raft then it
bit. Torstein limped about for some time with a rag round his
big toe because he had let it stray into the mouth of a dolphin,
which had used the opportunity to close its jaws and chew a
little harder than usual. After our return home we heard that
dolphins attack and eat people when bathing. This was not very
complimentary to us, seeing that we had bathed among them
every day without their showing any particular interest. But
they were formidable beasts of prey, for we found both squids
and whole flying fish in their stomachs.
Flying fish were the dolphins' favorite food. If anything
splashed on the surface of the water, they rushed at it blindly
in the hope of its being a flying fish. In many a drowsy morn-
ing hour, when we crept blinking out of the cabin and, half
asleep, dipped a toothbrush into the sea, we became wide-awake
with a jump when a thirty-pound fish shot out like lightning
from under the raft and nosed at the toothbrush in disappoint-
ment. And, when we were sitting quietly at breakfast on the
edge of the raft, a dolphin might jump up and make one of its
KON-TIK1
most vigorous sideway splashes, so that the sea water ran down
our backs and into our food.
One day, when we were sitting at dinner, Torstein made a
reality of the tallest of fish stories. He suddenly laid down his
fork and put his hand into the sea, and, before we knew what
was happening, the water was boiling and a big dolphin came
tumbling in among us. Torstein had caught hold of the tail
end of a fishing line which came quietly gliding past, and on
the other end hung a completely astonished dolphin which had
broken Erik's line when he was fishing a few days before.
There was not a day on which we had not six or seven dol-
phins following us in circles round and under the raft. On bad
days there might be only two or three, but, on the other hand,
as many as thirty or forty might turn up the day after. As a
rule it was enough to warn the cook twenty minutes in advance
if we wanted fresh fish for dinner. Then he tied a line to a
short bamboo stick and put half a flying fish on the hook. A
dolphin was there in a flash, plowing the surface with its head
as it chased the hook, with two or three more in its wake. It
was a splendid fish to play and, when freshly caught, its flesh
was firm and delicious to eat, like a mixture of cod and salmon.
It kept for two days, and that was all we needed, for there were
fish enough in the sea.
We became acquainted with pilot fish in another way. Sharks
brought them and left them to be adopted by us after the
sharks' death. We had not been long at sea before the first shark
visited us. And sharks soon became an almost daily occurrence.
Sometimes the shark just came swimming up to inspect the
raft and went on in search of prey after circling round us once
or twice. But most often the sharks took up a position in our
wake just behind the steering oar, and there they lay without
146
Halfway
a sound, stealing from starboard to port and occasionally giving
a leisurely wag of their tails to keep pace with the raft's placid
advance. The blue-gray body of the shark always looked brown-
ish in the sunlight just below the surface, and it moved up and
down with the seas so that the dorsal fin always stuck up
menacingly. If there was a high sea, the shark might be lifted
up by the waves high above our own level, and we had a direct
side view of the shark as in a glass case as it swam toward us
in a dignified manner with its fussy retinue of small pilot fish
ahead of its jaws. For a few seconds it looked as if both the
shark and its striped companions would swim right on board,
but then the raft would lean over gracefully to leeward, rise
over the ridge of waves, and descend on the other side.
To begin with, we had a great respect for sharks on account
of their reputation and their alarming appearance. There was
an unbridled strength in the streamlined body, consisting of one
great bundle of steel muscles, and a heartless greed in the broad
flat head with the small, green cat's eyes and the enormous jaws
which could swallow footballs. When the man at the helm
shouted "Shark alongside to starboard" or "Shark alongside to
port," we used to come out in search of hand harpoons and
gaffs and station ourselves along the edge of the raft. The shark
usually glided round us with the dorsal fin close up to the logs.
And our respect for the shark increased when we saw that the
gaffs bent like spaghetti when we struck them against the sand-
paper armor on the shark's back, while the spearheads of the
hand harpoons were broken in the heat of the battle. All we
gained by getting through the shark's skin and into the gristle
or muscle was a hectic struggle, in which the water boiled
round us till the shark broke loose and was off, while a little
oil floated up and spread itself out over the surface.
'47
KON-TIKI
To save our last harpoon head we fastened together a bunch
of our largest fishhooks and hid them inside the carcass of a
whole dolphin. We slung the bait overboard with a precaution-
ary multiplication of steel lines fastened to a piece of our own
life line. Slowly and surely the shark came, and, as it lifted its
snout above the water, it opened its great crescent-shaped jaws
with a jerk and let the whole dolphin slip in and down. And
there it stuck. There was a struggle in which the shark lashed
the water into foam, but we had a good grip on the rope and
hauled the big fellow, despite its resistance, as far as the logs aft,
where it lay awaiting what might come and only gaped as
though to intimidate us with its parallel rows of sawlike teeth.
Here we profited by a sea to slide the shark up over the low end
logs, slippery with seaweed and, after casting a rope round the
tail fin, we ran well out of the way till the war dance was over.
In the gristle of the first shark we caught this way we found
our own harpoon head, and we thought at first that this was
the reason for the shark's comparatively small fighting spirit.
But later we caught shark after shark by the same method, and
every time it went just as easily. Even if the shark could jerk
and tug and certainly was fearfully heavy to play, it became
quite spiritless and tame and never made full use of its giant
strength if we only managed to hold the line tight without let-
ting the shark gain an inch in the tug of war. The sharks we
got on board were usually from six to ten feet long, and there
were blue sharks as well as brown sharks. The last-named had
a skin outside the mass of muscles through which we could not
drive a sharp knife unless we struck with our whole strength,
and often not even then. The skin of the belly was as impen-
etrable as that of the back; the five gill clefts behind the head
on each side were the only vulnerable point.
148
Halfway
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, how-
ever hard we tugged on the line. We gradually acquired a num-
ber of these small remoras which hung on and dangled ob-
stinately 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
149
KON-TIKl
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 dis-
appeared 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-Ti\i 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-
I 5
Hdljway
Tity'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-Tity 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 boil-
ing 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 devil-
ish-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 cam-
paigning with.
KON-TIKl
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 Wash-
ington had shown us reports and dramatic magnesium photo-
graphs from an area in the Humboldt Current where mon-
strous 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, an-
other 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 f?el 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
752
Halfway
the squid. We wrote a page or two in the logbook with cuttle-
fish 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 pro-
genitor 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 sucking 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 them-
selves desperately through space. But why the big ones never
came on board, when the small ones were constant night visi-
'53
KON-TIK1
tors, 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 differ-
ent 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 de-
fenseless 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 sur-
face 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
Halfway
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 cuttle-
fish 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-Tity 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:
71/5. Today a huge marine animal twice came up to the
surface alongside us as we sat at suffer 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 thic\ dar\-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
bacJ{, heavy sickle-shaped tail fin. Kept near surface and swam
at times by wriggling its body liJ^e an eel. It dived when Her-
man and I went out in the rubber dinghy with a hand harpoon.
Came up later but dived again and disappeared.
Next day: Eri\ was sitting at the masthead, 12 noon, when
155
KON-TIKI
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 likf a big, brown, fiat shadow in the sea.
1 8/6. Knut observed a snakelibe 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 li^e a
snake.
On several occasions we glided past a large darjc 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
i 5 6
Halfway
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 be-
came 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 trans-
figured, 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 net-
work 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 move-
ments, eager for prey. Here and there the light fell on the
sappy red wood of a centerboard which stuck downward out of
KON-T1KI
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 intentionally
assembled under the Kon~Tity to keep us company for a few
days.
What we liked best was a dip under the surface when the
great gold-firmed 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
Haljtvay
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 tor-
pedoes 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 there-
fore 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.
There were not many fixed marks out here at sea. Waves
and fish, sun and stars, came and went. There was not sup-
posed to be land of any sort in the 4,300 sea miles that separated
the South Sea islands from Peru. We were therefore greatly
surprised when we approached 100 west and discovered that
a reef was marked on the Pacific chart right ahead of us on
the course we were following. It was marked as a small circle,
andt as the chart had been issued the same year, we looked up
the reference in Sailing Directions -for South America. We read
that "breakers were reported in 1906 and again in 1926 to exist
about 600 miles southwestward of Galapagos Islands, in lati-
tude 6 42' S., longitude 99 43' W. In 1927 a steamer passed
one mile westward of this position but saw no indication of
breakers, and in 1934 another passed one mile southward and
KON-TIK1
saw no evidence of breakers. The motor vessel 'Cowrie/ in
1935, obtained no bottom at 160 fathoms in this position."
According to the chart the place was clearly still regarded as
a doubtful one for shipping, but, as a deep-draught vessel runs
a greater risk by going too near a shoal than we should with a
raft, we decided to steer straight for the point marked on the
chart and see what we found. The reef was marked a little
farther north than the point we seemed to be making for, so
we laid the steering oar over to starboard and trimmed the
square sail so that the bow pointed roughly north and we took
sea and wind from the starboard side. Now it came about that
a little more Pacific splashed into our sleeping bags than we
were accustomed to, especially as at the same time the weather
began to freshen considerably. But we saw to our satisfaction
that the Kon-Tify could be maneuvered surely and steadily at
a surprisingly wide angle into the wind, so long as the wind
was still on our quarter. Otherwise the sail swung round, and
we had the same mad circus business to get the raft under con-
trol again.
For two days and nights we drove the raft north-northwest.
The seas ran high and became incalculable as the trade wind
began to fluctuate between southeast and east, but we were
lifted up and down over all the waves that rushed against us.
We had a constant lookout at the masthead, and when we rode
over the ridges the horizon widened considerably. The crests
of the seas reached six feet above the level of the roof of the
bamboo cabin, and, if two vigorous seas rushed together, they
rose still higher in combat and flung up a hissing watery tower
which might burst down in unexpected directions. When night
came, we barricaded the doorway with provision boxes, but it
was a wet night's rest. We had hardly fallen asleep when the
160
Hold on, Haugland! If the intervals between the waves were too short, water
often came on board from astern, and the helmsman had a hard job to prevent
himself from being washed overboard.
Above: When we were halfway across, we were about 2,000 sea miles from
land both ahead and astern. We felt we were living in a strange world
"east of the sun and west of the moon."
Below: Provisions were stored between the logs and the bamboo deck. Our
Peruvian parrot always came fluttering along when we opened a box of food.
Above: The whale shark which paid us a visit. It is the world's biggest fish
and can be as much as 60 feet long. Its body is covered with white spots 3 and
its jaws are nearly 5 feet wide.
Below: The dorsal fin projected menacingly from the water when the monster
approached the raft.
X**
.*
Above: Whales often visited us, and the raft seemed pretty small alongside
them. Sometimes they followed us for hours before they disappeared.
Below: The raft would certainly have come off badly in a collision with a
whale. But however deliberately the whales seemed to come rushing straight
toward the raft, they always dived under it at the last moment.
Hcdfwafy
first crash on the bamboo wall came, and, while a thousand
jets of water sprayed in like a fountain through the bamboo
wickerwork, a foaming torrent rushed in over the provisions
and on to us.
"Ring up the plumber," I heard a sleepy voice remark, as we
hunched ourselves up to give the water room to run out
through the floor. The plumber did not come, and we had a
lot of bathwater in our beds that night. A big dolphin actually
came on board unintentionally in Herman's watch.
Next day the seas were less confused, as the trade wind had
decided that it would now blow for a time from due east. We
relieved one another at the masthead, for now we might expect
to reach the point we were making for late in the afternoon.
We noticed more life than usual in the sea that day. Perhaps
it was only because we kept a better lookout than usual.
During the forenoon we saw a big swordfish approaching
the raft close to the surface. The two sharp pointed fins which
stuck up out of the water were six feet apart, and the sword
looked almost as long as the body. The swordfish swept in a
curve close by the man at the helm and disappeared behind
the wave crests. When we were having a rather wet and salty
midday meal, the carapace, head, and sprawling fins of a large
sea turtle were lifted up by a hissing sea right in front of our
noses. When that wave gave place to two others, the turtle was
gone as suddenly as it had appeared. This time too we saw the
gleaming whitish-green of dolphins' bellies tumbling about in
the water below the armored reptile. The area was unusually
rich in tiny flying fish an inch long, which sailed along in big
shoals and often came on board. We also noted single skuas
and were regularly visited by frigate birds, with forked tails
like giant swallows, which cruised over the raft. Frigate birds
161
KON-TIKI
are usually regarded as a sign that land is near, and the opti-
mism on board increased.
"Perhaps there is a reef or a sandbank there all the same/*
some of us thought. And the most optimistic said: "Suppose
we find a little green grassy island one can never know since
so few people have been here before. Then we'll have dis-
covered a new land Kon-Tiki Island!"
From noon onward Erik was more and more diligent in
climbing up on the kitchen box and standing blinking through
the sextant. At 6:20 P.M. he reported our position as latitude
6 42' south by longitude 99 42' west. We were i sea mile
due east of the reef on the chart. The bamboo yard was lowered
and the sail rolled up on deck. The wind was due east and
would take us slowly right to the place. When the sun went
down swiftly into the sea, the full moon in turn shone out in
all its brilliance and lit up the surface of the sea, which un-
dulated in black and silver from horizon to horizon. Visibility
from the masthead was good. We saw breaking seas every-
where in long rows, but no regular surf which would indicate
a reef or shoal. No one would turn in; all stood looking out
eagerly, and two or three men were aloft at once.
As we drifted in over the center of the marked area, we
sounded all the time. All the lead sinkers we had on board
were fastened to the end of a fifty-four-thread silk rope more
than 500 fathoms long, and, even if the rope hung rather aslant
on account of the raft's leeway, at any rate the lead hung at a
depth of some 400 fathoms. There was no bottom east of the
place, or in the middle of it, or west of it. We took one last
look over the surface of the sea, and, when we had assured
ourselves that we could safely call the area surveyed and free
from shallows of any kind, we set sail and laid the oar over
162
Halfway
in its usual place, so that wind and sea were again on our port
quarter.
And so we went on with the raft on her natural free course.
The waves came and went as before between the open logs aft.
We could now sleep and eat dry, even if the heaving seas round
us took charge in earnest and raged for several days while the
trade wind vacillated from east to southeast.
On this little sailing trip up to the spurious reef we had
learned quite a lot about the effectiveness of the centerboards
as a keel, and when, later in the voyage, Herman and Knut
dived under the raft together and salved the fifth centerboard,
we learned still more about these curious pieces of board, some-
thing which no one has understood since the Indians them-
selves gave up this forgotten sport. That the board did the work
of a keel and allowed the raft to move at an angle to the wind
that was plain sailing. But when the old Spaniards declared
that the Indians to a large extent "steered" their balsa rafts on
the sea with "certain centerboards which they pushed down
into the chinks between the timbers/' this sounded incompre-
hensible both to us and to all who had concerned themselves
with the problem. As the centerboard was simply held tight in
a narrow chink, it could not be turned sideways and serve as
a helm.
We discovered the secret in the following manner: The
wind was steady and the sea had gone down again, so that
the Kon-Tify had kept a steady course for a couple of days
without our touching the lashed steering oar. We pushed the
recovered centerboard down into a chink aft, and in a moment
the Kon-Tify altered course several degrees from west toward
northwest and proceeded steadily and quietly on her new
course. If we pulled this centerboard up again, the raft swung
KON-TIKI
back on to her previous course. But if we pulled it only half-
way up, the raft swung only halfway back on her old course.
By simply raising and lowering the centerboards we could
effect changes of course and keep to them without touching
the steering oar.
This was the Incas' ingenious system. They had worked out
a -simple system of balances by which pressure of the wind on
the sail made the mast the fixed point. The two arms were
respectively the raft forward of and the raft aft of the mast.
If the aggregate centerboard surface aft was heavier, the bow
swung freely round with the wind; but if the centerboard sur-
face forward was heavier, the stern swung round with the
wind. The centerboards which are nearest the mast have, of
course, the least effect on account of the relation between arm
and power. If the wind was due astern, the centerboards ceased
to be effective, and then it was impossible to keep the raft
steady without continually working the steering oar. If the raft
lay thus at full length, she was a little too long to ride the seas
freely. As the cabin door and the place where we had meals
were on the starboard side, we always took the seas on board
on our port quarter.
We could certainly have continued our voyage by making
the steersman stand and pull a centerboard up and down in a
chink instead of hauling sidewise on the ropes of the steering
oar, but we had now grown so accustomed to the steering oar
that we just set a general course with the centerboards and
preferred to steer with the oar.
The next great stage on our voyage was as invisible to the
eye as the shoal which existed only on the map. It was the
forty-fifth day at sea; we had advanced from the ySth degree
of longitude to the io8th and were exactly halfway to the first
164
Halfway
islands ahead. There were over 2,000 sea miles between us and
South America to the east, and it was the same distance on to
Polynesia in the west. The nearest land in any direction was
the Galapagos Islands to east-northeast and Easter Island due
south, both more than 500 sea miles away on the boundless
ocean. We had not seen a ship, and we never did see one, be-
cause we were off the routes of all ordinary shipping traffic in
the Pacific.
But we did not really feel these enormous distances, for the
horizon glided along with us unnoticed as we moved and our
own floating world remained always the same a circle flung
up to the vault of the sky with the raft itself as center, while
the same stars rolled on over us night after night.
265
ACROSS
THE PACIFIC
A Queer Craft - Out in the Dinghy -
Unhindered Progress- Absence of Sea Signs-
At Sea in a Bamboo Hut -
On the Longitude of Easter Island -
The Mystery of Easter Island -
The Stone Giants - Red-Stone Wigs -
The "Long-Ears" - Ti\i Builds a Bridge -
Suggestive Place Names -
Catching Shares with Our Hands -
The Parrot -
L12B Calling -Sailing by the Stars -
Three Seas - A Storm -
Blood Bath in the Sea, Blood Bath on Board -
Man Overboard - Another Storm -
The Kon-Tiki Becomes Rickety -
Messengers from Polynesia
Across the Pacific
WHEN THE SEA WAS NOT TOO ROUGH, WE WERE OFTEN
out in the little rubber dinghy taking photographs. I shall not
forget the first time the sea was so calm that two men felt like
putting the balloon-like little thing into the water and going for
a row. They had hardly got clear of the raft when they dropped
the little oars and sat roaring with laughter. And, as the swell
lifted them away and they disappeared and reappeared among
the seas, they laughed so loud every time they caught a glimpse
of us that their voices rang out over the desolate Pacific. We
looked around us with mixed feelings and saw nothing comic
but our own hirsute faces ; but as the two in the dinghy should
be accustomed to those by now, we began to have a lurking
suspicion that they had suddenly gone mad. Sunstroke, per-
haps. The two fellows could hardly scramble back on board
the Kon-Tity for sheer laughter and, gasping, with tears in
their eyes they begged us just to go and see for ourselves.
Two of us jumped down into the dancing rubber dinghy
and were caught by a sea which lifted us clear. Immediately
we sat down with a bump and roared with laughter. We had
169
RON-TIKI
to scramble back on the raft as quickly as possible and calm the
last two who had not been out yet, for they thought we had
all gone stark staring mad.
It was ourselves and our proud vessel which made such a
completely hopeless, lunatic impression on us the first time we
saw the whole thing at a distance. We had never before had
an outside view of ourselves in the open sea. The logs of
timber disappeared behind the smallest waves, and, when we
saw anything at all, it was the low cabin with the wide door-
way and the bristly roof of leaves that bobbed up from among
the seas. The raft looked exactly like an old Norwegian hay-
loft lying helpless, drifting about in the open sea a warped
hayloft full of sunburned bearded ruffians. If anyone had come
paddling after us at sea in a bathtub, we should have felt the
same spontaneous urge to laughter. Even an ordinary swell
rolled halfway up the cabin wall and looked as if it would
pour in unhindered through the wide open door in which the
bearded fellows lay gaping. But then the crazy craft came up
to the surface again, and the vagabonds lay there as dry, shaggy,
and intact as before. If a higher sea came racing by, cabin and
sail and the whole mast might disappear behind the mountain
of water, but just as certainly the cabin with its vagabonds
would be there again next moment. The situation looked bad,
and we could not realize that things had gone so well on board
the zany craft.
Next time we rowed out to have a good laugh at ourselves
we nearly had a disaster. The wind and sea were higher than
we supposed, and the Kon-Tiki was cleaving a path for herself
over the swell much more quickly than we realized. We in the
dinghy had to row for our lives out in the open sea in an
attempt to regain the unmanageable raft, which could not stop
170
Across the Pacific
and wait and could not possibly turn around and come back.
Even when the boys on board the Kon-Tity got the sail down,
the wind got such a grip on the bamboo cabin that the raft
drifted away to westward as fast as we could splash after her
in the dancing rubber dinghy with its tiny toy oars. There was
only one thought in the head of every man we must not be
separated. Those were horrible minutes we spent out on the
sea before we got hold of the runaway raft and crawled on
board to the others, home again.
From that day it was strictly forbidden to go out in the rub-
ber dinghy without having a long line made fast to the bow,
so that those who remained on board could haul the dinghy
in if necessary. We never went far away from the raft, there-
after, except when the wind was light and the Pacific curving
itself in a gentle swell. But we had these conditions when the
raft was halfway to Polynesia and the ocean, all dominating,
arched itself round the globe toward every point of the com-
pass. Then we could safely leave the Kon-Tify and row away
into the blue space between sky and sea.
When we saw the silhouette of our craft grow smaller and
smaller in the distance, and the big sail at last shrunken to a
vague black square on the horizon, a sensation of loneliness
sometimes crept over us. The sea curved away under us as
blue upon blue as the sky above, and where they met all the
blue flowed together and became one. It almost seemed as if
we were suspended in space. All our world was empty and
blue; there was no fixed point in it but the tropical sun, golden
and warm, which burned our necks. Then the distant sail of
the lonely raft drew us to it like a magnetic point on the hori-
zon. We rowed back and crept on board with a feeling that
we had come home again to our own world on board and yet
KON-TIKI
on firm, safe ground. And inside the bamboo cabin we found
shade and the scent of bamboos and withered palm leaves. The
sunny blue purity outside was now served to us in a suitably
large dose through the open cabin wall. So we were accustomed
to it and so it was good for a time, till the great clear blue
tempted us out again.
It was most remarkable what a psychological effect the shaky
bamboo cabin had on our minds. It measured eight by fourteen
feet, and to diminish the pressure of wind and sea it was built
low so that we could not stand upright under the ridge of the
roof. Walls and roof were made of strong bamboo canes, lashed
together and guyed, and covered with a tough wickerwork of
split bamboos. The green and yellow bars, with fringes of
foliage hanging down from the roof, *were restful to the eye
as a white cabin wall never could have been, and, despite the
fact that the bamboo wall on the starboard side was open for
one third of its length and roof and walls let in sun and moon,
this primitive lair gave us a greater feeling of security than
white-painted bulkheads and closed portholes would have given
in the same circumstances.
We tried to find an explanation for this curious fact and
came to the following conclusion. Our consciousness was totally
unaccustomed to associating a palm-covered bamboo dwelling
with sea travel. There was no natural harmony between the
great rolling ocean and the drafty palm hut which was floating
about among the seas. Therefore, either the hut would seem
entirely out of place in among the waves, or the waves would
seem entirely out of place round the hut wall. So long as we
kept on board, the bamboo hut and its jungle scent were plain
reality, and the tossing seas seemed rather visionary. But from
the rubber boat, waves and hut exchanged roles.
772
Across the Pacific
The fact that the balsa logs always rode the seas like a gull,
and let the water right through aft if a wave broke on board,
gave us an unshakable confidence in the dry part in the middle
of the raft where the cabin was. The longer the voyage lasted,
the safer we felt in our cozy lair, and we looked at the white-
crested waves that danced past outside our doorway as if they
were an impressive movie, conveying no menace to us at all.
Even though the gaping wall was only five feet from the un-
protected edge of the raft and only a foot and a half above the
water line, yet we felt as if we had traveled many miles away
from the sea and occupied a jungle dwelling remote from the
sea's perils once we had crawled inside the door. There we
could lie on our backs and look up at the curious roof which
twisted about like boughs in the wind, enjoying the jungle
smell of raw wood, bamboos, and withered palm leaves.
Sometimes, too, we went out in the rubber boat to look at
ourselves by night. Coal-black seas towered up on all sides, and
a glittering myriad of tropical stars drew a faint reflection from
plankton in the water. The world was simple stars in the
darkness. Whether it was 1947 B.C. or A.D. suddenly became of
no significance. We lived, and that we felt with alert intensity.
We realized that life had been full for men before the tech-
nical age also in fact, fuller and richer in many ways than
the life of modern man. Time and evolution somehow ceased
to exist; all that was real and that mattered were the same
today as they had always been and would always be. We were
swallowed up in the absolute common measure of history
endless unbroken darkness under a swarm of stars.
Before us in the night the Kon-Tify rose out of the seas to
sink down again behind black masses of water that towered
between her and us. In the moonlight there was a fantastic
KON-TIKI
atmosphere about the raft. Stout, shining wooden logs fringed
with seaweed, the square pitch-black outline of a Viking sail,
a bristly bamboo hut with the yellow light of a paraffin lamp
aft the whole suggested a picture from a fairytale rather than
an actual reality. Now and then the raft disappeared completely
behind the black seas; then she rose again and stood out sharp
in silhouette against the stars, while glittering water poured
from the logs.
When we saw the atmosphere about the solitary raft, we
could well see in our mind's eye the whole flotilla of such ves-
sels, spread in fan formation beyond the horizon to increase
the chances of finding land, when the first men made their
way across this sea. The Inca Tupak Yupanqui, who had
brought under his rule both Peru and Ecuador, sailed across
the sea with an armada of many thousand men on balsa rafts,
just before the Spaniards came, to search for islands which
rumor had told of out in the Pacific. He found two islands,
which some think were the Galapagos, and after eight months'
absence he and his numerous paddlers succeeded in toiling
their way back to Ecuador. Kon-Tiki and his followers had
certainly sailed in a similar formation several hundred years
before but, having discovered the Polynesian islands, they had
no reason for trying to struggle back.
When we jumped on board the raft again, we often sat down
in a circle round the paraffin lamp on the bamboo deck and
talked of the seafarers from Peru who had had all these same
experiences fifteen hundred years before us. The lamp flung
huge shadows of bearded men on the sail, and we thought
of the white men with the beards from Peru whom we could
follow in mythology and architecture all the way from Mexico
to Central America and into the northwestern area of South
Across the Pacific
America as far as Peru. Here this mysterious civilization dis-
appeared, as by the stroke of a magic wand, before the coming
of the Incas and reappeared just as suddenly out on the soli-
tary islands in the west which we were now approaching. Were
the wandering teachers men of an early civilized race from
across the Atlantic, who in times long past, in the same simple
manner, had come over with the westerly ocean current and
the trade wind from the area of the Canary Islands to the Gulf
of Mexico? That was indeed a far shorter distance than the
one we were covering, and we no longer believed in the sea
as a completely isolating factor.
Many observers have maintained, for weighty reasons, that
the great Indian civilizations, from the Aztecs in Mexico to the
Incas in Peru, were inspired by sporadic intruders from over
the seas in the east, while all the American Indians in general
are Asiatic hunting and fishing peoples who in the course of
twenty thousand years or more trickled into America from
Siberia. It is certainly striking that there is not a trace of grad-
ual development in the high civilizations which once stretched
from Mexico to Peru. The deeper the archaeologists dig, the
higher the culture, until a definite point is reached at which
the old civilizations have clearly arisen without any foundation
in the midst of primitive cultures.
And the civilizations have arisen where the current comes
in from the Atlantic, in the midst of the desert and jungle
regions of Central and South America, instead of in the more
temperate regions where civilizations, in both old and modern
times, have had easier conditions for their development.
The same cultural distribution is seen in the South Sea is-
lands. It is the island nearest to Peru, Easter Island, which
bears the deepest traces of civilization, although the insignifi-
KON-TIKI
cant little island is dry and barren and is the farthest from Asia
of all the islands in the Pacific.
When we had completed half our voyage, we had sailed just
the distance from Peru to Easter Island and had the legendary
island due south of us. We had left land at a chance point in
the middle of the coast of Peru to imitate an average raft put-
ting to sea. If we had left the land farther south, nearer Kon-
Tiki's ruined city Tiahuanaco, we should have got the same
wind but a weaker current, both of which would have carried
us in the direction of Easter Island.
When we passed 110 west, we were within the Polynesian
ocean area, inasmuch as the Polynesian Easter Island was now
nearer Peru than we were. We were on a line with the first
outpost of the South Sea islands, the center of the oldest island
civilization. And when at night our glowing road guide, the
sun, climbed down from the sky and disappeared beyond the
sea in the west with his whole spectrum of colors, the gentle
trade wind blew life into the stories of the strange mystery of
Easter Island. While the night sky smothered all concept of
time, we sat and talked and bearded giants' heads were again
thrown upon the sail.
But far down south, on Easter Island, stood yet larger giants'
heads cut in stone, with bearded chins and white men's features,
brooding over the secret of centuries.
Thus they stood when the first Europeans discovered the is-
land in 1722,, and thus they had stood twenty-two Polynesian
generations earlier, when, according to native tradition, the
present inhabitants landed in great canoes and exterminated
all men among an earlier population found on the island. The
primitive newcomers had arrived from the islands farther west,
but the Easter Island traditions claim that the earliest inhabit-
776
Catching sharks with our hands. Sharks followed us throughout the voyage
and we got to know them thoroughly. Top left, a shark eating out of the
author's hand. Its black head projects from the water and snaps a dolphin in
half with the utmost ease. Just as it is about to dive, the author seizes its tail
fin, as rough as sandpaper. The shark is slowly hauled on deck. As soon as
the tail fin comes above water the shark is helpless, and when at last the
stomach sinks down toward the head it is almost paralyzed.
Shark fishing (continued)-. One strong jerk and the shark is on deck. Then
we have to jump out of the way and keep at a distance till the shark has ceased
to snap around.
Below: A day's catch. Nine : sharks, two tunnies, and a lot of bonitos. The flying
ctn accS' rem ra m tht fore S round H ^e on board of their
TTj
F * *
imm' * } V
i .
Above: A blue shark with its conqueror. Shark flesh was edible only if soaked
in salt water for twenty-four hours. But we often cleared the water of sharks
to be on the safe side in case one of us should fall overboard.
Below: An idyllic scene: Hesselberg playing and singing in his "watch below."
Heave ho! The ropes became slack in tropical sun and squalls, and we often
had to make them taut.
Across the Pacific
ants, and the true discoverers of the island, had come from a
distant land toward the rising sun. There is no land in this di-
rection but South America. With the early extermination of the
unknown local architects the giant stone heads on Easter Island
have become one of the foremost symbols of the insoluble mys-
teries of antiquity. Here and there on the slopes of the treeless
island their huge figures have risen to the sky, stone colossi
splendidly carved iti the shape of men and set up as a single
block as high as a normal building of three or four floors. How
had the men of old been able to shape, transport, and erect such
gigantic stone colossi? As if the problem was not big enough,
they had further succeeded in balancing an extra giant block
of red stone like a colossal wig on the top of several of the
heads, thirty-six feet above the ground. What did it all mean,
and what kind of mechanical knowledge had the vanished
architects who had mastered problems great enough for the
foremost engineers of today?
If we put all the pieces together, the mystery of Easter Island
is perhaps not insoluble after all, seen against a background of
raftsmen from Peru. The old civilization has left on this island
traces which the tooth of time has not been able to destroy.
Easter Island is the top of an ancient extinct volcano. Paved
roads laid down by the old civilized inhabitants lead to well-
preserved landing places on the coast and show that the water
level round the island was exactly the same then as it is today.
This is no remains of a sunken continent but a tiny desolate
island, which was as small and solitary when it was a vivid
cultural center as it is today.
In the eastern corner of this wedge-shaped island lies one of
the extinct craters of the Easter Island volcano, and down in
the crater lies the sculptors' amazing quarry and workshop. It
177
KON-TIKI
lies there exactly as the old artists and architects left it hundreds
of years ago, when they fled in haste to the eastern extremity of
the island where, according to tradition, there was a furious
battle which made the present Polynesians victors and rulers of
the island, whereas all grown men among the aboriginals were
slain and burned in a ditch. The sudden interruption of the
artists' work gives a clear cross section of an ordinary working
day in the Easter Island crater. The sculptors' stone axes, hard
as flint, lie strewn about their working places and show that
this advanced people was as ignorant of iron as Kon-Tiki's
sculptors were when they were driven in flight from Peru, leav-
ing behind them similar gigantic stone statues on the Andes
plateau. In both places the quarry can be found where the leg-
endary white people with beards hewed blocks of stone thirty
feet long or more right out of the mountainside with the help
of axes of still harder stone. And in both places the gigantic
blocks, weighing many tons, were transported for many miles
over rough ground before being set up on end as enormous
human figures, or raised on top of one another to form mys-
terious terraces and walls.
Many huge unfinished figures still lie where they were begun,
in their niches in the crater wall on Easter Island, and show
how the work was carried on in different stages. The largest
human figure, which was almost completed when the builders
had to flee, was sixty-six feet long; if it had been finished and
set up, the head of this stone colossus would have been level
with the top of an eight-floor building. Every separate figure
was hewn out of a single connected block of stone, and the
working niches for sculptors round the lying stone figures show
that not many men were at work at the same time on each fig-
ure. Lying on their backs with their arms bent and their hands
! 7 8
Across the Pacific
placed on their stomachs, exactly like the stone colossi in South
America, the Easter 'Island figures were completed in every
minute detail before they were removed from the workshop and
transported to their destinations round about on the island. In
the last stage inside the quarry the giant was attached to the
cliff side by only a narrow ridge under his back; then this too
was hewn away, the giant meanwhile being supported by
boulders.
Large quantities of these figures were just dragged down to
the bottom of the crater and set up on the slope there. But a
number of the largest colossi were transported up and over the
wall of the crater, and for many miles round over difficult
country, before being set up on a stone platform and having an
extra stone colossus of red tuff placed on their heads. This
transport in itself may appear to be a complete mystery, but we
cannot deny that it took place or that the architects who disap-
peared from Peru left in the Andes Mountains stone colossi of
equal size, which show that they were absolute experts in this
line. Even if the monoliths are largest and most numerous on
Easter Island, and the sculptors there had acquired an individ-
ual style, the same vanished civilization erected similar giant
statues in human shape on many of the other Pacific islands,
but only on those nearest to America, and everywhere the mon-
oliths were brought to their final site from out-of-the-way
quarries. In the Marquesas, I heard legends of how the gigantic
stones were maneuvered, a$d, as these corresponded exactly to
the natives' stories of the transport of the stone pillars to the
huge portal on Tongatabu, it can be assumed that the same
people employed the same method with the columns on Easter
Island.
The sculptors' work in the pit took a long time but required
779
KON-TIKI
only a few experts. The work of transport each time a statue
was completed was more quickly done but, on the other hand,
required large numbers of men. Little Easter Island was then
both rich in fish and thoroughly cultivated, with large planta-
tions of Peruvian sweet potatoes, and experts believe that the
island in its great days could have supported a population of
seven or eight thousand. About a thousand men were quite
enough to haul the huge statues up and over the steep crater
wall, while five hundred were sufficient to drag them on fur-
ther across the island.
Wearproof cables were plaited from bast and vegetable fibers,
and, using wooden frames, the multitude dragged the stone
colossus over logs and small boulders made slippery with taro
roots. That old civilized peoples were masters in making ropes
and cables is well known from the South Sea islands and still
more from Peru, where the first Europeans found suspension
bridges a hundred yards long laid across torrents and gorges
by means of plaited cables as thick as a man's waist.
When the stone colossus had arrived at its chosen site and
was to be set up on end, the next problem arose. The crowd
built a temporary inclined plane of stone and sand and pulled
the giant up the less steep side, legs first. When the statue
reached the top, it shot over a sharp edge and slid straight
down so that the footpiece landed in a ready-dug hole. As the
complete inclined plane still stood there, rubbing against the
back of the giant's head, they rolled up an extra cylinder of
stone and placed it on the top of his head; then the whole
temporary plane was removed. Ready-built inclined planes like
this stand in several places on Easter Island, waiting for huge
figures which have never come. The technique was admirable
but in no way mysterious if we cease to underestimate the in-
180
Across the Pacific
telligence of men in ancient times and the amount of time and
manpower which they had at their command.
But why did they make these statues ? And why was it nec-
essary to go off to another quarry four miles away from the
crater workshop to find a special kind of red stone to place on
the figure's head? Both in South America and in the Mar-
quesas Islands the whole statue was often of this red stone, and
the natives went great distances to get it. Red headdresses for
persons of high rank were an important feature both in Poly-
nesia and in Peru.
Let us see first whom the statues represented. When the first
Europeans visited the island, they saw mysterious "white men"
on shore and, in contrast to what is usual among peoples of
this kind, they found men with long flowing beards, the de-
scendants of women and children belonging to the first race
on the island, who had been spared by the invaders. The na-
tives themselves declared that some of their ancestors had been
white, while others had been brown. They calculated precisely
that the last-named had immigrated from elsewhere in Poly-
nesia twenty-two generations before, while the first had come
from eastward in large vessels as much as fifty-seven genera-
tions back (i.e., ca. 400 500 A.D.). The race which came from
the east were given the name "long-ears," because they length-
ened their ears artificially by hanging weights on the lobes so
that they hung down to their shoulders. These were the mys-
terious "long-ears" who were killed when the "short-ears" came
to the island, and all the stone figures on Easter Island had large
ears hanging down to their shoulders, as the sculptors them-
selves had had.
Now the Inca legends in Peru say that the sun-king Kon-Tiki
ruled over a white people with beards who were called by the
i*r
KON-T1K1
Incas "big-ears," because they had their ears artificially length-
ened so that they reached down to their shoulders. The Incas
emphasized that it was Kon-Tiki's "big-ears" who had erected
the abandoned giant statues in the Andes Mountains before
they were exterminated or driven out by the Incas themselves
in the battle on an island in Lake Titicaca.
To sum up: Kon-Tiki's white "big-ears" disappeared from
Peru westward with ample experience of working on colossal
stone statues, and Tiki's white "long-ears" came to Easter Island
from eastward skilled in exactly the same art, which they at
once took up in full perfection so that not the smallest trace
can be found on Easter Island of any development leading up
to the masterpieces on the island.
There is often a greater resemblance between the great stone
statues in South America and those on certain South Sea islands
than there is between the monoliths on the different South Sea
islands compared with one another. In the Marquesas Islands
and Tahiti such statues were known under the generic name
Tifa and they represented ancestors honored in the islands'
history who, after their death, had been ranked as gods. And
therein undoubtedly may be found the explanation of the curi-
ous red stone caps on the Easter Island figures. At the time of the
European explorations there existed on all the islands in Poly-
nesia scattered individuals and whole families with reddish hair
and fair skins, and the islanders themselves declared that it was
these who were descended from the first white people on the
islands. On certain islands religious festivals were held, the par-
ticipators in which colored their skins white and their hair red
to resemble their earliest ancestors. At annual ceremonies on
Easter Island the chief person of the festival had all his hair
cut off so that his head might be painted red. And the colossal
182
Across the Pacific
red-stone caps on the giant statues on Easter Island were carved
in the shape which was typical of the local hair style; they had
a round knot on the top, just as the men had their hair tied in
a little traditional topknot in the middle of the head.
The statues on Easter Island had long ears because the sculp-
tors themselves had lengthened ears. They had specially
chosen red stones as wigs because the sculptors themselves had
reddish hair. They had their chins carved pointed and project-
ing, because the sculptors themselves grew beards. They had
the typical physiognomy of the white race with a straight and
narrow nose and thin sharp lips, because the sculptors them-
selves did not belong to the Indonesian race. And when the
statues had huge heads and tiny legs, with their hands laid in
position on their stomachs, it was because it was just in this
way the people were accustomed to make giant statues in South
America. The sole decoration of the Easter Island figures is a
belt which was always carved round the figure's stomach. The
same symbolic belt is found on every single statue in Kon-Tiki's
ancient ruins by Lake Titicaca. It is the legendary emblem of
the sun-god, the rainbow belt. There was a myth on the island
of Mangareva according to which the sun-god had taken off
the rainbow which was his magic belt and climbed down it
from the sky on to Mangareva to people the island with his
white-skinned children. The sun was once regarded as the old-
est original ancestor in all these islands, as well as in Peru.
We used to sit on deck under the starry sky and retell Easter
Island's strange history, even though our own raft was carrying
us straight into the heart of Polynesia so that we should see
nothing of that remote island but its name on the map. But so
full is Easter Island of traces from the east that even its name
can serve as a pointer.
183
KON-TIKI
"Easter Island" appears on the map because some chance
Dutchman "discovered" the island one Easter Sunday. And we
have forgotten that the natives themselves, who already lived
there, had more instructive and significant names for their
home. This island has no less than three names in Polynesian.
One name is Te-Pito-te-Henua, which means "navel of the
islands." This poetical name clearly places Easter Island in a
special position in regard to the other islands farther westward
and is the oldest designation for Easter Island according to the
Polynesians themselves. On the eastern side of the island, near
the traditional landing place of the first "long-ears," is a care-
fully tooled sphere of stone which is called the "golden navel"
and is in turn regarded as the navel of Easter Island itself.
When the poetical Polynesian ancestors carved the island navel
on the east coast and selected the island nearest Peru as the
navel of their myriad islands further west, it had a symbolic
meaning. And when we know that Polynesian tradition refers
to the discovery of their islands as the "birth" of their islands,
then it is more than suggested that Easter Island of all places
was considered the "navel," symbolic of the islands' birthmark
and as the connecting link with their original motherland.
Easter Island's second name is Rapa Nui which means "Great
Rapa," while Rapa Iti or "Little Rapa" is another island of the
same size which lies a very long way west of Easter Island. Now
it is the natural practice of all peoples to call their first home
"Great " while the next is called "New " or "Little "
even if the places are of the same size. And on Little Rapa the
natives have quite correctly maintained traditions that the first
inhabitants of the island came from Great Rapa, Easter Island,
to the eastward, nearest to America. This points directly to an
original immigration from the east.
184
Across the Pacific
The third and last name of this key island is Mata-Kite-Rani,
which means "the eye (which) looks (toward) heaven." At
first glance this is puzzling, for the relatively low Easter Island
does not look toward heaven any more than the other loftier
islands for example, Tahiti, the Marquesas, or Hawaii. But
Rani, heaven, had a double meaning to the Polynesians. It was
also their ancestors' original homeland, the holy land of the
sun-god ? Tiki's forsaken mountain kingdom. And it is very
significant that they should have called just their easternmost
island, of all the thousands of islands in the ocean, "the eye
which looks toward heaven." It is all the more striking seeing
that the kindred name Mata-Rani, which means in Polynesian
"the eye of heaven," is an old Peruvian place name, that of a
spot on the Pacific coast of Peru opposite Easter Island and
right at the foot of Kon-Tiki's old ruined city in the Andes.
The fascination of Easter Island provided us with plenty of
subjects of conversation as we sat on deck under the starry
sky, feeling ourselves to be participators in the whole prehistoric
adventure. We almost felt as if we had done nothing else since
Tiki's days but sail about the seas, under sun and stars searching
for land.
We no longer had the same respect for waves and sea. We
knew them and their relationship to us on the raft. Even the
shark had become a part of the everyday picture; we knew it
and its usual reactions. We no longer thought of the hand har-
poon, and we did not even move away from the side of the raft,
if a shark came up alongside. On the contrary, we were more
likely to try and grasp its back fin as it glided unperturbed
along the logs. This finally developed into a quite new form
of sport tug of war with shark without a line.
We began quite modestly. We caught all too easily more dol-
i8 5
KON-TIKI
phins than we could eat. To keep a popular form of amusement
going without wasting food, we hit on comic fishing without
a hook for the mutual entertainment of the dolphins and our-
selves. We fastened unused flying fish to a string and drew
them over the surface of the water. The dolphins shot up to the
surface and seized the fish, and then we tugged, each in our
own direction, and had a fine circus performance, for if one
dolphin let go another came in its place. We had fun, and the
dolphins got the fish in the end.
Then we started the same game with the sharks. We had
either a bit of fish on the -end of a rope or often a bag with
scraps from dinner, which we let out on a line. Instead of turn-
ing on its back, the shark pushed its snout above the water and
swam forward with jaws wide to swallow the morsel. We could
not help pulling on the rope just as the shark was going to close
its jaws again, and the cheated animal swam on with an un-
speakably foolish, patient expression and opened its jaws again
for the offal, which jumped out of its mouth every time it tried
to swallow it. It ended by the shark's coming right up to the
logs and jumping up like a begging dog for the food which
hung dangling in a bag above its nose. It was just like feeding
a gaping hippopotamus in a zoological gardens, and one day
at the end of July, after three months on board the raft, the fol-
lowing entry was made in the diary:
We made friends with the shari^ which followed us today.
At dinner we fed it with scraps which we poured right down
into its open jaws. It has the effect of a half fierce, half good-
natured and friendly dog when it swims alongside us. It cannot
be denied that shares can seem quite pleasant so long as we do
not get into their jaws ourselves. At least we find it amusing to
have them about us, except when we are bathing.
286
Across the Pacific
One day a bamboo stick, with a bag of sharks' food tied to
a string, was lying ready for use on the edge of the raft when
a sea came and washed it overboard. The bamboo stick was al-
ready lying afloat a couple of hundred yards astern of the raft,
when it suddenly rose upright in the water and came rushing
after the raft by itself, as if it intended to put itself nicely back
in its place again. When the fishing rod came swaying nearer
us, we saw a ten-foot shark swimming right under it, while the
bamboo stick stuck up out of the waves like a periscope. The
shark had swallowed the food bag without biting off the line.
The fishing rod soon overtook us, passed us quite quietly, and
vanished ahead.
But, even if we gradually came to look upon the shark with
quite other eyes, our respect for the five or six rows of razor-
sharp teeth which lay in ambush in the huge jaws never dis-
appeared.
One day Knut had an involuntary swim in company with
a shark. No one was ever allowed to swim away from the raft,
both on account of the raft's drift and because of sharks. But
one day it was extra quiet and we had just pulled on board
such sharks as had been following us, so permission was given
for a quick dip in the sea, Knut plunged in and had gone quite
a long way before he came up to the surface to crawl back. At
that moment we saw from the mast a shadow bigger than him-
self coming up behind him, deeper down. We shouted warnings
as quietly as we could so as not to create a panic, and Knut
heaved himself toward the side of the raft. But the shadow be-
low belonged to a still better swimmer, which shot up from the
depths and gained on Knut. They reached the raft at the same
time. While Knut was clambering on board, a six-foot shark
glided past right under his stomach and stopped beside the
i8 7
KON-TIKI
raft. We gave it a dainty dolphin's head to thank it for not
having snapped.
Generally it is smell more than sight which excites the sharks*
voracity. We have sat with our legs in the water to test them,
and they have swum toward us till they were two or three feet
away, only quietly to turn their tails toward us again. But, if the
water was in the least bloodstained, as it was when we had
been cleaning fish, the sharks' fins came to life and they would
suddenly collect like bluebottles from a long way off. If we
flung out shark's guts, they simply went mad and dashed about
in a blind frenzy. They savagely devoured the liver of their
own kind and then, if we put a foot into the sea, they came
for it like rockets and even dug their teeth into the logs where
the foot had been. The mood of a shark may vary immensely,
the animal being completely at the mercy of its own emotions.
The last stage in our encounter with sharks was that we be-
gan to pull their tails. Pulling animals' tails is held to be an
inferior form of sport, but that may be because no one has tried
it on a shark. For it was, in truth, a lively form of sport.
To get hold of a shark by the tail we first had to give it a
real tidbit. It was ready to stick its head high out of the water
to get it. Usually it had its food served dangling in a bag. For,
if one has fed a shark directly by hand once, it is no longer
amusing. If one feeds dogs or tame bears by hand, they set their
teeth into the meat and tear and worry it till they get a bit off
or until they get the whole piece for themselves. But, if one
holds out a large dolphin at a safe distance from the shark's
head, the shark comes up and smacks his jaws together, and,
without one's having felt the slightest tug, half the dolphin is
suddenly gone and one is left sitting with a tail in one's hand.
We had found it a hard job to cut the dolphin in two with
188
Across the Pacific
knives, but in a fraction of a second the shark, moving its tri-
angular saw teeth quickly sideways, had chopped off the back-
bone and everything else like a sausage machine.
When the shark turned quietly to go under again, its tail
flickered up above the surface and was easy to grasp. The
shark's skin was just like sandpaper to hold on to, and inside
the upper point of its tail there was an indentation which might
have been made solely to allow of a good grip. If we once got
a firm grasp there, there was no chance of our grip's not hold-
ing. Then we had to give a jerk, before the shark could collect
itself, and get as much as possible of the tail pulled in tight
over the logs. For a second or two the shark realized nothing,
but then it began to wriggle and struggle in a spiritless man-
ner with the fore part of its body, for without the help of its
tail a shark cannot get up any speed. The other fins are only
apparatus for balancing and steering. After a few desperate
jerks, during which we had to keep a tight hold of the tail, the
surprised shark became quite crestfallen and apathetic, and,
as the loose stomach began to sink down toward the head, the
shark at last became completely paralyzed.
When the shark had become quiet and, as it were, hung stiff
awaiting developments, it was time for us to haul in with all
our might. We seldom got more than half the heavy fish up
out of the water; then the shark too woke up and did the rest
itself. With violent jerks it swung its head round and up on to
the logs, and then we had to tug with all our might and jump
well out of the way, and that pretty quickly, if we wanted to
save our legs. For now the shark was in no kindly mood. Jerk-
ing itself round in great leaps, it thrashed at the bamboo wall,
using its tail as a sledge hammer. Now it no longer spared its
iron muscles. The huge jaws were opened wide, and the rows
189
KON-TIKl
of teeth bit and snapped in the air for anything they could
reach. It might happen that the war dance ended in the shark's
more or less involuntarily tumbling overboard and disappear-
ing for good after its shameful humiliation, but most often the
shark flung itself about at random on the logs aft, till we got a
running noose round the root of its tail or till it had ceased to
gnash its devilish teeth forever.
The parrot was quite thrilled when we had a shark on deck.
It came scurrying out of the bamboo cabin and climbed up the
wall at frantic speed till it found itself a good, safe lookout post
on the palm-leaf roof, and there it sat shaking its head or flut-
tered to and fro along the ridge, shrieking with excitement.
It had at an early date become an excellent sailor and was al-
ways bubbling over with humor and laughter. We reckoned
ourselves as seven on board six of us and the green parrot The
crab Johannes had, after all, to reconcile itself to being regarded
as a cold-blooded appendage. At night the parrot crept into its
cage under the roof of the bamboo cabin, but in the daytime
it strutted about the deck or hung on to guy ropes and stays and
did the most fascinating acrobatic exercises.
At the start of the voyage we had turnbuckles on the stays
of the mast but they wore the ropes, so we replaced them by
ordinary running knots. When the stays stretched and grew
slack from sun and wind, all hands had to turn to and brace up
the mast, so that its mangrove wood, as heavy as iron, should
not bump against and cut into the ropes till they fell down.
While we were hauling and pulling, at the most critical mo-
ment the parrot began to call out with its cracked voice: "Haul!
Haul! Ho, ho, ho, ho, ha ha ha!" And if it made us laugh, it
laughed till it shook at its own cleverness and swung round
and round on the stays.
190
Across the Pacific
At first the parrot was the bane of our radio operators. They
might be sitting happily absorbed in the radio corner with their
magic earphones on and perhaps in contact with a radio "ham"
in Oklahoma. Then their earphones would suddenly go dead,
and they could not get a sound however much they coaxed
the wires and turned the knobs. The parrot had been busy and
bitten off the wire of the aerial. This was specially tempting in
the early days, when the wire was sent up with a little balloon.
But one day the parrot became seriously ill. It sat in its cage
and moped and touched no food for two days, while its drop-
pings glittered with golden scraps of aerial. Then the radio
operators repented of their angry words and the parrot of its
misdeeds, and from that day Torstein and Knut were its chosen
friends and the parrot would never sleep anywhere but in the
radio corner. The parrot's mother tongue was Spanish when
it first came on board; Bengt declared it took to talking Spanish
with a Norwegian accent long before it began to imitate Tor-
stein's favorite ejaculations in full-blooded Norwegian.
We enjoyed the parrot's humor and brilliant colors for two
months, till a big sea came on board from astern while it was
on its way down the stay from the masthead. When we dis-
covered that the parrot had gone overboard, it was too late. We
did not see it. And the Kon-Tity could not be turned or
stopped ; if anything went overboard from the raft, we had no
chance of turning back for it numerous experiences had shown
that.
The loss of the parrot had a depressing effect on our spirits
the first evening; we knew that exactly the same thing would
happen to ourselves if we fell overboard on a solitary night
watch. We tightened up on all the safety regulations, brought
into use new life lines for the night watch, and frightened one
797
KON-TIKl
another out of believing that we were safe because things had
gone well in the first two months. One careless step, one
thoughtless movement, could send us where the green parrot
had gone, even in broad daylight.
We had several times observed the large white shells of cut-
tlefish eggs, lying floating like ostrich eggs or white skulls on
the blue swell. On one solitary occasion we saw a squid lying
wriggling underneath. We observed the snow-white balls float-
ing on a level with ourselves and thought at first that it would
be an easy matter to row out in the dinghy and get them. We
thought the same that time when the rope of the plankton net
broke so that the cloth net was left behind alone, floating in
our wake. Each time we launched the dinghy, with a rope at-
tached, to row back and pick up the floating object. But we
saw to our surprise that the wind and sea held the dinghy off
and that the line from the Kon-Tify had so violent a braking
effect in the water that we could never row right back to a
point we had already left. We might get within a few yards
of what we wanted to pick up, but then the whole line was out
and the Kon-Tify was pulling us away westward. "Once over-
board always overboard" was a lesson that was gradually
branded into our consciousness on board. If we wanted to go
with the rest, we must hang on till the Kon-Tify ran her bow
against land on the other side.
The parrot left a blank in the radio corner, but, when the
tropical sun shone out over the Pacific next day, we soon be-
came reconciled to his loss. We hauled in many sharks the next
few days, and we constantly found black curved parrots' beaks,
or so we thought, among tunnies' heads and other curiosities in
the shark's belly. But on closer examination the black beaks al-
ways proved to belong to assimilated cuttlefish.
192
Across the Pacific
The two radio operators had had a tough job in their corner
since the first day they came on board. The very first day, in
the Humboldt Current, sea water trickled even from the bat-
tery cases so that they had to cover the sensitive radio corner
with canvas to save what could be saved in the high seas. And
then they had the problem of fitting a long enough aerial on
the little raft. They tried to send the aerial up with a kite, but
in a gust of wind the kite simply plunged down into a wave
crest and disappeared. Then they tried to send it up with a bal-
loon, but the tropical sun burned holes in the balloon so that
it collapsed and sank into the sea. And then they had the
trouble with the parrot. In addition to all this, we were a fort-
night in the Humboldt Current before we came out of a dead
zone of the Andes in which the short wave was as dumb and
lifeless as the air in an empty soapbox.
But then one night the short wave suddenly broke through,
and Torstein's call signal was heard by a chance radio amateur
in Los Angeles who was sitting fiddling with his transmitter to
establish contact with another amateur in Sweden. The man
asked what kind of set we had and, when he got a satisfactory
answer to his question, he asked Torstein who he was and
where he lived. When he heard that Torstein's abode was a
bamboo cabin on a raft in the Pacific, there were several pe-
culiar clickings until Torstein supplied more details. When the
man on the air had pulled himself together, he told us that his
name was Hal and his wife's name Anna and that she was
Swedish by birth and would let our families know we were
alive and welL
It was a strange thought for us that evening that a total
stranger called Hal, a chance moving-picture operator far away
among the swarming population of Los Angeles, was the only
KON-TIKI
person in the world but ourselves who knew where we were
and that we were well. From that night onward Hal, alias
Harold Kempel, and his friend Frank Cuevas took it in turns to
sit up every night and listen for signals from the raft, and Her-
man received grateful telegrams from the head of the U.S.
Weather Bureau for his two daily code reports from an area
for which there were extremely few reports and no statistics.
Later Knut and Torstein established contact with other radio
amateurs almost every night, and these passed on greetings to
Norway through a radio "ham" named Egil Berg at Notodden.
When we were just a few days out in mid-ocean, there was
too much salt water for the radio corner, and the station stopped
working altogether. The operators stood on their heads day
and night with screws and soldering irons, and all our distant
radio fans thought the raft's days were ended. But then one
night the signals LI 2 B burst out into the ether, and in a mo-
ment the radio corner was buzzing like a wasp's nest as several
hundred American operators seized their keys simultaneously
and replied to the call.
Indeed one always felt as if one were sitting down on a wasp's
nest if one strayed into the radio operators' domain. It was
damp with sea water, which forced its way up along the wood-
work everywhere, and, even if there was a piece of raw rubber
on the balsa log where the operator sat, one got electric shocks
both in the hinder parts and in the finger tips if one touched
the Morse key. And, if one of us outsiders tried to steal a pen-
cil from the well-equipped corner, either his hair stood straight
up on his head or he drew long sparks from the stump of the
pencil Only Torstein and Knut and the parrot could wriggle
their way about in that corner unscathed, and we put up a sheet
of cardboard to mark the danger zone for the rest of us.
Across the Pacific
Late one night Knut was sitting tinkering by lamplight in
the radio corner when he suddenly shook me by the leg and
said he had been talking to a fellow who lived just outside Oslo
and was called Christian Amundsen. This was a bit of an ama-
teur record, for the little short-wave transmitter on board the
raft with its 13,990 kilocycles per second did not send out more
than 6 watts, about the same strength as a small electric torch.
This was August 2, and we had sailed more than sixty degrees
round the earth, so that Oslo was at the opposite end of the
globe. King Haakon was seventy-five years old the day after,
and we sent him a message of congratulations direct from the
raft; the day after that Christian was again audible and sent
us a reply from the King, wishing us continued good luck and
success on our voyage.
Another episode we remember as an unusual contrast to the
rest of the life on the raft. We had two cameras on board, and
Erik had with him a parcel of materials for developing photo-
graphs on the voyage, so that we could take duplicate snap-
shots of things that had not come out well After the whale
shark's visit he could contain himself no longer, and one eve-
ning he mixed the chemicals and water carefully in exact
accordance with the instructions and developed two films. The
negatives looked like long-distance photographs nothing but
obscure spots and wrinkles. The film was ruined. We tele-
graphed to our contacts for advice, but our message was picked
up by a radio amateur near Hollywood. He telephoned a
laboratory and soon afterward he broke in and told us that
our developer was too warm; we must not use water above
60 or the negative would be wrinkled.
We thanked him for his advice and ascertained that the very
lowest temperature in our surroundings was that of the ocean
'95
KON-TIKl
current itself, which was nearly 80. Now Herman was a
refrigerating engineer, and I told him by way of a joke to get
the temperature of the water down to 60. He asked to have
the use of the little bottle of carbonic acid belonging to the
already inflated rubber dinghy, and after some hocus-pocus in
a kettle covered with a sleeping bag and a woolen vest suddenly
there was snow on Herman's stubbly beard, and he came in
with a big lump of white ice in the kettle.
Erik developed afresh with splendid results.
Even though the ghost words carried through the air by
short wave were an unknown luxury in Kon-Tiki ? s early days,
the long ocean waves beneath us were the same as of old and
they carried the balsa raft steadily westward as they did then,
fifteen hundred years ago.
The weather became a little more unsettled, with scattered
rain squalls, after we had entered the area nearer the South
Sea islands and the trade wind had changed its direction. It
had blown steadily and surely from the southeast until we were
a good way over in the Equatorial Current; then it had veered
round more and more toward due east. We reached our most
northerly position on June 10 with latitude 6 19' south. We
were then so close up to the Equator that it looked as if we
should sail above even the most northerly islands of the Mar-
quesas group and disappear completely in the sea without find-
ing land. But then the trade wind swung round farther, from
east to northeast, and drove us in a curve down toward the
latitude of the world of islands.
It often happened that wind and sea remained unchanged
for days on end, and then we clean forgot whose steering
watch it was except at night, when the watch was alone on
deck. For, if sea and wind were steady, the steering oar was
796
Across the Pacific
lashed fast and the Kon-Tiki sail remained filled without our
attending to it. Then the night watch could sit quietly in the
cabin door and look at the stars. If the constellations changed
their position in the sky, it was time for him to go out and see
whether it was the steering oar or the wind that had shifted.
It was incredible how easy it was to steer by the stars when
we had seen them marching across the vault of the sky for
weeks on end. Indeed, there was not much else to look at at
night. We knew where we could expect to see the different
constellations night after night, and, when we came up toward
the Equator, the Great Bear rose so clear of the horizon in
the north that we were anxious lest we should catch a glimpse
of the Pole Star, which appears when one comes from south-
ward and crosses the Equator. But as the northeasterly trade
wind set in, the Great Bear sank again.
The old Polynesians were great navigators. They took bear-
ings by the sun by day and the stars by night. Their knowledge
of the heavenly bodies was astonishing. They knew that the
earth was round, and they had names for such abstruse con-
ceptions as the Equator and the northern and southern tropics.
In Hawaii they cut charts of the ocean on the shells of round
bottle gourds, and on certain other islands they made detailed
maps of plaited boughs to which shells were attached to mark
the islands, while the twigs marked particular currents. The
Polynesians knew five planets, which they called wandering
stars, and distinguished them from the fixed stars, for which
they had nearly two hundred different names. A good navi-
gator in old Polynesia knew well in what part of the sky the
different stars would rise and where they would be at different
times of the night and at different times of the year. They
knew which stars culminated over the different islands, and
KON-TIKI
there were cases in which an island was named after a star
which culminated over it night after night and year after year.
Apart from the fact that the starry sky lay like a glittering
giant compass revolving from east to west, they understood that
the different stars right over their heads always showed them
how far north or south they were. When the Polynesians had
explored and brought under their sway their present domain,
which is the whole of the sea nearest to America, they main-
tained traffic between some of the islands for many generations
to come. Historical traditions relate that, when the chiefs from
Tahiti visited Hawaii, which lay more than 2,000 sea miles
farther north and several degrees farther west, the helmsman
steered first due north by sun and stars, till the stars right above
their heads told them that they were on the latitude of Hawaii.
Then they turned at a right angle and steered due west till
they came so near that birds and clouds told them where the
group of islands lay.
Whence had the Polynesians obtained their vast astronomical
knowledge and their calendar, which was calculated with as-
tonishing thoroughness? Certainly not from Melanesian or
Malayan peoples to the westward. But the same old vanished
civilized race, the "white and bearded men," who had taught
Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas their amazing culture in America,
had evolved a curiously similar calendar and a similar astro-
nomical knowledge which Europe in those times could not
match. In Polynesia, as in Peru, the calendar year had been so
arranged as to begin on the particular day of the year when
the constellation of the Pleiades first appeared above the hori-
zon, and in both areas this constellation was considered the
patron of agriculture.
In Peru, where the continent slopes down toward the Pacific,
jg8
Across the Pacific
there stand to this day in the desert sand the ruins of an astro-
nomical observatory of great antiquity, a relic of the same mys-
terious civilized people which carved stone colossi, erected
pyramids, cultivated sweet potatoes and bottle gourds, and
began their year with the rising of the Pleiades. Kon-Tiki knew
the movement of the stars when he set sail upon the Pacific
Ocean.
On July 2 our night watch could no longer sit in peace study-
ing the night sky. We had a strong wind and nasty sea after
several days of light northeasterly breeze. Late in the night we
had brilliant moonlight and a quite fresh sailing wind. We
measured our speed by counting the seconds we took to pass
a chip, flung out ahead on one side of us, and found that we
were establishing a speed record. While our average speed was
from twelve to eighteen "chips," in the jargon current on board,
we were now for a time down to "six chips," and the phos-
phorescence swirled in a regular wake astern of the raft.
Four men lay snoring in the bamboo cabin while Torstein
sat clicking with the Morse key and I was on steering watch.
Just before midnight I caught sight of a quite unusual sea
which came breaking astern of us right across the whole of
my disturbed field of vision. Behind it I could see here and
there the foaming crests of two more huge seas like the first,
following hard on its heels. If we ourselves had not just passed
the place, I should have been convinced that what I saw was
high surf flung up over a dangerous shoal. I gave a warning
shout, as the first sea came like a long wall sweeping after us
in the moonlight, and wrenched the raft into position to take
what was coming.
When the first sea reached us, the raft flung her stern up
sideways and rose up over the wave back which had just
KON-TIKI
broken, so that it hissed and boiled all along the crest. We
rode through the welter of boiling foam which poured along
both sides of the raft, while the heavy sea itself rolled by under
us. The bow flung itself up last as the wave passed, and we
slid, stern first, down into a broad trough of the waves. Imme-
diately after the next wall of water came on and rose up, while
we were again lifted hurriedly into the air and the clear water
masses broke over us aft as we shot over the edge. As a result
the raft was flung right broadside on to the seas, and it was
impossible to wrench her round quickly enough.
The next sea came on and rose out of the stripes of foam
like a glittering wall which began to fall along its upper edge
just as it reached us. When it plunged down, I saw nothing
else to do but hang on as tight as I could to a projecting bam-
boo pole of the cabin roof; there I held my breath while I felt
that we were flung sky-high and everything round me carried
away in roaring whirlpools of foam. In a second we and the
Kon-Tify were above water again and gliding quietly down a
gentle wave back on the other side. Then the seas were normal
again. The three great wave walls raced on before us, and astern
in the moonlight a string of coconuts lay bobbing in the water.
The last wave had given the cabin a violent blow, so that
Torstein was flung head over heels into the radio corner and
the others woke, scared by the noise, while the water gushed
up between the logs and in through the wall. On the port side
of the foredeck the bamboo wickerwork was blown open like a
small crater, and the diving basket had been knocked flat up
in the bow, but everything else was as it had been. Where the
three big seas came from, we have never been able to explain
with certainty, unless they were due to disturbances on the sea
bottom, which are not so uncommon in these regions.
200
Across the Pacific
Two days later we had our first storm. It started by the trade
wind dying away completely, and the feathery, white trade-
wind clouds, which were drifting over our heads up in the
topmost blue, being suddenly invaded by a thick black cloud
bank which rolled up over the horizon from southward. Then
there came gusts of wind from the most unexpected directions,
so that it was impossible for the steering watch to keep control.
As quickly as we got our stern turned to the new direction of
the wind, so that the sail bellied out stiff and safe, just as
quickly the gusts came at us from another quarter, squeezed
the proud bulge out of the sail, and made it swing round and
thrash about to the peril of both crew and cargo. But then the
wind suddenly set in to blow straight from the quarter whence
the bad weather came, and, as the black clouds rolled over us,
the breeze increased to a fresh wind which worked itself up
into a real storm.
In the course of an incredibly short time the seas round
about us were flung up to a height of fifteen feet, while single
crests were hissing twenty and twenty-five feet above the trough
of the sea, so that we had them on a level with our masthead
when we ourselves were down in the trough. All hands had to
scramble about on deck bent double, while the wind shook
the bamboo wall and whistled and howled in all the rigging.
To protect the radio corner we stretched canvas over the rear
wall and port side of the cabin. All loose cargo was lashed
securely, and the sail was hauled down and made fast around
the bamboo yard. When the sky clouded over, the sea grew
dark and threatening, and in every direction it was white-
crested with breaking waves. Long tracks of dead foam lay
like stripes to windward down the backs of the long seas; and
everywhere, where the wave ridges had broken and plunged
207
KON-TIKI
down, green patches like wounds lay frothing for a long time
in the blue-black sea. The crests blew away as they broke, and
the spray stood like salt rain over the sea. When the tropical
rain poured over us in horizontal squalls and whipped the sur-
face of the sea, invisible all round us, the water that ran from
our hair and beards tasted brackish, while we crawled about
the deck naked and frozen, seeing that all the gear was in
order to weather the storm.
When the storm rushed up over the horizon and gathered
about us for the first time, strained anticipation and anxiety
were discernible in our looks. But when it was upon us in
earnest, and the Kon-Tify took everything that came her way
with ease and buoyancy, the storm became an exciting form of
sport, and we all delighted in the fury round about us which
the balsa raft mastered so adroitly, always seeing that she her-
self lay on the wave tops like a cork, while all the main weight
of the raging water was always a few inches beneath. The sea
had much in common with the mountains in such weather. It
was like being out in the wilds in a storm, up on the highest
mountain plateaus, naked and gray. Even though we were
right in the heart of the tropics, when the raft glided up and
down over the smoking waste of sea we always thought of
racing downhill among snowdrifts and rock faces.
The steering watch had to keep its eyes open in such weather.
When the steepest seas passed under the forward half of the
raft, the logs aft rose right out of the water, but the next sec-
ond they plunged down again to climb up over the next crest.
Each time the seas came so close upon one another that the
hindmost reached us while the first was still holding the bow
in the air. Then the solid sheets of water thundered in over
the steering watch in a terrifying welter, but next second the
202
Across the Pacific
stern went up and the flood disappeared as through the prongs
of a fork.
We calculated that in an ordinary calm sea, where there
were usually seven seconds between the highest waves, we took
in about two hundred tons of water astern in twenty-four hours.
But we hardly noticed it because it just flowed in quietly round
the bare legs of the steering watch and as quietly disappeared
again between the logs. But in a heavy storm more than ten
thousand tons of water poured on board astern in the course of
twenty-four hours, seeing that loads varying from a few gal-
lons to two or three cubic yards, and occasionally much more,
flowed on board every five seconds. It sometimes broke on
board with a deafening thunderclap, so that the helmsman
stood in water up to his waist and felt as if he were forcing
his way against the current in a swift river. The raft seemed
to stand trembling for a moment, but then the cruel load that
weighed her down astern disappeared overboard again in great
cascades.
Herman was out all the time with his anemometer measur-
ing the squalls of gale force, which lasted for twenty-four hours.
Then they gradually dropped to a stiff breeze with scattered
rain squalls, which continued to keep the seas boiling round us
as we tumbled on westward with a good sailing wind. To obtain
accurate wind measurements down among the towering seas
Herman had, whenever possible, to make his way up to the
swaying masthead, where it was all he could do to hold on.
When the weather moderated, it was as though the big fish
around us had become completely infuriated. The water round
the raft was full of sharks, tunnies, dolphins, and a few dazed
bonitos, all wriggling about close under the timber of the raft
and in the waves nearest to it. It was a ceaseless life-and-death
203
KON-TIKI
struggle; the backs of big fishes arched themselves over the
water and shot off like rockets, one chasing another in pairs,
while the water round the raft was repeatedly tinged with thick
blood. The combatants were mainly tunnies and dolphins, and
the dolphins came in big shoals which moved much more
quickly and alertly than usual. The tunnies were the assailants;
often a fish of 150 to 200 pounds would leap high into the air
holding a dolphin's bloody head in its mouth. But, even if
individual dolphins dashed off with tunnies hard on their
heels, the actual shoal of dolphins did not give ground, al-
though there were often several wriggling round with big
gaping wounds in their necks. Now and again the sharks, too,
seemed to become blind with rage, and we saw them catch
and fight with big tunnies, which met'in the shark a superior
enemy.
Not one single peaceful little pilot fish was to be seen. They
had been devoured by the furious tunnies, or they had hidden
in the chinks under the raft or fled far away from the battle-
field. We dared not put our heads down into the water to see.
I had a nasty shock and could not help laughing afterward
at my own complete bewilderment when I was aft, obeying
a call of nature. We were accustomed to a bit of a swell in the
water closet, but it seemed contrary to all reasonable probabili-
ties when I quite unexpectedly received a violent punch astern
from something large and cold and very heavy, which came
butting up against me like a shark's head in the sea. I was
actually on my way up the mast stay, with a feeling that I had
a shark hanging on to my hindquarters, before I collected my-
self. Herman, who was hanging over the steering oar doubled
up with laughter, was able to tell me that a huge tunny had
delivered a sideways smack at my nakedness with his 160
Across the Pacific
pounds or so of cold fish. Afterward, when Herman and then
Torstein were on watch, the same fish tried to jump on board
with the seas from astern, and twice the big fellow was right
up on the end of the logs, but each time it flung itself over-
board again before we could get a grip of the slippery body.
After that a stout bewildered bonito came right on board
with a sea, and with that, and a tunny caught the day before,
we decided to fish, to bring order into the sanguinary chaos that
surrounded us.
Our diary says:
A six-foot shar\ was hooded first and hauled on board. As
soon as the hoof^ was out again, it was swallowed by an eight-
foot shar}^, and we hauled that on board. When the hoo\ came
out again, we got a fresh six-foot shar\ and had hauled it over
the edge of the raft when it bro\e loose and dived. The hoo\
went out again at once, and an eight-foot sharJ^ came on to it
and gave us a hard tussle. We had its head over the logs when
all four steel lines were cut through and the shar\ dived into
the depths. New hoo\ out, and a seven-foot shar\ was hauled
on board. It was now dangerous to stand on the slippery logs
aft fishing, because the three shares \ept on throwing up their
heads and snapping, long after one would have thought they
were dead. We dragged the shares forward by the tail into a
heap on the foredec\, and soon afterward a big tunny was
hooded and gave us more of a fight than any shar\ before we
got it on board. It was so fat and heavy that none of us could
lift it by the tail.
The sea was just as full of furious fish bac\s. Another sharl^
was hooded but bro\e away just when it was being pulled on
board. But then we got a six-foot shar\ safely on board. After
that a five-foot shar\, which also came on board. Then we
205
KON-TIKI
caught yet another six-foot shar\ and hauled it up. When the
hoo\ came out again, we hauled in a seven-joot shar\.
Wherever we walked on deck, there were big sharks lying
in the way, beating their tails convulsively on the deck or
thrashing against the bamboo cabin as they snapped around
them. Already tired and worn out when we began to fish after
the storm, we became completely befuddled as to which sharks
were quite dead, which were still snapping convulsively if we
went near them, and which were quite alive and were lying in
ambush for us with their green cat's eyes. When we had nine
big sharks lying round us in every direction, we were so weary
of hauling on heavy lines and fighting with the twisting and
snapping giants that we gave up after five hours' toil.
Next day there were fewer dolphins and tunnies but just as
many sharks. We began to fish and haul them in again but
soon stopped when we perceived that all the fresh shark's blood
that ran off the raft only attracted still more sharks. We threw
all the dead sharks overboard and washed the whole deck
clean of blood. The bamboo mats were torn by shark teeth and
rough sharkskin, and we threw the bloodiest and most torn of
them overboard and replaced them with new golden-yellow
bamboo mats, several layers of which were lashed fast on the
foredeck.
When we turned in on these evenings in our mind's eye we
saw greedy, open shark jaws and blood. And the smell of
shark meat stuck in our nostrils. We could eat shark it tasted
like haddock if we got the ammonia out of the pieces by
putting them in sea water for twenty-four hours but bonito
and tunny were infinitely better.
That evening, for the first time, I heard one of the fellows
say that it would soon be pleasant to be able to stretch oneself
206
Across the Pacific
out comfortably on the green grass on a palm island; he would
be glad to see something other than cold fish and rough sea.
The weather had become quite quiet again, but it was never
as constant and dependable as before. Incalculable, violent gusts
of wind from time to time brought with them heavy showers,
which we were glad to see because a large part of our water
supply had begun to go bad and tasted like evil-smelling marsh
water. When it was pouring the hardest, we collected water
from the cabin roof and stood on deck naked, thoroughly to
enjoy the luxury of having the salt washed off with fresh water.
The pilot fish were wriggling along again in their usual
places, but whether they were the same old ones which had
returned after the blood bath, or whether they were new fol-
lowers taken over in the heat of the battle, we could not say.
On July 21 the wind suddenly died away again. It was op-
pressive and absolutely still, and we knew from previous experi-
ence what this might mean. And, right enough, after a few
violent gusts from east and west and south, the wind freshened
up to a breeze from southward, where black, threatening clouds
had again rushed up over the horizon. Herman was out with
his anemometer all the time, measuring already fifty feet and
more per second, when suddenly Torstein's sleeping bag went
overboard. And what happened in the next few seconds took
a much shorter time than it takes to tell it.
Herman tried to catch the bag as it went, took a rash step,
and fell overboard. We heard a faint cry for help amid the
noise of the waves, and saw Herman's head and a waving arm
as well as some vague green object twirling about in the water
near him. He was struggling for life to get back to the raft
through the high seas which had lifted him out from the port
side. Torstein. who was at the steering oar aft, and I myself,
207
KON-TIKI
up in the bow, were the first to perceive him, and we went
cold with fear. We bellowed "Man overboard!" at the top of
our lungs as we rushed to the nearest life-saving gear. The
others had not heard Herman's cry because of the noise of the
sea, but in a trice there was life and bustle on deck. Herman
was an excellent swimmer, and, though we realized at once
that his life was at stake, we had a fair hope that he would
manage to crawl back to the edge of the raft before it was
too late.
Torstein, who was nearest, seized the bamboo drum round
which was the line we used for the lifeboat, for this was within
his reach. It was the only time on the whole voyage that this
line got caught up. Herman was now on a level with the stern
of the raft but a few yards away, and his last hope was to crawl
to the blade of the steering oar and hang on to it. As he missed
the end of the logs, he reached out for the oar blade, but it
slipped away from him. And theie he lay, just where experience
had shown we could get nothing back. While Bengt and I
launched the dinghy, Knut and Erik threw out the life belt.
Carrying a long line, it hung ready for use on the corner of the
cabin roof, but today the wind was so strong that when it was
thrown it was simply blown back to the raft. After a few un-
successful throws Herman was already far astern of the steering
oar, swimming desperately to keep up with the raft, while the
distance iticreased with each gust of wind. He realized that
henceforth the gap would simply go on increasing, but he set
a faint hope on the dinghy which we had now got into the
water. Without the line, which acted as a brake, it would per-
haps be possible to drive the rubber raft to meet the swimming
man, but whether the rubber raft would ever get back to the
Kon-Tify was another matter. Nevertheless, three men in a
208
Our daily bread. Dolphins followed us throughout the voyage and were the
best eating imaginable. They bit at once if we used flying fish as bait.
Above: Haugland goes down to inspect the lashings on the raft's bottom. The
author holds him firmly by the legs.
Below: Where Haugland went down, a shark was hauled up an easy matter,
as the deck was only a foot or two above the surface of the water.
Hesselberg making a diving basket. If we received unwelcome attentions
when we dived under the raft, we just crouched inside the basket and were
quickly hauled on board.
At left: Studying the
chart. Hesselberg took
observations daily and
marked our drift on the
chart. Not till after three
months, when we reached
the Tuamotu group, did
a serious navigation prob-
lem arise how were we
to land?
Below: Raaby in the
radio corner. Haugland
and Raaby had their ra-
dio station behind a card-
board partition decorated
by Danielsson. They were
in contact with amateurs
in many different coun-
tries and sent regular re-
ports to the U.S. Weather
Bureau.
Across the Pacific
rubber dinghy had some chance; one man in the sea had none.
Then we suddenly saw Knut take oflf and plunge headfirst
into the sea. He had the life belt in one hand and was heaving
himself along. Every time Herman's head appeared on a wave
back Knut was gone, and every time Knut came up Herman
was not there. But then we saw both heads at once; they had
swum to meet each other and both were hanging on to the life
belt. Knut waved his arm, and, as the rubber raft had mean-
while been hauled on board, all four of us took hold of the
line ot the life belt and hauled for dear life, with our eyes fixed
on the great dark object which was visible just behind the two
men. This same mysterious beast in the water was pushing a
big greenish-black triangle up above the wave crests; it almost
gave Knut a shock when he was on his way over to Herman.
Only Herman knew then that the triangle did not belong to
a shark or any other sea monster. It was an inflated corner of
Torstein's watertight sleeping bag. But the sleeping bag did
not remain floating for long after we had hauled the two men
safe and sound on board. Whatever dragged the sleeping bag
down into the depths had just missed a better prey.
"Glad I wasn't in it," said Torstein and took hold of the
steering oar where he had let it go.
But otherwise there were not many wisecracks that evening.
We all felt a chill running through nerve and bone for a long
time afterward. But the cold shivers were mingled with a warm
thankfulness that there were still six of us on board.
We had a lot of nice things to say to Knut that day Herman
and the rest of us, too.
But there was not much time to think about what had al-
ready happened, for as the sky grew black over our heads the
gusts of wind increased in strength, and before night a new
209
KON-THQ
storm was upon us. We finally got the life belt to hang astern
of the raft on a long line, so that we had something behind the
steering oar toward which to swim if one of us should fall
overboard again in a squall. Then it grew pitch dark around
us as night fell and hid the raft and the sea. Bouncing wildly
up and down in the darkness, we only heard and felt the gale
howling in masts and guy ropes, while the gusts pressed with
smashing force against the springy bamboo cabin till we
thought it would fly overboard. But it was covered with canvas
and well guyed. And we felt the Kon-Tity tossing with the
foaming seas, while the logs moved up and down with the
movement of the waves like the keys of an instrument. We
were astonished that cascades of water did not gush up through
the wide chinks in the floor, but they only acted as a regular
bellows through which damp air rushed up and down.
For five whole days the weather varied between full storm
and light gale; the sea was dug up into wide valleys filled with
the smoke from foaming gray-blue seas, which seemed to have
their backs pressed out long and flat under the onset of the
wind. Then on the fifth day the heavens split to show a glimpse
of blue, and the malignant, black cloud cover gave place to
the ever victorious blue sky as the storm passed on. We had
come through the gale with the steering oar smashed and the
sail rent; the centerboards hung loose and banged about like
crowbars among the logs, because all the ropes which had
tightened them up under water were worn through. But we
ourselves and the cargo were completely undamaged.
After the two storms the Kon-Tiki had become a good deal
weaker in the joints. The strain of working over the steep
wave backs had stretched all the ropes, and the continuously
working logs had made the ropes eat into the balsa wood. We
210
Across the Pacific
thanked Providence that we had followed the Incas' custom
and had not used wire ropes, which would simply have sawed
the whole raft into matchwood in the gale. And, if we had
used bone-dry,, high-floating balsa at the start, the raft would
long ago have sunk into the sea under us, saturated with sea
water. It was the sap in the fresh logs which served as an im-
pregnation and prevented the water from filtering in through
the porous balsa wood.
But now the ropes had become so loose that it was dangerous
to let one's foot slip down between two logs, for it could be
crushed when they came together violently. Forward and aft,
where there was no bamboo deck, we had to give at the knees
when we stood with our feet wide apart on two logs at the
same time. The logs aft were as slippery as banana leaves with
wet seaweed, and, even though we had made a regular path
through the greenery where we usually walked and had laid
down a broad plank for the steering watch to stand on, it was
not easy to keep one's foothold when a sea struck the raft. On
the port side one of the nine giants bumped and banged against
the crossbeams with dull, wet thuds both by night and by day.
There came also new and fearful creakings from the ropes
which held the two sloping masts together at the masthead,
for the steps of the masts worked about independently of each
other, because they rested on two different logs.
We got the steering oar spliced and lashed with long billets
of mangrove wood, as hard as iron, and with Erik and Bengt
as sailmakers Kon-Tiki soon raised his head again and swelled
his breast in a stiff bulge toward Polynesia, while the steering
oar danced behind in seas which the fine weather had made
soft and gentle. But the centerboards never again became quite
what they had been; they did not meet the pressure of the
211
KON-TIKI
water with their full strength but gave way and hung, dangling
loose and unguyed, under the raft. It was useless to try to in-
spect the ropes on the underside, for they were completely
overgrown with seaweed. On taking up the whole bamboo
deck we found only three of the main ropes broken; they had
been lying crooked and pressed against the cargo, which had
worn them away. It was evident that the logs had absorbed a
great weight of water but, since the cargo had been lightened,
this was roughly canceled out. Most of our provisions and
drinking water were already used up, likewise the radio oper-
ators' dry batteries.
Nevertheless, after the last storm it was clear enough that we
should both float and hold together for the short distance that
separated us from the islands ahead. Now quite another prob-
lem came into the foreground how would the voyage end?
The Kon-Tify would slog on inexorably westward until she
ran her bow into a solid rock or some other fixed object which
would stop her drifting. But our voyage would not be ended
until all hands had landed safe and sound on one of the nu-
merous Polynesian islands ^ahead.
When we came through the last storm, it was quite uncer-
tain where the raft would end up. We were at an equal distance
from the Marquesas Islands and the Tuamotu group, and in a
position which meant that we could very easily pass right be-
tween the two groups of islands without having a glimpse of
one of them. The nearest island in the Marquesas group lay
300 sea miles northwest, and the nearest island in the Tuamotu
group lay 300 sea miles southwest, while wind and current were
uncertain, with their general direction westerly and toward
the wide ocean gap between the two island groups.
The island which lay nearest to the northwest was no other
212
Across the Pacific
than Fatu Hiva, the little jungle-clad mountainous island where
I had lived in a hut built on piles on the beach and heard the
old man's vivid stories of the ancestral hero Tiki. If the Kon-
Tify stood in to that same beach, I should meet many acquaint-
ances, but hardly the old man himself. He must have departed
long ago, with a fair hope of meeting the real Tiki again. If
the raft headed in toward the mountain ranges of the Mar-
quesas group, I knew the few islands in the group were a long
way apart and the sea thundered unchecked against perpen-
dicular cliffs where we should have to keep our eyes open
while steering for the mouths of the few valleys, which always
ended in narrow strips of beach.
If, on the contrary, she headed down toward the coral reefs
of the Tuamotu group, there the numerous islands lay close
together and covered a wide space of sea. But this group of
islands is also known as the Low or Dangerous Archipelago,
because the whole formation has been built up entirely by coral
polyps and consists of treacherous submerged reefs and palm-
clad atolls which rise only six or ten feet above the surface of
the sea. Dangerous ring-shaped reefs fling themselves protect-
ingly round every single atoll and are a menace to shipping
throughout the area. But, even if coral polyps built the Tua-
motu atolls while the Marquesas Islands are remains of extinct
volcanoes, both groups are inhabited by the same Polynesian
race, and the royal families in both regard Tiki as their pri-
meval ancestor.
As early as July 3, when we were still 1,000 sea miles from
Polynesia, Nature herself was able to tell us, as she was able
to tell the primitive raftsmen from Peru in their time, that
there really was land ahead somewhere out in the sea. Until we
were a good thousand sea miles out from the coast of Peru we
213
KON-T1KI
had noted small flocks of frigate birds. They disappeared at
about 100 west, and after that we saw only small petrels which
have their home on the sea. But on July 3 the frigate birds
reappeared, at 125 west, and from now onward small flocks
of frigate birds were often to be seen, either high up in the sky
or shooting down over the wave crests, where they snapped up
flying fish which had taken to the air to escape from dolphins.
As these birds did not come from America astern of us, they
must have their homes in another country ahead.
On July 16 Nature betrayed herself still more obviously. On
that day we hauled up a nine-foot shark, which threw up from
its stomach a large undigested starfish which it had recently
brought from some coast out here in the ocean.
And the very next day we had the first definite visitor straight
from the islands of Polynesia.
It was a great moment on board when two large boobies
were spotted above the horizon to westward and soon afterward
came sailing in over our mast, flying low. With a wingspread
of five feet they circled round us many times, then folded their
wings and settled on the sea alongside us. Dolphins rushed to
the spot at once and wriggled inquisitively round the great
swimming birds, but neither party touched the other. These
were the first living messengers that came to bid us welcome
to Polynesia. They did not go back in the evening but rested
on the sea, and after midnight we still heard them flying in
circles round the mast, uttering hoarse cries.
The flying fish which came on board were now of another
and much larger species; I recognized them from fishing trips
I had taken with the natives along the coast of Fatu Hiva.
For three days and nights we made straight toward Fatu Hi-
va, but then a strong northeast wind came on and sent us down
214
Across the Pacific
in the direction of the Tuamotu atolls. We were now blown
out of the real South Equatorial Current, and the ocean currents
were no longer behaving dependably. One day they were there;
another day they were gone. The currents could run like in-
visible rivers branching out all over the sea. If the current was
swift, there was usually more swell and the temperature of the
water usually fell one degree. It showed its direction and
strength every day by the difference between Erik's calculated
and his measured position.
On the threshold of Polynesia the wind said "Pass," having
handed us over to a weak branch of the current which, to our
alarm, had its course in the direction of the Antarctic. The wind
did not become absolutely still we never experienced that
throughout the voyage and when it was feeble we hoisted
every rag we had to collect what little there was. There was
not one day on which we moved backward toward America,
and our smallest distance in twenty-four hours was 9 sea miles,
while our average run for the voyage as a whole was 42^ sea
miles in twenty-four hours.
The trade wind, after all, had not the heart to fail us right
in the last lap. It reported for duty again and pushed and
shoved at the ramshackle craft which was preparing her entry
into a new and strange part of the world.
With each day that passed, larger flocks of sea birds came
and circled over us aimlessly in all directions. One evening,
when the sun was about to sink into the sea, we noticed that
the birds had received a violent impetus. They were flying away
in a westerly direction without paying any attention to us or
the flying fish beneath them. From the masthead we could see
that, as they came over, they all flew straight on on exactly the
same course. Perhaps they saw something from up above which
2/5
KON-TIKI
we did not see. Perhaps they were flying by instinct. In any
case they were flying with a plan, straight home to the nearest
island, their breeding place.
We twisted the steering oar and set our course exactly in
the direction in which the birds had disappeared. Even after it
was dark, we heard the cries of stragglers flying over us against
the starry sky on exactly the same course as that which we were
now following. It was a wonderful night; the moon was nearly
full for the third time in the course of the Kon-Tify's voyage.
Next day there were still more birds over us, but we did
not need to wait for them to show us our way again in the
evening. This time we had detected a curious stationary cloud
above the horizon. The other clouds were small feathery wisps
of wool which came up in the south and passed across the vault
of the sky with the trade wind till they disappeared over the
horizon in the west. So I had once come to know the drifting
trade-wind clouds on Fatu Hiva, and so we had seen them over
us night and day on board the Kon-Tify. But the lonely cloud
on the horizon to the southwest did not move; it just rose like
a motionless column of smoke while the trade-wind clouds
drifted by. The Polynesians knew land lay under such clouds.
For, when the tropical sun bakes the hot sand, a stream of warm
air is created which rises up and causes its vapor content to con-
dense up in the colder strata of air.
We steered on the cloud till it disappeared after sunset. The
wind was steady, and with the steering oar lashed tight the Kon-
Tity kept to her course unaided. The steering watch's job was
now to sit on the plank at the masthead, shiny with wear, and
keep a lookout for anything that indicated land.
There was a deafening screaming of birds over us all that
night. And the moon was nearly full.
216
7
TO THE SOUTH
SEA ISLANDS
First Sight of Land -
We Drift Away from Pufyi Pu\a -
A Festal Day along the Angatau Reef-
On the Threshold of Paradise -
The First Natives -
The Kon-Tiki Gets a New Crew ~
Knut on Shore Leave- A Losing Battle -
We Drift Out to Sea Again -
In Dangerous Waters -
From Tafyime to Raroia -
Drifting toward the Witches' Caldron-
At the Mercy of the Breakers -
A Shipwrecl^ -
Cast Ashore on the Coral Reef-
We Find a Desert Island
To the South Sea Islands
ON THE NIGHT BEFORE JULY 30 THERE WAS A NEW
and strange atmosphere about the Kon-Tify. Perhaps it was
the deafening clamor from all the sea birds over us which show-
ed that something fresh was brewing. The screaming of birds
with many voices sounded hectic and earthly after the dead
creaking of lifeless ropes, which was all we had heard above
the noise of the sea in the three months we had behind us. And
the moon seemed larger and rounder than ever as it sailed over
the lookout at the masthead. In our fancy it reflected palm tops
and warm-blooded romance; it did not shine with such a yellow
light over the cold fishes out at sea.
At six o'clock Bengt came down from the masthead, woke
Herman, and turned in. When Herman clambered up the
creaking, swaying mast, the day had begun to break. Ten min-
utes later he was down the rope ladder again and was shaking
me by the leg.
"Come out and have a look at your island!"
His face was radiant and I jumped up, followed by Bengt
who had not quite gone to sleep yet. Hard on one another's
219
KON-TIKI
heels, we huddled together as high as we could climb, at the
point where the masts crossed. There were many birds around
us, and a faint violet-blue veil over the sky was reflected in the
sea as a last relic of the departing night. But over the whole
horizon away to the east a ruddy glow had begun to spread,
and far down to the southeast it gradually formed a blood-red
background for a faint shadow, like a blue pencil line, drawn
for a short way along the edge of the sea.
Land! An island! We devoured it greedily with our eyes and
woke the others, who tumbled out drowsily and stared in all
directions as if they thought our bow was about to run on to
a beach. Screaming sea birds formed a bridge across the sky in
the direction of the distant island, which stood out sharper
against the horizon as the red background widened and turned
gold with the approach of the sun and the full daylight.
Our first thought was that the island did not lie where it
should. As the island could not have drifted, the raft must have
been caught up in a northward current in the course of the
night. We had only to cast one glance over the sea to perceive
at once, from the direction of the waves, that we had lost our
chance in the darkness. Where we now lay, the wind no longer
allowed us to press the raft on a course toward the island. The
region round the Tuamotu Archipelago was full of strong, local
ocean currents which twisted in all directions as they ran up
against land; many of them varied in direction as they met
powerful tidal currents flowing in and out over reefs and la-
goons.
We laid the steering oar over, but we knew quite well that it
was useless. At half-past six the sun rose out of the sea and
climbed straight up as it does in the tropics. The island lay
some few sea miles away and had the appearance of a quite
220
To the South Sea Islands
low strip of forest creeping along the horizon. The trees were
crowded close together behind a narrow light-colored beach,
which lay so low that it was hidden behind the seas at regular
intervals. According to Erik's positions this island was Puka
Puka, the first outpost of the Tuamotu group. Sailing Directions
for Pacific Islands 7940, our two different charts, and Erik's
observations gave, in all, four quite different positions for this
island, but as there were no other islands in all that neighbor-
hood there could be no doubt that the island we saw was Puka
Puka.
No extravagant outbursts were to be heard on board. After
the sail had been trimmed and the oar laid over, we all formed
a silent group at the masthead or stood on deck staring toward
the land which had suddenly cropped up out in the middle of
the endless, all-dominating sea. At last we had a visible proof
that we had really been moving in all these months; we had
not just been lying tumbling about in the center of the same
eternal circular horizon. To us it seemed as if the island were
mobile and had suddenly entered the circle of blue and empty
sea in the center of which we had our permanent abode; as if
the island were drifting slowly across our own domain, heading
for the eastern horizon. We were all filled with a warm, quiet
satisfaction at having actually reached Polynesia, mingled with
a faint momentary disappointment at having to submit help-
lessly to seeing the island lie there like a mirage while we con-
tinued our eternal drift across the sea westward.
Just after sunrise a thick black column of smoke rose above
the treetops to the left of the middle of the island. We followed
it with our eyes and thought to ourselves that the natives were
rising and getting their breakfast. We had no idea then that
native lookout posts had seen us and were sending up smoke
221
KON-TIK1
signals to invite us to land. About seven o'clock we scented a
faint breath of burned borao wood which tickled our salted
nostrils. It awoke in me at once slumbering memories of the fire
on the beach on Fatu Hiva. Half an hour later we caught the
smell of newly cut wood and of forest. The island had now be-
gun to shrink and lay astern of us so that we received flickering
wafts of breeze from it. For a quarter of an hour Herman and
I clung to the masthead and let the warm smell of leaves and
greenery filter in through our nostrils. This was Polynesia a
beautiful, rich smell of dry land after ninety-three salty days
down among the waves. Bengt already lay snoring in his sleep-
ing bag again. Erik and Torstein lay on their backs in the cabin
meditating, and Knut ran in and out and sniffed the smell of
leaves and wrote in his diary.
At half-past eight Puka Puka sank into the sea astern of us,
but right on till eleven o'clock we could see, on climbing to the
masthead, that there was a faint blue streak above the horizon
in the east. Then that too was gone, and a high cumulo-nimbus
cloud, rising motionless skyward, was all that showed where
Puka Puka lay. The birds disappeared. They kept by preference
to windward of the islands so that they had the wind with
them when they returned home in the evening with full bellies.
The dolphins also had become noticeably scarcer, and there
were again only a few pilot fish under the raft.
That night Bengt said he longed for a table and chair, for
it was so tiring to lie and turn from back to stomach while
reading. Otherwise he was glad we had missed our landing, for
he still had three books to read. Torstein suddenly had a desire
for an apple, and I myself woke up in the night because I
definitely smelled a delicious odor of steak and onions. But it
turned out to be only a dirty shirt.
222
To the South Sea Islands
The very next morning we detected two new clouds rising
up like the steam from two locomotives below the horizon. The
map was able to tell us that the names of the coral islands they
came from were Fangahina and Angatau. The cloud over An-
gatau lay the most favorably for us as the wind was blowing,
so we set our course for that, lashed the oar fast, and enjoyed
the wonderful peace and freedom of the Pacific. So lovely was
life on this fine day on the bamboo deck of the Kon-Tify that
we drank in all the impressions in the certainty that the journey
would soon be over now, whatever might await us.
For three days and nights we steered on the cloud over Anga-
tau; the weather was brilliant, the oar alone held us on our
course, and the current played us no tricks. On the fourth
morning Torstein relieved Herman after the 4-6 watch and
was told that Herman thought he had seen the outlines of a
low island in the moonlight. When the sun rose just afterward,
Torstein stuck his head in at the cabin door and shouted:
"Land ahead!"
We all plunged out on deck, and what we saw made us hoist
all our flags. First the Norwegian aft, then the French at the
masthead because we were heading for a French colony. Soon
the raft's entire collection of flags was fluttering in the fresh
trade wind the American, British, Peruvian, and Swedish flags
besides the flag of the Explorers Club so there was no doubt
on board that now the Kon-Tity was dressed. The island was
ideally placed this time, right in our own course and a little far-
ther away from us than Puka Puka had been when it cropped
up at sunrise four days before. As the sun rose straight up over
the sky astern of us, we could see a clear green glimmer high
up toward the misty sky over the island. It was the reflection
of the still, green lagoon on the inside of the surrounding reef.
223
KON-TIKI
Some of the low atolls throw up mirages of this kind for many
thousand feet into the air, so that they show their position to
primitive seafarers many days before the island itself is visible
above the horizon.
About ten o'clock we took charge of the steering oar our-
selves; we must now decide toward which part of the island
we should steer. We could already distinguish individual tree-
tops from the others and could see rows of tree trunks shining
in the sun, which stood out against the background of dense
shadowy foliage.
We knew that somewhere between us and the island there
was a dangerous submerged shoal, lying in ambush for any-
thing that approached the innocent island. This reef lay right
under the deep, free roll of the swell from the east, and, as the
huge masses of water lost their balance above the shoal, they
wavered skyward and plunged down, thundering and foaming,
over the sharp coral reef. Many vessels have been caught in
the terrible suction against the submerged reefs in the Tuamotu
group and have been smashed to pieces against the coral.
From the sea we saw nothing of this insidious trap. We sailed
in, following the direction of the waves, and saw only the
curved shining back of sea after sea disappearing toward the
island. Both the reef and the whole frothing witches' dance
over it were hidden behind rising rows of broad wave backs
ahead of us. But along both ends of the island where we saw
the beach in profile, both north and south, we saw that a few
hundred yards from land the sea was one white boiling mass
flinging itself high into the air.
We laid our course so as to graze the outside of the witches'
kitchen off the southern point of the island, hoping, when we
got there, to be able to steer along the atoll till we came round
224
At right: The first birds
from Polynesia which
welcomed us. We fol-
lowed the same course as
they when they flew
home at evening.
Below: Land in sight!
After 93 days we sighted
land for the first time. It
was the island Puka
Puka. But the wind and
current took us out to
sea again.
Above: Kon-Tify approaching land. The tricolor was hoisted as we steered
toward the French island Angatau. We had reached Polynesia.
Below: The first natives coming out. Toward evening several canoes appeared
with natives eager to help us ashore. But the raft drifted out to sea again, and
finally Angatau disappeared astern.
Above: A reef with a witches' caldron of seething breakers barred the approach
to the island Raroia. The raft was heavily pounded and finally flung up by
the waves on to the coral reef surrounding the island. t
Bdow: The wreck was wasted higher up on to the reef every day. The Raroia
reef-25 miles long-is (like all the other islands in the Tuamotu group) the
work of industrious little coral polyps.
Salvage work. Danielsson
safe and sound, but his
head still aching from a
blow from the mast
dragging his mattress out
of the wreckage. The
most important cargo has
already been salvaged.
Chaos. After the strand-
ing the raft was hardly
recognizable. The masts
were broken, the cabin
crushed, the bamboo deck
twisted up to form a bar-
ricade, and our belong-
ings strewn all over the
place.
To the South Sea Islands
the point on the lee side or till we touched, before we drifted
past, a place where it was so shallow that we could stop our
drift with a makeshift anchor and wait till the wind changed
and placed us under the lee of the island.
About noon we could see through the glass that the vegeta-
tion on shore consisted of young green coconut palms, which
stood with theii tops close together over a waving hedge of
luxuriant undergrowth in the foreground. On the beach in
front of them a number of large coral blocks lay strewn about
on the bright sand. Otherwise there was no sign of life, apart
from white birds sailing over the palm tufts.
At two o'clock we had come so close that we began to sail
along the island, just outside the baffling reef. As we gradually
approached, we heard the roar of the breakers like a steady
waterfall against the reef, and soon they sounded like an end-
less express train running parallel with us a few hundred yards
from our starboard side. Now, too, we could see the white spray
which was occasionally flung high into the air behind the curly,
breaking wave backs just in there where the "train" was roaring
along.
Two men at the same time stood turning the steering oar;
they were behind the bamboo cabin and so had no view ahead
whatever. Erik, as navigator, stood on the top of the kitchen
box and gave directions to the two men at the heavy oar. Our
plan was to keep as close in to the dangerous reef as was safe.
We kept a continuous lookout from the masthead for a gap or
opening in the reef where we could try to slip the raft through.
The current was now driving us along the whole length of the
reef and played us no tricks. The loose centerboards allowed us
to steer at an angle of about 20 to the wind on both sides, and
the wind was blowing along the reef.
225
KON-T1KI
While Erik directed our zigzag course and took his loops as
near the reef as was advisable in view of the suction, Herman
and I went out in the rubber dinghy at the end of a rope. When
the raft was on the inward tack, we swung after her on the
rope and came so close to the thundering reef that we caught a
glimpse of the glass-green wall of water that was rolling away
from us and saw how, when the seas sucked themselves back,
the naked reef exposed itself, resembling a torn-up barricade of
rusty iron ore. As far as we could see along the coast there was
no gap or passage. So Erik trimmed the sail by tightening the
port and loosening the starboard sheets, and the helmsman fol-
lowed with the steering oar, so that the Kon-Tify turned her
nose out again and tumbled away from the danger zone till
her next drive inward.
Each time the Kon-Tify stood in toward the reef and swung
out again, we two who were in tow in the dinghy sat with our
hearts in our mouths, for each time we came so close in that we
felt the beat of the seas becoming nervous as it rose higher and
fiercer. And each time we were convinced that this time Erik
had gone too far, that this time there was no hope of getting
the Kon-Tity out again clear of the breakers which drew us
in toward the devilish red reef. But each time Erik got clear
with a smart maneuver, and the Kon-Tify ran safely out into
the open sea again, well out of the clutch of the suction. All the
time we were gliding along the island, so close that we saw
every detail on shore; yet the heavenly beauty there was inac-
cessible to us because of the frothing moat that lay between.
About three o'clock the forest of palms ashore opened, and
through a wide gap we saw right into a blue glassy lagoon.
But the surrounding reef lay as compact as ever, gnashing its
blood-red teeth ominously in the foam. There was no passage,
226
To the South Sea Islands
and the palm forest closed again as we plodded on along the
island with the wind at our backs. Later the palm forest became
thinner and thinner and gave us a view into the interior of the
coral island. This consisted of the fairest, brightest salt-water
lagoon, like a great silent tarn, surrounded by swaying coconut
palms and shining bathing beaches. The seductive, green palm
island itself formed a broad, soft ring of sand round the hos-
pitable lagoon, and a second ring ran round the whole island
the rust-red sword which defended the gates of heaven.
All day we zigzagged along Angatau and had its beauty at
close quarters, just outside the cabin door. The sun beat down
on all the palms, and all was Paradise and joy on the island
within. As our maneuvers gradually became a matter of rou-
tine, Erik got out his guitar and stood on deck in a huge Pe-
ruvian sun hat playing and singing sentimental South Sea
songs, while Bengt served an excellent dinner on the edge of
the raft. We opened an old coconut from Peru and drank to the
young fresh nuts which hung on the trees inside. The whole
atmosphere the peace over the bright, green palm forest which
stood deep-rooted and beckoned toward us, the peace over the
white birds that sailed round the palm tops, the peace over the
glassy lagoon and the soft sand beach, and the viciousness of
the red reef, the cannonading and roll of drums in the air
all made an overwhelming impression on the six of us who had
come in from the sea. An impression which can never be ef-
faced from our memories. There was no doubt that now we
had reached the other side; we should never see a more genuine
South Sea island. Landing or no landing, we had nonetheless
reached Polynesia; the expanse of sea lay behind us for all time.
"It happened that this festal day off Angatau was the ninety-
seventh day on board. Strangely enough, it was ninety-seven
227
KON-TIKI
days that we had estimated in New York as the absolute mini-
mum time in which, in theoretically ideal conditions, we could
reach the nearest islands of Polynesia.
About five o'clock we passed two palm-roofed huts which
lay among the trees on shore. There was no smoke and no sign
of life.
At half -past five we stood in toward the reef again; we had
sailed along the whole south coast and were getting near the
west end of the island, and must have a last look round in the
hope of finding a passage before we passed. The sun now stood
so low that it blinded us when we looked ahead, but we saw a
little rainbow in the air where the sea broke against the reef a
few hundred yards beyond the last point of the island. This
now lay as a silhouette ahead of us. On the beach inside we de-
tected a cluster of motionless black spots. Suddenly one of them
moved slowly down toward the water, while several of the
others made off at full speed up to the edge of the woods. They
were people! We steered along the reef as close in as we dared;
the wind had died down so that we felt we were within an inch
of getting under the lee of the island. Now we saw a canoe be-
ing launched, and two individuals jumped on board and pad-
dled off on the other side of the reef. Farther down they turned
the boat's head out, and we saw the canoe lifted high in the air
by the seas as it shot through a passage in the reef and came
straight out toward us.
The opening in the reef, then, was down there; there was
our only hope. Now, too, we could see the whole village lying
in among the palm trunks. But the shadows were already grow-
ing long.
The two men in the canoe waved. We waved back eagerly,
and they increased their speed. It was a Polynesian outrigger
228
To the South Sea Islands
canoe; two brown figures in singlets sat paddling, facing ahead.
Now there would be fresh language difficulties. I alone of those
on board remembered a few words of Marquesan from my
stay on Fatu Hiva, but Polynesian is a difficult language to keep
up, for lack of practice in our northern countries.
We felt some relief, therefore, when the canoe bumped
against the raft's side and the two men leaped on board, for
one of them grinned all over his face and held out a brown
hand, exclaiming .in English:
"Good night!"
"Good night/' I replied in astonishment. "Do you speak Eng-
lish?"
The man grinned again and nodded.
"Good night," he said. "Good night."
This was his entire vocabulary in foreign languages, and
thereby he scored heavily over .his more modest friend, who
just stood in the background and grinned, much impressed, at
his experienced comrade.
"Angatau?" I asked, pointing toward the island.
"H'angatau," the man nodded affirmatively.
Erik nodded proudly. He had been right; we were where the
sun had told him that we were.
"Maimai hec iuta" I tried.
According to my knowledge acquired on Fatu Hiva this
should mean approximately, "Want to go to land."
They both pointed toward the invisible passage in the reef,
and we laid the oar over and decided to take our chance.
At that moment fresher gusts of wind came from the interior
of the island. A small rain cloud lay over the lagoon. The wind
threatened to force us away from the reef, and we saw that the
Kon-Tify was not answering the steering oar at a wide enough
229
KON-TIKI
angle to be able to reach the mouth of the opening in the reef.
We tried to find bottom, but the anchor rope was not long
enough. Now we had to have resort to the paddles, and pretty
quickly, too, before the wind got a fair hold of us. We hauled
down the sail at top speed and each of us got out his big
paddle.
I wanted to give an extra paddle to each of the two natives,
who stood enjoying the cigarettes they had been given on board.
They only shook their heads vigorously, pointed out the course,
and looked confused. I made signs that we must all paddle and
repeated the words, "Want to go to land!" Then the most ad-
vanced of the two bent down, made a cranking motion in the
air with his right hand, and said:
"Brrrrmrr-r*
There was no doubt whatever that he wanted us to start the
engine. They thought they were standing on the deck of a
curiously deep loaded boat. We took them aft and made them
feel under the logs to show them that we had no propeller or
screw. They were dumbfounded and, putting out their cigarettes,
flung themselves down on the side of the raft where we sat
four men on each outside log, dipping our paddles into the
water. At the same time the sun sank straight into the sea be-
hind the point, and the gusts of wind from the interior of the
island freshened. It did not look as if we were moving an inch.
The natives looked frightened, jumped back into the canoe,
and disappeared. It grew dark, and we were alone once more,
paddling desperately so as not to drift out to sea again.
As darkness fell over the island, four canoes came dancing
out from behind the reef, and soon there was a crowd of Poly-
nesians on board, all wanting to shake hands and get cigarettes.
With these fellows on board, who had local knowledge, there
230
To the South Sea Islands
was no danger. They would not let us go out to sea again and
out of sight, so we should be ashore that evening!
We quickly had ropes made fast from the sterns of all the
canoes to the bow of the Kon-Tify, and the four sturdy outrig-
ger canoes spread out in fan formation, like a dog team, ahead
of the wooden raft. Knut jumped into the dinghy and found
a place as draft dog in among the canoes, and we others, with
paddles, posted ourselves on the two outside logs of the Kon-
Tity. And so began, for the first time, a struggle against the
east wind which had been at our back for so long.
It was now pitch dark until the moon rose, and there was a
fresh wind. On land the inhabitants of the village had collected
brushwood and lighted a big fire to show us the direction of
the passage through the reef. The thundering from the reef
surrounded us in the darkness like a ceaselessly roaring water-
fall, and at first the noise grew louder and louder.
We could not see the team that was pulling us in the canoes
ahead, but we heard them singing exhilarating war songs in
Polynesian at the top of their lungs. We could hear that Knut
was with them, for every time the Polynesian music died away
we heard Knut's solitary voice singing Norwegian folk songs
in the midst of the Polynesians' chorus. To complete the chaos
we on board the raft chimed in with "Tom Brown's baby had
a pimple on his nose," and both white and brown men heaved
at their paddles with laughter and song.
We were overflowing with high spirits. Ninety-seven days.
Arrived in Polynesia. There would be a feast in the village that
evening. The natives cheered and bellowed and shouted. There
was a landing on Angatau only once a year, when the copra
schooner came from Tahiti to fetch coconut kernels. So there
would indeed be a feast round the fire on land that evening.
231
KON-TIK1
But the angry wind blew stubbornly. We toiled till every
limb ached. We held our ground, but the fire did not come
any nearer and the thunder from the reef was just the same
as before. Gradually the singing died away. All grew still. It
was all and more the men could do to row. The fire did not
move; it only danced up and down as we fell and rose with
the seas. Three hours passed, and it was now nine o'clock.
Gradually we began to lose ground. We were tired.
We made the natives understand that we needed more help
from land. They explained to us that there were plenty of
people ashore, but they had only these four seagoing canoes in
the whole island.
Then Knut appeared out of the darkness with the dinghy.
He had an idea; he could row in in the rubber dinghy and
fetch more natives. Five or six men could sit crowded together
in the dinghy at a pinch.
This was too risky. Knut had no local knowledge; he would
never be able to feel his way forward to the opening in the
coral reef in that pitch-black darkness. He then proposed to
take with him the leader of the natives, who could show him
the way. I did not think this plan a safe one, either, for the
native had no experience in maneuvering a clumsy rubber
dinghy through the narrow and dangerous passage. But I asked
Knut to fetch the leader, who was sitting paddling in the dark-
ness ahead of us, so that we might hear what he thought of the
situation. It was clear enough that we were no longer able to
prevent ourselves from drifting astern.
Knut disappeared into the darkness to find the leader. When
some time had passed and Knut had not returned with the
leader, we shouted for them but received no answer except from
a cackling chorus of Polynesians ahead. Knut had vanished into
To the South Sea Islands
the darkness. At that moment we understood what had hap-
pened. In all the bustle, noise, and turmoil Knut had misun-
derstood his instructions and rowed shoreward with the leader.
All our shouting was useless, for where Knut now was all other
sounds were drowned by the thunder all along the barrier.
We quickly got hold of a Morse lamp, and a man climbed
up to the masthead and signaled, "Come back. Come back."
But no one came back.
With two men away and one continuously signaling at the
masthead our drift astern increased, and the rest of us had be-
gun to grow really tired. We threw marks overboard and saw
that we were moving slowly but surely the wrong way. The
fire grew smaller and the noise from the breakers less. And
the farther we emerged from under the lee of the palm forest,
the firmer hold of us the eternal east wind took. We felt it
again now; it was almost as it had been out at sea. We gradu-
ally realized that all hope had gone we were drifting out to
sea. But we must not slacken oirr paddling. We must put the
brake on the drift astern with all our might till Knut was safe
on board again.
Five minutes went. Ten minutes. Half an hour. The fire grew
smaller; now and then it disappeared altogether when we our-
selves slid down into the trough of the sea. The breakers became
a distant murmur. Now the moon rose; we could just see the
glimmer of its disk behind the palm tops on land, but the sky
seemed misty and half clouded over. We heard the natives be-
ginning to murmur and exchange words. Suddenly we noticed
that one of the canoes had cast off its rope into the sea and dis-
appeared. The men in the other three canoes were tired and
frightened and were no longer pulling their full weight. The
Kon-Tify went on drifting out over the open sea.
KON-TIKI
Soon the three remaining ropes slackened and the three ca-
noes bumped against the side of the raft. One of the natives
came on board and said quietly with a jerk of his head:
"luta (To land)."
He looked anxiously at the fire, which now disappeared for
long periods at a time and only flashed out now and again like
a spark. We were drifting fast. The breakers were silent; only
the sea roared as it used to, and all the ropes on board the Kon-
Tiki creaked and groaned.
We plied the natives with cigarettes, and I hurriedly scrawled
a note which they were to take with them and give to Knut if
they found him. It ran:
"Take two natives with you in a canoe with the dinghy in
tow. Do NOT come back in the dinghy alone."
We counted on the helpful islanders being willing to take
Knut with them in a canoe, assuming they thought it advisable
to put to sea at all; if they did not think it advisable, it would
be madness for Knut to venture out on to the ocean in the
dinghy in the hope of overtaking the runaway raft.
The natives took the scrap of paper, jumped into the canoes,
and disappeared into the night. The last we heard was the
shrill voice of our first friend out in the darkness calling po-
litely:
"Good night!"
There was a murmur of appreciation from the less accom-
plished linguists, and then all was as silent, as free from sounds
from without, as when we were 2,000 sea miles from the near-
est land.
It was useless for us four to do anything more with the pad-
dles out here in the open sea, under the full pressure of the
wind, but we continued the light signals from the masthead,
234
To the South Sea Islands
We dared not send "Come back" any longer; we now sent out
only regular flashes. It was pitch dark. The moon appeared
only through occasional rifts in the bank of clouds. It must have
been Angatau's cumulo-nimbus cloud which was hanging
over us.
At ten o'clock we gave up the last faint hope of seeing Knut
again. We sat down in silence on the edge of the raft and
munched a few biscuits, while we took turns flashing signals
from the masthead, which seemed just a naked projection
without the broad Kon-Tity sail.
We decided to keep the lamp-signaling going all night, so
long as we did not know where Knut was. We refused to be-
lieve that he had been caught by the breakers. Knut always
landed on his feet, whether it was heavy water or breakers; he
was alive all right. Only it was so damnable to have him stuck
down among Polynesians on an out-of-the-way island in the
Pacific. An accursed business ! After all that long voyage all we
could do was to nip in and land a man on a remote South Sea
island and sail off again. No sooner had the first Polynesians
come smiling on board than they had to clear out headlong to
escape being themselves caught up in the Kon-Tify's wild, in-
continent rush westward. It was the devil of a situation. And
the ropes were creaking horribly that night. Not one of us
showed a sign of wanting to sleep.
It was half -past ten. Bengt was coming down to be relieved
at the swaying masthead. Then we all started. We had heard
voices clearly, out on the sea in the darkness. There it was again.
It was Polynesians talking. We shouted into the black night
with all the strength of our lungs. They shouted back, and
there was Knut's voice among the rest! We were mad with
excitement. Our tiredness had gone; the whole thundercloud
KON-TIKI
had lifted. What did it matter if we drifted away from Anga-
tau? There were other islands in the sea. Now the nine balsa
logs, so fond of travel, could drift where they liked, so long as
all six of us were assembled on board again.
Three outrigger canoes emerged from the darkness, riding
over the swell, and Knut was the first man to jump across to
the dear old Kon~Ti{i, followed by six brown men. There was
little time for explanations; the natives must have presents and
be off on their adventurous journey back to the island. Without
seeing light or land, and with hardly any stars, they had to
find their course by paddling against wind and sea till they
saw the light from the fire. We rewarded them amply with
provisions, cigarettes, and other gifts, and each of them shook
us heartily by the hand in a last farewell.
They were clearly anxious on our account; they pointed west-
ward, indicating that we were heading toward dangerous reefs.
The leader had tears in his eyes and kissed me tenderly on the
chin, which made me thank Providence for my beard. Then
they crept into the canoes, and we six comrades were left on
the raft, together and alone.
We left the raft to her own devices and listened to Knut's
story.
Knut had in good faith made for land in the dinghy with
the native leader on board. The native himself was sitting at
the little oars and rowing toward the opening in the reef, when
Knut to his surprise saw the light signals from the Kon-Tity
asking him to come back. He made signs to the rower to turn,
but the native refused to obey. Then Knut took hold of the
oars himself, but the native tore his hands away, and with the
reef thundering round them it was no use starting a fight. They
had bounded right in through the opening in the reef and gone
236
To the South Sea Islands
on inside it, until they were lifted right up on to a solid coral
block on the island itself. A crowd of natives caught hold of
the dinghy and dragged it high up on the shore, and Knut
stood alone under the palm trees surrounded by a huge crowd
of natives chattering away in an unknown lingo. Brown, bare-
legged men, women, and children of all ages flocked round
him and felt the material of his shirt and trousers. They them-
selves wore ragged old European clothes, but there were no
white men on the island.
Knut got hold of some of the smartest fellows and made
signs to them that they should go out in the dinghy with him.
Then a big fat man came waddling up who Knut presumed
must be the chief, for he had an old uniform cap on his head
and talked in a loud, authoritative voice. All made way for him.
Knut explained both in Norwegian and in English that he
needed men and must get back to the raft before we others
drifted away. The chief beamed and understood nothing, and
Knut, despite his most vehement protests, was pushed over to
the village by the whole shouting crowd. There he was re-
ceived by dogs and pigs and pretty South Sea girls who came
along carrying fresh fruit. It was clear that the natives were
prepared to make Knut's stay as agreeable as possible, but Knut
was not to be enticed; he thought sadly of the raft which was
vanishing westward. The natives' intention was obvious. They
badly wanted our company, and they knew that there were a
lot of good things on board white men's ships. If they could
keep Knut ashore, the rest of us and the queer boat would
certainly come in also. No vessel would leave a white man
behind on such an out-of-the-way island as Angatau.
After more curious experiences Knut got away and hurried
down to the dinghy, surrounded by admirers of both sexes.
KON-T1KI
His international speech and gesticulations could no longer be
misunderstood; they realized that he must and would return
to the odd craft out in the. night, which was in such a hurry
that she had to go on at once.
Then the natives tried a trick; they indicated by signs that
the rest of us were coming ashore on the other side of the point.
Knut was puzzled for a few minutes, but then loud voices
were heard down on the beach, where women and children
were tending the flickering fire. The three canoes had come
back, and the men brought Knut the note. He was in a des-
perate situation. Here were instructions not to row out on the
sea alone, and all the natives absolutely refused to go with him.
There followed a high-pitched, noisy argument among all
the natives. Those who had been out and seen the raft under-
stood perfectly well that it was of little use to keep Knut back
in the hope of getting the rest of us ashore. The end of it was
that Knut's promises and threats in international accents in-
duced the crews of three canoes to accompany him out to sea
in pursuit of the Kon-Tify. They put out to sea in the tropical
night with the dinghy dancing along in tow, while the natives
stood motionless by the dying fire and watched their new
blond friend disappear as quickly as he had come.
Knut and his companions could see the faint light' signals
from the raft far out to sea when the swell lifted the canoes.
The long, slim Polynesian canoes, stiffened by pointed side
floats, cut through the water like knives, but it seemed an eter-
nity to Knut before he felt the thick round logs of the Kon-
Tify under his feet again.
"Have a good time ashore?" Torstein asked enviously.
"Oho, you just should have seen the hula girls!" Knut teased
him*
238
To the South Sea Islands
We left the sail down and the oar inboard, and all six of
us crept into the bamboo cabin and slept like boulders on the
beach at Angatau.
For three days we drifted across the sea without a sight of
land.
We were drifting straight toward the ominous Takume and
Raroia reefs, which together blocked up forty to fifty miles of
the sea ahead of us. We made desperate efforts to steer clear,
to the north of these dangerous reefs, and things seemed to be
going well till one night the watch came hurrying in and
called us all out.
The wind had changed. We were heading straight for the
Takume reef. It had begun to rain, and there was no visibility
at all. The reef could not be far off.
In the middle of night we held a council of war. It was a
question of saving our lives now. To get past on the north side
was now hopeless; we must try to get through on the south
side instead. We trimmed the sail, laid the oar over, and began
a dangerous piece of sailing with the uncertain north wind
behind us. If the east wind came back before we had passed
the whole facade of the fifty-mile-long reefs, we should be
hurled in among the breakers, at their mercy.
We agreed on all that should be done if shipwreck was im-
minent. We would stay on board the Kon-Tity at all costs. We
would not climb up the mast, from which we should be shaken
down like rotten fruit, but would cling tight to the stays of
the mast when the seas poured over us. We laid the rubber
raft loose on the deck and made fast to it a small watertight
radio transmitter, a small quantity of provisions, waterbottles,
and medical stores. This would be washed ashore independently
of us if we ourselves should get over the reef safe but empty-
239
KON-TIKI
handed. In the stern of the Kon-Tify we made fast a long rope
with a float which also would be washed ashore, so that we
could try to pull in the raft if she were stranded out on the
reef. And so we crept into bed and left the watch to the helms-
man out in the rain.
As long as the north wind held, we glided slowly but surely
down along the facade of the coral reefs which lay in ambush
below the horizon. But then one afternoon the wind died away,
and when it returned it had gone round into the east. Accord-
ing to Erik's position we were already so far down that we
now had some hope of steering clear of the southernmost point
of the Raroia reef. We would try to get round it and into
shelter before going on to other reefs beyond it.
When night came, we had been a hundred days at sea.
Late in the night I woke, feeling restless and uneasy. There
was something unusual in the movement of the waves. The
Kon-Tify's motion was a little different from what it usually
was in such conditions. We had become sensitive to changes in
the rhythm of the logs. I thought at once of suction from a
coast, which was drawing near, and was continually out on
deck and up the mast. Nothing but sea was visible. But I could
get no quiet sleep. Time passed.
At dawn, just before six, Torstein came hurrying down from
the masthead. He could see a whole line of small palm-clad is-
lands far ahead. Before doing anything else we laid the oar
over to southward as far as we could. What Torstein had seen
must be the small coral islands which lay strewn like pearls
on a string behind the Raroia reef. A northward current must
have caught us.
At half-past seven palm-clad islets had appeared in a row all
along the horizon to westward. The southernmost lay roughly
240
To the South Sea Islands
ahead of our bow, and thence there were islands and clumps of
palms all along the horizon on our starboard side till they dis-
appeared as dots away to northward. The nearest were four or
five sea miles away.
A survey from the masthead showed that, even if our bow
pointed toward the bottom island in the chain, our drift side-
ways was so great that we were not advancing in the direction
in which our bow pointed. We were drifting diagonally right
in toward the reef. With fixed centerboards we should still
have had some hope of steering clear. But sharks were follow-
ing close astern, so that it was impossible to dive under the
raft and tighten up the loose centerboards with fresh guy ropes.
We saw that we had now only a few hours more on board
the Kon-Tify. They must be used in preparation for our in-
evitable wreck on the coral reef. Every man learned what he
had to do when the moment came; each one of us knew where
his own limited sphere of responsibility lay, so that we should
not fly round treading on one another's toes when the time
came and seconds counted. The Kon-Tify pitched up and
down, up and down, as the wind forced us in. There was no
doubt that here was the turmoil of waves created by the reef
some waves advancing while others were hurled back after
beating vainly against the surrounding wall.
We were still under full sail in the hope of even now being
able to steer clear. As we gradually drifted nearer, half side-
ways, we saw from the mgst how the whole string of palm-
clad isles was connected with a coral reef, part above and part
under water, which lay like a mole where the sea was white
with foam and leaped high into the air. The Raroia atoll is
oval in shape and has a diameter of twenty-five miles, not
counting the adjoining reefs of Takume. The whole of its
241
KON-T1KI
longer side faces the sea to eastward, where we came pitching
in. The reef itself, which runs in one line from horizon to
horizon, is only a few hundred yards clear, and behind it idyllic
islets lie in a string round the still lagoon inside.
It was with mixed feelings that we saw the blue Pacific being
ruthlessly torn up and hurled into the air all along the horizon
ahead of us. I knew what awaited us; I had visited the Tua-
motu group before and had stood safe on land looking out
over the immense spectacle in the east, where the surf from
the open Pacific broke in over the reef. New reefs and islands
kept on gradually appearing to southward. We must be lying
off the middle of the facade of the coral wall.
On board the Kon-Tity all preparations for the end of the
voyage were being made. Everything of value was carried into
the cabin and lashed fast. Documents and papers were packed
into watertight bags, along with films and other things which
would not stand a dip in the sea. The whole bamboo cabin
was covered with canvas, and especially strong ropes were
lashed across it. When we saw that all hope was gone, we
opened up the bamboo deck and cut off with machete knives
all the ropes which held the centerboards down. It was a hard
job to get the centerboards drawn up, because they were all
thickly covered with stout barnacles. With the centerboards up
the draught of our vessel was no deeper than to the bottom of
the timber logs, and we would therefore be more easily washed
in over the reef. With no centerboards and with the sail down,
the raft lay completely sideways on and was entirely at the
mercy of wind and sea.
We tied the longest rope we had to the homemade anchor and
made it fast to the step of the port mast, so that the Kon-Tif(i
would go into the surf stern first when the anchor was thrown
242
To the South Sea Islands
overboard. The anchor itself consisted of empty water cans
filled with used radio batteries and heavy scrap, and solid man-
grove-wood sticks projected from it, set crosswise.
Order number one, which came first and last, was: Hold on
to the raft! Whatever happened, we must hang on tight on
board and let the nine great logs take the pressure from the
reef. We ourselves had more than enough to do to withstand
the weight of the water. If we jumped overboard, we should
become helpless victims of the suction which would fling us
in and out over the sharp corals. The rubber raft would capsize
in the steep seas or, heavily loaded with us in it, it would be
torn to ribbons against the reef. But the wooden logs would
sooner or later be cast ashore, and we with them, if we only
managed to hold fast.
Next, all hands were told to put on their shoes for the first
time in a hundred days and to have their life belts ready. The
last precaution, however, was not of much value, for if a man
fell overboard he would be battered to death, not drowned.
We had time, too, to put our passports and such few dollars as
we had left into our pockets. But it was not lack of time that
was troubling us.
Those were anxious hours in which we lay drifting helplessly
sideways, step after step, in toward the reef. It was noticeably
quiet on board; we all crept in and out from cabin to bamboo
deck, silent or laconic, and carried on with our jobs. Our serious
faces showed that no one was in doubt as to what awaited us,
and the absence of nervousness showed that we had all gradu-
ally acquired an unshakable confidence in the raft. If it had
brought us across the sea, it would also manage to bring us
ashore alive.
Inside the cabin there was a complete chaos of provision
KON-TIKI
cartons and cargo, lashed fast. Torstein had barely found room
for himself in the radio corner, where he had got the short-
wave transmitter working. We were now over 4,000 sea miles
from our old base at Callao, where the Peruvian Naval War
School had maintained regular contact with us, and still farther
from Hal and Frank and the other radio amateurs in the
United States. But, as chance willed, we had on the previous
day got in touch with a capable radio "ham" who had a set on
Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, and the operators, quite con-
trary to all our usual practice, had arranged for an extra con-
tact with him early in the morning. All the time we were
drifting closer and closer in to the reef, Torstein was sitting
tapping his key and calling Rarotonga.
Entries in the Kon-TiJtfs log ran:
8:15: We arc slowly approaching land. We can now mafe
out with the nakfd eye the separate palm trees inside on the
starboard side.
8:45: The wind has veered into a still more unfavorable
quarter for us, so we have no hope of getting clear. No nervous-
ness on board, but hectic preparations on dec\. There is some-
thing lying on the reef ahead of us which lool(s likf the wrec\
of a sailing vessel, but it may be only a heap of driftwood.
9:45: The wind is taking us straight toward the last island
but one we see behind the reef. We can now see the whole
coral reef clearly; here it is built up li\e a white and red specif-
ied wall which barely sticks up out of the water as a belt in
front of all the islands. All along the reef white foaming surf
is flung up toward the sty. Bengt is just serving up a good hot
meal, the last before the great action!
It is a wrecl^ lying in there on the reef. We are so close now
that we can see right across the shining lagoon behind the reef
244
To the South Sea Islands
and see the outlines of other islands on the other side of the
lagoon.
As this was written, the dull drone of the surf came near
again ; it came from the whole reef and filled the air like thrill-
ing rolls of the drum, heralding the exciting last act of the
9:50: Very close now. Drifting along the reef. Only a hun-
dred yards or so away. Torstein is talking to the man on Raro-
tonga. All clear. Must pacf^ up log now. All in good spirits;
it loo^s bad, but we shall make it!
A few minutes later the anchor rushed overboard and caught
hold of the bottom, so that the Kon-Tiki swung around and
turned her stern inward toward the breakers. It held us for a
few valuable minutes, while Torstein sat hammering like mad
on the key. He had got Rarotonga now. The breakers thun-
dered in the air and the sea rose and fell furiously. All hands
were at work on deck, and now Torstein got his message
through. He said we were drifting toward the Raroia reef. He
asked Rarotonga to listen in on the same wave length every
hour. If we were silent for more than thirty-six hours, Raro-
tonga must let the Norwegian Embassy in Washington know.
Torstein's last words were:
"O.K. Fifty yards left. Here we go. Good-by."
Then he closed down the station, Knut sealed up the papers,
and both crawled out on deck as fast as they could to join the
rest of us, for it was clear now that the anchor was giving way.
The swell grew heavier and heavier, with deep troughs be-
tween the waves, and we felt the raft being swung up and
down, up and down, higher and higher.
Again the order was shouted: "Hold on, never mind about
the cargo, hold on!"
245
KON-TIKI
We were now so near the waterfall inside that we no longer
heard the steady continuous roar from all along the reef. We
now heard only a separate boom each time the nearest breaker
crashed down on the rocks.
All hands stood in readiness, each clinging fast to the rope
he thought the most secure. Only Erik crept into the cabin at
the last moment; there was one part of the program he had
not yet carried out he had not found his shoes!
No one stood aft, for it was there the shock from the reef
would come. Nor were the two firm stays which ran from the
masthead down to the stern safe. For if the mast fell they
would be left hanging overboard, over the reef. Herman, Bengt,
and Torstein had climbed up on some boxes which were lashed
fast forward of the cabin wall, and, while Herman clung on
to the guy ropes from the ridge of the roof, the other two held
on to the ropes from the masthead by which the sail at other
times was hauled up. Knut and I chose the stay running from
the bow up to the masthead, for, if mast and cabin and every-
thing else went overboard, we thought the rope from the bow
would nevertheless remain lying inboard, as we were now head
on to the seas.
When we realized that the seas had got hold of us, the anchor
rope was cut and we were off. A sea rose straight up under us,
and we felt the Kon-Tify being lifted up in the air. The great
moment had come; we were riding on the wave back at breath-
less speed, our ramshackle craft creaking and groaning as she
quivered under us. The excitement made one's blood boil. I
remember that, having no other inspiration, I waved my arm
and bellowed "Hurrah!" at the top of my lungs; it afforded a
certain relief and could do no harm anyway. The others cer-
tainly thought I had gone mad, but they all beamed and grinned
246
To the South Sea Islands
enthusiastically. On we ran with the seas rushing in behind us;
this was the Kon-Tify's baptism of fire. All must and would go
well.
But our elation was soon dampened. A new sea rose high up
astern of us like a glittering, green glass wall. As we sank down
it came rolling after us, and, in the same second in which I
saw it high above me, I felt a violent blow and was submerged
under floods of water. I felt the suction through my whole
body, with such great power that I had to strain every single
muscle in my frame and think of one thing only hold on,
hold on! I think that in such a desperate situation the arms
will be torn off before the brain consents to let go, evident as
the outcome is. Then I felt that the mountain of water was
passing on and relaxing its devilish grip of my body. When the
whole mountain had rushed on, with an ear-splitting roaring
and crashing, I saw Knut again hanging on beside me, doubled
up into a ball. Seen from behind, the great sea was almost flat
and gray. As it rushed on, it swept over the ridge of the cabin
roof which projected from the water, and there hung the three
others, pressed against the cabin roof as the water passed over
them.
We were still afloat.
In an instant I renewed my hold, with arms and legs bent
round the strong rope. Knut let himself down and with a
tiger's leap joined the others on the boxes, where the cabin took
the strain. I heard reassuring exclamations from them, but at
the same time I saw a new green wall rise up and come tower-
ing toward us. I shouted a warning and made myself as small
and hard as I could where I hung. In an instant hell was over
us again, and the Kon-Tify disappeared completely under the
masses of water. The sea tugged and pulled with all the force
247
KON-TIKI
it could bring to bear at the poor little bundles of human
bodies. The second sea rushed over us, to be followed by a third
like it.
Then I heard a triumphant shout from Knut, who was now
hanging on to the rope ladder:
"Look at the raft she's holding!"
After three seas only the double mast and the cabin had been
knocked a bit crooked. Again we had a feeling of triumph over
the elements, and the elation of victory gave us new strength.
Then I saw the next sea come towering up, higher than all
the rest, and again I bellowed a warning aft to the others as I
climbed up the stay, as high as I could get in a hurry, and hung
on fast. Then I myself disappeared sideways into the midst of
the green wall which towered high over us. The others, who
were farther aft and saw me, disappear first, estimated the
height of the wall of water at twenty-five feet, while the foam-
ing crest passed by fifteen feet above the part of the glassy wall
into which I had vanished. Then the great wave reached them,
and we had all one single thought hold on, hold on, hold,
hold, hold!
We must have hit the reef that time. I myself felt only the
strain on the stay, which seemed to bend and slacken jerkily.
But whether the bumps came from above or below I could not
tell, hanging there. The whole submersion lasted only seconds,
but it demanded more endurance than we usually have in our
bodies. There is greater strength in the human mechanism than
that of the muscles alone. I determined that, if I was to die, I
would die in this position, like a knot on the stay. The sea
thundered on, over and past, and as it roared by it revealed a
hideous sight. The Kon-Tify was wholly changed, as by the
stroke of a magic wand. The vessel we knew from weeks and
To the South Sea Islands
months at sea was no more; in a few seconds our pleasant
world had become a shattered wreck.
I saw only one man on board besides myself. He lay pressed
flat across the ridge of the cabin roof, face downward with his
arms stretched out on both sides, while the cabin itself was
crushed in, like a house of cards, toward the stern and toward
the starboard side. The motionless figure was Herman. There
was no other sign of life, while the hill of water thundered by,
in across the reef. The hardwood mast on the starboard side
was broken like a match, and the upper stump, in its fall, had
smashed right through the cabin roof, so that the mast and all
its gear slanted at a low angle over the reef on the starboard
side. Astern, the steering block was twisted round lengthways
and the crossbeam broken, while the steering oar was smashed
to splinters. The splashboards at the bow were broken like
cigar boxes, and the whole deck was torn up and pasted like
wet paper against the forward wall of the cabin, along with
boxes, cans, canvas, and other cargo. Bamboo sticks and rope
ends stuck up everywhere, and the general effect was of com-
plete chaos.
I felt cold fear run through my whole body. What was the
good of my holding on ? If I lost one single man here, in the
run in, the whole thing would be ruined, and for the moment
there was only one human figure to be seen after the last buffet.
In that second Torstein's hunched-up form appeared outside the
raft. He was hanging like a monkey in the ropes from the
masthead and managed to get on to the logs again, where he
crawled up on to the debris forward of the cabin. Herman, too,
now turned his head and gave me a forced grin of encourage-
ment, but did not move. I bellowed in the faint hope of locat-
ing the others and heard Bengt's calm voice call out that all
249
KON-TIKI
hands were aboard. They were lying holding on to the ropes
behind the tangled barricade which the tough plaiting from
the bamboo deck had built up.
All this happened in the course of a few seconds, while the
Kon-Tify was being drawn out of the witches' caldron by the
backwash, and a fresh sea came rolling over her. For the last
time I bellowed "Hang on!" at the top of my lungs amid the
uproar, and that was all I myself did; I hung on and disap-
peared in the masses of water which rushed over and past in
those endless two or three seconds. That was enough for me.
I saw the ends of the logs knocking and bumping against a
sharp step in the coral reef without going over it. Then we
were sucked out again. I also saw the two men who lay
stretched out across the ridge of the cabin roof, but none of us
smiled any longer. Behind the chaos of bamboo I heard a calm
voice call out:
"This won't do."
I myself felt equally discouraged. As the masthead sank
farther and farther out over the starboard side, I found myself
hanging on to a slack line outside the raft. The next sea came.
When it had gone by I was dead tired, and my only thought
was to get up on to the logs and lie behind the barricade. When
the backwash retreated, I saw for the first time the rugged red
reef naked beneath us and perceived Torstein standing, bent
double, on gleaming red corals, holding on to a bunch of rope
ends from the mast. Knut, standing aft, was about to jump. I
shouted that we must all keep on the logs, and Torstein, who
had been washed overboard by the pressure of water, sprang
up again like a cat.
Two or three more seas rolled over us with diminishing
force, and what happened then I do not remember, except that
250
To the South Sea Islands
water foamed in and out and I myself sank lower and lower
toward the red reef over which we were being lifted in. Then
only crests of foam full of salt spray came whirling in, and I
was able to work my way in on to the raft, where we all made
for the after end of the logs which was highest up on the reef.
At the same moment Knut crouched down and sprang up
on to the reef with the line which lay clear astern. While the
backwash was running out, he waded through the whirling
water some thirty yards in and stood safely at the end of the
line when the next sea foamed in toward him, died down, and
ran back from the flat reef like a broad stream.
Then Erik came crawling out of the collapsed cabin, with
his shoes on. If we had all done as he did, we should have got
off cheaply. As the cabin had not been washed overboard but
had been pressed down pretty flat under the canvas, Erik lay
quietly stretched out among the cargo and heard the peals of
thunder crashing above him while the collapsed bamboo walls
curved downward. Bengt had had a slight concussion when
the mast fell but had managed to crawl under the wrecked
cabin alongside Erik. We should all of us have been lying there
if we had realized in advance* how firmly the countless lashings
and plaited bamboo sheets would hang on to the main logs
under the pressure of the water.
Erik was now standing ready on the logs aft, and when the
sea retired he, too, jumped up on to the reef. It was Herman's
turn next, and then Bengt's. Each time the raft was pushed a
bit farther in, and, when Torstein's turn and my own came,
the raft already lay so far in on the reef that there was no
longer any ground for abandoning her. All hands began the
work of salvage.
We were now twenty yards away from that devilish step up
251
KON-T1KI
on the reef, and it was there and beyond it that the breakers
came rolling after one another in long lines. The coral polyps
had taken care to build the atoll so high that only the very
tops of the breakers were able to send a fresh stream of sea
water past us and into the lagoon, which abounded in fish.
Here inside was the corals' own world, and they disported
themselves in the strangest shapes and colors.
A long way in on the reef the others found the rubber raft,
lying drifting and quite waterlogged. They emptied it and
dragged it back to the wreck, and we loaded it to the full with
the most important equipment, like the radio set, provisions,
and water bottles. We dragged all this in across the reef and
piled it up on the top of a huge block of coral, which lay alone
on the inside of the reef like a large meteorite. Then we went
back to the wreck for fresh loads. We could never know what
the sea would be up to when the tidal currents got to work
around us.
In the shallow water inside the reef we saw something bright
shining in the sun. When we waded over to pick it up, to our
astonishment we saw two empty tins. This was not exactly
what we had expected to find there, and we were still more
surprised when we saw that the little boxes were quite bright
and newly opened and stamped "Pineapple," with the same in-
scription as that on the new field rations we ourselves were
testing for the quartermaster. They were indeed two of our
own pineapple tins which we had thrown overboard after our
last meal on board the Kon-Tify. We had followed close be-
hind them up on the reef.
We were standing on sharp, rugged coral blocks, and on the
uneven bottom we waded now ankle-deep, now chest-deep,
according to the channels and stream beds in the reef. Anem-
252
To the South Sea Islands
ones and corals gave the whole reef the appearance of a rock
garden covered with mosses and cactus and fossilized plants,
red and green and yellow and white. There was no color that
was not represented, either in corals or algae or in shells and
sea slugs and fantastic fish, which were wriggling about every-
where. In the deeper channels small sharks about four feet
long came sneaking up to us in the crystal-clear water. But
we had only to smack the water with the palms of our hands
for them to turn about and keep at a distance.
Where we had stranded, we had only pools of water and
wet patches of coral about us; farther in lay the calm blue
lagoon. The tide was going out, and we continually saw more
corals sticking up out of the water round us, while the surf
which thundered without interruption along the reef sank
down, as it were, a floor lower. What would happen there on
the narrow reef when the tide began to flow again was un-
certain. We must get away.
The reef stretched like a half-submerged fortress wall up to
the north and down to the south. In the extreme south was a
long island densely covered with tall palm forest. And just
above us to the north, only 600 or 700 yards away, lay another
but considerably smaller palm island. It lay inside the reef,
with palm tops rising into the sky and snow-white sandy
beaches running out into the still lagoon. The whole island
looked like a bulging green basket of flowers, or a little bit of
concentrated paradise.
This island we chose.
Herman stood beside me beaming all over his bearded face.
He did not say a word, only stretched out his hand and laughed
quietly. The Kon-Tity still lay far out on the reef with the
spray flying over her. She was a wreck, but an honorable
KON-TIKI
wreck. Everything above deck was smashed up, but the nine
balsa logs from the Quevedo forest in Ecuador were as intact
as ever. They had saved our lives. The sea had claimed but
little of the cargo, and none of what we had stowed inside the
cabin. We ourselves had stripped the raft of everything of real
value, which now lay in safety on the top of the great sun-
smitten rock inside the reef.
Since I had jumped off the raft, I had genuinely missed the
sight of all the pilot fish wriggling in front of our bow. Now
the great balsa logs lay up on the reef in six inches of water,
and brown sea slugs lay writhing under the bows. The pilot
fish were gone. The dolphins were gone. Only unknown flat
fish with peacock patterns and blunt tails wriggled inquisitively
in and out between the logs. We had arrived in a new world.
Johannes had left his hole. He had doubtless found another
lurking place here.
I took a last look round on board the wreck and caught
sight of a little baby palm in a flattened basket. It projected
from an eye in a coconut to a length of eighteen inches, and
t^wo roots stuck out below. I waded in toward the island with
the nut in my hand. A little way ahead I saw Knut wading
happily landward with a model of the raft, which he had made
with much labor on the voyage, under his arm. We soon passed
Bengt. He was a splendid steward. With a lump on his fore-
head and sea water dripping from his beard, he was walking
bent double pushing a box, which danced along before him
every time the breakers outside sent a stream over into the
lagoon. He lifted the lid proudly. It was the kitchen box, and
in it were the primus and cooking utensils in good order.
I shall never forget that wade across the reef toward the
heavenly palm island that grew larger as it came to meet us.
254
To the South Sea Islands
When I reached the sunny sand beach, I slipped off my shoes
and thrust my bare toes down into the warm, bone-dry sand.
It was as though I enjoyed the sight of every footprint which
dug itself into the virgin sand beach that led up to the palm
trunks. Soon the palm tops closed over my head, and I went
on, right in toward the center of the tiny island. Green coco-
nuts hung under the palm tufts, and some luxuriant bushes
were thickly covered with snow-white blossoms, which smelled
so sweet and seductive that I felt quite faint. In the interior of
the island two quite tame terns flew about my shoulders. They
were as white and light as wisps of cloud. Small lizards shot
away from my feet, and the most important inhabitants of the
island were large blood-red hermit crabs which lumbered along
in every direction with stolen snail shells as large as eggs ad-
hering to their soft hinder parts.
I was completely overwhelmed. I sank down on my knees
and thrust my fingers deep down into the dry warm sand.
The voyage was over. We were all alive. We had run ashore
on a small uninhabited South Sea island. And what an island!
Torstein came in, flung away a sack, threw himself flat on his
back and looked up at the palm tops and the white birds, light
as down, which circled noiselessly just above us. Soon we were
all six lying there. Herman, always energetic, climbed up a
small palm and pulled down a cluster of large green coconuts.
We cut of? their soft tops with our machete knives, as if they
were eggs, and poured down our throats the mosr delicious
refreshing drink in the world sweet, cold milk from young
and seedless palm fruit. On the reef outside resounded the
monotonous drum beats from the guard at the gates of paradise.
"Purgatory was a bit damp," said Bengt, "but heaven is
more or less as I'd imagined it."
255
KON-T1KI
We stretched ourselves luxuriously on the ground and smiled
up at the white trade-wind clouds drifting by westward up
above the palm tops. Now we were no longer following them
helplessly; now we lay on a fixed, motionless island, in
Polynesia.
And as we lay and stretched ourselves, the breakers outside
us rumbled like a train, to and fro, to and fro, all along the
horizon.
Bengt was right; this was heaven.
256
Above: An uninhabited South Sea island, protected by the coral reef, was our
first home across the ocean. It was a curious experience to feel solid ground
under our feet again after 101 days at sea.
Below: We were able to save most of our equipment and carried it to the
island in our rubber boat, which we had found a long way in on the reef. We
waded across to the island seen in the background, but that too was uninhabited.
!.;,,. .
'
A coconut from Peru was
planted on the island
where we had been ship-
wrecked. The coconut
palm grew on the coast
of tropical America and
in _ the South Sea islands
before Columbus' time.
As the nuts will not with-
stand sea water for any
length of time, they must
have been spread with
man's assistance.
Big fresh green coconuts
hung from the trees in
clusters. With coconuts,
hermit crabs, and fish we
were not short of food.
"All well, all well"
Raaby and Haugland
sent out this message
hour after hour to prevent
relief expeditions from
coming to search for us.
"If all's well, why wor-
ry?" asked an American
radio "ham" who picked
up the message. In the
foreground Hesselberg is
shown turning the hand
generator.
Polynesians arrive. After
a week on our desert is-
land an outrigger canoe
appeared. The natives on
board lived in a village on
the other side of the la-
goon; they had found
wreckage and seen a light
from our island.
At left: "Ke -\e-te -hum-
hum (Heave ho)!" shout-
ed the natives as they
dragged the raft to land.
After several days she had
finally been washed over
the reef.
'Below: Kon~Ti%i in the
Raroia lagoon. It may be
safely assumed that no
other vessel will repeat our
raft's exploit in clearing
the breakers and then sail-
ing as trimly over land as
over water.
8
AMONG
POLYNESIANS
A Robinson Crusoe Touch - Fear of Relief -
All Well, Kon-Tiki! -Other Wrecks -
Uninhabited Islands -
Fight with Marine Eels - Natives Find Us -
Ghosts on the Reef- Envoy to the Chief -
The Chief Visits Us-
The Kon-Tiki Is Recognized - A High Tide -
Our Craft's Overland Cruise -
Only Four on the Island - Natives Fetch Us -
Reception in the Village -
Forefathers from the Sunrise - Hula Feast -
Medicine Men on the Air
We Become Royalty - Another Shipwrec\ -
The "Tamara" Salvages the "Maoae" -
To Tahiti -
Meeting on the Quay - A Royal Stay -
Six Wreaths
Among Polynesians
OUR LITTLE ISLAND WAS UNINHABITED. WE SOON GOT
to know every palm clump and every beach, for the island was
barely two hundred yards across. The highest point was less
than six feet above the lagoon.
Over our heads, in the palm tops, there hung great clusters
of green coconut husks, which insulated their contents of cold
coconut milk from the tropical sun, so we should not be thirsty
in the first weeks. There were also ripe coconuts, a swarm of
hermit crabs, and all sorts of fish in the lagoon; we should be
well off.
On the north side of the island we found the remnants of
an old, unpainted wooden cross, half buried in the coral sand.
Here there was the view northward along the reef to the
stripped wreck, which we had first seen closer in as we drifted
by on the way to our stranding. Still farther northward we saw
in a bluish haze the palm tufts of another small island. The
island to southward, on which the trees grew thickly, was
much closer. We saw no sign of life there, either, but for the
time we had other matters to think about.
259
KON-TIKI
Robinson Crusoe Hesselberg came limping up in his big
straw hat with his arms full of crawling hermit crabs. Knut
set fire to some dry wood, and soon we had crab and coconut
milk with coffee for dessert.
"Feels all right being ashore, doesn't it, boys?" Knut asked
delightedly.
He had himself enjoyed this feeling once before on the voy-
age, at Angatau. As he spoke, he stumbled and poured half a
kettle of boiling water over Bengt's bare feet. We were all of
us a bit unsteady the first day ashore, after 101 days on board
the raft, and would suddenly begin reeling about among the
palm trunks because we had put out a foot to counter a sea
that did not come.
When Bengt handed over to us our respective mess utensils,
Erik grinned broadly. I remember that, after the last meal on
board, I had leaned over the side of the raft and washed up as
usual, while Erik looked in across the reef, saying: "I don't
think I shall bother to wash up today." When he found his
things in the kitchen box, they were as clean as mine.
After the meal and a good stretch on the ground we set about
putting together the soaked radio apparatus; we must do it
quickly so that Torstein and Knut might get on the air before
the man on Rarotonga sent out a report of our sad end.
Most of the radio equipment had already been brought
ashore, and among the things which lay drifting on the reef
Bengt found a box, on which he laid hands. He jumped high
into the air from an electric shock; there was no doubt that
the contents belonged to the radio section. While the operators
unscrewed, coupled, and put together, we others set about
pitching camp.
Out on the wreck we found the heavy waterlogged sail and
260
Among Polynesians
dragged it ashore. We stretched it between two big palms in
a little opening, looking on to the lagoon, and supported two
other corners with bamboo sticks which came drifting in from
the wreck. A thick hedge of wild flowering bushes forced the
sail together so that we had a roof and three walls and, more-
over, a clear view of the shining lagoon, while our nostrils
were filled with an insinuating scent of blossoms. It was good
to be here. We all laughed quietly and enjoyed our ease; we
each made our beds of fresh palm leaves, pulling up loose
branches of coral which stuck up inconveniently out of the
sand. Before night fell we had a very pleasant rest, and over
our heads we saw the big bearded face of good old Kon-Tiki.
No longer did he swell out his breast with the east wind be-
hind him. He now lay motionless on his back looking up at
the stars which came twinkling out over Polynesia.
On the bushes round us hung wet flags and sleeping bags,
and soaked articles lay on the sand to dry. Another day on this
island of sunshine and everything would be nicely dry. Even
the radio boys had to give it up until the sun had a chance of
drying the inside of their apparatus next day. We took the
sleeping bags down from the trees and turned in, disputing
boastfully as to who had the driest bag. Bengt won, for his
did not squelch when he turned over. Heavens, how good it
was to be able to sleep !
When we woke next morning at sunrise, the sail was bent
down and full of rain water as pure as crystal. Bengt took
charge of this asset and then ambled down to the lagoon and
jerked ashore some curious breakfast fish which he decoyed
into channels in the sand.
That night Herman had had pains in the neck and back
where he had injured himself before the start from Lima, and
267
KON-TIKl
Erik had a return of his vanished lumbago. Otherwise we had
come out of the trip over the reef astonishingly lightly, with
scratches and small wounds, except for Bengt who had had a
blow on the forehead when the mast fell and had a slight con-
cussion. I myself looked most peculiar, with my arms and legs
bruised blue black all over by the pressure against the rope.
But none of us was in such a bad state that the sparkling
clear lagoon did not entice him to a brisk swim before break-
fast. It was an immense lagoon. Far out it was blue and rippled
by the trade wind, and it was so wide that we could only just
see the tops of a row of misty, blue palm islands which marked
the curve of the atoll on the other side. But here, in the lee of
the islands, the trade wind rustled peacefully in the fringed
palm tops, making them stir and sway, while the lagoon lay
like a motionless mirror below and reflected all their beauty.
The bitter salt water was so pure and clear that gaily colored
corals in nine feet of water seemed so near the surface that we
thought we should cut our toes on them in swimming. And the
water abounded in beautiful varieties of colorful fish. It was
a marvelous world in which to disport oneself. The water was
just cold enough to be refreshing, and the air was pleasantly
warm and dry from the sun. But we must get ashore again
quickly today; Rarotonga would broadcast alarming news if
nothing had been heard from the raft at the end of the day.
Coils and radio parts lay drying in the tropical sun on slabs
of coral, and Torstein and Knut coupled and screwed. The
whole day passed, and the atmosphere grew more and more
hectic. The rest of us abandoned all other jobs and crowded
round the radio in the hope of being able to give assistance.
We must be on the air before 10 P.M. Then the thirty-six hours'
time limit would be up, and the radio amateur on Rarotonga
262
Among Polynesians
would send out appeals for airplane and relief expeditions.
Noon came, afternoon came, and the sun set. If only the
man on Rarotonga would contain himself! Seven o'clock, eight,
nine. The tension was at breaking point. Not a sign of life in
the transmitter, but the receiver, an NC-I73, began to liven up
somewhere at the bottom of the scale and we heard faint music.
But not on the amateur wave length. It was eating its way up,
however; perhaps it was a wet coil which was drying inward
from one end. The transmitter was still stone-dead short cir-
cuits and sparks everywhere.
There was less than an hour left. This would never do. The
regular transmitter was given up, and a little sabotage trans-
mitter from wartime was tried again. We had tested it several
times before in the course of the day, but without result. Now
perhaps it had become a little drier. All the batteries were com-
pletely ruined, and we got power by cranking a tiny hand
generator. It was heavy, and we four who were laymen in
radio matters took turns all day long sitting and turning the
infernal thing.
The thirty-six hours would soon be up. I remember someone
whispering "Seven minutes more," "Five minutes more," and
then no one would look at his watch again. The transmitter
was as dumb as ever, but the receiver was sputtering upward
toward the right wave length. Suddenly it crackled on the
Rarotonga man's frequency, and we gathered that he was in
full contact with the telegraph station in Tahiti. Soon after-
ward we picked up the following fragment of a message sent
out from Rarotonga:
no plane this side of Samoa. I am quite sure ."
Then it died away again. The tension was unbearable. What
was brewing out there? Had they already begun to send out
263
KON-TIKI
plane and rescue expeditions? Now, no doubt, messages con-
cerning us were going over the air in every direction.
The two operators worked feverishly. The sweat trickled
from their faces as freely as it did from ours who sat turning
the handle. Power began slowly to come into the transmitter's
aerial, and Torstein pointed ecstatically to an arrow which
swung slowly up over a scale when he held the Morse key
down. Now it was coming!
We turned the handle madly while Torstein called Raro-
tonga. No one heard us. Once more. Now the receiver was
working again, but Rarotonga did not hear us. We called
Hal and Frank at Los Angeles and the Naval School at Lima,
but no one heard us.
Then Torstein sent out a CQ message: that is to say, he
called all the stations in the world which could hear us on our
special amateur wave length.
That was of some use. Now a faint voice out in the ether
began to call us slowly. We called again and said that we heard
him. Then the slow voice out in the ether said:
"My name is Paul I live in Colorado. What is your name
and where do you live?"
This was a radio amateur. Torstein seized the key, while we
turned the handle, and replied:
"This is the Kon-Tify. We are stranded on a desert island in
the Pacific."
Paul did not believe the message. He thought it was a radio
amateur in the next street pulling his leg, and he did not come
on the air again. We tore our hair in desperation. Here were
we, sitting under the palm tops on a starry night on a desert
island, and no one even believed what we said.
Torstein did not give up; he was at the key again sending
264
Among Polynesians
"All well, all well, all well" unceasingly. We must at all costs
stop all this rescue machinery from starting out across the
Pacific.
Then we heard, rather faintly, in the receiver:
"If all's well, why worry?"
Then all was quiet in the ether. That was all.
We could have leaped into the air and shaken down all the
coconuts for sheer desperation, and heaven knows what we
should have done if both Rarotonga and good old Hal had
not suddenly heard us. Hal wept for delight, he said, at hear-
ing LI 2 B again. All the tension stopped immediately; we
were once more alone and undisturbed on our South Sea is-
land and turned in, worn out, on our beds of palm leaves.
Next day we took it easy and enjoyed life to the full. Some
bathed, others fished or went out exploring on the reef in
search of curious marine creatures, while the most energetic
cleared up in camp and made our surroundings pleasant. Out
on the point which looked toward the Kon-Tify we dug a
hole on the edge of the trees, lined it with leaves, and planted
in it the sprouting coconut from Peru. A cairn of corals was
erected beside it, opposite the place where the Kon~Tify had
run ashore.
The Kon-TiJ^i had been washed still farther in during the
night and lay almost dry in a few pools of water, squeezed in
among a group of big coral blocks a long way through the reef.
After a thorough baking in the warm sand Erik and Her-
man were in fine fettle again and were anxious to go south-
ward along the reef in the hope of getting over to the large
island which lay down there. I warned them more against eels
than against sharks, and each of them stuck his long machete
knife into his belt. I knew the coral reef was the habitat of a
255
KON-TIK1
frightful eel with long poisonous teeth which could easily tear
off a man's, leg. They wriggle to the attack with lightning
rapidity and are the terror of the natives, who are not afraid
to swim round a shark.
The two men were able to wade over long stretches of the
reef to southward, but there were occasional channels of deeper
water running this way and that where they had to jump in
and swim. They reached the big island safely and waded
ashore. The island, long and narrow and covered with palm
forest, ran farther south between sunny beaches under the
shelter of the reef. The two continued along the island till
they came to the southern point. From here the reef, covered
with white foam, ran on southward to other distant islands.
They found the wreck of a big ship down there ; she had four
masts and lay on the shore cut in two. She was an old Spanish
sailing vessel which had been loaded with rails, and rusty rails
lay scattered all along the reef. They returned along the other
side of the island but did not find so much as a track in the
sand.
On the way back across the reef they were continually com-
ing upon curious fish and were trying to catch some of them
when they were suddenly attacked by no fewer than eight
large eels. They saw them coming in the clear water and
jumped up on to a large coral block, round and tinder which
the eels writhed. The slimy brutes were as thick as a man's
calf and speckled green and black like poisonous snakes, with
small heads, malignant snake eyes, and teeth an inch long and
as sharp as an awl. The men hacked with their machete knives
at the little swaying heads which came writhing toward them;
they cut the head off one and another was injured. The blood
in the sea attracted a whole flock of young blue sharks which
266
Among Polynesians
attacked the dead and injured eels, while Erik and Herman
were able to jump over to another block of coral and get away.
On the same day I was wading in toward the island when
something, with a lightning movement, caught hold of my
ankle on both sides and held on tight. It was a cuttlefish. It
was not large, but it was a horrible feeling to have the cold
gripping arms about one's limb and to exchange looks with the
evil little eyes in the bluish-red, beaked sack which constituted
the body. I jerked in my foot as hard as I could, and the squid,
which was barely three feet long, followed it without letting
go. It must have been the bandage on my foot which attracted
it. I dragged myself in jerks toward the beach with the disgust-
ing carcass hanging on to my foot. Only when I reached the
edge of the dry sand did it let go and retreat slowly through the
shallow water, with arms outstretched and eyes directed shore-
ward, as though ready for a new attack if I wanted one. When
I threw a few lumps of coral at it, it darted away.
Our various experiences out on the reef only added a spice
to our heavenly existence on the island within. But we could
not spend all our lives here, and we must begin to think about
how we should get back to the outer world, After a week the
Kon-Tify had bumped her way in to the middle of the reef,
where she lay stuck fast on dry land. The great logs had pushed
away and broken off large slabs of coral in the effort to force
their way forward to the lagoon, but now the wooden raft lay
immovable, and all our pulling and all our pushing were
equally unavailing. If we could only get the wreck into the
lagoon, we could always splice the mast and rig her sufficiently
to be able to sail with the wind across the friendly lagoon and
see what we found on the other side. If any of the islands were
inhabited, it must be some of those which lay along the horizon
267
KON-T1KI
away in the east, where the atoll turned its facade toward the
lee side.
The days passed.
Then one morning some of the fellows came tearing up and
said they had seen a white sail on the lagoon. From up among
the palm trunks we could see a tiny speck which was curiously
white against the opal-blue lagoon. It was evidently a sail close
to land on the other side. We could see that it was tacking.
Soon another appeared.
They grew in size, as the morning went on, and came nearer.
They came straight toward us. We hoisted the French flag on
a palm tree and waved our own Norwegian flag on a pole.
One of the sails was now so near that we could see that it be-
longed to a Polynesian outrigger canoe. The rig was of more
recent type. Two brown figures stood on board gazing at us.
We waved. They waved back and sailed straight in on to the
shallows.
"la-ora-na" we greeted them in Polynesian.
"la-ora-na" they shouted back in chorus, and one jumped out
and dragged his canoe after him as he came wading over the
sandy shallows straight toward us.
The two men had white men's clothes but brown men's
bodies. They were barelegged, well built, and wore homemade
straw hats to protect them from the sun. They landed and
approached us rather uncertainly, but, when we smiled and
shook hands with them in turn, they beamed on us with rows
of pearly teeth which said more than words.
Our Polynesian greeting had astonished and encouraged the
two canoers in exactly the same way as we ourselves had been
deceived when their kinsman off Angatau had called out
"Good night," and they reeled off a long rhapsody in Polyne-
268
Among Polynesians
sian before they realized that their outpourings were going wide
of the mark. Then they had nothing more to say but giggled
amiably and pointed to the other canoe which was approaching.
There were three men in this, and, when they waded ashore
and greeted us, it appeared that one of them could talk a little
French. We learned that there was a native village on one of
the islands across the lagoon, and from it the Polynesians had
seen our fire several nights earlier. Now there was only one
passage leading in through the Raroia reef to the circle of is-
lands around the lagoon, and, as this passage ran right past
the village, no one could approach these islands inside the reef
without being seen by the inhabitants of the village. The old
people in the village, therefore, had come to the conclusion
that the light they saw on the reef to eastward could not be
the work of men but must be something supernatural. This
had quenched in them all desire to go across and see for them-
selves. But then part of a box had come drifting across the
lagoon, and on it some signs were painted. Two of the natives,
who had been on Tahiti and learned the alphabet, had de-
ciphered the inscription and read TIKI in big black letters on
the slab of wood. Then there was no longer any doubt that
there were ghosts on the reef, for Tiki was the long-dead
founder of their own race they all knew that. But then tinned
bread, cigarettes, cocoa, and a box with an old shoe in it came
drifting across the lagoon. Now they all realized that there had
been a shipwreck on the eastern side of the reef, and the chief
sent out two canoes to search for the survivors whose fire they
had seen on the island.
Urged on by the others, the brown man who spoke French
asked why the slab of wood that drifted across the lagoon had
"Tiki" on it. We explained that "Kon-Tiki" was on all our
269
KON-T1K1
equipment and that it was the name of the vessel in which we
had come.
Our new friends were loud in their astonishment when they
heard that all on board had been saved, when the vessel
stranded, and that the flattened wreck out on the reef was
actually the craft in which we had come. They wanted to put
us all into the canoes at once and take us across to the village.
We thanked them and refused, as we wanted to stay till we
had got the Kon-Tiki off the reef. They looked aghast at the
flat contraption out on the reef; surely we could not dream of
getting that collapsed hull afloat again! Finally the spokesman
said emphatically that we must go with them; the chief had
given them strict orders not to return without us.
We then decided that one of us should go with the natives
as envoy to the chief and should then come back and report to
us on the conditions on the other island. We would not let the
raft remain on the reef and could not abandon all the equip-
ment on our little island. Bengt went with the natives. The
two canoes were pushed of? from the sand and soon disappeared
westward with a fair wind.
Next day the horizon swarmed with white sails. Now, it
seemed, the natives were coming to fetch us with all the craft
they had.
The whole convoy tacked across toward us, and, when they
came near, we saw our good friend Bengt waving his hat in
the first canoe, surrounded by brown figures. He shouted to us
that the chief himself was with him, and the five of us formed
up respectfully down on the beach where they were wading
ashore.
Bengt presented us to the chief with great ceremony. The
chiefs name, Bengt said, was Tepiuraiarii Teriifaatau, but he
270
Among Polynesians
would understand whom we meant if we called him Teka. We
called him Teka.
Teka was a tall, slender Polynesian with uncommonly in-
telligent eyes. He was an important person, a descendant of the
old royal line in Tahiti, and was chief of both the Raroia and
the Takume islands. He had been to school in Tahiti, so that
he spoke French and could both read and write. He told me
that the capital of Norway was called Christiania and asked
if I knew Bing Crosby. He also told us that only three foreign
vessels had called at Raroia in the last ten years, but that the
village was visited several times a year by the native copra
schooner from Tahiti, which brought merchandise and took
away coconut kernels in exchange. They had been expecting
the schooner for some weeks now, so she might come at any
time.
Bengt's report, summarized, was that there was no school,
radio, or any white men on Raroia, but that the 127 Polyne-
sians in the village had done all they could to make us com-
fortable there and had prepared a great reception for us when
we came over.
The chief's first request was to see the boat which had
brought us ashore on the reef alive. We waded out toward the
Kon-Tify with a string of natives after us. When we drew near,
the natives suddenly stopped and uttered loud exclamations,
all talking at once. We could now see the logs of the Kon-Tify
plainly, and one of the natives burst out:
"That's not a boat, it's a pae-pae!"
"Pae-pae!" they all repeated in chorus.
They splashed out across the reef at a gallop and clambered
up on to the Kon-Tify. They scrambled about everywhere like
excited children, feeling the logs, the bamboo plaiting, and the
271
KON-TIKI
ropes. The chief was in as high spirits as the others; he came
back and repeated with an inquiring expression :
"The Tity isn't a boat, she's a pae-pae."
Pae-pae is the Polynesian word for "raft" and "platform/'
and on Easter Island it is also the word used for the natives'
canoes. The chief told us that such pae-pae no longer existed,
but that the oldest men in the village could relate old traditions
of them. The natives all outshouted one another in admiration
for the great balsa logs, but they turned up their noses at the
ropes. Ropes like that did not last many months in salt water
and sun. They showed us with pride the lashings on their own
outriggers; they had plaited them themselves of coconut hemp,
and such ropes remained as good as new for five years at sea.
When we waded back to our little island, it was named
Fenua Kon-Tiki, or Kon-Tiki Island. This was a name we could
all pronounce, but our brown friends had a hard job trying to
pronounce our short Nordic Christian names. They were de-
lighted when I said they could call me Terai Mateata, for the
great chief in Tahiti had given me that name when adopting
me as his "son" the first time I was in those parts.
The natives brought out fowls and eggs and breadfruit from
the canoes, while others speared big fish in the lagoon with
three-pronged spears, and we had a feast round the campfire.
We had to narrate all our experiences with the pae-pae at sea,
and they wanted to hear about the whale shark again and
again. And every time we came to the point at which Erik
rammed the harpoon into its skull, they uttered the same cries
of excitement. They recognized at once every single fish of
which we showed them sketches and promptly gave us the
names in Polynesian. But they had never seen or heard of the
whale shark or the Gempylus.
272
At top: The raft arrives at Tahiti in tow of the government schooner "Tamara."
Below, left: Tiki was the name of the first great chief on Tahiti. He was
regarded by the inhabitants as their divine ancestor, and stone statues of South
American type were erected in his honor on many of the islands.
Below, right: Teriieroo a Teriierooiterai is the name of the last chief on Tahiti.
He was on the quay to meet us when we arrived. Ten years before he had
adopted the author as his son and had given him the name Terai Mateata
(Blue Sky).
Above: The country which
Tiki found. Low coral
islands, like those of the
Tuamotu group, and lofty
mountainous islands like
Tahiti and Moorea were
found by Kon-Tiki, Son of
the Sun, when he came
from Peru with the first
men on balsa rafts.
At left: Hula dance on Ta-
hiti. Purea was related to
the last queen of the island.
After Tiki another Indian
race came to these islands
in big double canoes from
British Columbia via Ha-
waii. The Polynesian race
is a mixture of these two
immigrant peoples.
A Tahltian belle. When we came to the native village on Raroia, the natives
started festivities that lasted the fourteen days we spent on the island. Our stay
on Tahiti was of the same nature, but lasted longer.
At the White House. After our return to Washington, President Truman
received the members of the expedition. The American flag that had accom-
panied us across the Pacific was presented to him. From left: (half hidden)
Knut Haugland, the author, Herman Watzinger, President Truman, Mr. Lykke
(counselor to the Embassy), Erik Hesselberg, and Torstein Raaby. Bengt
Danielsson had remained on the west coast.
Among Polynesians
When the evening came, we turned on the radio, to the great
delight of the whole assemblage. Church music was most to
their taste until, to our own astonishment, we picked up real
hula music from America. Then the liveliest of them began to
wriggle with their arms curved over their heads, and soon the
whole company sprang up on their haunches and danced the
hula-hula in time with the music. When night came, all camped
round a fire on the beach. It was as much of an adventure to
the natives as it was to us.
When we awoke next morning, they were already up and
frying newly caught fish, while six freshly opened coconut
shells stood ready for us to quench our morning thirst.
The reef was thundering more than usual that day; the wind
had increased in strength, and the surf was whipping high into
the air out there behind the wreck.
"The Ti^i will come in today," said the chief, pointing to the
wreck. "There'll be a high tide."
About eleven o'clock the water began to flow past us into
the lagoon. The lagoon began to fill like a big basin, and the
water rose all round the island. Later in the day the real inflow
from the sea came. The water came rolling in, terrace after
terrace, and more and more of the reef sank below the surface
of the sea. The masses of water rolled forward along both
sides of the island. They tore away large coral blocks and dug
up great sandbanks which disappeared like flour before the
wind, while others were built up. Loose bamboos from the
wreck came sailing past us, and the Kon-Tify began to move.
Everything that was lying along the beach had to be carried
up into the interior of the island so that it might not be caught
by the tide. Soon only the highest stones on the reef were visible,
and all the beaches round our island had gone, while the water
KON-TIKI
flowed up toward the herbage of the pancake island. This was
eerie. It looked as if the whole sea were invading us. The Kan-
Tify swung right round and drifted until she was caught by
some other coral blocks.
The natives flung themselves into the water and swam and
waded through the eddies till, moving from bank to bank, they
reached the raft. Knut and Erik followed. Ropes lay ready on
board the raft, and, when she rolled over the last coral blocks
and broke loose from the reef, the natives jumped overboard
and tried to hold her. They did not know the Kon-Tify and
her ungovernable urge to push on westward; so they were
towed along helplessly with her. She was soon moving at a
good speed right across the reef and into the lagoon. She be-
came slightly at a loss when she reached quieter water and
seemed to be looking round as though to obtain a survey of
further possibilities. Before she began to move again and dis-
covered the exit across the lagoon, the natives had already suc-
ceeded in getting the end of the rope around a palm on land.
And there the Kon-Tity hung, tied up fast in the lagoon. The
craft that went over land and water had made her way across
the barricade and into the lagoon in the interior of Raroia.
With inspiring war cries, to which "\e-\e-te-huru-huru"
formed an animating refrain, we hauled the Kon-Tify by our
combined efforts in to the shore of the island of her own name.
The tide reached a point four feet above normal high water.
We had thought the whole island was going to disappear be-
fore our eyes.
The wind-whipped waves were breaking all over the lagoon,
and we could not get much of our equipment into the narrow,
wet canoes. The natives had to get back to die village in a
hurry, and Bengt and Herman went with them to see a small
Among Polynesians
boy who lay dying in a hut in the village. The boy had an
abscess on his head, and we had penicillin.
Next day we four were alone on Kon-Tiki Island. The east
wind was now so strong that the natives could not come across
the lagoon, which was studded with sharp coral formations and
shoals. The tide, which had somewhat receded, flowed in again
fiercely, in long, rushing step formations.
Next day it was quieter again. We were now able to dive
under the Kon-Tify and ascertain that the nine logs were intact,
even if the reef had planed an inch or two off the bottom. The
cordage lay so deep in its grooves that only four of the numer-
ous ropes had been cut by the corals. We set about clearing up
on board. Our proud vessel looked better when the mess had
been removed from the deck, the cabin pulled out again like a
concertina, and the mast spliced and set upright.
In the course of the day the sails appeared on the horizon
again; the natives were coming to fetch us and the rest of the
cargo. Herman and Bengt were with them, and they told us
that the natives had prepared great festivities in. the village.
When we got over to the other island, we must not leave the
canoes till the chief himself had indicated that we might do so.
We ran across the lagoon, which here was seven miles wide,
before a fresh breeze. It was with real sorrow that we saw the
familiar palms on Kon-Tiki Island waving us good-by as they
changed into a clump and shrank into one small indefinable
island like all the others along the eastern reef. But ahead of us
larger islands were broadening out. And on one of them we
saw a jetty and smoke rising from huts among the palm trunks.
The village looked quite dead; not a soul was to be seen.
What was brewing now? Down on the beach, behind a jetty of
coral blocks, stood two solitary figures, one tall and thin and
275
KON-TIKI
one big and stout as a barrel. As we came in, we saluted them
both. They were the chief Teka and the vice-chief Tupuhoe.
We all fell for Tupuhoe's broad hearty smile. Teka was a
clear brain and a diplomat, but Tupuhoe was a pure child of
nature and a sterling fellow, with a humor and a primitive
force the like of which one meets but rarely. With his power-
ful body and kingly features he was exactly what one expects
a Polynesian chief to be. Tupuhoe was, indeed, the real chief
on the island, but Teka had gradually acquired the supreme
position because he could speak French and count and write,
so that the village was not cheated when the schooner came
from Tahiti to fetch copra.
Teka explained that we were to march together up to the
meetinghouse in the village, and when all the boys had come
ashore we set oS thither in ceremonial procession, Herman
first with the flag waving on a harpoon shaft, and then I my-
self between the two chiefs.
The village bore obvious marks of the copra trade with
Tahiti; both planks and corrugated iron had been imported in
the schooner. While some huts were built in a picturesque old-
fashioned style, with twigs and plaited palm leaves, others were
knocked together with nails and planks as small tropical bunga-
lows. A large house built of planks, standing alone among the
palms, was the new village meetinghouse; there we six whites
were to stay. We marched in with the flag by a small back door
and out on to a broad flight of steps before the facade. Before
us in the square stood everyone in the village who could walk
or crawl women and children, old and young. All were in-
tensely serious; even our cheerful friends from Kon-Tiki Island
stood drawn up among the others and did not give us a sign
of recognition.
276
Among Polynesians
When we had all come out on the steps, the whole assembly
opened their mouths simultaneously and joined in singing
the "Marseillaise"! Teka, who knew the words, led the singing,
and it went fairly well in spite of a few old women getting
stuck up on the high notes. They had been training hard for
this. The French and Norwegian flags were hoisted in front of
the steps, and this ended the official reception by the chief
Teka. He retired quietly into the background, and now stout
Tupuhoe sprang forward and became master of the ceremonies.
Tupuhoe gave a quick sign, on which the whole assembly burst
into a new song. This time it went better, for the tune was
composed by themselves and the words, too, were in their lan-
guage and sing their own hula they could. The melody was
so fascinating, in all its touching simplicity, that we felt a
tingling down our backs as the South Sea came roaring to-
ward us. A few individuals led the singing and the whole choir
joined in regularly; there were variations in the melody, though
the words were always the same:
"Good day, Terai Mateata and your men, who have come
across the sea on a pac-pae to us on Raroia; yes, good day, may
you remain long among us and share memories with us so that
we can always be together, even when you go away to a far
land. Good day."
We had to ask them to sing the song over again, and more
and more life came into the whole assembly as they began to
feel less constrained. Then Tupuhoe asked me to say a few
words to the people as to why we had come across the sea on
a pae-pac; they had all been counting on this. I was to speak
in French, and Teka would translate bit by bit.
It was an uneducated but highly intelligent gathering of
brown people that stood waiting for me to speak. I told them
277
KON-TIKI
that I had been among their kinsmen out here in the South
Sea islands before, and that I had heard of their first chief,
Tiki, who had brought their forefathers out to the islands from
a mysterious country whose whereabouts no one knew any
longer. But in a distant land called Peru, I said, a mighty chief
had once ruled whose name was Tiki. The people called him
Kon-Tiki, or Sun-Tiki, because he said he was descended from
the sun. Tiki and a number of followers had at last disappeared
from their country on big pae-paes; therefore we six thought
that he was the same Tiki who had come to those islands. As
nobody would believe that a pae-pae could make the voyage
across the sea, we ourselves had set out from Peru on a pae-pae,
and here we were, so it could be done.
When the little speech was translated by Teka, Tupuhoe was
all fire and flame and sprang forward in front of the assembly
in a kind of ecstasy. He rumbled away in Polynesian, flung out
his arms, pointed to heaven and us, and in his flood of speech
constantly repeated the word Tiki. He talked so fast that it was
impossible to follow the thread of what he said, but the whole
assembly swallowed every word and was visibly excited. Teka,
on the contrary, looked quite embarrassed when he had to
translate.
Tupuhoe had said that his father and grandfather, and his
fathers before him, had told of Tiki and had said that Tiki
was their first chief who was now in heaven. But then the
white men came and said that the traditions of their ancestors
were lies. Tiki had never existed. He was not in heaven at all,
for Jehovah was there. Tiki was a heathen god, and they must
not believe in him any longer. But now we six had come to
them across the sea on a pae-pae. We were the first whites who
had admitted that their fathers had spoken the truth. Tiki had
275
Among Polynesians
lived, he had been real, but now he was dead and in heaven.
Horrified at the thought of upsetting the missionaries' work,
I had to hurry forward and explain that Tiki had lived, that
was sure and certain, and now he was dead. But whether he
was in heaven or in hell today only Jehovah knew, for Jehovah
was in heaven while Tiki himself had been a mortal man, a
great chief like Teka and Tupuhoe, perhaps still greater.
This produced both cheerfulness and contentment among
the brown men, and the nodding and mumbling among them
showed clearly that the explanation had fallen on good soil.
Tiki had lived that was the main thing. If he was in hell now,
no one was any the worse for it but himself; on the contrary,
Tupuhoe suggested, perhaps it increased the chances of seeing
him again.
Three old men pushed forward and wanted to shake hands
with us. There was no doubt that it was they who had kept
the memories of Tiki alive among the people, and the chief
told us that one of the old men knew an immense number of
traditions and historical ballads from his forefathers' time. I
asked the old man if there was, in the traditions, any hint of
the direction from which Tiki had come. No, none of the old
men could remember having heard that. But after long and
careful reflection the oldest of the three said that Tiki had with
him a near relation who was called Maui, and in the ballad of
Maui it was said that he had come to the islands from Pura
and pura was the word for the part of the sky where the sun
rose. If Maui had come from Pura, the old man said, Tiki had
no doubt come from the same place, and we six on the pae-pae
had also come from pura that was sure enough.
I told the brown men that on a lonely island near Easter
Island, called Mangareva, the people had never learned the use
279
KON-TIKI
of canoes and had continued to use big pae-paes at sea right
down to our time. This the old men did not know, but they
knew that their forefathers also had used big pae-paes. How-
ever, they had gradually gone out of use, and now they had
nothing but the name and traditions left. In really ancient
times they had been called rongo-rongo, the oldest man said,
but that was a word which no longer existed in the language.
Rongo-rongo were mentioned in the most ancient legends.
This name was interesting, for Kongo on certain islands
pronounced "Lono" was the name of one of the Polynesians'
best-known legendary ancestors. He was expressly described as
white and fair-haired. When Captain Cook first came to
Hawaii, he was received with open arms by the islanders be-
cause they thought he was their white kinsman Kongo, who,
after an absence of generations, had come back from their an-
cestors' homeland in his big sailing ship. And on Easter Island
the word "rongo-rongo" was the designation for the mysterious
hieroglyphs the secret of which was lost with the last "long-
ears" who could write.
While the old men wanted to discuss Tiki and rongo-rongo,
the young ones wanted to hear about the whale shark and the
voyage across the sea. But the food was waiting, and Teka was
tired of interpreting.
Now the whole village was allowed to come up and shake
hands with each of us. The men mumbled "ia-ora-na" and
almost shook our hands out of joint, while the girls squirmed
forward and greeted us coquettishly yet shyly and the old
women babbled and cackled and pointed to our beards and the
color of our skin. Friendliness beamed from every face, so it
was quite immaterial that there was a hubbub of linguistic con-
fusion. If they said something incomprehensible to us in Polyne-
280
Among Polynesians
sian, we gave them tit for tat in Norwegian. We had the great-
est fun together. The first native word we all learned was the
word for "like," and when, moreover, one could point to what
one liked and count on getting it at once, it was all very simple.
If one wrinkled one's nose when "like" was said, it meant
"don't like," and on this basis we got along pretty well.
As soon as we had become acquainted with the 127 inhabit-
ants of the village, a long table was laid for the two chiefs and
the six of us, and the village girls came round bearing the most
delicious dishes. While some arranged the table, others came
and hung plaited wreaths of flowers round our necks and
smaller wreaths round our heads. These exhaled a lingering
scent and were cool and refreshing in the heat. And so a feast
of welcome began which did not end till we left the island
weeks after. Our eyes opened wide and our mouths watered,
for the tables were loaded with roast suckling pigs, chickens,
roast ducks, fresh lobsters, Polynesian fish dishes, breadfruit,
papaya, and coconut milk. While we attacked the dishes, we
were entertained by the crowd singing hula songs, while young
girls danced round the table.
The boys laughed and thoroughly enjoyed themselves, each
of us looking more absurd than the next as we sat and gorged
like starving men, with flowing beards and wreaths of flowers
in our hair. The two chiefs were enjoying life as wholeheartedly
as ourselves.
After the meal there was hula dancing on a grand scale. The
village wanted to show us their local folk dances. While we
six and Teka and Tupuhoe were each given stools in the orches-
tra, two guitar players advanced, squatted down, and began to
strum real South Sea melodies. Two ranks of dancing men and
women, with rustling skirts of palm leaves round their hips,
281
KON-TIKI
came gliding and wriggling forward through the ring of spec-
tators who squatted and sang. They had a lively and spirited
leading singer in a luxuriantly fat vahine, who had had one
arm bitten off by a shark. At first the dancers seemed a little
self-conscious and nervous, but when they saw that the white
men from the pae-pae did not turn up their noses at their an-
cestors' folk dances, the dancing became more and more ani-
mated. Some of the older people joined in; they had a splendid
rhythm and could dance dances which were obviously no
longer in common use. As the sun sank into the Pacific, the
dancing under the palm trees became livelier and livelier, and
the applause of the spectators more and more spontaneous.
They had forgotten that we who sat watching them were six
strangers; we were now six of their own people, enjoying our-
selves with them.
The repertory was endless; one fascinating display followed
another. Finally a crowd of young men squatted down in a
close ring just in front of us, and at a sign from Tupuhoe they
began to beat time rhythmically on the ground with the palms
of their hands. First slowly, then more quickly, and the rhythm
grew more and more perfect when a drummer suddenly joined
in and accompanied them, beating at a furious pace with two
sticks on a bone-dry, hollowed block of wood which emitted
a sharp, intense sound. When the rhythm reached the desired
degree of animation, the singing began, and suddenly a hula
girl with a wreath of flowers round her neck and flowers be-
hind one ear leaped into the ring. She kept time to the music
with bare feet and bent knees, swaying rhythmically at the
hips and curving her arms above her head in true Polynesian
style. She danced splendidly, and soon the whole assembly were
beating time with their hands. Another girl leaped into the
282
Among Polynesians
ring, and after her another. They moved with incredible sup-
pleness in perfect rhythm, gliding round one another in the
dance like graceful shadows. The dull beating of hands on the
ground, the singing, and the cheerful wooden drum increased
their tempo faster and faster and the dance grew wilder and
wilder, while the spectators howled and clapped in perfect
rhythm.
This was the South Seas life as the old days had known it.
The stars twinkled and the palms waved. The night was mild
and long and full of the scent of flowers and the song of
crickets. Tupuhoe beamed and slapped me on the shoulder.
"Maitai?" he asked.
"Yes, maitai" I replied.
"Maitai?" he asked all the others.
"Maitai" they all replied emphatically, and they all really
meant it.
"Maitai" Tupuhoe nodded, pointing to himself; he too was
enjoying himself now.
Even Teka thought it was a very good feast; it was the first
time white men had been present at their dances on Raroia, he
said. Faster and faster, faster and faster, went the rolls of the
drums, the clapping, singing, and dancing. Now one of the
girl dancers ceased to move round the ring and remained on
the same spot, performing a wriggling dance at a terrific tempo
with her arms stretched out toward Herman. Herman snick-
ered behind his beard; he did not quite know how to take it.
"Be a good sport," I whispered. "You're a good dancer."
To the boundless delight of the crowd Herman sprang into
the ring and, half crouching, tackled all the difficult wriggling
movements of the hula. The jubilation was unbounded. Soon
Bengt and Torstein leaped into the dance, striving till the per-
283
KON-TIK1
spiration streamed down their faces to keep up with the tempo,
which rose and rose to a furious pace till the drum alone was
beating in one prolonged drone and the three real hula dancers
quivering in time like aspen leaves. Then they sank down in
the finales and the drumbeats ceased abruptly.
Now the evening was ours. There was no end to the
enthusiasm.
The next item on the program was the bird dance, which
was one of the oldest ceremonies on Raroia. Men and women
in two ranks jumped forward in a rhythmic dance, imitating
flocks of birds following a leader. The dance leader had the
title of chief of the birds and performed curious maneuvers
without actually joining in the dance. When the dance was
over, Tupuhoe explained that it had been performed in honor
of the raft and would now be repeated, but the dance leader
would be relieved by myself. As the dance leaders main task
appeared to me to consist in uttering wild howls, hopping
around on his haunches, wriggling his backside, and waving
his hands over his head, I pulled the wreath of flowers well
down over my head and marched out into the arena. While I
was curving myself in the dance, I saw old Tupuhoe laughing
till he nearly fell off his stool, and the music grew feeble be-
cause the singers and players followed Tupuhoe's example.
Now everyone wanted to dance, old and young alike, and
soon the drummer and earth-beaters were there again, giving
the lead to a fiery hula-hula dance. First the hula girls sprang
into the ring and started the dance at a tempo that grew wilder
and wilder, and then we were invited to dance in turn, while
more and more men and women followed, stamping and
writhing along, faster and faster.
But Erik could not be made to stir. The drafts and damp on
Among Polynesians
board the raft had revived his vanished lumbago and he sat
like an old yacht skipper, stiff and bearded, puffing at his pipe.
He would not be moved by the hula girls who tried to lure
him into the arena. He had put on a pair of wide sheepskin
trousers which he had worn at night in the coldest spells in
the Humboldt Current, and, sitting under the palms with his
big beard, body bare to the waist, and sheepskin breeches, he
was a faithful copy of Robinson Crusoe. One pretty girl after
another tried to ingratiate herself, but in vain. He only sat
gravely puffing his pipe, with the wreath of flowers in his
bushy hair.
Then a well-developed matron with powerful muscles en-
tered the arena, executed a few more or less graceful hula steps,
and then marched determinedly toward Erik. He looked
alarmed, but the amazon smiled ingratiatingly, caught him
resolutely by the arm, and pulled him off of his stool. Erik's
comic pair of breeches had the sheep's wool inside and the skin
outside, and they had a rent behind so that a white spot of
wool stuck out like a rabbit's tail. Erik followed most reluc-
tantly and limped into the ring with his pipe in one hand and
the other pressed against the spot where his lumbago hurt him.
When he tried to jump round, he had to let go of his trousers
to save his wreath which was threatening to fall off, and then,
with the wreath on one side, he had to catch hold of his trou-
sers again, which were coming down of their own weight.
The stout dame who was hobbling round in the hula in front
of him was just as funny, and tears of laughter trickled down
our beards. Soon all the others who were in the ring stopped,
and salvos of laughter rang through the palm grove as Hula
Erik and the female heavyweight circled gracefully round. At
last even they had to stop, because both singers and musicians
285
KON-T1K1
had more than they could do to hold their sides for laughter
at the comic sight.
The feast went on till broad daylight, when we were allowed
to have a little pause, after again shaking hands with every
one of the 127. We shook hands with every one of them every
morning and every evening throughout our stay on the island.
Six beds were scraped together from all the huts in the village
and placed side by side along the wall in the meetinghouse,
and in these we slept in a row like the seven little dwarfs in
the fairy story, with sweet-smelling wreaths of flowers hanging
above our heads.
Nexf day the boy of six who had an abscess on his head
seemed to be in a bad way. He had a temperature of 106, and
the abscess was as large as a man's fist and throbbed painfully.
Teka declared that they had lost a number of children in
this way and that, if none of us could do any doctoring, the
boy had not many days to live. We had bottles of penicillin in
a new tablet form, but we did not know what dose a small
child could stand. If the boy died under our treatment, it might
have serious consequences for all of us.
Knut and Torstein got the radio out again and slung up an
aerial between the tallest coconut palms. When evening came
they got in touch again with our unseen friends, Hal and
Frank, sitting in their rooms at home in Los Angeles. Frank
called a doctor on the telephone, and we signaled with the
Morse key all the boy's symptoms and a list of what we had
available in our medical chest. Frank passed on the doctor's re-
ply, and that night we went off to the hut where little Hau-
irata lay tossing in a fever with half the village weeping and
making a noise about him.
Herman and Knut were to do the doctoring, while we others
286
Among Polynesians
had more than enough to do to keep the villagers outside. The
mother became hysterical when we came with a sharp knife
and asked for boiling water. All the hair was shaved off the
boy's head and the abscess was opened. The pus squirted up
almost to the roof, and several of the natives forced their way in
in a state of fury and had to be turned out. It was a grave mo-
ment. When the abscess was drained and sterilized, the boy's
head was bound up and we began the penicillin cure. For two
days and nights, while the fever was at its maximum, the boy
was treated every four hours, and the abscess was kept open.
And each evening the doctor in Los Angeles was consulted.
Then the boy's temperature fell suddenly, the pus was replaced
by plasma which was allowed to heal, and the boy was beaming
and wanting to look at pictures from the white man's strange
world where there were motorcars and cows and houses with
several floors.
A week later Haumata was playing on the beach with the
other children, his head bound up in a big bandage which he
was soon allowed to take off.
When this had gone well, there was no end to the maladies
which cropped up in the village. Toothache and gastric troubles
were everywhere, and both old and young had boils in one
place or another. We referred the patients to Dr. Knut and Dr.
Herman, who ordered diets and emptied the medicine chest of
pills and ointments. Some were cured and none became worse,
and, when the medicine chest was empty, we made oatmeal
porridge and cocoa, which were admirably efficacious with hys-
terical women.
We had not been among our brown admirers for many days
before the festivities culminated in a fresh ceremony. We were
to be adopted as citizens of Raroia and receive Polynesian
287
KON-TIKI
names. I myself was no longer to be Terai Mateata; I could be
called that in Tahiti, but not here among them.
Six stools were placed for us in the middle of the square, and
the whole village was out early to get good places in the circle
round. Teka sat solemnly among them; he was chief all right,
but not where old local ceremonies were concerned. Then Tu-
puhoe took over.
All sat waiting, silent and profoundly serious, while portly
Tupuhoe approached solemnly and slowly with his stout
knotted stick. He was conscious of the gravity of the moment,
and the eyes of all were upon him as he came up, deep in
thought, and took up his position in front of us. He was the
born chief a brilliant speaker and actor.
He turned to the chief singers, drummers, and dance leaders,
pointed at them in turn with his knotted stick, and gave them
curt orders in low, measured tones. Then he turned to us again,
and suddenly opened his great eyes wide, so that the large white
eyeballs shone as bright as the teeth in his expressive copper-
brown face. He raised the knotted stick and, the words stream-
ing from his lips in an uninterrupted flow, he recited ancient
rituals which none but the oldest members understood, because
they were in an old forgotten dialect.
Then he told us, with Teka as interpreter, that Tikaroa was
the name of the first king who had established himself on the
island, and that he had reigned over this same atoll from north
to south, from east to west, and up into the sky above men's
heads.
While the whole choir joined in the old ballad about King
Tikaroa, Tupuhoe laid his great hand on my chest and, turning
to the audience, said that he was naming me Varoa Tikaroa, or
Tikaroa's Spirit.
288
Among Polynesians
When the song died away, it was the turn of Herman and
Bengt. They had the big brown hand laid upon their chests in
turn and received the names Tupuhoe-Itetahua and Topakino.
These were the names of two old-time heroes who had fought
a savage sea monster and killed it at the entrance to the Raroia
reef.
The drummer delivered a few vigorous rolls, and two robust
men with knotted-up loincloths and a long spear in each hand
sprang forward. They broke into a march in double-quick time,
with their knees raised to their chests and their spears pointing
upward, and turned their heads from side to side. At a fresh
beat of the drum they leaped into the air and, in perfect rhythm,
began a ceremonial battle in the purest ballet style. The whole
thing was short and swift and represented the heroes' fight with
the sea monster. Then Torstein was named with song and cere-
mony; he was called Maroake, after a former king in the pres-
ent village, and Erik and Knut received the names of Tane-
Matarau and Tefaunui after two navigators and sea heroes of
the past. The long monotonous recitation which accompanied
their naming was delivered at breakneck speed and with a con-
tinuous flow of words, the incredible rapidity of which was cal-
culated both to impress and amuse.
The ceremony was over. Once more there were white and
bearded chiefs among the Polynesian people on Raroia. Two
ranks of male and female * dancers came forward in plaited
straw skirts with swaying bast crowns on their heads. They
danced forward to us and transferred the crowns from their
own heads to ours; we had rustling straw skirts put round our
waists, and the festivities continued.
One night the flower-clad radio operators got into touch with
the radio amateur on Rarotonga, who passed on a message to
289
KON-TIKI
us from Tahiti. It was a cordial welcome from the governor of
the French Pacific colonies.
On instructions from Paris he had sent the government
schooner "Tamara" to fetch us to Tahiti, so we should not have
to wait for the uncertain arrival of the copra schooner. Tahiti
was the central point of the French colonies and the only island
which had contact with the world in general. We should have
to go via Tahiti to get the regular boat home to our own world.
The festivities continued on Raroia. One night some strange
hoots were heard from out at sea, and lookout men came down
from the palm tops and reported that a vessel was lying at the
entrance to the lagoon. We ran through the palm forest and
down to the beach on the lee side. Here we looked out over the
sea in the opposite direction to that from which we had come.
There were much smaller breakers on this side, which lay un-
der the shelter of the entire atoll and the reef.
Just outside the entrance to the lagoon we saw the lights of a
vessel. Since the night was clear and starry, we could distinguish
the outlines of a broad-beamed schooner with two masts. Was
this the governor's ship which was coming for us ? Why did
she not come in ?
The natives grew more and more uneasy. Now we too saw
what was happening. The vessel had a heavy list and threatened
to capsize. She was aground on an invisible coral reef under the
surface.
Torstein got hold of a light and signaled:
"Qucl bateau?"
"'Maoae,'" was flashed back.
The "Maoae" was the copra schooner which ran between
the islands. She was on her way to Raroia to fetch copra. There
was a Polynesian captain and crew on board, and they knew
290
Among Polynesians
the reefs inside out. But the current out of the lagoon was
treacherous in darkness. It was lucky that the schooner lay
under the lee of the island and that the weather was quiet. The
list of the "Maoae" became heavier and heavier, and the crew
took to the boat. Strong ropes were made fast to her mastheads
and rowed in to the land, where the natives fastened them
round coconut palms to prevent the schooner from capsizing.
The crew, with other ropes, stationed themselves off the open-
ing in the reef in their boat, in the hope of rowing the "Maoae"
off when the tidal current ran out of the lagoon. The people of
the village launched all their canoes and set out to salvage the
cargo. There were ninety tons of valuable copra on board. Load
after load of sacks of copra was transferred from the rolling
schooner and brought on to dry land.
At high water the "Maoae" was still aground, bumping and
rolling against the corals until she sprang a leak. When day
broke she was lying in a worse position on the reef than ever.
The crew could do nothing; it was useless to try to haul the
heavy 150-ton schooner off the reef with her own boat and the
canoes. If she continued to lie bumping where she was, she
would knock herself to pieces, and, if the weather changed, she
would be lifted in by the suction and be a total loss in the surf
which beat against the atoll.
The "Maoae" had.no radio, but we had. But it would be
impossible to get a salvage vessel from Tahiti until the "Maoae"
would have had ample time to roll herself into wreckage. Yet
for the second time that month the Raroia reef was balked of
its prey.
About noon the same day the schooner "Tamara" came in
sight on the horizon to westward. She had been sent to fetch
us from Raroia, and those on board were not a little astonished
291
KON-TIKl
when they saw, instead of a raft, the two masts of a large
schooner lying and rolling helplessly on the reef.
On board the "Tamara" was the French administrator of the
Tuamotu and Tubuai groups, M. Frederic Ahnne, whom the
governor had sent with the vessel from Tahiti to meet us. There
were also a French movie photographer and a French telegra-
pher on board, but the captain and crew were Polynesian. M.
Ahnne himself had been born in Tahiti of French parents and
was a splendid seaman. He took over the command of the ves-
sel with the consent of the Tahitian captain, who was delighted
to be freed from the responsibility in those dangerous waters.
While the "Tamara" was avoiding a myriad of submerged reefs
and eddies, stout hawsers were stretched between the two
schooners and M. Ahnne began his skillful and dangerous evo-
lutions, while the tide threatened to drag both vessels on to the
same coral bank.
At high tide the "Maoae" came off the reef, and the "Ta-
mara" towed her out into deep water. But now water poured
through the hull of the "Maoae," and she had to be hauled
with all speed on to the shallows in the lagoon. For three days
the "Maoae" lay off the village in a sinking condition, with all
pumps going day and night. The best pearl divers among our
friends on the island went down with lead plates and nails and
stopped the worst leaks, so that the "Maoae" could be escorted
by the "Tamara" to the dockyard in Tahiti with her pumps
working.
When the "Maoae" was ready to be escorted, M. Ahnne ma-
neuvered the "Tamara" between the coral shallows in the
lagoon and across to Kon-Tiki Island. The raft was taken in
tow, and then he set his course back to the opening with the
Kon-Tify in tow and the "Maoae" so close behind that the crew
292
Among Polynesians
could be taken off if the leaks got the upper hand out at sea.
Our farewell to Raroia was more than sad. Everyone who
could walk or crawl was down on the jetty, playing and sing-
ing our favorite tunes as the ship's boat took us out to the
"Tamara."
Tupuhoe bulked large in the center, holding little Haumata
by the hand. Haumata was crying, and tears trickled down the
cheeks of the powerful chief. There was not a dry eye on the
jetty, but they kept the singing and music going long, long
after the breakers from the reef drowned all other sounds in
our ears.
Those faithful souls who stood on the jetty singing were los-
ing six friends. We who stood mute at the rail of the "Tamara"
till the jetty was hidden by the palms and the palms sank into
the sea were losing 127. We still heard the strange music with
our inner ear:
" and share memories with us so that we can always be to-
gether, even when you go away to a far land. Good day."
Four days later Tahiti rose out of the sea. Not like a string
of pearls with palm tufts. As wild jagged blue mountains flung
skyward, with wisps of cloud like wreaths round the peaks.
As we gradually approached, the blue mountains showed
green slopes. Green upon green, the lush vegetation of the south
rolled down over rust-red hills and cliffs, till it plunged down
into deep ravines and valleys running out toward the sea. When
the coast came near, we saw slender palms standing close
packed up all the valleys and all along the coast behind a golden
beach. Tahiti was built by old volcanoes. They were dead now
and the coral polyps had slung their protecting reef about the
island so that the sea could not erode it away.
Early one morning we headed through an opening in the
KON-T1KI
reef into the harbor of Papeete. Before us lay church spires and
red roofs half hidden by the foliage of giant trees and palm
tops. Papeete was the capital of Tahiti, the only town in French
Oceania. It was a city of pleasure, the seat of government, and
the center of all traffic in the eastern Pacific.
When we came into the harbor, the population of Tahiti
stood waiting, packed tight like a gaily colored living wall.
News spreads like the wind in Tahiti, and die pac-pac which
had come from America was something everyone wanted to see.
The Kon-Tiki was given the place of honor alongside the
shore promenade, the mayor of Papeete welcomed us, and a lit-
tle Polynesian girl presented us with an enormous wheel of Ta-
hitian wild flowers on behalf of the Polynesian Society. Then
young girls came forward and hung sweet-smelling white
wreaths of flowers round our necks as a welcome to Tahiti, the
pearl of the South Seas.
There was one particular face I was looking for in the multi-
tude, that of my old adoptive father in Tahiti, the chief Teri-
ieroo, head of the seventeen native chiefs on the island. He was
not missing. Big and bulky, and as bright and alive as in the
old days, he emerged from the crowd calling, "Terai Mateata!"
and beaming all over his broad face. He had become an old
man, but he was the same impressive chieftainly figure.
"You come late," he said smiling, "but you come with good
news. Your pac-pae has in truth brought blue sky (terai mate-
ata) to Tahiti, for now we know where our fathers came from."
There was a reception at the governor's palace and a party
at the town hall, and invitations poured in from every corner of
the hospitable island.
As in former days, a great feast was given by the chief Teri-
ieroo at his house in the Papeno Valley which I knew so well,
294
Among Polynesians
and, as Raroia was not Tahiti, there was a new ceremony at
which Tahitian names were given those who had none before.
Those were carefree days under sun and drifting clouds. We
bathed in the lagoon, climbed in the mountains, and danced
the hula on the grass under the palms. The days passed and
became weeks. It seemed as if the weeks would become months
before a ship came which could take us home to the duties that
awaited us.
Then came a message from Norway saying that Lars Chris-
tensen had ordered the 4,ooo-tonner "Thor I" to proceed from
Samoa to Tahiti to pick up the expedition and take it to
America.
Early one morning the big Norwegian steamer glided into
Papeete harbor, and the Kon-Tify was towed out by a French
naval craft to the side of her large compatriot, which swung
out a huge iron arm and lifted her small kinsman up on to
her deck. Loud blasts of the ship's siren echoed over the palm-
clad island. Brown and white people thronged the quay of Pa-
peete and poured on board with farewell gifts and wreaths of
flowers. We stood at the rail stretching out our necks like gi-
raffes to get our chins free from the ever growing load of
flowers.
"If you wish to come back to Tahiti," Chief Teriieroo cried
as the whistle sounded over the island for the last time, "you
must throw a wreath out into the lagoon when the boat goes!"
The ropes were cast off, the engines roared, and the propeller
whipped the water green as we slid sideways away from the
quay.
Soon the red roofs disappeared behind the palms, and the
palms were swallowed up in the blue of the mountains which
sank like shadows into the Pacific.
295
KON-TIKI
Waves were breaking out on the blue sea. We could no longer
reach down to them. White trade-wind clouds drifted across
the blue sky. We were no longer traveling their way. We were
defying Nature now. We were going back to the twentieth
century which lay so far, far away.
But the six of us on deck, standing beside our nine dear balsa
logs, were grateful to be all alive. And in the lagoon at Tahiti
six white wreaths lay alone, washing in and out, in and out,
with the wavelets on the beach.
296
APPENDIX
MY MIGRATION THEORY, AS SUCH, WAS NOT NECES-
sarily proved by the successful outcome of the Kon-Tiki expedi-
tion. What we did prove was that the South American balsa
raft possesses qualities not previously known to scientists of our
time > and that the Pacific islands are located well inside the
range of prehistoric craft from Peru. Primitive people are ca-
pable of undertaking immense voyages over the open ocean.
The distance is not the determining factor in the case of oceanic
migrations but whether the wind and the current have the same
general course day and night, all the year round. The trade
winds and the Equatorial Currents are turned westward by the
rotation of the earth, and this rotation has never changed in all
the history of mankind.
INDEX
Agurto, see Alvarez
Ahnnc, M. Frederic, 292
Air Force laboratory, 46
Air Material Command, 38, 42, 47
Alvarez, Captain Agurto Alexis, 64-66,
68, 70
Amazon expedition, 79
Ambjorg, 34
American military attache in Ecuador, 63
Amundsen, Christian, 195
Andes, 52, 59, 64-66, 91-92, 178-79*
182, 185-93
Angatau, 223-39, 268
Angelo, 68-69
Antarctic, 39, 100, 215
Ants, 143-44
Arabia, 20
Army supply department, 46
Asia, 22, 175-76
Atlantis, 20
Australia, 22
Aztecs, 175, 198
B
Bahr, Consul General, 76, 90
Bajkov, Dr. A. D., 139
Balsa rafts, 30, 32-37, 45, 51-52, 67-69,
83, 85, 100, 102, 136, 163, 174
Balsa trees, wood, logs, 52-59, 68-75, 82;
see also Kon-Tify
Bamboos, giant, 131
Bandidos, 63-64
Bank of Norway, 33
Barnacles, 14344, 158, 242
Behre, Professor, 50
Bengt, see Danielsson
Berg, Egil, 194
"Big-ears," 182
Bird dance, 284
Blue shark, 113, 148, 151, 266
Blue whale, 141
Bonito, 113, 132, 155, 158, 203-6"
Boobies, 214
Bottle gourd, 131, 135, 197
British Columbia, 25
British Military Mission in Washington,
50
Brooklyn, 33
Brown shark, 148
Bryhn, Consul General, 63-64
Buchwald, Don Federico von, 58, 6872;
Don Gustavo von, 58
Bustamante y Rivero, Don Jose (Presi-
dent of Peru), 53, 76-79, 91
Cachalot, 142
Callao, 14, 75, 83, 92, 95, 100-1, 143,
244
Canary Islands, 175
Cari, 24
Carl, 31-33
Caucasus, 20
Centerboards, 85, 128, 150, 156-57, 163-
64, 210-11, 225, 241-42
Central America, 109, 135, 174-75
Chicago, university at, 32, 34
Chile, 53
China, 20
Christensen, Lars, 295
Coca plant, 133-34
Coconut, coconut palm, 136, 138, 225-28,
231, 233, 244, 253-56, 259, 262, 271-
72, 282, 286, 291
Coelenterates, 140
Cohen, Dr. Benjamin, 53, 76
Colossi on Easter Island, 176-83
Columbia University, 50
Columbus, 60, no, 136
Cook, Captain, 280
Cook Islands, 244
Copepods, 139
Copra, 231, 271, 276, 290-91
Coquimbo Valley, 25
"Cowrie," 160
Crosby, Bing, 271
Cuevas, Frank, 194, 244, 264, 286
Cumulo-nimbus, 235
Currents: Humboldt, 88, 100, 104, 109-
10, 130, 140, 152, 193, 285; South
298
Index
Currents continued
Equatorial, 123, 131, 196, 215; cross-
currents off Peruvian coast, 101;
toward Central America, 109; around
Galapagos Islands, no, 123
Cuttlefish (squid), 13, 118, 145, 152-55*
192, 267
D
Dangerous (or Low) Archipelago, 213
Danielsson, Bengt, 14; joins expedition
at Lima, 79-81, 83, 88-89; takes
seventy-three books with him on raft,
90-91, 97, 100-1, 113, 116; pursues
sea turtle, 124; as steward is responsible
for rations, 128; restricted to special
provisions by way of experiment, 130,
141, 154, 191, 208, 211, 219, 222, 227,
235, 244, 246, 249; concussion in
stranding of raft, 251; salvages kitchen
utensils, 254-56, 260-62; goes as envoy
to chief on Raroia, 270-71, 274-75;
dances the hula, 283; receives Polyne-
sian name, 283, 289
Disney, Walt, 121, 139
Diving basket, 156-57, 200
Dolphin (dorado), 113, 117, 119-21,
123, 143-46, 151, i53-54> 156-57,
159, l6l, 185-86, 203-6, 214, 222,
254
Dolphin (toothed whale), 142, 146
Fenua Kon-Tiki, 272
Finnmark, 25, 44-46
Fire-Tiki, 24
Flying fish, 13, 113-14, 129, 132, 137,
145-46, 154, 1 6 1, 214-15
Foreign liaison section of War Depart-
ment, 46-48
Fred Olsen Line, 34
Freuchen, Peter, 38, 40-41
Frigate birds, 161, 214
Galapagos Islands, 109-10, 116, 123, 159,
165, 174
Gempylus, 115-17, 272
Germans invade Norway, 25
Germany, 20
Gestapo, 43
Giant bamboos, 131
Giant ray, 119, 156
Glover, Admiral, 50
"Golden navel," 184
Great Bear, 197
Great Rapa, 184
Greenland, 38, 40
Greenwich Village, 31
Guardian Rlos, 95-100
Guayaquil, 57-59, 69, 74
Guayas, Rio, 74-75
Easter Island, 20-21, 23-24, 134, 165,
175-85, 272, 279-80
Ecuador, 52, 57~75> ^5* i3 no, 174,
254
Eels, 265-67
Egypt, 20
Erik, see Hesselberg
Eskimos, 38
Explorers Club, 37, 40, 42, 223
"Eye of heaven," 185
"Eye which looks toward heaven," 185
Fangahina, 223
Fatu Hiva, 15-18, 213-14, 216, 222, 229
H
Haakon, King, 195
Hal, see Kempel
Harpoon, 113, 122-23, 147-48, 151* *55-
56, 185, 272
Haskin, Colonel, 37-38
Haugland, Knut, 14-15; war experiences,
43-44; agrees to join expedition, 45;
arrives in New York, 81; at Lima, 82,
89, 107; experiments with radio aerials,
109-10, 114; sights whale shark, 119;
radio under difficulties, 128, 156, 163;
has a swim with a shark, 187-88, 191;
establishes radio contacts, 194-95; res-
cues Watzinger, 208-9, 222, 231; goes
ashore on Angatau, 232-36, 245, 248,
250-51, 254, 260, 262, 274-75; he and
Watzinger treat sick boy with penicillin,
286-87; receives Polynesian name, 289
Haumata, 275, 286-87, 293
299
KON-TIKI
Hawaii, 21, 25, 134, 185, 197-98* 280
Head-hunters, 61-62
Heavy water sabotage, 43
Herman, fee Watzinger
Hermit crabs, 255, 260
Hesselberg, Erik, 14; agrees to join expe-
dition, 45; coming by sea from Oslo to
Panama, 81; arrives at Lima, 82, 90-91,
97, 100-1, 105; takes position of raft,
109; harpoons whale shark, 122; occu-
pations on board, 128, 146, 155-56; has
idea of diving basket, 156-57, 162; de-
velops photographs, 195-96, 208, 211
215, 221-22; navigates raft along An-
gatau reef, 225-29, 240, 246, 251, 260,
262, 265; attacked by eels, 266-67; 272,
274; becomes a hula dancer, 284-85;
receives Polynesian name, 289
Hiti, 72
Hotu Matua, 24
Hula dancing, 88, 238, 273, 281-86, 295
Humboldt Current, 88, 100, 104, 109-10,
130, 140, 152, 193, 285
I
[guanas, 73
Ilia-Tiki, 24
Ilo, 72
Incas, 21-24, 35) I00 IQ 8, i34> 164, 175,
181-82, 198, 2ii
India, 20
Indians (South American), 60, 64-65,
135, 163; see also Incas
Indonesia, 22
Indonesian race, 183
Ipomoea batatas, 135
I
Japan, 20
Jellyfish, 98, 139-40
Johannes, 137-38, 190, 254
Jorge, 60-62
K
Kama, 72
Kane, 24, 72
Kayak, 38
Kempel, Harold, 193-94, 244, 264-65,
286
Kimi, 135
Kirkenes, 44
Knut, see Haugland
Kongo, 71
Kon-Tiki, 24-25, 83, 88, 91, 101-2, 104,
130, 174, 176, 178, 181-83, 185, 196-
97, 199, 261, 278
Kon-Tikj. (raft) construction, 83-86-,
pessimism of foreign observers, 86-87,
and Norwegian seamen, 87-88; trial
trip in harbor, 90; christened, 91; tow-
ed out to sea, 96-100; performance in
heavy sea, 103-9; logs' absorption of
water, in; strain on ropes, 111-13;
course changes, 113; daily life on raft,
127-29; tropical garden on board, 134-
36; invaded by small crabs, 137-38;
floating aquarium under raft, 157-59;
comic appearance at sea, 169-70; mas-
ters heavy storm, 201-3; weaker in
joints after storm, 210-12; stranding on
Raroia reef, 248-51; brought into
lagoon, 273-74; towed to Tahiti, 292-
94; shaped on board "Thor I," 295
Kon-Tiki Island, 162, 272-73, 275-76,
292
Ku, 71-72
Kukara, 72
Kumara potato, 45; see sweet potato
Kura, 72
Lagenaria vulgaris, 135
Lamour, Dorothy, 88
Latacunga, 64
Lewis, Colonel, 48-49
LI 2 B, 194, 265
Lianas, 72
Lie, Trygve, 53
Lima, 75-82, 88, 92, 95, 109, 261, 264
Little Rapa, 184
"Long-ears," 181-84, 280
Lono, 280
Los Angeles, 193, 264, 286
Low (or Dangerous) Archipelago, 213
Lumsden, Colonel, 50
M
Machete knives, 83, 152, 242, 265-66
300
Index
Malaya, 20
Malayan peoples, 198
Mangareva, 183, 279
"Maoae," 290-92
Maroake, 289
Marquesas Islands, 15, 23, 37, 179-82,
185, 196, 212-13
Mata-Kite-Rani, 185
Mata-Rani, 185
Maui, 279
Mauri, 72
Mayas, 198
Melanesian peoples, 22, 198
Meteorological Institute, 128
Mexico, 174-75
Military Mission in Washington, British,
50
Monoliths, 18; see Easter Island
Munthe of Morgenstierne, Wilhelm von,
53
Munthe-Kaas, Colonel Otto, 46, 52
Murmansk, 25
N
National Geographic Society, 152
Naval Hydrographic Institute, 50
Naval War School (Peru), 244, 264
"Navel, golden," 184
"Navel of the islands," 184
New York, 15, 29-53, 81, 228
New Zealand, 20, 134
Nieto, Manuel, 76, 79, 86
Nordmark, 44
Northwest Indians, 25
Norway, 20, 25, 194, 271
Norwegian ambassador, 53; Embassy, 245
Norwegian consul general in Ecuador, 63-
64; in Peru, 76, 90
Norwegian military attache in Washing-
ton, 46, 52; assistant, 46
Norwegian Sailors' Home, 3334, 3637,
39, 4i
Notodden, 194
Pae-pae, 271-72, 278-80, 282, 294
Palenque, Rio, 67-68, 74, 103
Palms, see coconut
Panama, 81, 136
Pani, 134
Papa, 72
Papeete, 294-95
Papeno Valley, 294
Parrots, 73; Kon-Tiki parrot, 13-15, 18,
95-97, 1 01, 107-8, 190-92, 194
Penicillin, 275, 286-87
Pentagon building, 47
Peru, 12, 22-25, 33, 35~36, 39, 42, 45,
50, 52-53, 75, 101, 104, 109, 129-30,
134-36, 152, 159, 174-85, 198-99, 213,
265, 278
Peruvian air minister, 78-79; Foreign
Ministry, 76, 79; minister of marine,
76, 79, 86; naval attache in Washing-
ton, 76; President, 53, 76-79, 91
Petrels, 136, 214
P/jy/o-plankton, 138
Pilot fish, 117, 120-23, 143, 146, 149-51,
156-57, 204, 207, 222, 254
Pitcairn Island, 23
Pizarro, 100
Plankton, 117, 138-41, 173
Pleiades, 198-99
Pole Star, 197
Polynesia, Polynesians, 18, 20-25, 30-31,
45, 71-72, 75, 9i, 128-129, 133-36,
165, 171, 174-76, 181-85, 197-98, 211-
1 6, 221, 227-38, 261, 268-94
"Polynesia and America: A Study of Pre-
historic Relations," 31
Polynesian Society, 294
Porpoises, 113, 142
Potatoes, 45, 131, 134-36, 180
President of Peru, 53, 76-79, 91
Primus stove, 101, 129, 254
Puka Puka, 221-23
Pura, 279
Pyramids, 23
Octopus, 15255
Oslo,^, 81, 195
Ossining, 3436
Ouia Valley, 15
Oviedo, 136
Quartermaster general's laboratory, 48
Quevedo, 58-60, 63-64, 67-68, 82, 254
Quito, 59-64
301
Ra, 72
Raaby, Torstein, 13-14; war experiences,
43-45; agrees to join expedition, 45;
arrives in New York, 81; sent by air to 
