Polynesian WaldenNorwegian explorer and author Thor Heyerdahl achieved fame in the late 1940s and early 1950s with his book and documentary film Kon-Tiki, about his voyage from South America to Polynesia on a primitive wooden raft. The Kon-Tiki expedition was not his first adventurous journey, however. As early as his teenage years, Heyerdahl had dreamed of escaping civilization to live a self-sufficient life in an unspoiled wilderness. He decided on Fatu-Hiva, an island in the Marquesas, as the ideal destination in which to live this dream of getting “back to nature.” Heyerdahl deliberately searched for a wife to share this vision, and he found one in Liv Coucheron-Torp. The day after their marriage in 1936, the couple sailed for the Marquesas, where they would be dropped on the shore with little more than the clothes on their backs. In 1938, Heyerdahl published in Norway an account of this unconventional honeymoon entitled Hunt for Paradise. After achieving worldwide fame from his later expeditions, he revised the account and published it in English in 1974 as Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature.
At the time, Fatu-Hiva was home to a few small coastal Indigenous communities and a handful of white men. The Heyerdahls ventured into the interior of the island to live a semi-isolated existence in the jungle. They relocated a few times to different locations around the island, where they built their own homes and mostly foraged for fruit and shellfish. Heyerdahl doesn’t just describe what they saw and did but also, much like Henry David Thoreau in Walden or Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, philosophizes quite a bit about nature and man’s place in it. This includes much eloquent lamenting on environmental degradation. In this travelog, Heyerdahl’s account goes beyond the romantic stereotype of a South Pacific paradise and presents the realistic pros and cons of living on a tropical island.
It was here in the Marquesas that Heyerdahl first got the idea that Polynesians are descended from seafaring Peruvians, an theory he tested with his Kon-Tiki expedition. On Fatu-Hiva, the Heyerdahls encountered many Polynesian ruins and anthropological artifacts. Heyerdahl points out the stylistic similarities between the art of the Polynesians and Indigenous South Americans. He also discusses in much detail the migration or transplantation of plant and animal species between the Americas and Polynesia. He hypothesizes on which species were brought to Fatu-Hiva by white explorers and which preceded them (thus brought by ancient South American mariners). This theory of the American ancestry of Polynesians was controversial for its time, since most scientists believed that Polynesians were descended from mainland Asians who migrated Eastward. Today, Heyerdahl’s theory is considered racially problematic pseudoscience, and DNA evidence doesn’t support it. Nevertheless, when it comes to expedition narratives, Heyerdahl knows how to write a good book. For those who like exotic adventure, Kon-Tiki is an excellent read; Fatu-Hiva is merely good. For a better account of roughing it in the Marquesas, read Herman Melville’s Typee.
Given Heyerdahl’s background in zoology, I was disappointed that he didn’t write more about the wildlife of Fatu-Hiva. He focuses more attention on the human inhabitants of the island. Despite being far off the beaten path, Fatu-Hiva was not entirely uncivilized nor untouched by European influence. In fact, the greatest danger faced by the Heyerdahls is unexpected: Catholic islanders who persecute the couple for being Protestants. Heyerdahl readily admits that his experiment in getting “back to nature” was only partially successful because the negative aspects of human nature and modern civilization were to some degree inescapable. Nevertheless, his attempt at a tropical idyll is admirable and makes for an interesting read.
Like an amazing adventure novel, only true
As a young man, ethnographer, geographer, and zoologist Thor Heyerdahl spent his honeymoon on the island of Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas, where he and his wife lived among the natives. While there, the islanders told him legends of an ancient progenitor, a hero named Kon-Tiki who came from the East, the first of their people to settle these islands. The more Heyerdahl studied Polynesian culture, the more he became convinced that there was truth to these legends. Noticing cultural and artistic similarities between the peoples of South America and the South Pacific, he developed the theory that the Polynesian islands were populated by descendants of the Inca. Most scholars scoffed at his idea on the basis that these ancient cultures did not possess the maritime technology to perform such a monumental nautical feat as crossing the Pacific. Heyerdahl decided the only way to substantiate his theory was to prove this objection false. He resolved to sail across the Pacific from Peru to Polynesia on a raft such as the ancient Peruvian peoples were known to have built. He recruited five of his Norwegian countrymen to accompany him on the journey. In April 1947 they set off into the open sea on their tiny balsa wood craft. Heyerdahl named the raft Kon-Tiki, after the ancient Polynesian forefather. In 1948 he published an account of the journey in Norwegian, titled The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas. The book was published in English in 1950, titled simply Kon-Tiki, and became an international best seller.
Heyerdahl and company’s daring adventure in experimental archaeology makes for a fantastic read. This is due in no small part to the fact that Heyerdahl is not only a bold explorer and talented scientist; he’s also an excellent writer. The prose often reads like literature. Even the more scientific passages are far from dull. Heyerdahl imbues them with the same enthusiasm for discovery, wonder of nature, and reverence for sea life that made Jacques Cousteau famous. The dangers and joys of the expedition are chronicled with gripping immediacy and eloquence. Heyerdahl tracks the process of his journey from the initial conception of his ethnographic theory, through the logistical planning stages and building of the raft, the long perilous ocean voyage, and the triumphant arrival in the Tuamotu Archipelago. Every step of the way, the reader is on the edge of his seat, worrying and cheering for these brave (some might say foolhardy) explorers as they struggle to complete their epic voyage.
I only have two reservations about this book. 1) Was it really necessary to kill so many sharks? 2) Heyerdahl’s continual assertion that the South Americans who settled Polynesia were white-skinned, bearded, and blonde- or red-haired, which leads him to the speculation that the Inca themselves may have had European origins. By today’s standards, the idea that Caucasians may have been responsible for advanced Native American civilizations comes across as a case of White Eurocentric wishful thinking. That portion of his theory may have flown in 1947, but would likely meet with heated opposition were it proposed today. Overall, was Heyerdahl’s theory correct? Was Polynesia settled by South Americans? There’s evidence for and against that contention, and I’m in no position to argue either way. I’m prone to think there was probably a lot of prehistoric intercontinental travel that we don’t know about. Regardless, it is certainly a question to ignite the imagination, and I respect and admire Heyerdahl for laying his life on the line to investigate the possibility. His articulate account of that bold and historic experiment is educational, entertaining, and exhilarating.
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