A Norwegian Holiday (Part 8)
The Kon-Tiki Museum: the Kon-Tiki and Ra expeditions — and the unfairly forgotten lady
Adjacent to the Fram Museum, across the road from it, stands the Kon-Tiki Museum. This museum deals with the story of the incredible voyage of Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian explorer, who, in 1947, sailed 8000 km across the Pacific Ocean on a fragile raft named the Kon-Tiki from the coast of Peru in South America to French Polynesia. And, thereby hangs a most fascinating tale.
Thor Heyerdahl and the legend of Kon-Tiki
Thor Heyerdahl was a Norwegian explorer, writer and anthropologist. Born in Larvik, Norway, in 1914, he studied zoology and geography in Oslo University. During the time when he was in Oslo University, he became interested in Polynesia and studied about it in depth on his own.
Soon after graduating from university in 1937, he went to Fatu Hiva, one of the Polynesian islands in the South Pacific, ostensibly to study the flora and fauna of that remote island. It was during his arduous, one-year-long stay there in a remote, uninhabited valley with his newly-married wife (whom he had married just the day before he left for Polynesia!) that he began to postulate about ancient trans-oceanic contacts between South America and the remote Pacific islands in Polynesia. He postulated that the Polynesian people originated in faraway South America and that it was possible, even in ancient times, for these people to cross the Pacific Ocean to reach these remote islands.
Kon-Tiki is a bearded Sun God in South America’s Inca mythology. Legend has it that he was the head of a race of fair-skinned people in Peru and that he was defeated and chased away by conquerors who came from Chile. Kon-Tiki and his people escaped to Peru’s Pacific coast and, according to Inca mythology, thence “sailed into the ocean and disappeared”.
Lending credence to the accounts of some Polynesians of their forebears having come from “an eastern land across the ocean” and linking these to the Kon-Tiki legend, Heyerdahl postulated that the ancient forefathers of the inhabitants of these remote Pacific islands probably reached there from South America around 500 A.D.. He felt that this explained why a fair proportion of Polynesians were relatively light-skinned. It was to prove this tenuous postulate that he decided to set out on a primitive raft across the Pacific. It has to be noted that Heyerdahl’s postulate has been, subsequently, debunked by modern anthropological and genetic studies which clearly point to a South East Asian origin for the Polynesians.
The Kon-Tiki Raft and the incredible Trans-Pacific Expedition
We entered the Kon-Tiki Museum and, turning left, went up a short flight of steps to reach a huge hall. In the centre of this hall, under spotlights, was kept a large raft with a sail. This was the original Kon-Tiki raft which was used by Heyerdahl and his five mates in their daredevil attempt to cross the mighty Pacific Ocean.
The Kon-Tiki raft was made out of balsa wood. (Balsa is a tree native to South and Central America, especially Ecuador, and is known for its soft, lightweight but strong wood. Ancient Ecuadorans used it to make rafts. Balsa is, in fact, the Ecuadoran word for raft. My thoughts went back to the 1970s, when I had used balsa wood to make miniature, powered, flying models of airplanes during my childhood in Trivandrum, Kerala, when I used to attend aero-modelling classes. At present, balsa wood is widely used to manufacture the gigantic blades of wind turbines). The Kon-Tiki raft was made from nine long balsa trunks tied together using hemp ropes. Its bow was made out of pine wood and the mast from mangrove trunks. It had a cabin made out of bamboo and thatched with plantain leaves. No metal was used in its construction at all. The raft’s sail featured an image of the Inca God, Kon-Tiki.
Heyerdahl and his team set out from Peru in April, 1947. Carried by ocean currents and propelled by wind, it travelled almost 8000 km across the Pacific Ocean, providentially surmounting numerous deadly perils on the way. The voyage ended when they made landfall on a tiny island in the South Pacific 101 days later. When they set out recklessly on a flimsy raft, captained by Heyerdahl who had no previous sailing experience at all and barely knew swimming, experts had predicted certain death and destruction for the team. Heyerdahl, with his audacious voyage, completed against daunting odds, had succeeded in proving the seaworthiness of ancient Peruvian balsa rafts!
One of the foremost fears was that the hemp ropes holding the raft together would gradually erode and break, due to friction caused by their movement against the logs, breaking up and reducing the raft to just a few logs. Though the ropes did move about and rub against the wood, they did not get cut through or break. Instead, their constant friction against the logs resulted in them cutting grooves into the soft balsa logs, thus protecting them from breaking. And, the raft miraculously survived!
The voyagers had carried with them canned food (unlike the ancient Peruvians!) — and drinking water in containers as well as inside bamboo rods. They supplemented this food with fresh catch from the sea. Flying Fish was a particular favourite. They maintained contact with land through a ham radio on board. (Ham radio is a term which was initially used as a derogatory term for amatuer radio communicators, the prefix ‘ham’ meaning ‘clumsy’ or ‘inefficient’, as in “ham-handed”). About a month into their voyage, they came across a huge whale shark, the largest variety of shark. The Kon-Tiki museum has on display a life-size model of a whale shark in the basement floor to mark this close encounter.
After the Kon-Tiki expedition’s success, Heyerdahl and his team became international celebrities. He wrote a best selling book about his adventure, ‘The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas’, which was translated into 70 languages. A documentary made about the expedition, named ‘Kon-Tiki’, won an Academy Award in 1951.
The Ra expeditions
Going ahead inside the museum, we came across another raft called the Ra II. This was a papyrus raft constructed according to ancient Egyptian design and used by Heyerdahl to cross the Atlantic Ocean, from Morocco to Barbados in the West Indies.
The Ra II expedition was undertaken by Heyerdahl to demonstrate that there existed trans-oceanic contact between the ancient Egyptians and the ancient civilisation in Peru. Heyerdahl noted that, in both these civilisations they had built pyramids, had developed writing, worshipped the sun and mummified the dead. Just as ancient Egyptians used papyrus reed boats in the Nile, the ancient Peruvians used the locally available totora reed to make boats which were used in Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest lake located in the Andes and extending to Peru and Bolivia. (Totora is a sedge seen in Peru. Sedge is a plant similar to tall grass that grows in wet ground, typically near rivers; papyrus is also a sedge).
The initial Ra expedition in 1969 had to be aborted midway and Ra II was launched the following year. In his Ra expeditions (named after the ancient Egyptian sun god, Ra), Heyerdahl deliberately got together a team drawn from different countries, races and religions in order to demonstrate that people from widely differing backgrounds can co-exist and work successfully together. The second Ra expedition was successful, sailing 6100 km across the Atlantic in 57 days.
Easter Island Section
The Kon-Tiki museum also has a section dealing with Heyerdahl’s expeditions to the well-known Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean. A part of Chile, this island is famous for its large, monolithic, enigmatic, human statues known as Moai (pronounced ‘Mo eye’) which are said to date back to the 13th century. It has remained a mystery as to why and how these large statues, weighing several tonnes and numbering several hundreds, were created and transported across this remote Pacific island several centuries ago.
Heyerdahl spent two years from 1955 to 1956 in Easter Island with a Norwegian archaeological team, studying the Moai sculptures and other aspects of Polynesian culture and history. He befriended the local Rapa Nui people who, in an unprecedented gesture, gifted him a large number of cave stone sculptures from closely guarded family caves. These are displayed in the Kon-Tiki museum. His published scientific work and best-selling popular book describing his experience in Easter Island contributed significantly to increasing awareness about this remote Pacific island across the world.
The Forgotten Lady, Gerd Vold Hurum
As we were exiting the museum, my attention was drawn to a set of panels which narrated the story of a lady who was gravely wronged. This was the story of Gerd Vold Hurum, “the seventh member of the expedition” who did not go on the Kon-Tiki voyage.
Gerd was the key person who worked behind the scenes helping Heyerdahl organise the Kon-Tiki expedition. She had even gone aboard the raft during the initial couple of hours of the voyage, but her boss in Washington had her called back after denying her leave. After she was called back, it was primarily Gerd who co-ordinated with the voyagers, listened to their radio messages and conveyed them to their families by diligently typing them out and also sent messages back to them from land.
After the expedition, it was Gerd who proposed the idea of creating a museum and it was she who made arrangements to bring the raft, which had been abandoned, back to Oslo. Although the museum opened in Oslo in 1950, Gerd was, unfortunately, not acknowledged at all. It took more than seven decades for the museum to belatedly acknowledge her pivotal contribution to the voyage and, indeed, to the creation of the museum itself. The museum, remorsefully, answers the question why this happened: “Because she was a woman!”.
It was past 5 in the evening when we came out of the Kon-Tiki Museum, quite weary (but, considerably wiser!). It was raining steadily as we walked back to the Fram jetty. The gaggle of Barnacle Geese that we had seen earlier at Dronningen jetty had come ashore and were resting quietly under a nearby tree. After a short wait at the windy, rain-swept jetty, our boat arrived and we returned to Oslo’s Central Piers after a most memorable day spent in three of Bygdoy’s absolutely fascinating museums.
(To be continued in Part 9)
