Thor arrived to Polynesia

A hallucinant trek that looked for conquering even The Oscars®.

 

By Luis Paucar Temoche. Photographies by © Marco mejía.

 

TÚCÚMÉ, Peru – Before to be known as Viracocha God, they said his name has been Kon-Tiki. He was the creator, the Sun God, the Universe’s protector, king of kings, or who knows what other more providences were attributed to him. Kon-Tiki was a difficult and strange name, tangled and mythological. Even pronouncing it today provocates a break in the rhythm of each word.

 

Probably, it would be that mystical force held in him for the explorer Thor Heyerdahl called Kon-Tiki to his ship used in a trek he raised through the Pacific Ocean, from South America to Polynesia. It was the most important expedition of all.

 

It was 1947. Thor Heyerdahl has born 33 years earlier, October 1914, in Norway, and he was a marine biologist specialized in anthropology. He ever has haven that rare vocation of enveterate voyager and his savage curiosity had come him to say – “Frontiers? I never saw none, but I heard they are in the mind of some people.”

 

Heyerdahl, his travel affection aside, raised a personal challenge in each one of his treks. He traveled in boats made by himself or assisted by other people – his friends. He was a native researcher. He traveled, over all, to establish relationships between the inhabitants of a continent to another, of one people to another.

 

For example, he made with the Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés the boats Ra and Ra II to prove that the ancient Egyptians could have communication with Americas. Then, he proposed to sail from Morocco on the  Ra II papyrus boat through the Atlantic Ocean. And his next boat, Tigris, was created to prove that the culture of Indo Valley, Pakistan, could connect to Mesopotamia, actual Iraq.

 

All these relationships were reduced to simple hypotheses, so Thor Heyerdahl was a challenger who looked for give them answers, who made an underworld of ideas from something very little.

 

Fear to fail

The pictures use to show him with an apparently heavy outfit, solid arms, pink skin, white hair dressed up, shiny like a handful of frost. But Heyerdahl, a visibly seasoned and rude man, also feared. Once upon a time, he maybe unfolded his biggest secret: “If they would ask me at my 17 years old if I would travel by sea on a ship, I’d be absolutely denied that possibility. I suffered from phobia to the water at that age.”

 

Then, how has that scary dude gone to direct the most important expedition of that year? It was 1947. Heyerdahl, 33 years old, and how he did with all his projects, organized routes and destinations he was to cross. He traced circules in every hiding place to conquer and so giving a hard answer to his enigma – the Mister Heyerdahl’s enigma.

 

One day, he made a ship with trunks, plants, and natural matters of South America, and so he raised the trek on the Kon-Tiki: 4700 miles from Peru to Tuamotu Islands. His crew was joined by six men: Heyerdahl as the leader, Knut Haugland, Bengt Danielsson, Erick Hesselberg, Torstein Raaby, and Herman Watzinger.

 

April 28th, 1947. It was a dreaming trek between the viscosity of the sea and the loneliness of the dark sky at nights, far away from the family, but everyone with spirit of wondering, anyway. He and a little group came to South America where they used trees and other native matters to make the ship that shocked to a reef in Raroya, Tuamotu Islands, on August 7^th, 1947, after 101 days traveling by the Pacific Ocean, testing how the pre-historic people could have tripping.

 

The Phoenicians of Pacific?

To have knoledge of the ancient civilizations that had communication between them, much before the Discovery of Americas by Christopher Columbus (1492 AD) and other sailors as Magellan (1499 to 1502), probably has inspired Heyerdahl to take that trip. It was not necessary a proof. Inclusive, much time before, it was the certainty about the excellent expertise of Polynesians to sail to the Pre-Columbian Americas, specifically to the south.

 

In this part of the planet, a bird gave the first clues of the trek. It was found a bone of chicken, the Araucanian (a edible bird of Polynesian islands) that was dated in 1300 BC, so that have proved there were remote commercial, social, and economic relationships among the cultures of Polynesian islands, the Mapuches, and the Incas, located in the south of Chile and Peru respectively. This discovery was proved by the study Radiocarbon and DNA Evidence for Pre-Columbian Introduction of Polynesian Chickens to Chile (the History teaches the chickens were introduced by the Spaniards in 1532 AD).

 

For the Polynesians, the long trips to South America, Oceania, and perhaps other continents, left to register on his songs, dances, rythms, myths and legends those would share through their oral tradition that exists up to our times, but that is another story.

 

An award

The only modern technology owned by the Heyerdahl’s group was communication equipments and the cords which they tied the trunks. In one island of their destination, the locals said them they would tie with coconut fiber because it was more resistant. For feeding, they provided what the sea brought them. Thor Heyerdahl would want to experience the trip on the ships which transported the folks of that time. The primitive people were capable to take huge trips by the open sea.

 

And that was –for sure—quite complicated because: 1) The distances are not the determining factor in case of oceanic migrations if the time and the currents have the same general course day and night through the year, and 2) The trade winds and the Equatorial Current go to the west because of the earth’s rotation, and this had not changed never since the world exists.

 

The world is complex and huge. The Heyerdahl’s expedition finally proved there were not technical reasons to prevent the South American locals would settle down in the Polynesian islands. However, currently, the most of anthropologists continue to believe that –based on physical and genetic evidence—Polynesia was colonized from west to east with migrations starting from the Asian continent.

 

The documentary of that expedition wan an award from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (ampas) IN 1951. In 2013, the Noruegian Kon-Tiki was nominated to Best Foreign Language Film for the Oscars® that it grants, but it didn’t win. After that journey, the researcher practically moved to Túcúmé, Peru, where he continued unfolding the mysteries of its ancient people and its obsession to the sea.

 

The job of Thor Heyerdahl and the rest of explorers should be awarded someway. Maybe that rudeness, that spirit of voyager, all the characteristics possible to find in that man led him to say in the middle of his life: “In the world where the science stops, the imagination starts.” And the imagination is, anyway, the pencil which a boy paints his best adventures.

 

Marco Mejía contributed to the production of this story.