The Kon Tiki Expedition and Ocean Currents
When we were kids our neighbour, Hans, had a Norwegian father who was a whaler. That is going back some years now before the moratorium on whaling was enforced. Hans had a model of a wooden raft, complete with a fabric sail emblazoned with a striking face. That face belonged to the Inca sun god, Kon Tiki, and the model was that of a raft which had made a voyage across the Pacific in 1947, led by the Norwegian anthropologist and geographer Thor Heyerdahl.
The Kon Tiki Raft adrift on the Pacific
Thanks to Han’s model, my interest was piqued, and so I read the book “The Kon Tiki Expedition,” which turned out to be a tale of high adventure. Heyerdahl’s theory was that Polynesia had been populated by people from South America, and to prove that voyages across the Pacific were possible he built the Kon Tiki Raft.
He had arrived in the country by canoe
It’s a story of larger-than-life characters who made up the crew, all of whom had been in the Norwegian resistance during WWII except for one, who was a Swede. There is a wonderful part in the book where one of the crew members, when applying for a Peruvian visa, was asked by the immigration official how he had arrived in the country, to which he answered ‘by canoe’, which was true. However, when asked how he was going to leave, he answered ‘by raft’, which was also true, but which led to the exasperated official tearing the immigration form out of the typewriter, thinking that he was being made a fool of.
Cast themselves adrift on the wide Pacific Ocean
All those crew members had a wild look in their eye. They were probably bored out of their minds by the slow pace of life after the madness of WWII. Converging on Ecuador, they cut down nine massive balsa wood trees, floated them down to Peru, and in the naval dockyard there built a balsa-wood raft. On top they placed a ramshackle grass house, erected a mast, hoisted a flag, raised the sail and cast themselves adrift on the wide Pacific Ocean. They grew big beards, worked on their sun tans, caught fish and lived like vagabonds on the ocean for 101 days. The journey ended when they were shipwrecked on a Polynesian atoll, having drifted some 5000 miles across the Pacific, all the while living on fish, plankton and canned food.
I learned about the Humboldt Current
I learned about Peru and Ecuador, Polynesia and the Pacific when I read the book. I learned about the Incas and their sun god. I learned about the Humboldt Current that flows northwards up the coast of South America before swinging westward towards Polynesia, and I learned about the huge balsa trees that grew in the rain forests of Ecuador. I also learned about theories of human migration which up until then I had not been exposed to.
You cannot be anything but thrilled by these tales of high adventure
Having read the Kon Tiki Expedition, I devoured Heyerdahl’s other books about Easter Island, and subsequent expedition across the Atlantic on a papyrus boat called Ra and Ra II – Ra of course being the name of the Egyptian sun god. That papyrus boat didn’t fare as well as the balsa wood raft, but that is another story. Heyerdahl led several other expeditions using traditional craft, using traditional technologies from Lake Titicaca in the high Andes and from the Marsh Arabs of Iraq. You cannot be anything but thrilled by these tales of high adventure, and wish that you too could have arrived in a canoe and left in a raft– part of a merry band of mad adventurers having the time of their lives.
This is the way to keep our students engaged
I must leave it there. There have been other explorers like Tim Severin who have voyaged to distant lands in traditional vessels, and perhaps we could look at some of those journeys in the future. There is much to be conveyed in these tales of high adventure and I truly believe that this is the way to keep our students engaged with their world.
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