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write to the address at the top of page 5W
hen Thor Heyerdahl and the
Kon-Tiki crew landed on
Raroia in 1947 they met a very
sick child. Six-year-old Haumata had an
abscess on his head the size of a fist
and was close to death. Heyerdahl’s
team treated the boy, and he survived.
Seventy years later PBO contributor
Mel Parish landed on the atoll, and to
his surprise met Haumata himself.
“He was a bit of a local hero. The
islanders like to fetch him whenever they
have visitors,” says Mel, whose Pacific
crossing is featured on page 38 of this
issue. “He’s an old man now but really fit.”
Heyerdahl (33 at the time) set out to prove
that Polynesia could have been settled by
indigenous South Americans. After a
101-day crossing from Peru on balsawood
raft Kon-Tiki, he struck a reef and beached
on an uninhabited island near Raroia. On
seeing the washed-up flotsam from the
raft, villagers from Raroia rescued the crew
and took them to the island, where they
were welcomed with traditional dance.
When Knut Haugland and Torstein
Raaby saw the sick boy they set up a
telegraph and consulted friends in Los
Angeles, who got a doctor on the phone.
Using the Morse key they signalled all
the boy’s symptoms and what was
available in the medical chest, and the
doctor told them what to do.
“We had bottles of penicillin in a new
tablet form, but we did not know what
dose a small child could stand,” says
Heyerdahl in his book The Kon-Tiki
Expedition. “If the boy died under our
treatment it might have serious
consequences for all of us.
“...That night we went off to the hut
where little Haumata lay tossing in a fever
with half the village weeping and making a
noise about him...
“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 up to
the roof... it was no joke. When the
abscess was evacuated and sterilised, the
whole head was bound up and we began
the penicillin cure. For two days and nights
the boy was treated every four hours while
the fever was at its maximum, and the
abscess was kept open. And each evening
the doctor in Los Angeles was consulted.”
A week later Haumata was back playing
on the beach with the other children.
Following the successful treatment, Dr
Knut and Dr Herman treated ‘no end to the
maladies which cropped up in the village.’
Mel Parish’s entry to Raroia was not
quite so dramatic, though he did requirePolynesian surprise
Pacific yachtsman meets man saved by 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition
TOP Haugland and Watzinger treat
Haumata. ABOVE balsawood raft Kon-TikiEverett Historical Collection/Alamy