ON BOARD
Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl was an academic in the Indiana
Jones mould. He’s most famous for his 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition, in which
he sailed 6,900 kilometres from Peru to French Polynesia on a traditional
Peruvian balsa wood raft. Heyerdahl believed that similarities between the
two cultures implied long-forgotten contact, and he wanted to prove that
ancient South Americans could have made the journey across the Pacific,
using the vessels they had at their disposal.
Two decades later, the Ra expedition, named after the Egyptian sun god,
aimed to establish a similar cultural diffusion between the ancient
Mediterranean and South America. Heyerdahl’s boat design was informed
by Egyptologists and tomb paintings, constructed by boatbuilders from Lake
Chad and made of papyrus. (While ancient Egyptians also used more
sophisticated wooden boats, reed vessels existed in both Egyptian and
American cultures, meaning this was more likely the kind of vessel that
travelled there.) Ra I set off from Morocco in 1969 but broke up a few hundred
kilometres from the West Indies, as this dramatic image shows – the project
had neglected a tether that kept the stern of Ancient Egyptian boats pulled up
high in the water. A silver lining, however, was that they saw how, even when
drifting helplessly in the Atlantic, the boat was borne naturally towards its
destination. Ra II launched the following year and this time made it all the
way to Barbados – her reed hull sodden but intact.
When he died in 2002, Heyerdahl received a state funeral in Oslo, and books
and films have been made about his work. The popularity of his expeditions
lay in reaching back through time to pull the past into our present, bringing
ancient cultures to life. Unsurprisingly, he felt the concept of time presented
very little barrier to his work. “I have never been able to grasp the meaning of
time. I don’t believe it exists,” he is quoted as saying in Snorre Evensberget’s
1994 biography Thor Heyerdhal – The Explorer. “I’ve felt this again and again,
when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist.”Eye Opener
Thor Heyerdahl’s New World adventure
PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGESN
W S48Words Caroline White