In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl sailed into history on the Kon-Tiki raft, crossing the Pacific Ocean from Peru to Polynesia. His book about the voyage has sold millions of copies in dozens of languages, and the documentary he made won two Oscars.
Monday marked Thor’s 100th birthday. He passed away physically in 2002, but he lives on through his books and other works and through the people whose lives he influenced.
I am one of them. I met Heyerdahl by accident in a hotel checkout line in Peru in 1988, just as I was finishing my dissertation in archaeology. By the end of the day, he had offered me the chance to direct excavations at Túcume, Peru’s largest pyramid center, and we worked closely together until he died. Heyerdahl gave me remarkable opportunities, such as coffee and a chat with his friend Fidel Castro, the only person in my experience whose charisma outshone Heyerdahl’s.
Heyerdahl visited the University of Maine on three occasions — for a public lecture in 1997 before 1,100 people, for an international conference on ancient climate and culture in 1998, and for a commencement speech that same year.
At one point during his speech, Heyerdahl had the entire Alfond Arena at UMaine with him as he whipped back and forth atop the Kon-Tiki’s mast, debating the meaning of life as the raft crashed onto a reef. That day, the university accorded Heyerdahl an honorary doctorate, and the Climate Change Institute made him a distinguished research associate. He deeply valued his association with UMaine; he felt he had found kindred spirits dedicated to exploring our world, past and present.
“Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft” is Heyerdahl’s seminal account of his voyage on a balsa raft built in the style of ancient South American craft. I have met many scholars who were inspired to a life of investigation, exploration and discovery by reading this book. Of course, some were outraged by his ideas and have spent careers trying to prove him wrong. Countless others were simply thrilled to read about his real-life adventures. For years, Kon-Tiki was required summer reading for junior high school students across the U.S., and the 1948 book is still in print.
Kon-Tiki was an adventure, but it was much more — it was exploration with a purpose. Heyerdahl’s work then and throughout his life was motivated by the belief that ancient people were far more capable than most 20th-century citizens believed. In particular, Heyerdahl thought that the world’s oceans were crossed long before Columbus.
Kon-Tiki was his first attempt to show that it was possible, not to prove that it happened. Whether one believes that Polynesians visited South America and returned west to the islands or that ancient South Americans ventured into the Pacific, there is now irrefutable archaeological evidence that Heyerdahl was right about seaborne contact before the Europeans reached that ocean.
How could a man who only earned a bachelor’s degree, who never held a regular job after he left the Army at the end of World War II, who never even learned to drive, become one of the all-time best-selling authors, an Oscar-winning documentary director, the recipient of more than a dozen honorary doctorates and an inspiration to so many?
First, Heyerdahl had tremendous faith in his capacity to achieve whatever he set out to do, just as he had faith in the abilities of our ancestors in every corner of the globe. A month before he died, Heyerdahl was deep into planning for the excavation of a pyramid in Samoa. Brain cancer was a minor inconvenience that wasn’t going to slow him down.
Another reason is that he had a relentlessly positive outlook on life and people (so long as one didn’t prove him wrong) and an infectious sense of humor. This was a big part of his charisma.
Finally, Heyerdahl had a special ability to recount his countless anecdotes for amusement and to make a point. This explains what makes Kon-Tiki and his other books so compelling and why the general public always knew and cared so much more about his ideas than those of the academics who took such umbrage at Heyerdahl’s theories.
One privilege of working with Heyerdahl was to witness the anecdotes as they happened and then hear his masterful versions of them. I can’t tell them as well as he did, so I’ll just recount one.
At Túcume, Heyerdahl built a house and hired a local woman as cook. When one day he went to the beach and got a terrible sunburn, his cook told him the local remedy: rub his body with tomatoes and cover himself with flour. Always an adventurer, Heyerdahl took the advice. He fell asleep on his bed and when he woke, the concoction had dried. He was stark white except where bright red showed through the cracks. The sheet was stuck to his back. Wondering what to do, he went to ask his cook.
She took one look and ran screaming from the compound, not to return for several days. I can still hear him laughing.
Dan Sandweiss is a professor of anthropology and quaternary and climate studies at the University of Maine.