Journey to Kon-tiki. Sailing Thor Heyerdahl on Kon-Tiki Rafting Tour Heyerdahl

Thor Heyerdahl

Journey on the Kon-Tiki

DEDICATED TO MY FATHER

CHAPTER FIRST

Reflections. An old man from the island of Fatuhiwa. winds and sea currents. Following in the footsteps of Tiki. Where did people come to Polynesia? Mystery of the South Seas. Theories and facts. The legend of Kon-Tiki and white people.

Sometimes it happens like this: suddenly you realize that you are in a completely unusual environment. The events happened, of course, gradually and in a completely natural way, but you suddenly come to your senses and ask the question with surprise: how did all this, in fact, happen?

You are sailing, for example, on the sea on a raft in the company of a parrot and five comrades. It is absolutely inevitable that one fine morning, after having a good rest, you wake up and begin to think. On such a morning I wrote in the dew-drenched logbook:

"May 17. The sea is stormy. The wind is fair. Today I'm for a cook. I found seven flying fish on the deck, on the roof of the hut - a squid and in Turstein's sleeping bag - some kind of fish completely unknown to me ..." At this word, my hand stopped , and I unconsciously flashed the thought: what an unusual May 17!

Yes, however, and the whole situation is more than strange - only the sky and the sea. How did all this actually start?

I turned my head to the left. Nothing obscured my view of the boundless blue sea, the foaming waves rolled one after another in the eternal pursuit of the ever-retreating horizon. I looked to the right, deep into the dim hut. There a bearded man lay on his back and read Goethe; his toes were thrust through the bamboo lattice of the low ceiling of the rickety, tiny hut, our common home.

Bengt, - I asked, driving away a green parrot, who intended to get a job on the logbook, - can you explain how we got to such a life?

A golden-red beard fell down on a volume of Goethe.

You know better, damn it! This disgusting idea belongs to no one else but you. However, I confess, I think it's great.

He moved his fingers three bars lower and calmly plunged back into Goethe. Three men were working on the bamboo deck under the scorching sun. And it seemed that these half-naked, tanned, bearded people, with stripes of salt on their backs, all their lives were doing nothing but driving rafts across the Pacific Ocean to the west.

Eric climbed into the cabin with a sextant and a bundle of papers:

Ninety-eight degrees forty-six minutes west and eight degrees two minutes south. Alright guys, let's go late!

He took the pencil from me and made a small circle on the map that hung on the bamboo wall - a small, small circle, the last of nineteen such circles that formed a chain on the map of the Pacific Ocean, starting from the port of Callao on the coast of Peru. One by one, Herman, Knut and Turstein climbed into the hut: they burned with impatience to look at a new small circle, which, in comparison with the last one, took us forty nautical miles closer to the islands of the South Seas.

Look, guys, - Herman said proudly, - it turns out that now we are at a distance of one thousand five hundred and seventy kilometers from Peru!

And there are only six thousand four hundred and thirty left to the nearest islands, ”Knut carefully noted.

And if we are to be absolutely precise, then we are five thousand meters from the bottom of the ocean and only a few tens of meters from the moon, Turstein added jokingly.

So, now it was known exactly where we were, and I could continue my thoughts about how we ended up here. The parrot did not let up - by all means it was necessary for him to take a walk along the logbook. And all around stretched the blue sea, reflecting the same blue sky ...

May be. did it all start last winter in one of the New York museums? Or maybe even ten years ago, on one of the islands of the Marquesas archipelago, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? It is possible that we will approach it, unless the north-east carries us further south, to Tahiti or the Tuamotu Islands. An island clearly appeared before my eyes: its reddish-red jagged rocks, green jungle, sliding down the slopes to the sea itself, and slender swaying palm trees languishing in some kind of expectation on the coast. The island is called Fatuhiwa. Now between us and this island there was not a piece of land, thousands of nautical miles separated us from it. I pictured to myself the narrow valley of Ouia, which went out to the sea, and remembered to the smallest detail how we sat there in the evenings on a deserted shore and looked at the same boundless ocean. Then I was with my wife, and now I am in the company of bearded pirates. We caught with her all kinds of animals, insects and birds, collected figurines of gods and other remnants of a disappeared culture. I remember one evening in particular. The civilized world seemed incomprehensibly distant and unreal. For almost a whole year now we have been the only whites on the island, voluntarily renouncing all the blessings as well as the evils of cultural life. We lived in a hut on stilts, which we built ourselves under the palm trees on the shore, and our food was only what the jungle and the Pacific Ocean gave us.

We have gone through a hard school, and our own experience has helped us to penetrate the mysteries of many of the curious problems of the Pacific. And by the way, I think that we often acted and thought in the same way as those primitive people who arrived in the Polynesian islands from an unknown country. It must be said that their descendants - the Polynesians - calmly ruled this island power until people of the white race appeared here: with a bible in one hand and with gunpowder and vodka in the other.

On that memorable evening we sat, as we often did before, by moonlight on the seashore. We were awake, enchanted by the romance that surrounded us, and nothing escaped our attention. We breathed in the scent of the lush jungle and the salty scent of the sea, and listened to the wind rustling through the foliage and palm tops. All sounds, at regular intervals, were drowned in the roar of huge breakers, which ran up from the sea, fell on the shore, foaming and breaking into lace on the coastal pebbles. Millions of shiny pebbles gnashed, tinkled, rustled and died down, and the waves receded, so that, having gathered their strength, they again attacked the invincible shore.

It's strange, Liv said, that there are never such breakers on the other side of the island.

Yes, - I confirmed, - this side is windward, and the waves always go in this direction.

And again we sat in silence and admired the sea, which seemed to whisper incessantly that it was rolling its waves from the east, from the east, from the east ... The eternal wind, the trade wind, stirred the surface of the sea, raising it, and drove the waves distant horizon in the east here, to the islands. Rocks and reefs stood in the way of the uninterrupted striving of the sea forward; the east wind easily jumped over the coast, forest and mountains, and irresistibly rushed further to the west, from island to island, towards the sunset. From time immemorial, waves rolled over the horizon from the east and light clouds floated. And the first people who came to these islands knew about it. Birds and insects also knew about this, and the vegetation of the islands was completely influenced by this phenomenon. And we ourselves knew that far, far away, beyond the horizon, there, in the east, where the clouds come from, lies the open coast of South America. He is eight thousand kilometers away, and between him and us there is only one sea.

We looked at the clouds passing above us. They listened to the turbulent, moonlit sea and a half-naked old man who sat on his haunches and did not take his eyes off the dying embers of the fire.

Tiki, - the old man said quietly, - was a god and a leader. Tiki brought my ancestors to these islands, where we still live. We used to live in a big country, there, far beyond the sea...

He stirred the embers with his stick so that they would not go out. The old man sat and thought. His thoughts were far in the past, and he himself was connected with him by thousands of threads. He worshiped his ancestors and their deeds performed in the time of the gods. He was waiting for the hour when he would go to them. Old Tei Tetua was the last of all the tribes that once lived on the east coast of Fatuhiwa. He didn't know how old he was, but his brown, bark-like skin was as wrinkled as if it had been scorched by the sun and dried by the winds for hundreds of years. He was, undoubtedly, one of the few people on the islands who still remembered and believed in the legendary legends about the great Polynesian god and leader of Tiki, the son of the sun, about whom his father and grandfather told him.

As we went to bed that night in the little hut on stilts, the words of old Thea Tetua about Tiki and the forgotten homeland of the islanders across the sea resounded in my mind for a long time to the accompaniment of the dull sound of the surf. They sounded like a voice from the distant past, which seemed to want to tell something in the silence of the night. I couldn't sleep. It seemed that time no longer existed and Tiki and his sailors would now land on the shore washed by breakers. And then a sudden thought came into my head.

Balsa raft "Kon-Tiki"

When the conquistadors Francisco Pissarro in 1526 were preparing to set off on their second voyage from the Isthmus of Panama to the south, in the direction of Peru, one of the ships of the expedition somewhat separated from the main forces and set off for reconnaissance towards the equator. When it reached the northern regions of modern Ecuador, the Spaniards noticed a ship in the sea, sailing towards them. It was a large balsa raft heading north. There were 20 people on the raft, and its cargo was 36 tons. According to one of the Spanish sailors, the flat raft had a log base covered with a reed deck. She was raised so much that the load was not wetted by water. The logs and reeds were tightly tied with vegetable fiber rope. The Spaniards were especially surprised by the sails and rigging of the raft: “It was equipped with masts and yards made of very good wood and carried cotton sails of the same kind as our ship. Excellent tackle is made from the mentioned henequen, which resembles hemp; two stones, like millstones, served as anchors.

So the Europeans got acquainted with the unusual ships that were widely used off the western coast of South America. However, the Spaniards had heard about them before - from the Indians of Panama. They told Vasco Nunez de Balboa, the first European to see the Pacific Ocean, about a powerful state in the south, whose inhabitants set sail on ships with sails and oars, only slightly smaller in size than the Spanish ships. Descriptions of rafts have come down to us, which the Incas used even for very long voyages. They were all made from an odd number of logs, and the largest could carry up to 50 men (including heavily armed Spanish warriors) and a few horses.

The chronicler noted: “The largest rafts of the Peruvian Indians living near the forests, say, in the ports of Paita, Manta and Guayaquil, consist of seven, nine, and even more logs. This is how they are made: the logs lying next to each other are tied with vines or ropes, which also capture other logs laid across. The middle log in the bow is longer than the others, shorter logs are laid further on both sides of it, so that in appearance and ratio they give the bow of the raft a resemblance to the fingers of the hand, and the stern is even. Flooring is laid on top of the logs so that the water that penetrates from below into the cracks between the logs does not wet people and clothes. A “superstructure” (bamboo hut) was installed on the rafts, and a special place for cooking was provided at the stern. To control the raft and maneuver, the Indians used guars - long wide boards inserted into the gaps between the logs, an analogue of the European centerboards that appeared much later.

"Kon-Tiki"

In the twentieth century researchers involved in the history of the settlement of the Pacific Islands drew attention to a strange circumstance: many plants cultivated by the Polynesians came from South America. There were even theories that the settlement of the islands did not come from Asia, but from the American mainland. True, then these theories were recognized as untenable, but the likelihood of contacts between South American Indians and Polynesia looked quite realistic. However, there were big doubts: is a balsa raft capable of making such a long voyage? Will he sink when the logs are soaked with sea water? How will a "primitive" structure behave during a storm?

One of the enthusiasts who defended the theory of contacts between Indians and Polynesians was the Norwegian scientist and traveler Thor Heyerdahl. Summarizing the information at his disposal, he decided to sail across the Pacific Ocean on a balsa raft. He managed to enlist the support of the President of Peru, who at the beginning of 1947 gave the go-ahead for the construction of a raft in the military port of Callao.

In honor of the hero of Indian legends, the raft was named "Kon-Tiki" ("Kon-Tiki"). It consisted of nine balsa logs, and - as expected in accordance with ancient traditions - the central one was the longest, and the outermost ones were the shortest. On top of them, at intervals of a meter, thin transverse logs were strengthened, on which a deck of split bamboo trunks was laid, covered with mats on top. In the middle of the raft, a little further aft, a small open cabin was built from bamboo branches, and in front of it was a mangrove A-shaped mast. A large quadrangular sail (the expedition's navigator Eric Hesselberg painted a picture of Kon-Tiki on it) was attached to a yard made of two bamboo tables. There was a small bulwark in the bow to protect against waves. The greatest length of the structure was 13.5 m, width - 5.5 m. The crew consisted of five Norwegians and one Swede.

The voyage began on April 28, 1947, and from the port of Callao "Kon-Tiki" the tugboat of the Peruvian fleet "Guardian Rios" took 50 miles. After the raft reached the Humboldt current, its independent navigation began. Travelers gathered to steer the raft with the help of guars and a steering oar attached to the stern. Due to the lack of experience, this was not always successful, the Kon-Tiki was not maneuverable enough. But, according to Heyerdahl, the balsa raft “… did not rock very much. It was much more stable on the waves than any vessel of its size." Gradually managed to solve the problem of management, having learned to use guars.

The sea element showed its strong temper several times, but there was only one truly dangerous case - a man falling overboard. It was only by a miracle that Hermann Watzinger was saved. On July 30, sailors saw the land: the raft passed the most extreme island of the archipelago - Tuamotu. Polynesia was reached, but there was one more very difficult task to solve: to land on the shore without breaking on the reefs. In early August, despite the attempts of the islanders to help the Heyerdahl team, they failed to approach the island of Angatau. In the end, the raft was thrown onto a reef off a tiny uninhabited island on the 101st day of sailing - August 7th. Fortunately, none of the team was seriously injured. A few days later, the Polynesians found the travelers and transported them to the inhabited island of Roiroa, and the raft was dragged into the lagoon during high tide. Then Thor Heyerdahl and his brave companions went to Tahiti, and from there to Europe. The Kon-Tiki, delivered on the deck of a Norwegian cargo ship, also got there. Now he takes pride of place in the museum dedicated to him in Oslo.

Heyerdahl's book "Voyage to the Kon-Tiki" was translated into many languages, filmed during the voyage in 1951 won an Oscar as the best documentary. Subsequently, several more successful voyages were made on balsa rafts from the coast of South America to Polynesia. The theory of the contacts of the peoples inhabiting these parts of the world has received a lot of confirmation.

Journey to Kon-Tiki

A look at the past. - An old man from the island of Fatu Hiva. — Wind and current. — Finding Tiki. Who settled Polynesia? — Mystery of the South Sea. — Theory and fact. — The legend of Kon-Tiki and the white race. — The beginning of the war.

Sometimes you find yourself in an extraordinary position. Everything happens gradually, in the most natural way; and when there is no return, you suddenly become surprised and ask yourself how you got to this point.

So, for example, if you set sail on the ocean on a wooden raft with a parrot and five companions, then sooner or later the following will inevitably happen: one fine morning you will wake up in the ocean, having slept perhaps better than usual, and start thinking about how did you get here.

One such morning I sat writing in the dew-drenched logbook:

May 17th. Norway Independence Day. The sea is stormy. The wind is fresh. Today I am acting as a cook and found seven flying fish on deck, one squid on the cabin roof and one unknown fish in Thorstein's sleeping bag ... "

Here the pencil stopped, and the inevitable thought began to creep up: strange, however, the seventeenth of May; Indeed, the atmosphere is quite amusing. How did it all start?

To the left of my eyes stretched the vast expanse of blue ocean with hissing waves that rolled very close, incessantly chasing the fleeing horizon. As I turned to my right, I saw a dark cabin and a bearded man lying on his back reading Goethe; with his bare toes, this man pressed firmly against the slats in the low bamboo roof of the small, rickety cabin that was our home.

“Bengt,” I said, pushing away a green parrot that was about to perch on the ship's log, “can you explain to me what the hell we are up to here?

The volume of Goethe sank under a golden-red beard.

What the hell I've been up to, you know better. It's all your damn idea, but I think it's a great idea.

He lifted his legs up another three rungs and continued to read imperturbably. On the other side of the cabin, my other three companions were doing something on the bamboo deck under the scorching sun. Wearing only shorts, brown with beard and tan, with salt stripes down their backs, they looked as if they had spent their whole lives sailing west on wooden rafts across the Pacific Ocean. Bending over, Eric entered the cabin with a sextant and a bundle of papers in his hands:

- Eighty-nine degrees forty-six minutes west, eight degrees two minutes south latitude - guys, it's been a good day!

He took the pencil from me and made a small circle on a map that hung on a bamboo wall; a small circle at the end of a chain of nineteen circles that wound around the map, starting from the port of Callao in Peru. Hermann, Knut and Thorstein also hurried to squeeze in to look at the new little circle that brought us a good 40 nautical miles closer to the islands of the South Sea.

- See, guys? Herman said proudly. “That means we are eight hundred and fifty miles off the coast of Peru.

“And there are still three thousand five hundred to the nearest islands on the course,” Knut added prudently.

“And to be quite precise,” Thorstein said, “we are five thousand meters above the ocean floor and a few meters below the moon.

So now we knew exactly where we were, and I could continue my thoughts about why we were here. The parrot didn't care about anything; he only wanted to clutch at the ship's log. And all around stretched the same blue ocean under the blue dome of the sky.

Perhaps it all started last winter in the office of one of the New York museums. Or maybe the beginning was already laid ten years ago on a small island from the Marquesas group, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps we shall land on the same island now, unless the north-east wind carries us further south, towards Tahiti and the Tuamotu archipelago. Before my mind's eye, the islet clearly stood up with its rocky mountains of rust-red color, green thickets descending along the slopes to the sea, and slender palm trees that swayed in greeting on the shore. The islet was called Fatu Khiva; there was no land between him and where we were now, but he was a thousand miles away from us. I saw the narrow valley of Ouia just where it descended to the sea, and I remembered how we sat on a deserted shore and looked from evening to evening at the same boundless ocean. Then my wife accompanied me, and not bearded pirates, as now. We collected all kinds of animals, as well as drawings, statues and other monuments of a lost culture. I remember one evening very well. The civilized world turned out to be so incomprehensibly distant and unreal. We have lived on the island for almost a year now; besides us, there were no whites here; we voluntarily renounced all the blessings of civilization, as well as its evils. We lived in a hut we built for ourselves on stilts, in the shade of the palm trees on the beach, and ate what the rainforests and the Pacific Ocean could supply us with.

A harsh but useful school gave us the opportunity to get acquainted with many mysteries of the Pacific Ocean. I think that, both physically and mentally, we often had to repeat the experience of primitive people who came to these islands from an unknown country and whose Polynesian descendants reigned supreme over the island kingdom, until Europeans appeared with a bible in one hand and with gunpowder and vodka in another.

That evening we sat, as we often did before, on the shore by the light of the moon, and the ocean stretched before us. In this atmosphere full of romance, all our senses were heightened. We soaked up the smells of the lush vegetation of the jungle and the salty ocean, we heard the rustle of the wind among the leaves in the tops of palm trees. At regular intervals, all other sounds were drowned out by the noise of breakers, which rose up in front of us, crashed foaming on the shore and broke into foaming circles in the coastal pebbles. For some time there was a roar, a roar and a rattle among the countless pebbles sparkling in the moonlight; then everything calmed down again, when the ocean retreated to gather strength for a new onslaught on the invincible beret.

“Strange,” said the wife, “but there are never breakers on the other side of the island.

“Yes,” I answered, “but this is the windward side; the surf is always on this side.

We continued to sit and admire the ocean, which seemed to decide to persistently, endlessly repeat to us that it rolls its waves from the east.

east, east. The eternal east wind, the trade wind, stirred the surface of the ocean, raising the waves and rolling them forward; they appeared over the horizon from the east and went further, to other islands. Here before us the waves of the ocean, hitherto unobstructed, crashed against the rocks and reefs, while the east wind simply rose over the shore, the forests, the mountains, and continued without any hindrance on its way to the west, from island to island, towards the setting sun. .

So from time immemorial there have been waves and light clouds from behind the horizon from the east. The first people who reached the local islands knew well that this was the case. Birds and insects also knew, and this circumstance had a decisive influence on the vegetation of the islands. And we ourselves knew that far, far beyond the horizon, to the east, where the clouds come from, stretches the open coast of South America. He was 4,300 nautical miles away, and there was nothing between him and us but the ocean.

We looked at the passing clouds and at the moonlit, surging sea, and listened to the story of a half-naked old man who was squatting down with his eyes fixed on the fading heat of a small fire.

The old man stirred the coals with a stick to keep them from going out. 0n sat, thinking. He lived in the past and was strongly associated with it. He worshiped his ancestors and their exploits of those distant times when the ancestors were bots. And in the future, he hoped to connect with them. Old Tei Tetua was the only surviving representative of the extinct tribes that once inhabited the eastern coast of the island of Fatu Hiva. He himself did not know how old he was, but his wrinkled, tanned brown skin looked like it had dried in the sun and wind for a hundred years. He was, of course, one of the few inhabitants of these islands who remembered the legendary stories of their fathers and grandfathers about the great Polynesian leader - the god Tiki, the son of the sun, and believed in them.

As we lay down to sleep that night in the little hut on stilts, old Tei Tetua's tales of Tiki and the ancient home of the islanders across the ocean continued to haunt my ears to the accompaniment of the deep roar of the distant surf. They sounded like the voice of bygone days, which seemed to whisper something in the silence of the night. I couldn't sleep. Time seemed to cease to exist, and Tiki and his sailors landed for the first time in the foam of the surf on the shore of the island. Suddenly a thought struck me, and I said to my wife:

“Listen, have you noticed that the huge stone images of Tiki up in the jungle are amazingly similar to giant monolithic statues, monuments to lost civilizations in South America?

I was sure that the roar of the breakers confirmed my words. And then, little by little, I stopped hearing them and fell asleep.

This is probably where it all started. In any case, this began a chain of events that eventually led to the fact that six people and a green parrot sailed on a raft from the shores of South America.

I remember how frightened my father was and how surprised my mother and friends were when, back in Norway, I donated my cans of insects and fish brought from Fatu Khiva to the Zoological Museum of the University. I decided to give up zoology and take up the study of primitive peoples. The undiscovered mysteries of the South Sea captivated me. After all, there must be some reasonable explanation for them - and I set myself the goal of studying everything that was known about the legendary hero Tiki.

In the following years, the breakers and crumbling monuments in the jungle were for me something like a distant ghostly dream, which was the background and accompaniment to my studies of the tribes that inhabited the islands of the Pacific Ocean. Attempts to understand the thoughts and behavior of primitive people only with the help of books and museum collections are, of course, futile, but just as futile would be the efforts of a modern researcher to comprehend from his own experience all the wisdom that is collected in books occupying one shelf.

Scientific works, chronicles of the era of the first studies, countless collections in the museums of Europe and America provided abundant material that could help in solving the riddle that occupied me. From the time that Europeans, after the discovery of America, first reached the Pacific Islands, scientists of all specialties have accumulated a huge mass of facts about the inhabitants of the South Sea and about all the peoples who inhabited the surrounding countries. But the opinions of scientists differed sharply both in the question of the origin of this isolated island population and in explaining the reasons why this type of people is found only on isolated islands in the eastern part of the Pacific Ocean.

When the first Europeans ventured at last to cross the greatest of all oceans, they found to their surprise that in the central part of the ocean there were many small mountainous islands and low coral reefs, separated from each other and from the whole world by huge expanses of water. And each of these islands was inhabited by people who came there before the Europeans - tall beautiful people who met them on the shore with dogs, pigs and poultry. Where did they come from? They spoke in a language that no one knew. The Europeans, shamelessly calling themselves the discoverers of these islands, found cultivated fields and villages with temples and huts on them. On some islands, ancient pyramids, paved roads, and four-story-high stone carved figures have even been discovered. But there was no explanation for all these mysteries. What is this people? Where did he come from?

We can confidently say that there were almost as many answers to these questions as there were works devoted to them. Specialists in different branches of science offered a variety of solutions to the problem, but all their theories did not withstand the criticism of scientists who worked in other fields of knowledge. Malaya, India, China, Japan, Arabia, Egypt, the Caucasus, Atlantis, even Germany and Norway were seriously put forward as the homeland of the Polynesians. But every time there was a “stumbling block” of a decisive nature, and the whole structure crumbled to dust.

And where scientific knowledge stops, imagination begins its work. The mysterious monoliths on Easter Island, and all the other monuments of unknown origin found on this small, windswept, secluded island, which lies halfway between the nearest islands and the coast of South America, gave food for the most varied theories. Some researchers drew attention to the fact that the finds on Easter Island are in many ways reminiscent of the monuments of the prehistoric civilization of South America. Maybe once between the island and the mainland there was a land bridge, which subsequently fell? Perhaps Easter Island and all the other islands of the South Sea, on which we find similar monuments, are the remnants of a submerged continent?

This theory was widely held among non-specialists, but geologists and other scientists did not attach any importance to it. Moreover, zoologists, on the basis of the study of insects and mollusks on the islands of the South Sea, proved beyond doubt that throughout the history of mankind, these islands, as in our day, were completely separated from one another and from the continents surrounding them.

So, we know for certain that the ancestors of the Polynesians once, of their own free will or out of necessity, arrived on these isolated islands on some ships at the behest of the current or wind. A more careful study of the population of the South Sea gave every reason to believe that it appeared here only a few centuries ago. Although the Polynesians inhabit islands scattered across the ocean over an area four times the size of all of Europe, yet their language has not undergone significant changes on the various islands. Thousands of miles separate the Hawaiian Islands in the north from New Zealand in the south, Samoa in the west, and Easter Island in the east, but the inhabitants of all these islands speak. dialects of one common language, which we call Polynesian. Writing did not exist on any of the islands, except for a few wooden tablets with incomprehensible hieroglyphs that the inhabitants of Easter Island preserved, although neither they themselves nor any scientist could read them. But there were schools on the islands, and the most important subject studied in them were poetic legends, since for the Polynesians history was at the same time religion. They revered their ancestors and worshiped their dead leaders until the time of Tiki, and Tiki himself was said to be the son of the sun.

On almost every island, the male students of the school could name without hesitation the names of all their chiefs, from the time the island was first settled. Often, without relying on memory, they used a complex system of knots on interlaced ropes, as the Inca Indians once did in Peru. Modern researchers have recorded all the local genealogies on the various islands and found that they coincide with amazing accuracy both in terms of names and the number of generations. In this way it was established, based on the calculation of the generational change of Polynesians on average every 25 years, that the islands of the South Sea were settled about 500 AD. The second cultural wave, to which the new line of leaders corresponded, reached these islands about , later settlers ...

How could they have come so late? Apparently, very few researchers took into account the undoubted fact that the people who appeared so late on these islands were people of the true Stone Age. Despite their intelligence and otherwise surprisingly high culture, these sailors brought with them stone axes of a certain type and a number of other tools characteristic of the Stone Age, which they spread throughout all the islands where they appeared. It must not be forgotten that apart from a few isolated tribes that inhabited the primitive forests and some backward peoples, by 500 or 1100 AD, there were no viable civilizations on the level of the Stone Age anywhere in the world except America. And in America, even the highly developed Indian civilizations did not know iron at all and used stone axes and tools of the same type that were in use in the South Sea islands at the time of their discovery.

These numerous Indian civilizations were the closest neighbors of the Polynesians to the east. To the west lived only the black-skinned primitive tribes of Australia and Melanesia, distant relatives of the Negroes, and further behind them were Indonesia and the coast of Asia, where people emerged from the Stone Age, probably earlier than in any other part of the globe.

I became less and less interested in the Old World, where so many scientists looked for the ancestors of the Polynesians and not one found them, and turned my attention to the studied and unexplored Indian civilizations in America, which no one had taken into consideration before. And on the nearest mainland to the east, where the South American Republic of Peru is now located, located along the coast of the Pacific Ocean and in the adjacent mountainous region, there was no shortage of very interesting traces, one had only to set out to look for them. Some unknown people once lived here and created one of the most original civilizations in the world, which then, in ancient times, suddenly disappeared, as if swept away from the face of the earth. He left behind huge stone statues resembling human beings, which resembled the statues found on Pitcairn Island, the Marquesas Islands and Easter Island, and tall pyramids erected in ledges, as in Tahiti and Samoa. With stone axes, these people cut blocks of stone the size of a boxcar in the mountains, dragged them several miles into the valleys, put them upright or on top of each other, creating gates, high terrace walls - exactly like those we find on some islands of the Pacific Ocean. .

In this mountainous country, by the time the first Spaniards appeared in Peru, the Inca Indians had created their great empire. They told the Spaniards that the grandiose monuments that towered in the deserted valleys were erected by the people of the white gods, who lived here before the domination of the country passed to the Incas themselves. The Incas said about these disappeared architects that they were wise peace-loving mentors who, at the dawn of history, came from somewhere in the north and taught their primitive ancestors the art of building and agriculture, and also passed on their customs and customs to them. They did not look like other Indians, as they had white skin and long beards. They were taller than the Incas. Finally they left Peru as suddenly as they had arrived there; power in the country passed into the hands of the Incas, and the white teachers forever left the shores of South America and disappeared somewhere in the west, among the Pacific Ocean.

And so, when the Europeans appeared on the Pacific Islands, they were very surprised to find that many of the locals had almost white skin and a beard. On a number of islands, whole families could be found who were distinguished by exceptionally white skin, light - from reddish to blond hair, bluish-gray eyes and faces with a hook-nosed almost Semitic type.

The rest of the Polynesians had golden brown skin, black hair and flat, shapeless noses. The red-haired inhabitants called themselves urukehu and they were said to be the direct descendants of the first chiefs of the islands, who were white gods and bore the names of Tangaroa, Kane, and Tiki. Legends about the mysterious white people from whom the islanders once descended are common throughout Polynesia. When Roggeveen discovered Easter Island in 1722, he was surprised to find “whites” among the inhabitants gathered on the shore. And the inhabitants of Easter Island themselves could count their ancestors, who had white skin, until the time of Tiki and Hotu Matua, when they first sailed across the ocean "from a mountainous country in the east, which was burned by the sun."

Continuing my search, I discovered amazing facts in the culture, mythology and language of the inhabitants of Peru, which prompted me with even greater perseverance to clarify the question of where the Polynesian god Tiki came from.

And I found what I was looking for. One day I was sitting reading the legends of the Incas about the sun-king Viracocha, who was the supreme overlord of the disappeared white people in Peru. I've read:

“Viracocha it was called in the language of the Incas (Quechua), and, therefore, this name is of relatively recent origin. The original name of the sun-god Viracocha, which seems to have been more commonly used in Peru in ancient times, was Kon-Tiki or Illa-Tiki, which means Sun-Tiki or Fire-Tiki. Kon-Tiki was the high priest and sun-king of the "white people" of the legends of the Incas, those people who left behind giant ruins on the shores of Lake Titicaca. Legend tells that Kon-Tiki was attacked by a chief named Kari who came from the Coquimbo Valley. In a battle on one of the islands on Lake Titicaca, the mysterious white bearded people were killed, but Kon-Tiki himself and his closest associates escaped and reached the shores of the Pacific Ocean, from where they subsequently disappeared, going somewhere west across the ocean.

I no longer doubted that the white leader - the god of the Sun-Tiki, who, according to the stories of the Incas, was expelled from Peru by their ancestors, was none other than the white leader - the god of Tiki, the son of the sun, whom the inhabitants of all the islands of the eastern Pacific Ocean call the forefather of his people. Many details from the life of the Sun-Tiki in Peru, with the ancient names of the surroundings of Lake Titicaca, again resurrected in the historical legends common among the local population of the Pacific Islands.

However, everywhere in Polynesia I found indications that the peace-loving people of Kon-Tiki could not long hold dominion over the islands alone for a long time. Indications that warships tied in pairs—about the same size as Viking ships—carried the Northwest Indians across the ocean to the Hawaiian Islands and further south to all the other islands. They mingled with the people of Kon-Tiki and brought a new civilization to the island kingdom. This was the second people of the Stone Age, who appeared in Polynesia around 1100 and did not know any metal, pottery, wheels and spindles, or crops.

So, I was excavating in British Columbia, looking for ancient Polynesian-style stone carvings in areas where the Northwest Indians lived. At this time, the Germans invaded Norway.

To the right, to the left, around. Washing stairs in the barracks, cleaning shoes, a radio communication school, a parachute and, finally, the Murmansk convoy and sailing to the shores of Finnmarken, where during the entire hopeless winter, in the absence of the sun-god, the god of military equipment reigned.

Peace has come. And then the day came when I finished substantiating my theory. I must bring it up for discussion by specialist scientists. To do this, you need to go to America.

Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl with five comrades set sail on a raft from the western coast of South America to Tahiti. The raft was made of durable wood - basalt, it received the name of the legendary Indian god Kon-Tiki.

The voyage lasted three and a half months, during which the sailors covered a distance of 5,000 nautical miles, thereby confirming the likelihood of Heyerdahl's hypothesis that Native Americans could colonize Polynesia.

Studying the customs and culture of the Polynesians and drawing attention to the similarity of names (for example, the god Tiki), customs, stone statues of Polynesia and ancient Peru, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl suggested that Polynesia was once inhabited by the inhabitants of South America. To prove his theory, Heyerdahl built a raft. The Kon-Tiki balsa raft was built as a replica of a prehistoric South American ship. Assembled from nine balsa logs felled in Ecuador, with a crew of six, the raft sailed from Calao to Peru on April 28, 1947 and reached the island of Raroya in Polynesia after 101 days.

It was an extremely bold scientific experiment, for the consequences of failure for a small crew could be deplorable. However, contrary to the forecasts of those of little faith, the southeast trade wind and the South Equatorial Current safely carried the raft to the islands of Polynesia.

The raft was built from logs of the lightest tree with a density reaching 0.2-0.3 g/cm3, and, of course, with closed pores. All this provided a huge margin of buoyancy for the raft and slowed down the absorption of water, since freshly cut trunks retained natural juice, which prevented the penetration of water into the wood. Strong and rigid steel cables with continuous mutual movement of logs could cut through soft wood, so Heyerdahl tied the logs with a vegetable manila rope, which is distinguished by elasticity.

However, the lack of experience in maritime affairs made sailing on the Kon-Tiki much more difficult.

The expedition members did not know how the ancient Peruvians managed the raft in many days of crossing the ocean. The rudder watches were tiring and physically demanding.

At the same time, the ancient Peruvians knew a fairly simple way to control a similar vessel. In the tombs of the ancients, historians found plates of hard wood - “guars”, and in the drawings - their images. In cross section, guars have a segmented profile. They had to be stuck between the logs in the front or back of the raft, which would regulate the position of the “center of lateral resistance” (in modern terminology), and the symmetrical sectional profile facilitated their use. If the rigging is pulled from one side, the sail turns around the mast and changes the direction of the pull. By varying the submerged area of ​​several guars at the bow and stern, the raft can be made to turn with the wind and zigzag, sometimes even at an angle of less than 90°. The members of the expedition did not know this, and T. Heyerdahl himself learned about this method only in 1953 - after the completion of the voyage. It was only in the middle of the voyage that the experiments in navigating the raft led to some success, the crew nevertheless learned to use the guars.

A successful voyage of 4,300 miles proved that the islands in Polynesia were within the reach of this type of prehistoric South American vessel and could well have been inhabited by the ancient Peruvians. A documentary about the trip won an Oscar in 1951, and a book about the expedition has been translated into no less than 66 languages.

At the New York Explorers Club. Thor Heyerdahl second from right

Balsa floats down the river to the sea

Nine logs in the port of Callao

The raft will be ready soon

On the sail is the head of the ancient god Kon-Tiki.

Saw a whale shark

Here are the tuna

Hesselberg often picked up the guitar

Sharks pulled out of the water by the tail

Record trophy

On the steering wheel

Bengt Danielsson (seated, first from left) thought the flight was the best vacation of his life.

Seen from the mast

In the open ocean

Kon-Tiki on the reef

Coming to the Polynesian Islands

Close to the island

last meters

General view of Kon-Tiki

Scheme of the construction and knitting of the Kon-Tiki raft

Norwegian Journey Thor Heyerdahl on a raft across the Pacific Ocean is now considered a significant event in the exploration of the planet and the history of mankind. However, at one time, the journey not only brought many discoveries and forced official science to reconsider its view of a number of things, it, in fact, became the first reality show that the whole world watched for 101 days. And after the release of books, documentaries and feature films about this expedition, it can rightfully be considered a real cultural phenomenon.

Thor Heyerdahl, circa 1980. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org

"Come to your senses, you will all drown!"

It all started with the fact that Thor Heyerdahl put forward a bold hypothesis. In his opinion, the islands of Polynesia were inhabited by immigrants from America, and not from Asia, as science then believed. The scientific community ridiculed the Norwegian colleague. Nobody took his treatises and proofs seriously. And especially ardent skeptics decided to take Heyerdahl weakly. Like, if you are so smart, build a raft and try to repeat the route that the same ancient Incas supposedly easily passed. This is where the world show started. When it became clear that the scientist had accepted the challenge and was preparing for an adventurous journey at full speed, these same skeptics, together with the rest of the scientific world and journalists, tried to dissuade him from this undertaking. “That would be suicide! Come to your senses, you will all drown!” they told the scientist. But he has already bitten the bit.

Lolita washed overboard

Preparation for the expedition was complicated by the fact that at first Heyerdahl could not find sponsors and recruit a team of 5 people. Viral marketing helped. Newspapers began to write about the scientist's undertaking - and sponsors were found. Together with a desperate scientist, 5 more people went on an expedition: navigator and artist Erik Hesselberg, cook Bengt Danielsson, two radio operators (Knut Haugland And Turstein Robue), and technician, engineer and meteorologist Hermann Watzinger. The seventh member of the expedition was a South African parrot named Lolita. Lolita, however, was washed away during one of the storms. As soon as the raft of balsa logs was built (by the way, authentic, without a single nail), the travelers set off.

The crew of the Kon-Tiki. From left to right: Knut Haugland, Bengt Danielsson, Thor Heirdahl, Erik Hesselberg, Thorstein Robue and Hermann Watzinger. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org

The show starts!

In addition to scientific observations and experiments, the team broadcast their adventure almost live. Radio operators almost every day transmitted reports of meteorological observations, ocean currents and so on to the shore. In addition, one of the radio operators kept a detailed travel diary. Every little detail was recorded. Once, tired of writing, the first radio operator exclaimed in despair: “I’m ready to swear that all this correspondence weighs ten kilograms!” The second radio operator only calmly corrected him: “Twelve. I weighed it." And in order not to miss anything at all and squeeze the maximum out of their trip, the team members recorded everything on a movie camera. A book based recording and a film based documentary were to be the culmination of this show. In the meantime, the whole world was content with radiograms from Kon-Tiki. "Are they already drowned?" some asked with burning eyes. "Not yet!" others responded happily. People in various countries placed bets, made bets, looking forward to the denouement.

Didn't you wait? And we sailed!

On August 7, 1947, having covered several thousand kilometers, the raft approached the Raroia atoll, which is part of the Tuamotu archipelago. But no one was waiting for travelers there. Nobody at all: the island turned out to be uninhabited. For a week, the team trampled on this piece of land, until a boat with local residents accidentally swam up to it.

When travelers got out to the mainland to civilization, it became a world sensation. And the beginning of a triumph. Heyerdahl's book The Kon-Tiki Expedition has been translated into 70 languages ​​and has sold over 50 million copies. The traveler-edited documentary Kon-Tiki won an Oscar in 1952.

Subsequently, a feature film about the legendary journey appeared, also awarded many nominations and awards. And Thor Heyerdahl acquired not only the recognition of the scientific world. He became a real world star. He made many more travels, wrote 20 books. Of course, among his fans, he acquired a lot of followers. Alas, not everyone managed to complete their expeditions as successfully as Heyerdahl. Some repeated the fate of the Lolita parrot.