At my school in Sweden I had a very boring young mathematics teacher. None of us could have imagined that Mr Löfgren was the only man in the world to have crossed South America in a motro cycle.
The world-famous explorer Stanley who found Livingstone also discovered the world’s second largest river. To further explore the congo River, he hired the Swedish naval captian Anton Emanuel Andersson. What few people know is that when the Belgians colonized Congo they relied alomost entirely on skippers from Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
NORWAY
Sponsored by Oslo University Faculty of Zoology Thor Heyerdahl, with his young bride LIv, left for his first field research in Polynesia in 1937. the purpose of the Fatu-Hiva expedition was to study how the local animal life had reached the isolated oceanic island. Hyerdahl’s academic training, followed by a month of practical tuition in the Polynesian home of Teriieroo, the paramount cheief of Tahiti (and later his adoptive father), helped the young couple survive on the isolated mountain island of Fatu-Hiva in the Marquesas Group.
In close contact with Polynesians, and their environment, Heyerdahl observed how the fauna and flora were totally determined by the permanent westward drift of the trade-winds and ocean current. Thus he began to doubt the unproven and mutualy conflicting theories about Polynesian ancestors who had reached these island head against the elements from Asia, thousands of miles away. He suspected that, even if Asia was the first cradle of all circum-Pacific peoples, the migration to Polynesia must have gone with the prevailing winds and currents by way of Northwest America.
In 1939 he left for British columbia where he was based as a research fellow at the Provincial Museum in Victoria while studying the Northwest Coast Indians and their culture, before he went on to live among them. In 1941 he published his migration theory for the first time: "Did Polynesian culture originate in America?" he argued that the migration from Asia to Polynesia had gone by way of the British Columbia archipelago and through Melanesia or Micronesia. He also pointed out that the maritime Kwakiutl, Haida and Salis tribes of British columbia differed from other American Indians, and they showed closer affinities with the Polynesians than any other people in the entire Pacific area. Therefore, the Polynesian island world had come neither from Asia, not with big canoes, but by balsa raft direct form South America.
To prove his theory he left Peru on a raft that was a replica of early aboriginal designs. the raft named Kon-Tiki (in honour of a legendary pre-Inca sun king) crossed 8 000 km of open ocean, and landed Heyerdahl and his five companions on the Raroia atoll. The voyage proved the contemporary verdict on the balsa raft wrong, and showed that Polynesia lay well within the reach of pre-historic South American mariners. Some scientists refused to believe that the incredible voyage had actually taken place, until a documentary film of the expedition was released. The film won the Oscar for documentaries and Heyerdahl’s popular book on the Kon-Tiki expedition was eventually translated into a world record of 66 languages. Around the world the Kon-tiki fever was scorned by many scientists, who called Heyerdahl a "daring Viking" who had succeeded in a stint with no scientific value.
In 1952 Thor Hyerdahl led another expedition to the Galapagos Islands that proved that the island had numerous visits long before columbus "discovered" the continent. In 1955 he led an expedition to Easter Island. Here he became interested in the virtures of the prehistoric reed ships. The American totora reed, used by the pre-Incan civilization in Peru for making large ships had been planted in Easter Island crater lakes before the arrival of Europeans. This strictly South American freshwater plant could not have crossed the ocean without human aid, and the Easter Islanders used it to construct the very same kind of watercraft as in pre-historic Peru.
Ra I was launched in the spring of 1969 from the former Phoenician port of Safi in Morocco. The reed bundles proved incredibly buoyant. Ra sailed 5 000 km in eight weeks in spite of storms and broken rudder-oars. But it was the loss of the starboard bundles that made Heyerdahl interrupt the experiment only one week short of Barbados in the West Indies.
Ten months later Heyerdahl launched a second papyrus boat, Ra II, built by four Aymara Indians from Lake Titicaca in South America. Ra II crossed the widest span of the Atlantic, sailing 6 100 km in 57 days, from Safi in Morocco to Barbados in the West Indies. Anthropologists had to abandon the old dogma that the North African reed ships could not have managed to carry cultural inspiration to the aboriginal population of tropical america on a one-way drift voyage in pre-columbian times.
A major problem with Ra I and II had been the waterlogging, which caused the ships to float the last weeks with decks awash. From the marsh Arabs, who live in the former Sumerian territory of modern Iraq, Heyerdahl learned that reeds wold retain their buoyancy only if cut in the month of August.
Wanting to test this claim, Heyerdahl built his largest reed ship in 1971 (18 m long). The vessel named Tigris after the river it was launched, ended up in Djibouti at the entrance of the Red Sea five months later. Blocked by wars on all sides, the reed ship was burnt in April 1978.
But Heyerdahl had proved that is was possible for pre-historic watercraft to sail from Asia to Africa, from Africa to AMerica and from America to Polynesia.
On the way he has made other discoveries. One of his last triumphs was to to recognize that the rock pile that is the Guimar pyramid on Tenerife is an important remnant from the idland’s nearly exterminated indigenous Guanche poeple and another indication of pre-columbian culture-spreading sea voyages. Heyerdahl has identified the rock piles a a zigguart type pyramid like the ones found in both the Middle East and Central and South America. Just as he recognized the huge assemblage of pyramida in Tucume, Peru which others had seen as eroded hills
In 1995 Heyerdahl turned 80. He is married to former Miss France and Hollywood actress Jacqueline Beer and is busy creating a museum on Tenerife and studying the island’s ancient links to the Old and New World.