Page 237 - The Secret Museum

A SCUFFED-UP BLACK EXERCISE BOOK filled with tales of whales, storms and adventure

on the high seas written by a handsome Norwegian scientist, Thor Heyerdahl, lives in
the archives of the Kon-Tiki Museum. It is the logbook of the Kon-Tiki expedition,
when Heyerdahl and five crew members crossed the Pacific – from Peru to the
Polynesian islands – in a raft made out of nine balsawood tree trunks tied together
with rope. They had a little bamboo hut built on top of the raft.

Kon-Tiki was named after a pre-Incan hero called Con-Tiki Viracocha, a sun-king
who once ruled the land of the Incas. According to their history, when the Incas
arrived, the sun-king moved to the Easter Islands. So Heyerdahl followed in his

wake, to test out a theory he had that South Americans may have settled the
Polynesian islands. He set sail in the Kon-Tiki to prove that it was possible then, and
is now, to cross our world’s biggest ocean on a prehistoric Peruvian raft. He built a
perfect replica of an indigenous raft by referring to sixteenth-century manuscripts that
described the boats and watching the rafts that local Peruvians still sailed off their
coastline.

Once the boat was ready, Heyerdahl and his crew, plus a parrot named Lorita and
a stowaway crab from Peru, spent 101 days at sea, drifting 8,000 kilometres on their

raft across the Pacific, carried by the Humboldt Current, until they washed up on
Raroia atoll in Polynesia.

While the raft that carried them safely across the Pacific is on display in the Kon-
Tiki Museum in Oslo, the logbook in which Heyerdahl wrote daily tales of their life
in the Pacific is kept out of sight. I slipped through a door, just behind Ra, another of
Heyerdahl’s expedition rafts, and headed upstairs to see the diary. The curator of the
museum and I lifted it out of its archival box. It was bigger than I had imagined.

As I turned its crisp, weathered pages, I noticed that Heyerdahl’s writing was of a
normal size at the beginning. As the trip goes on, his writing becomes tinier and

tinier, as he tries to squeeze in every last detail. He wrote in English, even though his
Norwegian was, of course, a lot more fluent. Maybe he thought that if his words were
written in English more people would easily understand them, should anything
happen to the raft. It’s also the language logbooks are generally written in. I thought it
was testament to how amazing the Scandinavians are at English.

On page one, on 27 April 1947, Heyerdahl describes how the ship was christened
Kon-Tiki by the expedition secretary, Miss Gerd Vold, ‘who broke a coco nut against
its bow’. Next, Heyerdahl describes the flags onboard his home for the next three

months: ‘Astern waved the Norwegian flag, in the top mast waved the Peruvian flag
and the flag of The Explorers Club, and at its side the flags of the USA, Great Britain,
Sweden and France.’ Then he describes lots of press and diplomats from many
countries checking out the raft: ‘60 visitors, totalling roughly 3½ tons, went on board
at a time without affecting buoyancy of the raft noticeably.’ The next day, the Kon-
Tiki set sail. Heyerdahl wrote: