Page 239 - The Secret Museum

Near the end of the logbook, on the day they crash-landed ashore, he wrote: ‘WE
HAVE MADE IT. THANKS, GOD.’ He must have been over the moon as he wrote these
words in this book. Some days later, people on a neighbouring atoll saw their
campfire and came over to have a look: they got a shock to find six blond, blue-eyed
men and a wooden raft. The blonds stayed for a week, enjoying their atoll, before a
boat came to collect them and rowed the raft to Tahiti.

A lot of the stories in the logbook were rewritten into a book, The Kon-Tiki
Expedition: By Raft across the South Seas, which has sold 60 million copies and is
one of the best-selling non-fiction books in the world. People fell in love with the

story, perhaps because the Second World War had just finished and Heyerdahl’s
madcap experiment was light relief.

The museum keeps the handwritten and the typed manuscripts of this book in
archival boxes, just beside the original logbook. Heyerdahl began writing the book
on board, alongside his logbook, but I preferred reading through the logbook written
in the intrepid adventurer’s hand.

The diary has never been on display, and probably never will be. This is because
it is fragile, of course, and has already got soaking wet, out in the ocean. However, it
is also because, although Heyerdahl wrote everything in it, the stories belong to

every man on board the raft, and they all went on to do different things after the
expedition, so it wasn’t easy to get permission from everyone to publish it.

Added to that, there are a few things in the diary which weren’t really for public
consumption. One of the stories Heyerdahl talks about in the diary but left out of the
book was that one of the crew was dating Gerd Vold, the expedition secretary, and
the two of them exchanged love messages via the raft’s radio.

In the published book Heyerdahl also glossed over the day when they got drunk
and nearly lost their compass, and the moment Heyerdahl needed to take down the
sail in an emergency: he got so nervous untying it, he couldn’t do it – he just froze
with fear. Heyerdahl could not swim and had been terrified of water since the time he

had almost drowned as a child – an extraordinary fact, given what he was attempting
to achieve.

The book also smoothed over the moment when Herman Watzinger was airing his
sleeping bag and the wind pulled it from his hands. He ran after it, slipped and fell
overboard. Knut Haugland grabbed a rope, jumped in and swam to his friend, and
pulled him to safety.

From the outset, Heyerdahl had wanted to take the raft to Easter Island, and the
Marquesas. He had spent time on the Marquesa Islands not long before the Kon-Tiki
expedition and had read an article about Easter Island when he was 12 or so, and had

said to one of his pals, Arnold Jacoby, ‘One day I will solve the mystery of Easter
Island.’ The statues inspired the Kon-Tiki experiment, as they reminded him of
statues he’d seen in South America and made him think that, maybe, the South