Page 240 - The Secret Museum

American natives had travelled across the Pacific to Polynesia.

However, once the raft was upon the ocean, the Humboldt Current had other plans,

and the raft drifted elsewhere. One night, Torstein Raaby was on night watch, and
decided to change their course, giving up on Easter Island and the Marquesas and
heading towards the Tuamotus archipelago so that they would find land more quickly.
Heyerdahl woke up to find they were totally off track from what he had planned. He
decided it was best to stick with the change. In the logbook in storage he discusses
the pivotal moment, but he skipped it in the published book.

In the logbook, Heyerdahl at times shows his anxieties and doubts, whereas in the
dramatized version he does not. The logbook is more intimate and private: it is the

only place where you can read the world of Heyerdahl, as he was.
In 2004, Heyerdahl’s grandson, Olav Heyerdahl read the logbook and started to

plan an expedition, Tangaroa, to follow the trail of Kon-Tiki and see how much
things had changed in the past 60 years. In 2006, he and five others left from the same
location, on the same day of the year as the Kon-Tiki, in a raft made of balsawood,
only with a bigger sail.

He describes how ‘in the Humboldt Current, we crossed this patch of garbage.
Plastic floating all around our clean and 100% natural raft. Shocking experience! At
that time I did not know that all these plastic parts were floating around. Nothing of
this was described in the KT logbook.’ He had been excited about filming and diving

with the sharks his grandfather had described, but ‘in total we saw 4 sharks! 4 sharks
in almost 2.5 months at sea! If people continue eating sharkfin soup, the oceans will
be clean. The sharks will for sure not survive.’ While his grandfather supped on
healthy shoals of tuna fish, ‘We caught one tuna across! We are misusing our planet.
There will only be leftovers for generations to come.’

Sailing through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a big soupy mess six times the
size of the UK, made up of all those thrown-away carrier bags, plastic bottles and
pieces of packaging that have not been recycled, must have been a devastating

experience. It encouraged him to set sail aboard Plastiki, a 12-ton catamaran made
entirely out of 12,500 recycled plastic bottles. I saw Plastiki being made in a
warehouse in the Embarcadero in San Francisco, and followed its trip in the news as
it sailed along the same route as Kon-Tiki and on to Australia. The aim of the trip
was to highlight the damage that plastic waste is doing to the oceans and the creatures
that live there. The crew hoped to inspire people to use less of the stuff and to

dispose of what is used more carefully so that it doesn’t end up in the ocean.
Back in the museum, the logbook is slowly being digitized, and bits of it are being

put online. This began when the Thor Heyerdahl Archives were inscribed into the
UNESCO Memory of the World list in 2011. The museum then decided that if the
logbook was a world treasure, people really ought to be able to read it. The original
will, of course, be kept safely upstairs in the museum, next door to a cold store filled
with 1,300 photographs from the Kon-Tiki expedition and 100,000 others from