Kon-Tiki Read online

  On July 16 Nature betrayed herself still more obviously. On that day we hauled up a nine-foot shark, which threw up from its stomach a large undigested starfish which it had recently brought from some coast out here in the ocean.

  And the very next day we had the first definite visitor straight from the islands of Polynesia.

  It was a great moment on board when two large boobies were spotted above the horizon to westward and soon afterward came sailing in over our mast, flying low. With a wingspread of five feet they circled round us many times, then folded their wings and settled on the sea alongside us. Dolphins rushed to the spot at once and wriggled inquisitively round the great swimming birds, but neither party touched the other. These were the first living messengers that came to bid us welcome to Polynesia. They did not go back in the evening but rested on the sea, and after midnight we still heard them flying in circles round the mast, uttering hoarse cries.

  The flying fish which came on board were now of another and much larger species; I recognized them from fishing trips I had taken with the natives along the coast of Fatu Hiva.

  For three days and nights we made straight toward Fatu Hiva, but then a strong northeast wind came on and sent us down in the direction of the Tuamotu atolls. We were now blown out of the real South Equatorial Current, and the ocean currents were no longer behaving dependably. One day they were there; another day they were gone. The currents could run like invisible rivers branching out all over the sea. If the current was swift, there was usually more swell and the temperature of the water usually fell one degree. It showed its direction and strength every day by the difference between Erik’s calculated and his measured position.

  On the threshold of Polynesia the wind said “Pass,” having handed us over to a weak branch of the current which, to our alarm, had its course in the direction of the Antarctic. The wind did not become absolutely still—we never experienced that throughout the voyage—and when it was feeble we hoisted every rag we had to collect what little there was. There was not one day on which we moved backward toward America, and our smallest distance in twenty-four hours was 9 sea miles, while our average run for the voyage as a whole was 42½ sea miles in twenty-four hours.

  The trade wind, after all, had not the heart to fail us right in the last lap. It reported for duty again and pushed and shoved at the ramshackle craft which was preparing her entry into a new and strange part of the world.

  With each day that passed, larger flocks of sea birds came and circled over us aimlessly in all directions. One evening, when the sun was about to sink into the sea, we noticed that the birds had received a violent impetus. They were flying away in a westerly direction without paying any attention to us or the flying fish beneath them. From the masthead we could see that, as they came over, they all flew straight on on exactly the same course. Perhaps they saw something from up above which we did not see. Perhaps they were flying by instinct. In any case they were flying with a plan, straight home to the nearest island, their breeding place.

  We twisted the steering oar and set our course exactly in the direction in which the birds had disappeared. Even after it was dark, we heard the cries of stragglers flying over us against the starry sky on exactly the same course as that which we were now following. It was a wonderful night; the moon was nearly full for the third time in the course of the Kon-Tiki’s voyage.

  Next day there were still more birds over us, but we did not need to wait for them to show us our way again in the evening. This time we had detected a curious stationary cloud above the horizon. The other clouds were small feathery wisps of wool which came up in the south and passed across the vault of the sky with the trade wind till they disappeared over the horizon in the west. So I had once come to know the drifting trade-wind clouds on Fatu Hiva, and so we had seen them over us night and day on board the Kon-Tiki. But the lonely cloud on the horizon to the southwest did not move; it just rose like a motionless column of smoke while the trade-wind clouds drifted by. The Polynesians knew land lay under such clouds. For, when the tropical sun bakes the hot sand, a stream of warm air is created which rises up and causes its vapor content to condense up in the colder strata of air.

  We steered on the cloud till it disappeared after sunset. The wind was steady, and with the steering oar lashed tight the Kon-Tiki kept to her course unaided. The steering watch’s job was now to sit on the plank at the masthead, shiny with wear, and keep a lookout for anything that indicated land.

  There was a deafening screaming of birds over us all that night. And the moon was nearly full.

  7

  TO THE SOUGH SEA ISLANDS

  First Sight of Land —

  We Drift Away from Puka Puka —

  A Festal Day along the Angatau Reef —

  On the Threshold of Paradise —

  The First Natives —

  The Kon-Tiki Gets a New Crew —

  Knut on Shore Leave—A Losing Battle —

  We Drift Out to Sea Again —

  In Dangerous Waters —

  From Takume to Raroia-

  Drifting toward the Witches’ Caldron —

  At the Mercy of the Breakers —

  A Shipwreck —

  Cast Ashore on the Coral Reef —

  We Find a Desert Island

  To the South Sea Islands

  ON THE NIGHT BEFORE JULY 30 THERE WAS A NEW and strange atmosphere about the Kon-Tiki. Perhaps it was the deafening clamor from all the sea birds over us which showed that something fresh was brewing. The screaming of birds with many voices sounded hectic and earthly after the dead creaking of lifeless ropes, which was all we had heard above the noise of the sea in the three months we had behind us. And the moon seemed larger and rounder than ever as it sailed over the lookout at the masthead. In our fancy it reflected palm tops and warm-blooded romance; it did not shine with such a yellow light over the cold fishes out at sea.

  At six o’clock Bengt came down from the masthead, woke Herman, and turned in. When Herman clambered up the creaking, swaying mast, the day had begun to break. Ten minutes later he was down the rope ladder again and was shaking me by the leg.

  “Come out and have a look at your island!”

  His face was radiant and I jumped up, followed by Bengt who had not quite gone to sleep yet. Hard on one another’s heels, we huddled together as high as we could climb, at the point where the masts crossed. There were many birds around us, and a faint violet-blue veil over the sky was reflected in the sea as a last relic of the departing night. But over the whole horizon away to the east a ruddy glow had begun to spread, and far down to the southeast it gradually formed a blood-red background for a faint shadow, like a blue pencil line, drawn for a short way along the edge of the sea.

  Land! An island! We devoured it greedily with our eyes and woke the others, who tumbled out drowsily and stared in all directions as if they thought our bow was about to run on to a beach. Screaming sea birds formed a bridge across the sky in the direction of the distant island, which stood out sharper against the horizon as the red background widened and turned gold with the approach of the sun and the full daylight.

  Our first thought was that the island did not lie where it should. As the island could not have drifted, the raft must have been caught up in a northward current in the course of the night. We had only to cast one glance over the sea to perceive at once, from the direction of the waves, that we had lost our chance in the darkness. Where we now lay, the wind no longer allowed us to press the raft on a course toward the island. The region round the Tuamotu Archipelago was full of strong, local ocean currents which twisted in all directions as they ran up against land; many of them varied in direction as they met powerful tidal currents flowing in and out over reefs and lagoons.

  We laid the steering oar over, but we knew quite well that it was useless. At half-past six the sun rose out of the sea and climbed straight up as it does in the tropics. The island lay some few sea miles away and had the appearance of a quite
low strip of forest creeping along the horizon. The trees were crowded close together behind a narrow light-colored beach, which lay so low that it was hidden behind the seas at regular intervals. According to Erik’s positions this island was Puka Puka, the first outpost of the Tuamotu group. Sailing Directions for Pacific Islands—1940, our two different charts, and Erik’s observations gave, in all, four quite different positions for this island, but as there were no other islands in all that neighborhood there could be no doubt that the island we saw was Puka Puka.

  No extravagant outbursts were to be heard on board. After the sail had been trimmed and the oar laid over, we all formed a silent group at the masthead or stood on deck staring toward the land which had suddenly cropped up out in the middle of the endless, all-dominating sea. At last we had a visible proof that we had really been moving in all these months; we had not just been lying tumbling about in the center of the same eternal circular horizon. To us it seemed as if the island were mobile and had suddenly entered the circle of blue and empty sea in the center of which we had our permanent abode; as if the island were drifting slowly across our own domain, heading for the eastern horizon. We were all filled with a warm, quiet satisfaction at having actually reached Polynesia, mingled with a faint momentary disappointment at having to submit helplessly to seeing the island lie there like a mirage while we continued our eternal drift across the sea westward.

  Just after sunrise a thick black column of smoke rose above the treetops to the left of the middle of the island. We followed it with our eyes and thought to ourselves that the natives were rising and getting their breakfast. We had no idea then that native lookout posts had seen us and were sending up smoke signals to invite us to land. About seven o’clock we scented a faint breath of burned borao wood which tickled our salted nostrils. It awoke in me at once slumbering memories of the fire on the beach on Fatu Hiva. Half an hour later we caught the smell of newly cut wood and of forest. The island had now begun to shrink and lay astern of us so that we received flickering wafts of breeze from it. For a quarter of an hour Herman and I clung to the masthead and let the warm smell of leaves and greenery filter in through our nostrils. This was Polynesia—a beautiful, rich smell of dry land after ninety-three salty days down among the waves. Bengt already lay snoring in his sleeping bag again. Erik and Torstein lay on their backs in the cabin meditating, and Knut ran in and out and sniffed the smell of leaves and wrote in his diary.

  At half-past eight Puka Puka sank into the sea astern of us, but right on till eleven o’clock we could see, on climbing to the masthead, that there was a faint blue streak above the horizon in the east. Then that too was gone, and a high cumulo-nimbus cloud, rising motionless skyward, was all that showed where Puka Puka lay. The birds disappeared. They kept by preference to windward of the islands so that they had the wind with them when they returned home in the evening with full bellies. The dolphins also had become noticeably scarcer, and there were again only a few pilot fish under the raft.

  That night Bengt said he longed for a table and chair, for it was so tiring to lie and turn from back to stomach while reading. Otherwise he was glad we had missed our landing, for he still had three books to read. Torstein suddenly had a desire for an apple, and I myself woke up in the night because I definitely smelled a delicious odor of steak and onions. But it turned out to be only a dirty shirt.

  The very next morning we detected two new clouds rising up like the steam from two locomotives below the horizon. The map was able to tell us that the names of the coral islands they came from were Fangahina and Angatau. The cloud over Angatau lay the most favorably for us as the wind was blowing, so we set our course for that, lashed the oar fast, and enjoyed the wonderful peace and freedom of the Pacific. So lovely was life on this fine day on the bamboo deck of the Kon-Tiki that we drank in all the impressions in the certainty that the journey would soon be over now, whatever might await us.

  For three days and nights we steered on the cloud over Angatau ; the weather was brilliant, the oar alone held us on our course, and the current played us no tricks. On the fourth morning Torstein relieved Herman after the 4—6 watch and was told that Herman thought he had seen the outlines of a low island in the moonlight. When the sun rose just afterward, Torstein stuck his head in at the cabin door and shouted: “Land ahead!”

  We all plunged out on deck, and what we saw made us hoist all our flags. First the Norwegian aft, then the French at the masthead because we were heading for a French colony. Soon the raft’s entire collection of flags was fluttering in the fresh trade wind—the American, British, Peruvian, and Swedish flags besides the flag of the Explorers Club—so there was no doubt on board that now the Kon-Tiki was dressed. The island was ideally placed this time, right in our own course and a little farther away from us than Puka Puka had been when it cropped up at sunrise four days before. As the sun rose straight up over the sky astern of us, we could see a clear green glimmer high up toward the misty sky over the island. It was the reflection of the still, green lagoon on the inside of the surrounding reef. Some of the low atolls throw up mirages of this kind for many thousand feet into the air, so that they show their position to primitive seafarers many days before the island itself is visible above the horizon.

  About ten o’clock we took charge of the steering oar ourselves; we must now decide toward which part of the island we should steer. We could already distinguish individual treetops from the others and could see rows of tree trunks shining in the sun, which stood out against the background of dense shadowy foliage.

  We knew that somewhere between us and the island there was a dangerous submerged shoal, lying in ambush for anything that approached the innocent island. This reef lay right under the deep, free roll of the swell from the east, and, as the huge masses of water lost their balance above the shoal, they wavered skyward and plunged down, thundering and foaming, over the sharp coral reef. Many vessels have been caught in the terrible suction against the submerged reefs in the Tuamotu group and have been smashed to pieces against the coral.

  From the sea we saw nothing of this insidious trap. We sailed in, following the direction of the waves, and saw only the curved shining back of sea after sea disappearing toward the island. Both the reef and the whole frothing witches’ dance over it were hidden behind rising rows of broad wave backs ahead of us. But along both ends of the island where we saw the beach in profile, both north and south, we saw that a few hundred yards from land the sea was one white boiling mass flinging itself high into the air.

  We laid our course so as to graze the outside of the witches’ kitchen off the southern point of the island, hoping, when we got there, to be able to steer along the atoll till we came round the point on the lee side or till we touched, before we drifted past, a place where it was so shallow that we could stop our drift with a makeshift anchor and wait till the wind changed and placed us under the lee of the island.

  The first birds from Polynesia which welcomed us. We followed the same course as they when they flew home at evening.

  Land in sight! After 93 days we sighted land for the first time. It was the island Puka Puka. But the wind and current took us out to sea again.

  Kon-Tiki approaching land. The tricolor was hoisted as we steered toward the French island Angatau. We had reached Polynesia.

  The first natives coming out. Toward evening several canoes appeared with natives eager to help us ashore. But the raft drifted out to sea again, and finally Angatau disappeared astern.

  A reef with a witches’ caldron of seething breakers barred the approach to the island Raroia. The raft was heavily pounded and finally flung up by the waves on to the coral reef surrounding the island.

  The wreck was washed higher up on to the reef every day. The Raroia reef—25 miles long—is (like all the other islands in the Tuamotu group) the work of industrious little coral polyps.

  Salvage work. Danielsson—safe and sound, but his head still aching from a blow from the mast—dragging his
mattress out of the wreckage. The most important cargo has already been salvaged.

  Chaos. After the stranding the raft was hardly recognizable. The masts were broken, the cabin crushed, the bamboo deck twisted up to form a barricade, and our belongings strewn all over the place.

  About noon we could see through the glass that the vegetation on shore consisted of young green coconut palms, which stood with their tops close together over a waving hedge of luxuriant undergrowth in the foreground. On the beach in front of them a number of large coral blocks lay strewn about on the bright sand. Otherwise there was no sign of life, apart from white birds sailing over the palm tufts.

  At two o’clock we had come so close that we began to sail along the island, just outside the baffling reef. As we gradually approached, we heard the roar of the breakers like a steady waterfall against the reef, and soon they sounded like an endless express train running parallel with us a few hundred yards from our starboard side. Now, too, we could see the white spray which was occasionally flung high into the air behind the curly, breaking wave backs just in there where the “train” was roaring along.

  Two men at the same time stood turning the steering oar; they were behind the bamboo cabin and so had no view ahead whatever. Erik, as navigator, stood on the top of the kitchen box and gave directions to the two men at the heavy oar. Our plan was to keep as close in to the dangerous reef as was safe. We kept a continuous lookout from the masthead for a gap or opening in the reef where we could try to slip the raft through. The current was now driving us along the whole length of the reef and played us no tricks. The loose centerboards allowed us to steer at an angle of about 20° to the wind on both sides, and the wind was blowing along the reef.