I like that
they took their time, and particularly like the part about asking permission
from the local indigenous people wherever they went.
I found this
all the more interesting because of my lifelong interest in Thor Heyerdahl,
whom I first read along about sixth grade and whose books I read and re-read
for years thereafter: KON-TIKI, AKU-AKU, THE RA EXPEDITION.
In more recent
times, I was much taken with Geoffrey Irwin's book THE PREHISTORIC EXPLORATIONS
AND COLONISATION OF THE PACIFIC (highly recommended), which I first found in
the Kent library and later tracked down my own copy of. I came away from
Irwin's book persuaded that he was in the right about the Polynesian
exploration and settlement of the Pacific as purposeful: carefully planned and
skillfully carried out, not a matter of setting out in a random direction and hoping
for the best.*
I find myself
curious as to what Heyerdahl wd make of this just-completed epic voyage,
carried out v. much in the Heyerdahlian manner. On the one hand, he was the
great champion who argued that we deeply underestimate prehistoric peoples,
many of whom he held to be highly skilled boatmen capable of long voyages
across the sea -- whether from Peru to Tahiti (Kon Tiki) or the Mediterranean to the Caribbean (The Ra). And on the other hand, his
strongly-held personal thesis was that the Pacific was settled from the east,
not the west.** That is, that the peoples of Easter Island &c were
descended at least in part (culturally as well as biologically) from explorers
who came from the Pacific coast of North and especially South America -- an
argument that's now been not so much disproven as rendered moot.
On a personal note,
Heyerdahl was one of my heroes for trying to actually find out if his theories
were possible by practical experimentation in the field. I cd no longer accept
Von Daniken and other 'unsolved mystery' types about the heads of Easter Island,
for example, after reading Heyerdahl (AKU-AKU), who showed how the statues were carved,
how they were moved, and how they were set up once in position, complete with
top-knots. There's also a Tolkien connection, albeit a tenuous one, in that Allen
& Unwin was Heyerdahl's publisher. Just was THE LORD OF THE RINGS was
A&U's big hit of the 1950s, their great hit of the decade before Tolkien
had been KON-TIKI. In fact, the one time I got to meet Joy Hill, she had a copy
of one of Heyerdahl's ships (either the RA or, more likely, the TIGRIS) on her
mantle, a gift she said from Heyerdahl, who'd become a friend of hers in the
course of their dealings at Allen & Unwin.
--John R.
*his chapter
on the early (30,000 BC) movements by ship from mainland asia to New Guinea and
Australia was particularly interesting --mostly predicated on whether you cd see where you wanted to get to from where you were -- and possibly apropos of arguments re. the early (pre-Clovis) settlement of the Americas.
**I have, but have
not read, a copy of his massive tome AMERICAN INDIANS IN THE PACIFIC (Allen
& Unwin, 1953) -- though looking at it now I see he includes material on
native peoples from near where I now live, like the Makah and Salish.
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