The Wayfinders by Wade Davis Read Free Book Online Page A

with the claim, supported by a harrowing journey of some
7,000 kilometres on a balsa raft, that Polynesia had actually been settled
from South America. When the raft, named
Kon-Tiki
, crashed onto a
reef in the Raroia Atoll in the Tuamotus some 800 kilometres northeast of
Tahiti on August 7, 1947, after a 101-day journey from Peru, a National Geographic hero was born. Heyerdahl was blond, good-looking,
bronzed by the sun, charismatic, and eminently photogenic: the very
archetype of the modern adventurer. His argument in favour of American
origins for the people of the Pacific, however, was dubious in the extreme.
    The argument was based on three strands of
non-evidence. First, Heyerdahl maintained, as had the early Spaniards, that
it would have been impossible for Polynesians to sail east into the
prevailing equatorial winds. This was an old puzzle that had in fact been
solved by Captain Cook in his conversations with the navigator Tupaia. The
answer was an open secret in Polynesia, but perhaps unknown to Heyerdahl, or
at least inconvenient for his hypothesis. There is a time every year when
the trade winds reverse, and sailors are free to sail east, knowing full
well that if they become lost, they need only await the returning easterlies
to carry them home.
    Heyerdahl’s second argument focused on monumental
architecture. Comparing the stonework of the Inca with that of Polynesia, he
cited similarities so superficial as to be meaningless to the trained eye of
an archaeologist. Third, and the only interesting possibility, was the
presence in Polynesia of the sweet potato,
Ipomoea batatas
, a plant
undoubtedly of American origin. All this implied, as we now know, was that
Polynesian vessels reached South America and returned home, a fact
corroborated by the recent discovery of chicken bones, a bird of Asian
origin, in pre-Columbian middens at El Arenal, on the south coast of Chile.
    In making his sensational claim Thor Heyerdahl
ignored the overwhelming body of linguistic, ethnographic, and
ethnobotanical evidence, augmented today by genetic and archaeological data,
indicating that he was patently wrong. He failed to note that in order to
get Kon-Tiki beyond the Humboldt Current at the beginning of
its voyage he had required the aid of the Peruvian navy. Or that there was
no evidence in his time, or today, to suggest that the design of sail rigged
on the raft existed in pre-Columbian South America. Indeed, Heyerdahl was so
loose with his interpretations, and so casual with chronology, that his
theory, as one scholar has suggested, was equivalent to a modern historian
claiming that: “America was discovered in the last days of the Roman Empire
by King Henry VIII, who brought a Ford Thunderbird to the benighted
aborigines.” But none of this mattered. Heyerdahl’s story was a sensation
and his book,
Kon-Tiki
, went on to sell more than 20 million
copies.

    FOR POLYNESIANS AND serious scholars of Polynesia, Heyerdahl’s
theory, which denied the culture its greatest accomplishment, was the
ultimate insult. But it inspired two vitally important initiatives. First,
it forced archaeologists to dig, to seek and find concrete evidence that
would allow them to trace the Polynesian diaspora. Second, it led Hawaiians
to sail. The Polynesian Voyaging Society, established in 1973, launched the Hokule’a on March 8, 1975. What began as a visionary
experiment grew over time into a mission to recapture history and reclaim a
stolen legacy.
    The challenge for archaeologists had always been
the dearth of physical remains upon which to establish a chronology.
Polynesians, technically sophisticated in so many ways, at the time of
European contact did not use pottery. A first breakthrough came in 1952 on
New Caledonia in the Coral Sea. There, at a remote site near a beach called
Lapita, archaeologists did find pottery, highly distinctive stamped ceramics
identical to shards that had been found thirty years before on Tonga, an
island 2,400