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Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search var _hbEC=0,_hbE=new Array;function _hbEvent(a,b){b=_hbE[_hbEC++]=new Object();b._N=a;b._C=0;return b;} var hbx=_hbEvent("pv");hbx.vpc="HBX0250u";hbx.gn="hits.gureport.co.uk"; var pageTitle = "{front}{TV+Listings}{179691}"; var refreshRegexp = new RegExp('[?].*&?refresh=1','i'); if (refreshRegexp.test(top.location + "")) { pageTitle += "{AUTO}"; } hbx.acct="DM5506080PEE;DM54102495BW";//ACCOUNT NUMBER(S) hbx.pn=pageTitle;//PAGE NAME(S) XXX hbx.mlc="GU/Guardian/Daily/TV+Listings"; hbx.pndef="title";//DEFAULT PAGE NAME ???? hbx.ctdef="full"; // DEFAULT CONTENT CATEGORY ???? hbx.fv=""; hbx.lt="auto"; hbx.dlf="n"; hbx.dft="n"; hbx.elf="n"; hbx.seg=""; hbx.fnl=""; hbx.cmp=""; hbx.cmpn=""; hbx.dcmp=""; hbx.dcmpn=""; hbx.dcmpe=""; hbx.dcmpre=""; hbx.hra=""; hbx.hqsr=""; hbx.hqsp=""; hbx.hlt=""; hbx.hla=""; hbx.gp=""; hbx.gpn=""; hbx.hcn=""; hbx.hcv=""; hbx.cp="null"; hbx.cpd=""; hbx.ci="(none)"; hbx.hc1="can"; hbx.hc2="(none)"; hbx.hrf=""; hbx.pec=""; &c1=can&c2=(none)&c3=&c4=&c5=&c6=&c7=) var s_account="gu_culture,gu_network"; s.pageName="Culture : TV Listings"; s.server='66'; s.channel = "Culture"; s.pageType=""; s.prop1='can'; s.prop2='(none)'; s.prop3="guardian.co.uk"; s.prop9=""; s.prop10="GU"; s.prop11="Culture"; s.prop12="TV Listings"; s.hier2="GU/Culture/TV Listings"; var s_code=s.t();if(s_code)document.write(s_code); )    Go to: Guardian Unlimited homeUK newsWorld newsComment is free blogNewsblogSport blogArts & entertainment blogPodcastsIn picturesVideo----------------------Archive searchArts and entertainmentBooksBusinessEducationGuardian.co.ukEnvironmentFilmFootballJobsKatine appealLife and styleMediaGuardian.co.ukMoneyMusicThe ObserverPoliticsScienceShoppingSocietyGuardian.co.ukSportTalkTechnologyTravelBeen there----------------------AudioEmail servicesSpecial reportsThe GuardianThe northernerThe wrap----------------------Advertising guideCompare finance productsCrosswordEvents / offersFeedbackGarden centreGNM press officeGraduateGuardian BookshopGuardianEcostoreGuardianFilmsHeadline serviceHelp / contactsInformationLiving our valuesNewsroomNotes & QueriesReader OffersSoulmates datingStyle guideSyndication servicesTravel offersTV listingsWeatherWeb guidesWorking for us----------------------Guardian AbroadGuardian WeeklyMoney ObserverPublicLearnGuardian back issuesObserver back issuesGuardian Professional   Network home  UK news World latest Books Money Film Society The Observer Politics Education Shopping Work Football Jobs Media Search    Heyerdahl nears end of voyage The man who sailed to fame on Kon-Tiki is dying after a life filled with high adventure and scientific controversyObserver Worldview Jason Burke Observer Sunday April 14, 2002 As a boy he lay in bed and looked through the windows of the family's wooden cabin at the blue sky and, far below, the still blue waters of the Norwegian fjord. He dreamt of distant seas and distant peoples. This weekend he lies dying in his home on the Italian Riviera, watching the waves and the clouds once again and, no doubt, dreaming still of far-off oceans. Within days, it is likely that Thor Heyerdahl - explorer, scientist, ecologist and adventurer - will be dead. Last week he refused further treatment on an inoperable and spreading brain tumour and returned from hospital to his home in the resort of Colla Micheri near Alassio with his family and fourth wife, Jacqueline, a former Miss France, to 'rest in peace'. His son, Thor Heyerdahl Jnr, described his father's condition as 'very weak'. 'It is just a matter of time now,' he added. It is 66 years since Heyerdahl, then 22, and his 20-year-old first wife tried to escape from civilisation by moving to the South Pacific island of Fatu-Hiva in the Marquesas. Fatu-Hiva, so remote that the its inhabitants were unaware of the First World War until long after it had finished, was, the couple hoped, a tropical paradise where they would be cut off from the modern world and its technology and could return to nature. To finance this utopian adventure, they gained the support of their wealthy parents, a rich wine merchant and the University of Oslo, though their projects were remarkably fuzzy. 'I was to visit some isolated Pacific island group and study how the local animals had found their way there,' Heyerdahl wrote later. Predictably, they found that the Marquesas were not a paradise, and their own existence there was anything but utopian. The people were riddled with tuberculosis, venereal disease and elephantiasis. Isolating themselves from the locals as far as possible, the Heyerdahls built a bamboo cabin to live in, but soon became depressed with their dreary vegetarian diet and began to sprout alarming boils and sores. To reach the nearest doctor, they had to cross the notoriously stormy stretch between two islands in a patched-up lifeboat and nearly died in high seas. When they returned to Fatu-Hiva after a month's absence, they found that the jungle had destroyed their bamboo cabin so they moved to a cave by the sea. Heyerdahl admitted that the project of returning to nature was a fiasco. 'There is nothing for modern man to return to,' he gloomily commented. His one solid achievement was to interview the last Marquesan cannibal, who told him that of all the portions of 'long pig' he had eaten the tastiest was the forearm of a white woman. Yet the eight-month stay on Fatu-Hiva merely whetted Heyerdahl's appetite. The young zoologist had to wait for the end of the Second World War, in which he fought with the Free Norwegian Forces, and a divorce from his first wife, before launching the Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947 to put the theories he had developed during his previous trip to the test. Challenged by a contemptuous academic to prove that mankind could have populated the Polynesian Islands from the east, rather than from Malaysia, Heyerdahl built a balsawood raft and, with six Norwegian crewmen, sailed 4,300 miles across the Pacific from Peru. The trip turned him into a star. It coincided with the development of media technology that allowed the expedition to film themselves. The book of the hazardous 101-day journey was a bestseller. Translated into 67 languages, it sold 20 million copies and the film, in a bleak postwar world starved of entertainment, was a massive hit. Fame made Heyerdahl a fortune and many enemies. Established anthropologists attacked his theories and methodology. The esoteric world of transoceanic migration studies and its offshoots in genetics have still yet to form a consensus about Heyerdahl's ideas. Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University and a leading authority on DNA and human evolution, told The Observer that modern techniques had shown that Heyerdahl was completely wrong. 'It's a shame because I had rather hoped he, as such a colourful character, was right, but with new techniques you can show the Polynesians did not come from the Americas. The movement was from the west,' Sykes said. Contemporary defenders say that critics have misunderstood Heyerdahl's work. 'Thor was saying that the people of Polynesia came originally from Asia, but had travelled via the western coast of America and approached the islands from that side. They had followed the prevailing currents,' said Dr Don Ryan, an archaeologist at the Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, who has worked closely with Heyerdahl over the past five years. 'And Thor proved that point.' Ryan also defends Heyerdahl against accusations of 'stunt archaeology'. 'It's as if you have to wear a lab coat to be a scientist,' he said. 'Thor employed a very dramatic form of experimental archaeology. It may have been spectacular but was rooted in very serious and scholarly study.' But critics have never bothered Heyerdahl. After the Kon-Tiki he turned his attention to the Galapagos and the mystery of the stone statues on Easter Island, where he used legends and oral tradition in an attempt to discover why a former civilisation on the remote Pacific island came to a sudden end. The resulting book - Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island - was another bestseller, much to his detractors' chagrin. In 1969 the Ra expeditions returned to the theme of sea-crossing, this time using reed boats modelled on Ancient Egyptian patterns and launched from Morocco to sail to the Caribbean. 'We tested the papyrus reeds in our bathtub,' Heyerdahl recalled at the Foyle's lunch held in his honour two years ago. Neither did age mellow him. Two years ago he pronounced that a giant pyramid-shaped structure in Sicily could have been built by ancient sun-worshippers. Italian archaeologists said it was a giant pile of rocks cleared from the fields. Most recently, Heyerdahl claimed the Vikings did not come from Norway but were ancestors of Russian Cossacks who fled north, led by the original historical figure on whom the legend of the Norse god Odin was based. Whatever the veracity of his theories, Heyerdahl has inspired generations of explorers. Sir Ranulph Fiennes told The Observer that he remembered watching the Kon-Tiki films: 'For me, as an impressionable young man in the Fifties, he was number one. We could see these amazing pictures of these tiny boats almost sinking on these huge waves.' Other role models for Fiennes were Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who explored the Empty Quarter of Arabia and the Hindu Kush, and Sir Vivien Fuchs, the Antarctic explorer. Fuchs is dead and Thesiger is now 91. 'There is a sense of a generation passing,' said Fiennes. 'They were all wonderful in their time. Heyerdahl himself was a real detective, an Inspector Morse of the ocean. When he set off on the Kon-Tiki he had very little to go on but his own intuition. It was fantastically brave.' Heyerdahl, who has had five children, has spent his final years with Jacqueline in Tenerife, developing theories about possible parallels between step pyramids in Peru, Mexico and Tenerife itself. One recent idea is that a cataclysmic event - perhaps a great flood that occurred about 5,000 years ago - acted as a catalyst for the development of civilisations all over the globe. Ryan said that Heyerdahl had been deeply affected by the rise of totalitarianism and violence in the Europe of his youth. Writing in The Observer in 1974, Heyerdahl described his feelings on leaving Fatu-Hiva in 1938. 'We hated going back to civilisation,' he wrote. 'But we had to do it. We were sure then, and I still am, that the only place where it is possible to find nature is within yourself. There it is, unchanged, now as always.' More from The ObserverObserver Worldview: international commentaryObserver International news   Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008 |
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