THOR HEYERDAHL: Thor Heyerdahl, who died on April 18th aged 87, was one of the great individualistic standard-bearers of mid-20th-century adventure. In 1947, he and his five-person crew climbed aboard Kon-Tiki, an experimental balsa raft, and swept atop the Pacific's Humboldt current from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands - and into history. His achievement, Thor Heyerdahl said, proved that New World mariners from the east might have sailed into Polynesia, contradicting the general assumption that it had been populated from the west.
The project lay at the heart of Thor Heyerdahl's life's work - trying to prove his conviction that the cultures of the ancient world were sometimes linked by sailors who could cross oceans.
To establish the dryland archaeological support for this hypothesis, in 1952-'53 Thor Heyerdahl travelled to the Galapagos Islands, lying on the equator 500 miles to the west of Ecuador. Shards of what were suggested to be pre-Incan pots challenged the view that there had been no pre-European visitors there.
This was just the prelude to his expeditions to Easter Island (Rapa Nui), set remotely apart to the south-east of the Tuamotu archipelago. Following that venture, he became interested in the feasibility of crossing the Atlantic in reed boats, and then in the possibility of ancient feats of seafaring in the Arabian sea and Indian ocean.
Demanding, opinionated, but sensitive and kind, throughout his career, he refused to play by the most basic rules of academic interchange, yet bristled when faced with criticism, and promptly took his case to the welcoming court of public opinion. There was, he said in a recent interview, a "shocking extent of ignorance" on the part of those who "call themselves authorities and pretend to have a monopoly of all knowledge". None the less, every archaeologist who ever worked with Thor Heyerdahl liked and respected him.
Born on October 6th, 1914, in Larvik, Norway, Thor Heyerdahl was the lonely, only son of unhappy, estranged parents who divorced during his early childhood. Entering Oslo University to study zoology and geography, he changed to anthropology while living in Fatu-Hiva in the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, having become fascinated by the question of where its inhabitants had come from.
There he shed the conventions of normal life - including the completion of his degree course - and, like so many earlier South Seas travellers, artists and poets, embarked on his own internal journey.
The next step, from 1939 to 1940, was to pursue his theory of native American movements into the Pacific by looking for a "missing link" in British Columbia. He believed that an early Stone Age people from south-east Asia had crossed the Pacific to North America, and had set off again for Polynesia at some point before 1000AD.
Certain artefact and language characteristics suggested to him that there might be a connection between peoples in Malaysia, Polynesia and - at the apex of this distended and still unproven theoretical triangle - some of the native American tribes of British Columbia.
From 1941, Thor Heyerdahl fought in the free Norwegian military forces in Finnmark, at Norway's northernmost extremity. He then conducted further research in Europe and the US from 1945 to 1947.
The Kon-Tiki expedition took its name from a mythical seafarer king who, in a legend of the Aymara Indians of Lake Titicaca, in modern Bolivia, had set off across the seas with his followers and disappeared. From Callao, Peru, to the island of Raroia, in Polynesia, the raft covered 4,300 miles in 101 days.
In 1948, the day after his second marriage had taken place in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Thor Heyerdahl met the American archaeologist Edwin N. Ferdon jnr. At the time, Thor Heyerdahl was lecturing and raising funds to support his book American Indians In The Pacific: The Theory Behind The Kon-Tiki Expedition, a controversial tome published in 1952. One of his chief interests was to trace the origins of Rapa Nui's megalithic sculpture, and to seek evidence of the relationship he believed it had to South American traditions. Ferdon joined the Norwegian expedition to Rapa Nui in 1958.
Thor Heyerdahl published Aku Aku: The Secret Of Easter Island, an imaginative, even fanciful, but engrossing yarn of "secret caves" and "ghostly" ceremonies, woven around the island's imposing sculptures, and stories of a mythical conflict between long- and short-eared people. Edited by Thor Heyerdahl and Ferdon in 1961, it is a landmark in Pacific studies and a monument to the project.
In Peru, Thor Heyerdahl had become acquainted with the use of small reed boats on Lake Titicaca. Excavations on Rapa Nui had uncovered images of what he believed were three-masted reed boats, and this led him to speculate whether such vessels, apparently known in ancient Egypt and still constructed by the Buduma people from Lake Chad, could have crossed the Atlantic.
His 1969 voyage from Morocco in Ra I proved that a papyrus ship could survive ocean conditions for a long time, though its stern threatened to disintegrate after covering 3,000 of the 4,000 miles to Barbados. However, Thor Heyerdahl and his collaborators came to appreciate that the inwardly curled stern they discerned in some ancient Egyptian pictures was not ornamental. It was essential to a vessel's elasticity, and so Thor Heyerdahl enlisted the aid of four Aymara Indians from Bolivia; the second attempt, in Ra II a year later, reached Barbados.
The Tigris expedition of 1977-'78 built on the knowledge gained during the course of the Ra voyages. Thor Heyerdahl sought to prove that Mesopotamian berdi reed could equally well have provided the material for Sumerian boat-builders to get to the Red Sea and Egypt, to the west, and to the ancient civilisations of the Indus Valley, to the east. Tigris, at more than 50ft, was his largest vessel. But when wars in the Red Sea region confined it to Djibouti Harbour, he burnt it in protest.
His expeditions to the Maldive Islands in 1983 and 1984 followed, blossoming out of his belief that these coral reefs had been known to seafarers long before their discovery by Arabs in 1153. Then, in 1986, 1987 and 1988, he returned to Rapa Nui with two main objectives. A story told in the early 1900s claimed that the island's great statues were capable of "walking".
Working with a Czechoslovak engineer named Pavel Pavel, Thor Heyerdahl tied ropes to the top and to the bottom of a small upright statue, and then crews pulling on the ropes wriggled it back and forward, moving it about four feet. The method was impractical in the island's rugged terrain, and Thor Heyerdahl did not pursue it, or other land-based theories, with the passion he brought to sea voyage experimentation.
Among the pyramids of Tucume, Peru, from 1988 to 1993, Thor Heyerdahl found what he believed was proof of his original Kon-Tiki hypothesis: "Images of reed ships crewed by mythical men with bird heads" - symbolic motifs similar to others found in petroglyphs on Rapa Nui.
In 1990, more pyramids took him to Guimar, Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, where he met his third wife, Jacqueline, and bought a house; the couple married in 1996.
Thor Heyerdahl published extensively, lectured widely, made documentary films - the 1951 Oscar-winning Kon-Tiki left an indelible impression - received numerous awards and was granted several honorary degrees. In the field of Polynesian studies he made three significant and enduring contributions: the notion of the sea as connector, not a barrier; the now indisputable fact of contact between South America and Polynesia; and his generous support of modern archaeology.
Thor Heyerdahl: born 1914; died, April 2002