Living the Legend

Teka, chief of Raroia and Tekume Islands, told the shipwrecked adventurers that in the last ten years only three foreign vessels had called in at Raroia. /ra-ro-ia /

"The village is visited several times a year by the native copra schooner from Tahiti, which brings merchandise and takes away coconut kernels," the chief added a bit more encouragingly.

On the beach facing the lagoon where Kon-Tiki lay marooned on the fringing reef, there was a brief exchange. Then Teka wanted to see the boat that Heyerdahl and his party had arrived on.

One of the natives exclaimed, "It's not a boat, it's a pae-pae, an ancient raft."

Kon Tiki

Pae-pae no longer exist. Only the oldest men in the village are able to relate traditions of them. The last known sighting of pae-pae were by Pizarro and Zarate off the Peru coast in the sixteenth century.

The next day, after a very high tide had made it possible to drag Kon-Tiki to safety in the lagoon, there was a ceremony honoring Heyerdahl and his crew. In a short speech, which was ecstatically received, Thor said succinctly that ten years before, while he had been living on Fatu Hiva in the Marqueses, he had gotten an idea. He had learned that their first chief, son of the sun, had brought their forefathers out to the islands from a mysterious country, the whereabouts of which no one now knew, but which they had given the name Pura.

Heyerdahl had noticed that the Tiki in the jungles of the Marquesas were remarkably like the monoliths left by extinct civilizations in South America.

As no one among the anthropological community would believe that a pae-pae could possibly sail from Peru to the Tuamotus, Thor and his friends had set out to show that it was indeed possible that the Polynesians did hail from Peru and not from Malaysia as many anthropologists had insisted.

The impact of Thor's speech did not derive from its eloquence. For the people of Raroia it was the first time that whites had admitted that the old people may have been speaking the truth.

Kon Tiki, the Sun God that had brought the Polynesians to these isles, had lived and been real, but was now dead and in heaven.

In 101 days, Kon-Tiki sailed approximately 4,300 nautical miles. The book was translated into 66 languages. Of course just because the story of a migration theory became a best seller does not mean that it was true. Try telling that to the Polynesians, if you dare.

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