The Sun God Shines Anew
Accolades and coins mark 50th anniversary of Thor Heyerdahl's
daring Kon-Tiki expedition
By Michael Brady
Kon-Tiki. The ancient Inca sun god. Thor Heyerdahl, the daring young
Norwegian anthropologist who, in 101 days in 1947, repealed received
academic wisdom and proved that the South Sea islands were most likely
peopled from Peru. A balsa raft adrift for 8,000 kilometres in the
currents of the Pacific, manned mostly by landlubbers. And it all
worked, to be written in the annals of exploration in letters of fire
as bright as the spirit of the sun god symbol painted on the sail
of the Kon-Tiki raft.
As a boy, I knew. Torstein Raaby, the wireless operator on the Kon-Tiki
raft, was one of my heroes, along with the leader of the expedition,
Thor Heyerdahl. Radio was my all-consuming hobby. Every evening during
the expedition, I tuned my amateur radio receiver to pick up Raaby's
signals, at the frequencies published in QST, the member magazine
of the American Radio Relay League. I read up on Raaby, and learned
that when he was just 24, he and fellow commando Karl Rasmussen had
been undercover at Alta in occupied Norway and had radioed the reports
to England that enabled the Royal Air Force to find and permanently
disable the mighty German battleship Tirpitz in April 1943. For that
and other daring undercover operations during the war, Raaby was one
of the 147 of his countrymen to be awarded the Royal Norwegian Olav
Military Cross medal. I read all I could on Norway, at school and
on my own. Thor Heyerdahl's book, The Kon-Tiki Expedition, was first
published in Norwegian in 1948, and then in an English translation
in 1950. My mother gave me one of the first copies available for my
birthday that year. It was a tale equal to any by Joseph Conrad, and
it was real life, not fiction.
A dozen years later, in 1962, I was in Norway, where I have been
since, my boyhood penchant intact. Though I never met him, I likened
Raaby to a kindly adopted uncle, who from his remote location, had
guided me in my choice of a career in electronics. In reading, I learned
that remoteness was his calling in life. He seemed to seek solace
in hardship, first on the mainland in Northern Norway, and then as
a lone wireless operator on Bear Island, far north of the Arctic Circle.
In 1964, when he perished on an ill-fated arctic expedition, I felt
that I had lost a long-time friend.
Now, 50 years after the expedition, Kon-Tiki skipper Thor Heyerdahl
is still going strong, his theories now embodied in the academic circles
that once reviled his findings. The documentary film of the expedition
won an Academy Award "Oscar" in 1951, the only Norwegian
film thus far to be so honoured. The original Norwegian book of 1948,
The Kon-Tiki Expedition has been translated into more than 30 other
languages, a record outstripped since only by Jostein Gaarder's Sofie's
World, the international best-seller of the 1990s. Arguably more than
any other Norwegian feat of this century, the Kon-Tiki expedition
has fired imagination world-wide.
And on my desk there are durable mementoes of the historic expedition,
50th anniversary official commemorative one dollar copper-nickel,
ten dollar silver and one hundred dollar gold coins, issued by Liberia,
a seafaring nation. The one-dollar coin is in a neat first-day cover,
with commemorative Norwegian stamps, postmarked on the anniversary
day, 28 April, at Bygdøy, the location of the Kon-Tiki Museum
in Oslo.
The Kon-Tiki raft under full sail is depicted on the obverses of
the one dollar and one-hundred dollar coins, whilst the Inca Kon-Tiki
mask adorns the obverse of the ten dollar coin. The numismatic workmanship
of the coins reflects the high level of aspiration of the expedition.
And in one respect, the coins bespeak the way of the expedition leader.
Thor Heyerdahl's letter of invitation to join the expedition was just
58 words long, a marvel of brevity for so daring an undertaking. The
coins are also few in number, just 6,000 of the one-dollar coins in
philatelic covers, 25,000 of the ten-dollar coins, and 7,500 of the
one-hundred-dollar coins, low quantities for a commemorative issue.
"If the entire issue is sold, royalty earnings may be appreciable,"
comments Jan Olav Aamlid of Oslo Mynthandel, sole dealers for the
commemorative issue, "and they will go entirely to support the
Kon-Tiki Museum".
As the museum prepares for the second half century of preserving
the record and artefacts of the expedition, I wonder what will happen
in the span of 101 days from July 28 to August 7 or maybe thereafter.
Will some young boy wander through the museum, view the real-life
raft, marvel at the full-size replica of an Easter Island statue,
and leave with a memory that will endure for 50 years? Will he see
the re-released Kon-Tiki film, be given a copy of the reprinted book
or safely put away some of the commemorative coins and feel changed
by the experience? My bet is a definite yes, by the dozens, by the
thousands. Decent daring does not tarnish.
