In search of paradise

Literature

By Nicolas

Rothwell

IN the mid 19305, a young Norwegian couple, disen chanted with their own civili sation, decided to escape the chains of their circumstances. They searched for the most unspoilt spot on earth to spend a year long honeymoon immersed in scientific and social experiment. They chose the Marquesas, remotest of all the island groups of French Polynesia.

“We wanted to see if the two of us could resume the kind of life abandoned by our ancestors.” So began the much-charted intellectual and geographic adventures of Thor Heyerdahl.

Green was the Earth on the Seventh Day, part memoir, part ecological tract, reprises the engaging tale of Heyerdahl’s Marquesan sojourn, first published in his Fatu-Hiva. It also provides a clue to the pattern of the Kon-Tiki explorer’s restless life, and connects the theorist of Pacific Voyaging with the impassioned advocate of green causes. Heyerdahl, as Oceanic scholars know all too well, is an effective, high-profile communicator of his own con victions - he has a firm belief that early colonisation of Polynesia from South America occurred - with committed per suasiveness, he has re-enacted the skills of ancient navigators: and he has championed the harmonious virtues of pre-technologi cal civilisation.

These are among the best-known of his enthusiasms and they combine in Green Was The Earth, a work written in grand ret rospect from Heyerdahl’s new Peruvian home, where he can gaze out on pyramids built long ago, according to Inca legend, by the vanished priest-king Kon-Tiki.

The Heyerdahls, Thor and Liv, spent a

bracing year in their Marquesan paradise.

It turned out to be disease-ridden, socially

troubled and depopulated.

The collision of their idealism with colonial reality is played out against the backdrop of sombre expectations: they were waiting for the outbreak .of World War.

“The spectacular progress of the mod em world”, felt Heyerdahl, “had by-passed any ethical standard.” The island of Fatu- Hiva, by contrast, offered perilous canoe escapades in which our hero is suspended between death and life; climbs along the razor-thin mountain ridges; unusual meet ings with ghost-like hermit crabs.

Eccentric figures appear: the Protestant pastor whose flock is limited to himself and the sexton; the erudite copra plantation owner Henry Lie of Hiva Oa, who rejoices in his pulley-controlled house; even Tei Tetua, the last surviving ex-cannibal on Fatu-Hiva.

The youthful Heyerdahl’s professional orientation is set by his stumbling across

the now-famous Marquesan sculptures:

magnificent colossi plunged in jungle foliage, “with round eyes as big as life belts and grotesque mouths drawn out in diabolical grins wide enough to swallow a human body.”

This encounter, and reflection on the style and subjects of the statuary, helped set the course of Heyerdahl’s life-long cru sade. If the carvings resembled South American stonework, then ocean voyagers must have preceded them; and if the Pacific had been so crossed, the Atlantic and other oceans may well also have been early avenues of cultural dissemination and of commerce.

Heyerdahl, like a good number of Western explorers and intellectual beach combers, has long been obsessed with Easter Island, where he discerns not mere ly an American connection, but an envi ronmental message.

Care for planet earth, indeed, is the great theme of his later years, and this book makes plain that it was his initial, all consuming motivation - the cause that brought him in search of an imagined pris tine Pacific.

Treeless, shattered Easter Island, so movingly described in later Heyerdahl

books, has its own Marquesan analogue here - the uninhabited Motane Island, where “man and environment had both perished together” and nothing could be found but endless skeletons of animals and a few starving sheep.

“Never before had the sun, the very intensity of the sunlight, given me the same feeling as when a full moon shines on a cemetery. The white trees stood like tombstones over a pillaged graveyard; there were skulls and bones everywhere. It was midnight at noon.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, despite the best intentions, the journey to the promised

island proved a temporary delight. Tropical

existence in the midst of a harsh landscape eventually palled, even if the Heyerdahls found a degree of calm and freedom on Fatu-Hiva that stayed with them in memo ry long after.

They felt, though, “an urge, an inconve nient need, to return to civilisation. But we did not want to be a single step father from nature than life in our part of the world made necessary.”

“Liv,” said Heyerdahl to his wife, and with these words he finished his first book on his Marquesan idyll, “One cannot buy a ticket to paradise.” For a summary work, though, and for one by the grand old man of geographic endeavour and exploration science, something rather more portentous was obviously felt to be necessary by way of conclusion, and Green Was The Earth offers its reader another 50 pages of epi logue, most of it in the form of a popular science exposition of cosmology and bio logical evolution retold in terms of the story of the seven days of creation.

End-game comes in the form of an invocation, a testament to Heyerdahl’s own children - both advice and moral message: “As we did before you, you may wonder forever why you were bom and what the purpose of life may be,” he muses: “Inside us is eternity and infinity, and there is where you will find both paradise and hell.

That is where God and the devil have their

battleground.”

And so, not a moment too soon, Green Was The Earth on The Seventh Day clos es, attempting with its last breath, much as its author has throughout his entire exis tence, to bridge two separate worlds.

Green was the Earth on the Seventh Day, by Thor Heyerdahl published by Little Brown, 1997. SA3S ■