The Creatures of the Kon-Tiki voyage

 

The Creatures of the Kon-Tiki voyage

                It's hard to imagine a better platform for observing marine life than a slow, silent raft.  The crew of Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl's balsa Kon-Tiki discovered this was true when, in 1947, they set out to test Heyerdahl's theory that South American natives could have spread people and culture across the Pacific through raft voyages. The raft sailed west for 101 days until it fetched up on a reef in the Tuamotu Islands.

While scientists today reject Heyerdahl’s idea, given genetic and cultural proof that Polynesia was populated from the other direction, this voyage by six men and a parrot (Lorita, if you’re wondering) was an audacious effort.  The carrying of modern charts and a radio didn’t do much to reduce the hazards of the voyage. The “hull” consisted of nine balsa logs, about two feet in diameter and up to 45 feet long, with smaller logs lashed across them.  Allegedly, a naval officer bet Heyerdahl and his crew a lifetime supply of whisky that they’d never make it across the Pacific alive. (Whether he paid off is not reported.)   

                The raft became something of a floating island, festooned with seaweed and investigated by all manner of marine fauna. The six men of the raft's international crew observed countless sea creatures, including a titanic whale shark which lingered for two days until a crewman pointlessly drove a harpoon into its head.  Heyerdahl also recorded a blue shark he estimated was nearly twenty feet long, which would be (by quite a margin) a record for that sleek predator.

                The voyage did not result in the formal description of any new species, but the crew did collect the first whole specimen of the weird deep-water predator called the snake mackerel. "Collect" may be too strong a word, since the Kon Tiki's two specimens of the fish obligingly jumped onto the raft at night.

                The snake mackerel was previously known only from a few skeletal remains washed ashore in South America. The new specimens showed the eel-shaped fish was about three feet long in life. It was colored violet and blue and featured large black eyes and bladelike teeth. One drowsy crewmember studied this finned nightmare for a moment and shook his head. "No, fish like that don't exist," he decided.

                Of special interest, however, are the visitors that couldn't be identified at all.

                Heyerdahl recorded that, on several nights, the raft was surrounded by "round heads two or three feet in diameter, lying motionless and staring at us with great glowing eyes."  At other times, the crew spotted "balls of light" over three feet across, flashing on and off under the waves.

                One night, a massive, phosphorescent form maneuvered back and forth under the Kon-Tiki. It appeared to change shape, then split into two and then three shining things, whose visible parts alone were estimated at thirty feet long.  No features were visible, just the huge, vaguely oval backs of the three unknown animals, circling under the raft for hours without surfacing. Fascinated crewmembers hung lights over the side to lure the mysterious visitors up, but without results.

                The crew also observed fish they couldn't name.  One was described rather puzzlingly in the log as a "thick dark-colored fish with a broad white body, thin tail, and spikes."  Another was six feet long with a "thin snout, large dorsal fin near head and a smaller one in the middle of the back, heavy sickle-shaped tailfin."  It swam by "wriggling its body like an eel."  On one occasion, thirty of these were observed in a school.

                Several times the raft passed "a huge dark mass, the size of the floor of a room," which remained motionless as they drifted by.

                Heyerdahl thought this last creature was a giant manta ray. Some of the other fellow travelers might have been enormous squid. And the others…?

All six men made the trip safely. The parrot, alas, was killed by a wave, although a hitchhiking crab named Johannes became a popular pet. Heyerdahl died in 2002, and his raft is on display in Oslo in his native Norway. Interestingly, one recent study (Ioannidi et. al., 2020) reported there was at least one instance in which a few South Americans did make this voyage.

Several rafts have made this crossing since, but none met all the creatures Heyerdahl reported. Might it still be worth repeating with modern sonar, night vision equipment, and collecting apparatus? I can’t find any source in which Heyerdahl’s creatures were identified, although I suspect the large fish have been identified since the voyage.  Still, some of Kon-Tiki’s strange companions could remain mysteries for years to come, reminders that beneath the waves is something very much like another planet, where we are only visitors. 

Heyerdahl, Thor. Kon-Tiki. George Allen and Unwin, 1950

https://www.amazon.com/Kon-Tiki-Expedition-Thor-Heyerdahl-1950-12-05/dp/B01K948S96/

Alexander G. Ioannidi et. al.. “Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement,” Nature, July 2020

Albright, Syd. “HISTORY CORNER: Thor Heyerdahl and Kon-Tiki,,” April 22, 221, https://cdapress.com/news/2021/aug/22/history-corner-thor-heyerdahl-and-kon-tiki/