Kon-Tiki in Reverse:The Tahiti-Nui Expedition |
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Section 1
1: De Bisschop’s critique of Kon-Tiki 2: De Bisschop’s “Maritime Ethnology” Section 21: Testing the seaworthiness of bamboo 2: Building the Tahiti-Nui Section 31: The Tahiti-Nui Expedition: False Starts and Archaeological 2: Eastward towards 3: Towards Eric De Bisschop (from his book Tahiti-Nui).Eric De Bisschop’s Tahiti-Nui (after Danielsson, 1960).The route of Tahiti-Nui and other raft expeditions after Kon-Tiki. |
Section 1: The remarkable Eric de Bisschop1: De Bisschop’s critique of the Kon-Tiki theory Thor Heyerdahl’s
idea of a bearded white god-man bringing civilization to Like William Willis, Eric
de Bisschop was in his sixties, and had already
spent much of his life at sea, before living the last years of his life on
rafts. In the 1930s, after four years
in Just before the Second
World War, he built a Polynesian double-hulled canoe he named Kaimiloa, and
sailed it from Settling in These centerboards, or guaras, allowed
one to tack and cross a raft into the wind like any European sailing
vessel. As Heyerdahl
wrote in 1994 to my colleague John Haslett, then planning the first of his
three balsa raft voyages, “balsa rafts of from 3 to 5 balsa logs are still
used in several fishing ports in both Ecuador and north Peru, and they go out
at night and come back to the same beach by noon” (Heyerdahl
1994). Long before Heyerdahl’s
experiments with the guaras,
Eric de Bisschop met Kon-Tiki crewmember and
anthropologist Bengt Danielsson
in Much more than this
esoteric question of raft design, however, was the suggestion that
Polynesian’s could not have reached the shores of When Bengt
Danielsson arrived in The raft was built of
bamboo, equipped with Peruvians guaras, and rigged
like a double-masted Chinese junk. Remarkably, rather than use all his
accumulated experience to demonstrate that a true Polynesian double-hulled
voyaging canoe could manage a journey from Tahiti to South America, de Bisschop proposed that his polyglot bamboo raft could
make the same voyage against five thousand miles of prevailing winds and
currents. He advanced his proposal to
general disbelief. When he announced
that he would set his course far to the south, to take advantage of the
shifting westerly winds and currents that prevail around 40° south, most
sailors thought the expedition a suicide.
Any raft caught in the cold and “roaring forties,” they argued, would
be quickly torn to pieces. To de Bisschop’s
credit, he was merely taking anthropological theorizing to its logical
conclusion. Like prevailing winds, the
prevailing anthropological view was one of an ultimate Southeast Asian origin
for Polynesian culture. De Bisschop on the other hand, considered the “Polynesian
problem,” as it was often referred to, far from solved. Like Heyerdahl,
he had no time for academics with no practical
maritime experience upon which to base their theories of Polynesian origins
and migrations. Heyerdahl
had had the courage to put his raft where his theory was. For this reason, and this reason alone, de Bisschop told Bengt Danielsson that he had more respect for Thor Heyerdahl than all his other opponents put together. 2: De Bisschop’s “Maritime Ethnology” In de Bisschop’s
view, if anthropologists wanted to understand the essentially maritime
culture of the Polynesians, they had better start to understand the nature of
the maritime world. That meant a vast expansion
of scholarly geographic horizons, and a total abandoning of the idea (still
subconsciously prevalent in many academic discussions) that the geography of
the Pacific has remained unchanged since time immemorial. De Bisschop
railed against anthropologists who “blandly assume that the geographical
features of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, with all the lands which emerge
from them or border them, have not budged an inch for thousands of years—an
assumption based on nothing except perhaps man’s subconscious reluctance to
admit that he inhabits an unstable and ever-changing crust” (de Bisschop 1959, 7). Bisschop saw a
Polynesian sphere of influence extending from To study this enormous
problem, de Bisschop envisioned as well a new field
of maritime ethnology, where scholars would use recreated voyaging
technologies in order to study ancient diffusions. That genetic evidence now points to the
likelihood of transoceanic migrations to Like Danielsson,
many wondered why de Bisschop would choose a raft
for his experiment, rather than the double-hulled and double-outrigger canoes
he was so familiar with. De Bisschop was clearly stung by this repeated
criticism. He countered that, in his
studies of Polynesian navigation, a maritime culture as sophisticated as that
of the Polynesians, surely would have possessed different vessels for
different missions. He imagined that
single outrigger canoes were appropriate for skimming over shoals and reefs;
much larger double-hulled and double-outrigger canoes would have been used
for quick hit-and-run raids on neighboring tribes or voyages to known
destinations. But for long-distance
voyages of exploration and colonization, with their essential cargoes of
people and provisions, only large rafts would suffice. And as de Bisschop
saw it, when equipped with the moveable centerboards called guaras, these
rafts became sailing vessels capable of true navigation. “It was by no means a floating contraption
at the mercy of winds and currents” (de Bisschop
1959, 34-35). Furthermore, the slow
speed of a raft voyage, de Bisschop imagined, was
no hindrance for a Section 2: Testing Bamboo and Building the Raft1: Testing the Seaworthiness of Bamboo To test whether Tahitian
bamboo could remain buoyant for the duration of a long ocean voyage, de Bisschop had a diving platform constructed from bamboo
and moored near a friend’s house for a year.
While some of the bamboo was eventually attacked teredo navalis, the platform was still afloat
after a year. As for whether or not
Polynesians ever used bamboo rafts, de Bisschop was
unequivocal. He cited several voyages
on bamboo rafts navigated by prehistoric Marquesans
fleeing tribal wars. Some of these
bamboo rafts, constructed with five layers of bamboo logs, ventured as far as
In building the raft, de Bisschop had little to go on in the way of local
knowledge. If bamboo rafts had ever
been used in 2: Building the Tahiti-Nui When the bamboo was ready,
it was lashed together with coconut fibre
rope. The sails de Bisschop
had plaited from vegetable fibres. Once finished, he christened the whole
creation Tahiti Nui,
Great Tahiti. The one concession to
the twentieth century was a cabin made of double walls of plywood, which
housed an echo sounder, radio, a darkroom, and a dry sleeping area for the
crew. Unlike Bombard, whose voyage de Bisschop cited, he had no desire to conduct a human
endurance test, “to be made to swallow plankton and other revolting stuff of
that sort, to drink sea water or the juice squeezed out of raw fish” (Ibid,
109). De Bisschop
himself was sixty-five years old and debilitated by bronchitis and
emphysema. His doctor told him in no
uncertain terms that he would not survive the journey, a knowledge that
bothered de Bisschop not at all. By de Bisschop’s
reckoning, the last great voyages by a Polynesian fleet had taken place some
700 years earlier, during the fourteenth century. On Section 3: The Tahiti-Nui Expedition1: False starts and Like all previous raft
expeditions, Tahiti-Nui
began with a tow by a diesel-powered ship to its place a departure. Fifty outrigger canoes escorted the raft
from At this early
stage of the experiment, the raft surprised even de Bisschop
by its ability to use its guara centerboards to make a passage toward the
southeast. Before the voyage, de Bisschop thought the best the raft might do was approach
his own Austral Heyerdahl
had just called at many of these islands after his work on 2: Eastward towards Beyond Instead, they were met
almost immediately by a dreadful fortnight of winds blowing from the
east. De Bisschop
had told Bengt Danielsson
that he intended to sail down to 40° south, where he would be assured of
steady winds and currents from the west.
But now he hesitated, staying in an area of wavering winds around 35°
south. Even here the seas were rough,
and de Bisschop was convinced Tahiti-Nui
would lose its two masts if he tried to sail any farther south. Ben Finney, for one,
believes it was the only decision de Bisschop could
have made. At 40° south, the raft
would have been torn apart by mountainous seas. If prehistoric Polynesians had voyaged
along this route to the east, they did so only at great risk to themselves
and their expeditions. Even at 35°
south, heavy winds forced de Bisschop to take in
most of the sail the raft carried, to prevent it from being carried
away. When the raft began show
signs of breaking up in late February, de Bisschop
was forced to put down a minor mutiny by the three other crewmembers. All were half de Bisschop’s
age and cared little for the scientific substance of his experiment. They advocated instead an audacious retreat
as far as 50° south in an attempt to speed their passage. Daily radio interruptions suggesting steady
winds further south—and thereby further enticing the demoralized crew in that
deadly direction—nearly drove de Bisschop to pitch
the set overboard. When the raft
circumscribed a complete circle on March 11, returning the crew to a point
they had passed seventeen days earlier, morale sank even further. One unexpected advantage
of de Bisschop’s more northerly course was a near
miss of Had de Bisschop
done so, it is likely that the voyage of Tahiti-Nui would have taken a rightful place alongside Kon-Tiki as one
of the great Pacific drift voyages, and ironically increased its value to
maritime anthropology. Tahiti-Nui had linked the Austral
islands of Rapa Iti and Raivavae, with their stone fortifications and ceremonial marae
platforms, with the stone ahu platforms and carvings of 3: Towards The destruction of Tahiti-Nui
arrived in slow and painful measures.
The raft drifted through April as the crew suffered through a
near-total lack of fresh water. May brought with it fresh winds from the west, but the raft
was still a thousand miles from “They have wicked heads
with two hard curved plates at the business end, only too well designed for
the dastardly work of boring and destroying. “I have seen natives,
especially in By the middle of May,
after six months at sea, even de Bisschop was tired
of the cold southern seas, and began to long for the warm and light blue
waters of The raft plowed on to its
farthest point east: 87° 54’W. Winds
then forced it back more than a degree to the west, where a Chilean naval
vessel caught up with it on Once ashore in |