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Play It Again, Thor!
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17646 |
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BOOK WORLD
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6 / 1990 |
4,299 Words |
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Lowell D. Holmes
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EASTER ISLAND
The Mystery Solved
Thor Heyerdahl
New York: Random House, Inc., 1989
256 pp., $24.95
In 1962, when preparing to leave on my second anthropological field trip to Samoa, I returned to Northwestern University to visit my mentor, Dr. Melville J. Herskovits, who was nearing retirement. As fortune would have it, this proved to be our last meeting, since Herskovits died of a heart attack while I was in the field. My former professor had just returned from the International Congress of Americanists and, after telling me about hearing a paper presented by Thor Heyerdahl, he remarked that "if Heyerdahl lives long enough he may turn into a pretty good anthropologist." If Easter Island: The Mystery Solved can be taken as evidence of progress toward that goal, I must conclude that it hasn't happened quite yet. Excellent writer - yes; colorful adventurer - yes; enthusiastic and flamboyant promoter of Pacific island research - yes; but as far as being an objective, open-minded anthropologist - not yet. To begin with, most academic anthropologists would tend to question the competence of someone who claims to be an anthropological scholar but consistently refers to the traditional sacred beliefs of the Easter Islanders as "superstitions."
Pet theory
Thor Heyerdahl has one major flaw that stands as an impediment to his growth in anthropology. This kind of flaw was well described by Thomas Jefferson - no slouch of an anthropologist himself - in a letter to Charles Thomson in 1787. He wrote, "The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees, in every object, only the traits which prove that theory." And in Notes on the State of Virginia he advised, "A patient pursuit of facts and cautious combination and comparison of them, is the drudgery to which man is subjected by his Maker, if he wishes to obtain sure knowledge." It must be admitted that Heyerdahl is surely patient in the presentation of his pet theory of Pacific migration, but saying it over and over again with little that is new in the way of supportable facts does not make the scheme more believable.
Thor Heyerdahl's newest book, Easter Island: The Mystery Solved, presents essentially the same incredible theory he developed in 1947 when he and five other young adventurers got aboard a balsa raft in Peru and headed for the South Seas. That voyage took 101 days and terminated on a reef in the Tuamotu archipelago, proving nothing more than that the currents and prevailing winds can deliver a clumsy log raft to a Polynesian isle - that is, if you have a sea-going tug boat to tow you far enough off-shore to escape the northerly flow of the currents that sweep up the coast toward the Galapagos, a square sail (which ancient Peruvians had not invented), a short wave radio, charts, a compass, and a raft-load of canned provisions. Fifteen hundred cans were still aboard when they arrived in Polynesia. The voyage represented something of an achievement in seamanship and human courage, but it did not prove that anyone else had ever made such a journey.
Easter Island: The Mystery Solved, like Thor Heyerdahl's earlier popular books Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island and The Art of Easter Island, is a handsome volume that begs for coffee table display. The photographs, most
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