Quest for Adventure

by Chris Bonington

  ‘9.50: Very close now. Drifting along the reef. Only a hundred or so yards away. Torstein is talking to the man on Rarotonga. All clear. Must pack up log now. All in good spirits; it looks bad, but we shall make it!’

  Now very nearly among the wild upsurge of breaking waves, to give themselves a few more moments to tap out their position on the Morse key of the radio, they dropped the heavy anchor, attached to their thickest length of rope. It held just long enough to swing Kon-Tiki round, so that the stern was facing the reef, then started dragging along the bottom as the raft was swept inexorably towards the thundering, boiling spray of the great Pacific waves smashing on to the reef.

  ‘When we realised that the sea had got hold of us, the anchor rope was cut, and we were off. A sea rose straight up under us and we felt the Kon-Tiki being lifted up in the air. The great moment had come; we were riding on the wave-back at breathless speed, our ramshackle craft creaking and groaning as she quivered under us. The excitement made one’s blood boil. I remember that, having no other inspiration, I waved my arm and bellowed “hurrah” at the pitch of my lungs; it afforded a certain relief and could do no harm anyway. The others certainly thought I had gone mad, but they all beamed and grinned enthusiastically. On we ran with the seas rushing in behind us; this was the Kon-Tiki’s baptism of fire; all must and would go well.

  ‘But our elation was soon damped. A new sea rose high astern of us like a glittering green glass wall; as we sank down it came rolling after us, and in the same second in which I saw it high above me I felt a violent blow and was submerged under floods of water. I felt the suction through my whole body, with such great strength that I had to strain every single muscle in my frame and think of one thing only – hold on, hold on! I think that in such a desperate situation the arms will be torn off before the brain consents to let go, evident as the outcome is. Then I felt that the mountain of water was passing on and relaxing its devilish grip of me. When the whole mountain had rushed on, with an ear-splitting roaring and crashing, I saw Knut again hanging on beside me, doubled up into a ball. Seen from behind the great sea was almost flat and grey; as it rushed on it swept just over the ridge of the cabin roof which projected from the water, and there hung the three others, pressed against the cabin roof as the water passed over them.’

  The raft was still afloat, lying in the trough of the breakers just short of the reef. Another wall of water came rolling in, towered above the raft, toppled and smashed down up on it, engulfing the raft, tearing at the men, so tiny and puny, who clung to it. Another and then another wave swept across them and each time they were edged closer to the sharp jaws of the reef, then the biggest wave of all, a sheer green wall curling above them, smashed over the raft, lifting it on to the reef itself, so that the raft was now held immobile against the savage force of the sea. They clung on to their bits of rope, lungs bursting as the sea boiled around them, and then it fell away leaving a momentary lull when they could glimpse then appalling havoc. The cabin was smashed flat, the mast broken like a matchstick but, worst of all, Heyerdahl could see only one other member of his crew:

  ‘I felt cold fear run through my whole body. What was the good of my holding on? If I had lost one single man here, in the run in, the whole thing would be ruined, and for the moment there was only one human figure to be seen after the last buffet. In that second Torstein’s hunched-up form appeared outside the raft. He was hanging like a monkey in the ropes from the masthead, and managed to get on to the logs again, where he crawled upon the debris forward of the cabin. Herman too now turned his head and gave me a forced grin of encouragement, but did not move. I bellowed in the faint hope of locating the others, and heard Bengt’s calm voice call out that all hands were aboard. They were lying holding on to the ropes behind the tangled barricade which the tough plating from the bamboo deck had built up.’

  Wave followed wave. Each time they were pulled a little further over the reef; each time the undertow tore at them, trying to draw them back into the maelstrom of breakers. But the force of the waves began to diminish and soon were just foaming around the stranded raft. They were able to let go their holds, take stock of the damage, and found that the raft was still remarkably intact, with the cabin flattened rather than destroyed, the logs still held together by their bonds.

  Exhausted but jubilant, they salvaged vital items of gear and then waded through the still waters behind the reef to a low-lying palm-covered island. Their voyage was over; they had proved that a balsa wood raft could cross the Pacific Ocean.

  Heyerdahl wrote: ‘I was completely overwhelmed. I sank down on my knees and thrust my fingers down into the dry warm sand.’

  The voyage of Kon-Tiki was the first great romantic venture after the Second World War and it caught the imagination of the entire world, particularly once Heyerdahl had published his book telling the story. There was an element of light-hearted schoolboy adventure in tales of near escapes with sharks and storms, of desert islands and palm trees, combined with the fascination of Heyerdahl’s determination to prove how an ancient legend could actually have been fact. This venture provided the general public with exactly the relief from the drab violence and ugliness of war that everyone wanted.

  But Heyerdahl had less success with his fellow scientists, who dismissed his voyage as an adventurous stunt with little relevance to serious scientific proof or study. Part of the reason was because Heyerdahl wrote his popular account first, so that he could pay off the huge debts incurred in making the voyage. His serious study, American Indians in the Pacific, was not finished until 1952. But when confronted by hostile academics, he showed the same implacable but good-humoured determination that he had shown through the frustrations of preparing for and making his voyage. Slowly, he won over the academic world to his view, final victory did not come, however, until after he had mounted another expedition, this time one that was purely scientific, to Easter Island, ‘the navel of the world’, whose strange giants of stone had mystified all the scientists who gazed upon them.

  Heyerdahl chartered a trawler and took a team of archaeologists to the island to complete the first comprehensive dig that had ever been made there. Once again he used his breadth of view and intense curiosity combined with a deep humanity to gain a completely original view of what had happened on the island. The story of his discoveries on Easter Island is, intellectually, as exciting an adventure as anything on board Kon-Tiki. As before, he wrote a popular book that deservedly became a huge best seller and then followed it by a serious study, Easter Island and the East Pacific. The academic world was at last convinced that his theory of migration must be correct, giving him their unanimous endorsement at the Tenth Pacific Science Conference in Hawaii in 1961.

  But for Heyerdahl the mystery was not completely solved. There was the intriguing similarity between the pyramids and other archaeological remains of Mexico and Peru and those of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. There was no evidence of any such civilisations further north on the American continent, the acknowledged route of countless migratory waves of people who had crossed the Bering Strait from Asia. Was it possible that ancient man had crossed the Atlantic from the Mediterranean? In the case of the Pacific migrationary theory, Heyerdahl had been on his own, but on the Atlantic there were two schools of thought already, the Diffusionists who believed that there must have been some kind of migration direct from Europe to Mexico, and the Isolationists who considered that this was impossible and that the Aztec and Inca civilisations had evolved on their own among the Indians who had originated from Asia. Their strongest argument was that the American Indians had not discovered the use of the ribbed and planked wooden hull, which, of course, both the Phoenicians and Vikings had. On the other hand, both reed boats and balsa rafts were in use in America and had been used on the Nile and in Mesopotamia at the dawn of civilisation.

  Heyerdahl was immediately fascinated by the prospect of the practical experiment, of recreating a reed boat and sailing it across the Atlantic. Once
again, it was the spirit of science and adventure. On the first attempt they were baulked just short of success, when their boat, Ra I, disintegrated. He returned the following year with a boat whose design they had improved in the light of experience, and this time managed to complete the crossing, reaching the island of Barbados. Also, on Ra II, they took only food which would have been available in ancient times – grain, dried nuts, fruit, olive oil and wine. They ate better than any of them had ever done on previous expeditions!

  But still he was not content. Ra II, like Kon-Tiki, had only been able to sail before the wind. It had, therefore, been at the mercy of the wind and currents and could only have made a one-way voyage. Heyerdahl wanted to discover whether these reed boats could have manoeuvred against the wind, whether they could have sailed the high seas, through the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, carrying both merchandise and passengers between the ports of the ancient world. And so Tigris was born.

  Tigris was a reed boat built on the banks of the River Tigris, using the reeds of the Marsh Arabs under the direction of a group of Bolivian Indians from Lake Titicaca, the only men who still build and sail boats made from reeds. The boat was a success; she could carry a good load, could sail the seas with and against the wind, but to Heyerdahl’s eyes the real problem derived from the world around them – not from wind and sea, but from what man has done to the land and ocean. They had innumerable narrow escapes when nearly run down by giant tankers, saw hideous slicks of oil and chemicals polluting the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean and were barred from landing anywhere on the shores of the Red Sea because of the conflicts in the area, finally, in protest against unrestricted armament delivery from industrialised nations to a corner of the world where civilisation began, Heyerdahl and his crew decided to burn Tigris, in a dramatic gesture of disillusionment at what man is doing to his planet.

  There are so many levels to Heyerdahl’s adventures, the pure, thrilling romantic adventure, the fascinating and practical work of historical detection and, on yet another level, that of social experiment, for on both Ra and Tigris, Heyerdahl sought to affirm his belief that people of different countries and backgrounds can work and live together by selecting an international crew, many of whom he did not even know personally before hand.

  For a man who does not consider himself to be an adventurer, Heyerdahl has throughout his life tackled some extraordinarily challenging and potentially dangerous schemes, but has done so, not for the sake of playing a risk game, but rather because he was prepared to accept the risks and then neutralise them as far as he could to attain his end. As an outstandingly bold and innovative man of science and of action, Thor Heyerdahl emerges as one of the great adventurers of the post-war period.

  – Chapter 2 –

  The Man Who Raced Himself

  Francis Chichester’s single-handed circumnavigation, 1966–1967

  It is Joshua Slocum who enters the ocean-going record books as the first man to circumnavigate the world single-handed aboard his famous sloop Spray. He set out from Boston in 1895 and returned three years later in 1898. This leisurely seeming progress had, however, been a magnificent achievement, for Slocum had none of the self-steering equipment and strong lightweight gear and winches used by the modern yachtsman. Nor, of course, did he have GPS (Global Positioning System) to help pinpoint his position. He made plenty of stops along the way. He prudently avoided the empty, storm-ridden expanses of the Southern Ocean and got round the tip of South America by going through the Magellan Straits.

  Francis Chichester had a very different approach to the adventure of solo circumnavigation and a more ambitious objective. Testing himself to the limit was not something new to Chichester. When he set sail from Plymouth on 27 August 1966, he had already established his individuality and success several times over, not just in the field of sailing but also as a pioneer of long-distance solo flying. Not only did he aim to sail round the world single-handed, he meant to go faster, with fewer stops, than anyone had ever done before.

  With his great sense of history, he wanted to follow the old clipper route but, characteristically, was not content merely to follow the clippers; he sought to beat their time from England to Sydney and then back home to England round Cape Horn. His plan was to make only the one stop at Sydney, and achieve the longest continuous voyage ever attempted by any small craft, let alone one that was single-handed. By the mid-1960s only nine small boats had been round the Horn and, of these, six had been capsized or pitchpoled. No single-handed boat had ever been round. The fact that Chichester was sixty-five when he set out on his attempt made it even more remarkable.

  He had always had an intensely competitive urge, combined with an adventurous, technically minded curiosity. The son of an English parson, he had a lonely childhood with little love or understanding at home. He was sent off to prep school and then to Marlborough, a public school that has produced several outstanding venturers, including John Hunt. Like many of his fellow-adventurers, his school career was undistinguished and, at the age of eighteen, without consulting his father he decided to abandon all ideas of going to university and the career in the Indian Civil Service which had been planned for him and, instead, emigrated to New Zealand, travelling steerage with £10 in his pocket. It sounds like the classic schoolboy adventure story, and Chichester certainly lived up to this conception. He was determined to make his fortune and took on a variety of jobs, ending up in property development. At the age of twenty-seven he was making £10,000 a year – in those days a great deal of money. He returned to England in 1929, having achieved his aim of making £20,000 before going back home.

  There was nothing particularly original about a wealthy young businessman taking up flying, but now, after twenty-four flying hours of instructions, he decided to buy a plane and fly it to Australia, hoping to beat the time taken by Hinkler, the only other man to do it. Chichester did not get the record, but he did manage to fly his plane to Sydney. He also flew into the depression, which took away the greater part of the fortune he had built, but he did not let this deter him and threw most of his energy into further flying projects. In those days flying was adventurous in a way that it has long ceased to be. There were no radio beacons or flight control paths. The Gipsy Moth had an open cockpit, a range of under a thousand miles and a top speed of just over a hundred miles an hour.

  No one had ever flown across the Tasman Sea from New Zealand to Australia. Chichester now dreamt up a plan of flying all the way from New Zealand to England over the Pacific, thus circumnavigating the globe, flying solo, something that had not yet been done. For a start, though, flying the Tasman Sea offered a huge challenge. It was 1,200 miles wide, two thirds of the distance across the Atlantic, with weather which is even more unpredictable. Even if he stripped everything out of the Gipsy Moth and carried extra petrol tanks, his plane could not have made that distance in a single hop. Looking at a map, he noticed there were two inhabited islands on the way, Norfolk and Lord Howe, but neither had airfields. Then he got the idea of fitting floats to the aircraft so that he could land on the sea, but still he had to find the islands – Norfolk Island, 481 miles out into the featureless ocean, and Lord Howe another 561 miles on. There were no radio aids and so he would have to do it by a combination of dead reckoning and taking shots of the sun, no easy matter while flying a juddering, bucking plane. He only had to be half a degree out in his reckoning and he could miss the island altogether; he would not have enough fuel to get back to New Zealand, had no radio to call for help and would have had little chance of being picked up by a ship. He hit upon the technique of aiming off – of intentionally missing the island to one side, so that he knew which way to turn when he had calculated he had gone far enough. It is a technique used by orienteers aiming for a checkpoint in the middle of a featureless country, but for them the penalty for a mistake is dropping a few places in a race; for Chichester it could well have been his life.

  An Australian, Menzies, beat him to the first solo fl
ight across the Tasman Sea, flying it in a single hop with a plane that had sufficient fuel capacity. This did not deter Chichester, who was fascinated by the navigational challenge of trying to make a landfall on a tiny island. He was busy learning astronavigation, adapting a sextant to his own specialist use as a solo pilot.

  Ready at last, on 28 March 1931, he took off from the far north tip of New Zealand, full of apprehension about what he was trying to do:

  ‘At noon I flew over the edge of New Zealand; it was Spirit’s Bay, where the Maoris believed there was a vast cavern through which all the spirits of the dead passed. I flew from under the cloud into the clear sky. All my miserable anxieties and worries dropped away, and I was thrilled through and through. Over my left shoulder, the last of New Zealand receded rapidly. Ahead stretched the ocean, sparkling under the eye of the sun; no sport could touch this, it was worth almost any price. I seemed to expand with vitality and power and zest.’

  He was putting into practice a whole series of techniques he had developed for calculating drift and position as a solo flyer:

  ‘I had to try a sextant shot to find out how far I was from the turn-off point, and at the same time to check my dead reckoning. I trimmed the tail as delicately as I could to balance the plane, but she would not stabilise and I had to use the control-stick for the whole time while adjusting the sextant ... I had just got the sun and horizon together in the sextant, when terrific acceleration pressing my back made me drop the sextant. I grabbed the stick and eased the seaplane from its vertical nose dive into a normal dive and then flattened it out.’