Kon-Tiki Quotes
"Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about."
"This is really a queer seventeenth of May—indeed, taken all round, a most peculiar existence. How did it all begin?"
"Bengt, can you tell me how the hell we came to be doing this?"
"The devil I do; you know best yourself. It was your damned idea, but I think it’s grand."
"98° 46′ west by 8° 2′ south—a good day’s run since yesterday, chaps!"
"That means we’re 850 sea miles from the coast of Peru."
"And we’ve got another 3,500 to go to get to the nearest islands."
"We were the only white people there; we had of our own will forsaken the good things of civilization along with its evils."
"We filled our nostrils with an aroma of rank jungle and salt sea and heard the wind’s rustle in leaves and palm tops."
"Tiki, he was both god and chief. It was Tiki who brought my ancestors to these islands where we live now."
"I felt sure that a roar of agreement came from the breakers."
"All the people you’ve been to see think it’s just a passing idea you’ve got."
"You can’t treat ethnographic problems as a sort of detective mystery!"
"The task of science is investigation pure and simple, not to try to prove this or that."
"I’m so sure the Indians crossed the Pacific on their rafts that I’m willing to build a raft of the same kind myself and cross the sea just to prove that it’s possible."
"Remember that you’re going to cross vast spaces of sea which are practically unknown because they lie outside all shipping routes."
"Write again and stir them up; it’s no good if you don’t."
"Ninety-seven days, but remember that’s only in theoretically ideal conditions."
"It’s easier to interest people in an expedition than in an unread manuscript."
"One can safely say that the answers to these riddles have been nearly as many in number as the works which have treated of them."
"We know, therefore, with absolute certainty that the original Polynesian race must at some time, willingly or unwillingly, have come drifting or sailing to these remote islands."
"But there has never been any agreement as to the origin of this isolated island people, or the reason why this type is only found scattered over all the solitary islands in the eastern part of the Pacific."
"These numerous Indian civilizations were the Polynesians’ nearest neighbors to the east. To westward there lived only the black-skinned primitive peoples of Australia and Melanesia, distant relations of the Negroes."
"It was real Arctic winter up in those parts, and the northern lights flashed in the starry sky which was arched over us, pitch black, all day and all night."
"I was sitting reading the Inca legends of the sun-king Virakocha, who was the supreme head of the mythical white people in Peru."
"I was no longer in doubt that the white chief-god Sun-Tiki, whom the Incas declared that their forefathers had driven out of Peru on to the Pacific, was identical with the white chief-god Tiki, son of the sun, whom the inhabitants of all the eastern Pacific islands hailed as the original founder of their race."
"Peace came. And one day my theory was complete. I must go to America and put it forward."
"So it had begun, by a fire on a South Sea island, where an old native sat telling legends and stories of his tribe."
"I’m ready to bet that both Knut and Torstein are fed up with hanging about at home now and would be glad to go for a little trip on a wooden raft."
"Am going to cross Pacific on a wooden raft to support a theory that the South Sea islands were peopled from Peru. Will you come?"
"We want the survivor in the house to keep the cockroaches away."
"I’ve often been bitten by scorpions and I’m not dead yet."
"It’s no use now because of the jungle rain up country."
"Perhaps, but all the same one in ten might have got through before us, as you said."
"Only the elements mattered. And the elements seemed to ignore the little raft."
"The whole sea was ours, and, with all the gates of the horizon open, real peace and freedom were wafted down from the firmament itself."
"It was as though the fresh salt tang in the air, and all the blue purity that surrounded us, had washed and cleansed both body and soul."
"To us on the raft the great problems of civilized man appeared false and illusory—like perverted products of the human mind."
"In reality the whale shark went on encircling us for barely an hour, but to us the visit seemed to last a whole day."
"We did not test coca leaves on board the Kon-Tiki, but we had on the foredeck large wicker baskets full of other plants, some of which had left a deeper imprint on the South Sea islands."
"It was like a little tropical garden on board the wooden raft."
"The sweet potato was one of the most important cultivated plants in these remote islands where the people otherwise lived mainly on fish."
"According to tradition it had been brought by no less a personage than Tiki himself."
"The coconut grew before Columbus’ time both on the Isthmus of Panama and in South America."
"Not even the coconut, with its famous shell, can spread over the ocean without men’s help."
"We sailed close to a white, floating bird’s feather... we saw that there were two or three passengers on board it."
"Johannes sat broad and round in his doorway with his eyes wide open, waiting for the change of watch."
"Plankton is a general name for thousands of species of visible and invisible small organisms."
"Some day in the future, perhaps, men will think of harvesting plankton from the sea to the same extent as now they harvest grain on land."
"We had before us fantastic shapes and colors in unending variety."
"It was like hauling in a bag of sparkling jewels."
"I have seen whales in the distance from boats, and I have seen them stuffed in museums, but I have never felt toward the gigantic carcass as one usually feels toward proper warm-blooded animals."
"Instead of the cold, toadlike whale shark, which had not even the sense to stick up its nose for a breath of fresh air, here we had a visit from something which recalled a well-fed jovial hippopotamus in a zoological gardens and which actually breathed—that made a most pleasant impression on me."
"We were prepared for a dangerous collision the first time a big whale altered course and came straight toward the raft in a purposeful manner."
"The marine creature against which the experts had begged us to be most on our guard was the octopus, for it could get on board the raft."
"The fact that cuttlefish can "glide" has been a novelty to all the zoologists we have met."
"But on board the Kon-Tiki squid came last on the menu."
"One day, when we were sitting as usual on the edge of the raft having a meal, so close to the water that we had only to lean back to wash out our mugs, we started when suddenly something behind us blew hard like a swimming horse and a big whale came up and stared at us."
"We had not been long at sea before the first shark visited us."
"It was damp with sea water, which forced its way up along the woodwork everywhere."
"Each time we launched the dinghy, with a rope attached, to row back and pick up the floating object."
"The loss of the parrot had a depressing effect on our spirits the first evening."
"We tightened up on all the safety regulations."
"There was too much salt water for the radio corner, and the station stopped working altogether."
"The very first day, in the Humboldt Current, sea water trickled even from the battery cases."
"They knew which stars culminated over the different islands."
"We had come through the gale with the steering oar smashed and the sail rent."
"We calculated that in an ordinary calm sea, where there were usually seven seconds between the highest waves, we took in about two hundred tons of water astern in twenty-four hours."
"The sea had much in common with the mountains in such weather."
"The steering watch had to keep its eyes open in such weather."
"We were astonished that cascades of water did not gush up through the wide chinks in the floor."
"The sea was just as full of furious fish backs."
"We dared not put our heads down into the water to see."
"The weather became a little more unsettled, with scattered rain squalls."
"The old Polynesians had names for such abstruse conceptions as the Equator and the northern and southern tropics."
"We must have hit the reef that time. I myself felt only the strain on the stay, which seemed to bend and slacken jerkily."
"There is greater strength in the human mechanism than that of the muscles alone."
"The sea had claimed but little of the cargo, and none of what we had stowed inside the cabin."
"When I reached the sunny sand beach, I slipped off my shoes and thrust my bare toes down into the warm, bone-dry sand."
"It was as though I enjoyed the sight of every footprint which dug itself into the virgin sand beach."
"The whole island looked like a bulging green basket of flowers, or a little bit of concentrated paradise."
"We stretched ourselves luxuriously on the ground and smiled up at the white trade-wind clouds drifting by westward."
"Now we were no longer following them helplessly; now we lay on a fixed, motionless island, in Polynesia."
"A coconut from Peru was planted on the island where we had been shipwrecked."
"With coconuts, hermit crabs, and fish we were not short of food."
"In the deeper channels small sharks about four feet long came sneaking up to us in the crystal-clear water."
"The water was just cold enough to be refreshing, and the air was pleasantly warm and dry from the sun."
"The whole island was barely two hundred yards across. The highest point was less than six feet above the lagoon."
"The water came rolling in, terrace after terrace, and more and more of the reef sank below the surface of the sea."
"The tide reached a point four feet above normal high water. We had thought the whole island was going to disappear before our eyes."
"But here, in the lee of the islands, the trade wind rustled peacefully in the palm tops, making them stir and sway."
"The breakers outside us rumbled like a train, to and fro, to and fro, all along the horizon."
"We were standing on sharp, rugged coral blocks, and on the uneven bottom we waded now ankle-deep, now chest-deep."
"The whole reef stretched like a half-submerged fortress wall up to the north and down to the south."