![]() Reality is always too multifaceted, too mercurial, for any guide to show the way. The failed hero is as common as the redeeming one. Culture creates heroes, not the other way round, but at some point it becomes impossible for those accorded heroic status to live up to our unreasonable expectations. Certain figures become larger than life because we crave for guides to lead us through complex realities. We all need heroes and heroines, whether we treasure them secretly or propagandize publically on their behalf. A Kon-Tiki crew member, probably Heyerdahl, signals to a native vessel in the film. Heyerdahl the scientist and Heyerdahl the adventurer. Hesselberg’s stylized drawing of a monolito from Tiwanaku, Bolivia, was adopted as the Kon-Tiki trademark. © Adam Helms Collection, Stockholm University Library ←vii | viii→ġ2. A group of Swedish booksellers and Adam Helms on an excursion, 3 September 1950. Hesselberg plays guitar for Raaby on the raft. Map showing Heyerdahl’s three journeys of experimental archaeology in the footsteps of a vanished itinerant race. Heyerdahl with one of the countless sharks that he and his crew caught during their Pacific crossing. Haugland and Raaby doing maintenance work on one of the four radio sets. The Kon-Tiki under construction in the dockyard of the Peruvian Navy in Callao. Heyerdahl and Liv Torp bathing in a river on Fatuiva. Heyerdahl and his wife-to-be Liv Torp in the Norwegian mountains. ![]() The plates are located between pages 116 and 117.ġ. The book also addresses the problematic nature of Heyerdahl’s theory that a white culture-bearing race had initiated all the world’s great civilizations. A Hero for the Atomic Age tells the story of how Heyerdahl organized an expedition to sail a balsa raft from Callao in Peru to the Tuamotu Islands in French Polynesia, and explains how he turned this physical crossing into an epic narrative that became imbued with a universal appeal. After years of relentless media exploitation of the 101-day raft journey, Heyerdahl emerged as the protagonist in a legend that helped to create a new postwar West. Kon-Tiki spoke of heroism, masculinity, free-spirited rebellion against scientific dogmatism, and the promise of an attainable exotic world, while it updated these mythological staples to fit the times. In the voyage of six Scandinavians and a parrot on a balsa raft across the Pacific Ocean the classic journey of discovery was re-invented for generations to come. The journey of the Kon-Tiki from Peru to Polynesia in 1947 became one of the founding myths of the postwar world. In English and many other languages the name «Kon-Tiki» is a byword for adventure and the exotic.
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