Posted on 04/25/2002 4:35:53 PM PDT by Richard Poe
WITH ALL THE WAR NEWS blaring from our TV sets, few Americans found time last week to mark the passing of 87-year-old Thor Heyerdahl. Yet his death haunts and accuses us, like a dagger pointed at our hearts.
The great Norwegian explorer lived as few men dare to live in this effeminate age. Heyerdahl roamed the seas in primitive, handmade craft, as intimate with death as his Viking forebears had been.
In 1947, he sailed more than 4,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean in a balsa-log raft named Kon-Tiki. He crossed the Atlantic in 1970, in a ship of reeds, modeled after those of the pharaohs.
Armchair critics sneered, dismissing Heyerdahls exploits as publicity stunts, devoid of scientific merit. A shameless few even mock the great man in death.
"History Isnt Made By Daft Men on Rafts," reads the headline of an article by Ross Clark in the London Sunday Telegraph of April 21.
"The flaw in the Heyerdahl approach is that it provides rather more entertainment than it does enlightenment," sniffs Clark. "Thanks to Kon-Tiki, almost every layman now believes that the Polynesians jumped onto balsawood rafts and crossed the Pacific. Heyerdahl did it and so, therefore, must the Polynesians. But all Heyerdahl showed was that it was possible to sail for 4,500 miles on a raft "
Well, yes. That is "all" that Heyerdahl showed. But for many of us, that is enough.
Safety first is the motto of our age. We prefer full-body searches at the airport and national ID cards imprinted with our DNA codes to the scary possibility of maybe tangling with a terrorist at 30,000 feet.
Heyerdahl thought differently. He was a man from another age.
Stone Age tribes the ancestors of todays Australian aborigines once crossed from Southeast Asia to Australia by boat or raft, far from sight of any land. A similar spirit drove the Stone Age seafarers who settled Malta, Crete and the misty British Isles.
Of prehistoric mariners, Norwegian archaeologist A.W. Brogger declared, "Distance was no object they knew no frontiers, needed no passport or identity papers or tickets. The earth was free, the world lay open, and they wandered across it as though a thousand miles was nothing but a joyous adventure."
That was the spirit of Thor Heyerdahl.
I corresponded briefly with Heyerdahl in 1997. At the time, I was writing Black Spark, White Fire, a book which examines the theory that Egyptian seafarers may have landed in Greece during the Bronze Age, planted colonies, founded royal dynasties and helped kindle Western civilization.
Greek legend holds that an Egyptian king named Danaos sailed a war fleet to the Peloponnese, conquered Greece and ordered the natives to call themselves "Danaans" in his honor.
A number of pyramids dot the Greek landscape to this day, structures of great antiquity and mysterious origin. Greek archaeologist Theodore Spyropoulos links them to the royal house of Danaos.
Spyropoulos theory is understandably controversial. But conventional scholars treat it with far more contempt than it deserves. They claim that Egyptians were poor sailors, incapable of reaching Greece.
Oddly, no one disputes that Egyptian vessels made regular stops in Crete, Lebanon, and even Ethiopia. If they could sail 900 miles down the Red Sea, why not a mere 560 miles to Greece?
I thought a quote from Heyerdahl would lend weight to my argument. Tracking him down to the Canary Islands, I interviewed the great man by fax.
"[The Egyptians] could very easily have sailed from Egypt to Greece " Heyerdahl responded. An Egyptian reed boat could probably make the crossing in, "a week on average," he estimated.
I will never forget the moment when those blessed words, under Heyerdahls letterhead, fell gently into my fax tray.
And now let me make a confession.
Sometimes I dream of duplicating Danaoss voyage in an Egyptian-style vessel just as Heyerdahl might have done. Go ahead. Laugh. Its a silly dream, I know, especially for a man like me, whose greatest nautical feat to date has been circumnavigating Manhattan by kayak.
Yet, every gust of salt air from the East River sends my mind roaming. Maybe Ill never muster the courage or money to organize such an expedition. But because of Heyerdahl, I dreamed of it.
Heroes, conquerors, explorers and knaves all alike must die. But the greatest men leave something behind. The very lives they lived cause other men to dream. They make our puny lives greater, if only in our imaginations.
Such a man was Thor Heyerdahl.
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Richard Poe is a New-York-Times-bestselling author and cyberjournalist. His latest book is The Seven Myths of Gun Control.
That was 700 BC and they did it in leather covered boats - right out into the Atlantic Ocean without hugging the coast.
They did it just like they regularly did such things.
And so, how far is it really from Spain to Ireland as a crow flies?
But , I am afraid, the world is effeminite and in a state of selfishness.
Most of us merely coast on and enjoy like paracites the magnificent achievments of this person and similar humans...in all noble endeavors.....
Sad.
One suspects that those who deride his "unscientific" accomplishment should suffer derision themselves for their lack of vision and insight as to what he proved.
It is doubtful that "postulators" in time to come will as easily discount the possibility/probability correlation which up until his voyages the so-called "scientific" pundits were able to summarily dismiss.
These were Israelites from the tribe of DAN who were living in Egypt.
Thor was great and inspired me as a child just as your namesake inspired me as a teenager. But, there is no reason to lament the passing of great adventurerers or great writers. Both still exist.
Thor was great and inspired me as a child just as your namesake inspired me as a teenager. But, there is no reason to lament the passing of great adventurerers or great writers. Both still exist.
Hi Blam! There is lots of support for the theory that they were part of the Tribe of Dan which left Egypt by sea with parts of the Tribes of Asher and Judah, several hundred years before the overland Exodus.
I don't have any good numbers for the tribal sizes at that time, but if you made a conservative estimate of 1.2 Million Israelites, and assumed that number was split equally among the tribes (which it was not), that would indicate 100,000 members of the Tribe of Dan. (They were in fact probably bigger than 1/12.)
If half of them left be sea, that's a goodly number of people to be cruising around the Med, looking for trouble, even without adding the cousins from Asher and Judah. The Tribe of Dans trail is so strong at that point in history (and later) it seems well within the realm of reason.
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"Greek legend holds that an Egyptian king named Danaos sailed a war fleet to the Peloponnese, conquered Greece and ordered the natives to call themselves "Danaans" in his honor. "
"These were Israelites from the tribe of DAN who were living in Egypt."
I am interested in this 3 year old conversation. Any new thoughts?
Doesn't Heyerdahl lend credence to the "possibility" that Biblical history is true? Certainly he would not agree with Biblical history, but his feats strike me as a type of proof.
I cannot also help but think of Heinrich Schliemann, the man who found the Troy of the Iliad. NO ONE in his day believed that the Iliad was true. Yet...he found it. He freaking found Troy! In Turkey, buried under 8 other layers of cities that have come and gone...Absolutely amazing isn't it?
OK, if the Biblical hypothesis can't be stomached...surely we can agree on this.
Men like Heyerdahl and Schliemann - the true Indiana JOnes' of the world - tell us more about antiquity than all the pin-headed elites in the universities do combined. Agreed?
Mr. Poe, go and live your dreams. Aloha
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On a discovery show about the ancient port of Caesarea it mentioned that seasonal winds blew north from Africa every year.
An Egyptian boat with a sail could easily sail north on those winds.
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