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On a single narrow street in Oslo, Norway, called Bygdøynesveien, stand perhaps the most remarkable collection of maritime museums in the world. At the head of the way, isolated in space as its collection was in time, is the Viking Ship Museum. Here are housed two of the world's greatest maritime cultural treasures, the Oseberg and Gokstad Viking ships, both excavated in the late nineteenth century. If you leave the Viking Ship Museum and walk to the end of Bygdøynesveien, past affluent homes roofed with gleaming glazed tile and sheltered behind high thick hedges, you emerge onto a rocky plain overlooking Oslo Fjord.
A triangle of maritime museums surrounds a small turning circle. There is the great A-frame housing Fridtjof Nansen's Fram, the most famous polar research vessel in history. Just behind the Fram Museum, displayed out-of-doors, is the only slightly less well-known Gjøa, the almost tiny vessel in which Captain Roald Amundsen completed the first voyage through the Northwest Passage in 1906. A large building, shaped like the prow of a ship jutting into the fjord, houses the Norwegian Maritime Museum, with its collections covering Norway's naval, merchant, and whaling heritage.
Across the circle from the Fram and Maritime collections, as if set slightly apart from both, stands the Institute for Pacific Archaeology and Cultural History, otherwise known as The Kon-Tiki Museum, the most popular museum in Scandinavia. On this street of institutions celebrating the Vikings, polar explorers, and whaling captains, a museum devoted to a raft expedition to Polynesia seems at first glance somewhat incongruous. And yet it is not.
When Fridtjof Nansen in the 1890s proposed drifting across the polar basin by setting the Fram into the same ice pack that had destroyed all previous expeditions in search of the North Pole, more than one observer saw disaster written all over the enterprise. Nansen's theory turned all previous experience on its head. He proposed that the way to explore this sea was not to avoid the ice but allow it to capture his ship-so that both ship and ice would drift together. When Fram and its crew emerged alive in 1896 after three years in the ice, with Nansen's theory vindicated, it was as if men long given up for lost had returned from a twilight world. It is easy to imagine that Thor Heyerdahl, challenged after the Second World War to
demonstrate whether a raft made of balsa wood could drift more than four thousand miles from South America to the islands of eastern Polynesia, sought some comfort in the experience of his fellow Norwegian Nansen.
Heyerdahl's balsa raft did not sink to the bottom of the Pacific, as so many had predicted it would. So it is not especially ironic that these two most famous of seagoing drifters occupy the end of the same street in Norway. Were they not safely enclosed within their permanent shelters, you could with a strong arm throw an obsidian mataa spear from the deck of Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki and strike the double hull of Nansen's Fram.
But Kon-Tiki was a drift expedition of a very different sort. It was conceived and executed as a scientific test of an anthropological hypothesis.
Nothing of the sort had ever been done before: a seagoing archaeological experiment. It is difficult today, when almost no archaeology documentary appears on television without some sort of experiment into the behavior of a prehistoric culture, to recall just how unique this concept was in 1947.
It is true that experiments had been attempted within the field of archaeology as early as the 1840s. Scandinavian naturalists, for example,
would observe how dogs crunched bird bones, in order to understand why the long bones of birds appear with such frequency on archaeological sites while the rest of the skeleton does not. And other explorers had crossed various bodies of water in replica craft, seeking to imitate cultures of an earlier age-the 1893 Atlantic crossing by a replica Viking ship comes to mind.
But the Scandinavian archaeologists of the 1840s were seeking to understand the operation of a known, recorded phenomenon. In a similar way, the Viking presence in Iceland and Greenland was a long-acknowledged fact. Few doubted the immense seaworthiness of the Viking longboat. Early journeys across the 200 miles that separate Greenland from Newfoundland had long been considered plausible and brief, if arduous and untested. They were in fact spoken of within the sagas. Then Helge Ingstad's and Anne Stine's work in the early 1960s demonstrated conclusive archaeological evidence for Viking encampments in North America, putting the matter to rest.
Heyerdahl calibrated his ideas on far more enormous scales of time, endurance, and space. First, he sought to re-create a craft he believed prehistoric peoples had invented and mastered nearly two millennia in the past. Second, he proposed to risk his life by making an actual voyage on board this craft, which he believed could remain afloat for months. Finally, unlike Vikings closing the stormy 200-mile gap separating Greenland from Newfoundland, Heyerdahl proposed to use his re-created prehistoric raft to connect a continent with an archipelago separated by more than four thousand miles of ocean.
Heyerdahl came to this idea after living as a Polynesian himself. Newly married, he spent a year in the Marquesas Islands with his wife in the late 1930s to research the zoological populating of the Pacific. Seeking to understand how wild animals had reached remote islands, he recognized instead archaeological evidence, oceanographic currents, and winds that offered him the chance to turn his attention from animals to prehistoric peoples. As weeks and months passed into the complete cycle of a year, he became more and more transfixed by the infinite succession of waves breaking from the east, accompanied by a seemingly endless procession of clouds driven by southeast trade winds. The march of southeast wind and wave took hold of his imagination, and he imagined these same physical processes carrying elements of human cultures from the South American
coast, 4,000 miles away, into the eastern rim of Polynesia.
His year in the Marquesas led Heyerdahl on a ten-year archival odyssey, to the chronicles of the European discoverers of the Pacific, to the myths of native Polynesians, and to such practical questions as how long a coconut can remain afloat and viable in salt water. He followed intently the discussions concerning the peopling of Poly-nesia. In 1941, Heyerdahl advanced the idea of a dual migration into Polynesia from the Americas. The first, he wrote, was led by a ''pre-Incan civilization, with its centre near Lake Titicaca and along the Peruvian coast below, [which] seems to have swept the islands at a comparatively early period, via Easter Island,'' while a second wave arrived from the northwestern coast of North America aided by northeast trades and currents.
Heyerdahl was hardly the first person to become obsessed with the riddle of Easter Island. Known as Rapa Nui, or Big Rapa, to its inhabitants, Easter Island has fascinated the Western imagination since the moment Jakob Roggeveen's fleet sighted the place on Easter Sunday, 1722. Its famous moai statues, huge stone figures, make it one of anthropology's most enduring cultural enigmas. The easternmost inhabited island of Polynesia, it lies 2,400 miles west of South America and 1,400 miles east of Pitcairn Island, its nearest inhabited Polynesian neighbor. In its extreme isolation, it has been populated solely by organisms able to travel thousands of miles by sea or air.
Heyerdahl then linked several cultivated plants from America with islands of Polynesia, including Easter Island. The most important was the South American sweet potato (Ipomœa batatas) or, in the local South American name, kumara. The sweet potato is well established throughout Polynesia, as is the word kumara-a plant name, as one scholar noted, ''that has stirred the imagination of scientists working in the Pacific like no other.'' Why? Because as both a cultivated plant and a name, it spread throughout the Pacific islands by human contact.
That contact was conclusively aboriginal, the cultigen having been observed in New Zealand by Captain James Cook on his first voyage and on Easter Island by Roggeveen in 1722, and having been described by traditional history as being located in Hawaii as early as 1250 c.e. Even proponents of European introduction found it unlikely that the plant could have spread so far in the 160 years separating the voyages of Cook and Roggeveen with those of the 1560s of the Spaniards Mendan˜a and Quiro´ s (Buck 1938, 313). In any case the kinds of long, interisland voyages necessary for the settlement of the expanse of Polynesia-and the introduction of kumara to the islands-had stopped sometime after the close of the fourteenth
century (Hornell 1946, cited in Heyerdahl 1952, 431).
Heyerdahl invoked traditional myths of Easter Islanders to support his theory of a Peruvian origin for the sweet potato, tobacco, and chili peppers on the island. The ethnologist Alfred Metraux quickly criticized him for using a native ''myth to prove a thesis and [then using] the thesis to test the veracity of the same myth'' (Metraux 1957, 227). Yet, however other cultivated plants may have arrived in Polynesia, the American origins of the sweet potato remain unchallenged. And current linguistic evidence points to the Cuna language spoken in northern Colombia as the origin of the word kumara, which in its various transliterations followed the sweet potato
across the Pacific.