Fatu-Hiva

Thor Heyerdahl is best known for sailing across the Pacific from South America to the Tuamotu Islands in 1947 to prove that these remote Pacific islands were populated from the Americas and not from the east. He did this on a raft which he called Kon Tiki but the reason for his expedition goes back to an earlier adventure which he recorded in this book, published in 1974.

At that time we were living in Jamaica and it was given to me by Bob Morris, the school's drama teacher - see earlier post here - and the Christmas referred to must have been the Christmas of 1974.

It's an almost incredible story, of how, in 1936, Heyerdahl chose a young woman, Liv Coucheron-Torp, to accompany him on an experiment - to live on a remote island away from civilisation with none of the benefits of modern life.

The island they chose was Fatu-Hiva in the Marquesas group, a place which had suffered a drastic decline in its population, mostly due to European diseases, and which therefore offered space for them to return to nature.

In fact they were ill-prepared for their experiment and would have been unlikely to survive without the generous help of some of the local population who, for example, showed them how to....

....to build the small house in which they lived for the first part of their stay.

In many ways it was paradise. Fruit was abundant, they had breadfruit trees to provide carbohydrate, they caught crayfish in the streams, and their friends brought them fish. But in the rainy season the food ran low, the mosquitoes ate them alive and Liv developed large tropical sores from their bites. They had to abandon the experiment and recover on a neighbouring island before trying once more, choosing a valley on the east coast which had less insects and which was....

....inhabited by the last local to have eaten human flesh.

They were very happy there but what finally drove the out was the very thing they had tried to escape: humans. Many of the local people turned against them and they ended their days on the island hiding in a cave before being rescued by a passing schooner.

However, the artifacts they collected convinced Heyerdahl that the island had been settled by immigrants from South America and spurred him into organising the Kon Tiki expedition to prove his theory.