A very young Thor Heyerdahl sets out with his new wife for paradise a natural and unspoiled world that they sought and, to a degree, found in the South Pacific. It was the first of many journeys that would lead to expeditions and explorations, to a vocation, to the testing of theories against the currents of oceans and history, to books that would include Kon-Tiki, Aku-Aku, and Easter Island, and would bring him worldwide fame and renown.
This warm, spirited, amusing memoir of Heyerdahl's youth is the key to his future life. We see the early emergence of certain of his basic ideas and beliefs: that ancient man, previously believed to be primitive and confined by the oceans, knew more and traveled farther than had been suspected, that the natural world was even then endangered and was well worth preserving, that individuals and peoples could live peacefully together, find common problems and uncommon joys.
Heyerdahl, who became a true world citizen—he sails with a hand-picked international crew under the U.N. flag—and a pioneer environmentalist, left his home in Norway, where the automobile and the airplane were just beginning to come into their own, and which many of us would consider a paradise, and traveled to a remote speck called Fatu-Hiva in the far-off Pacific. Just married and just out of college, he and his wife, Liv, undertook life there with little more than an iron pot, iron determination, a sharp knife, and sharp minds. Their adventures are the core of this book, descriptions of funny or frightening encounters with islanders friendly or alarming, with giant centipedes and scant resources, with the newly acquired information that flowers and bowers arrive with bugs and bogs, that a dwelling made out of green timber in the tropics has a tendency to keep on growing, but also that the stars in their eyes could no more be extinguished than the stars in the skies.
This, then, is a love story, an adventure story, a documentary based on journals the young Thor kept at the time, and a prophet's brief but unrestrained, unabashed sermon-polemic on why the seas, like the cities, should no longer be unthinkingly polluted in the pursuit of profits, and why the contempt for nature is as much a crime against the planet as a capital offense against humanity.
—from the dust jacket
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