Word: polynesia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...finding it "both superb and boring . . . There the weather is beautiful at sunrise and it does not change until night. Such immutable happiness is tiring." He dived off the reefs and never forgot the colors of the madrepores and the absinthe-green water; these appear in cut-outs like Polynesia, 1946, or The Bird and the Shark, 1947, as images of a spectacular and, on the whole, beneficent nature...
...grandson of a great Polynesian navigator as well as an instructor at the University of Hawaii, Thorkild publishes a paper claiming that even in this day of earth satellites and up-to-date hydrographic charts, there exists in the vastness of the Pacific an island known only to Polynesia's traditional navigators. He is promptly denied tenure for this temerity...
...collect research for a new book called October 1916 were handicapped by officials. "You Westerners cannot imagine my situation," he said. "I live in my own country; I write a novel about Russia. But it is as hard for me to gather material as if I were writing about Polynesia...
...April 28, 1947, an unknown Norwegian ethnologist named Thor Heyerdahl set off across the Pacific on a 45-ft. balsa raft he called Kon-Tiki, the Incan name for sun-god. Young Heyerdahl entertained a theory that Incan raftsmen might thus have freighted their civiliza tion to Polynesia. He failed to convince most fellow scholars that Peruvian-Polynesian cultural coincidences were more than just that. But by Aug. 7, when he cracked up on a coral reef 4,300 miles from Peru (and 250 miles east of Tahiti), Heyerdahl had proved indubitably that a balsa raft could cross the Pacific...
Following the design of old Egyptian murals, Heyerdahl built a papyrus-reed boat, or kaday, 50 ft. long, 15 ft. wide, and named it Ra, for the sun-god-cultural coincidence!-of Egypt, Easter Island and Polynesia. The Ra was loaded with over a ton of fresh water in authentic Egyptian jars and almost twice that weight in food. Menu samples: sheep cheese in olive oil and sello (ground almonds, honey, butter, flour and dates). Coops enclosed live chickens and a duck named Sinbad. There was also a pet monkey named Safi. With Heyerdahl sailed an oddly assorted crew...