If I die a violent death

It is 30 years to the day since Indira Gandhi, a major figure in the National Congress Party and India’s third prime minister, was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards. There is scant evidence available online that she was a diarist, although one or two sources do refer to a diary. One of her senior aids, B. N. Tandon, kept a daily diary for nearly two years so as to document a political crisis; it reveals a rather unflattering portrait of his boss. Meanwhile, India’s recently elected Bharatiya Janata Party has chosen to downplay Gandhi’s memory on this significant anniversary of her death.

Indira Nehru was born in Allahabad in 1917. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, led India’s political struggle for independence from British rule, and became the first prime minister of the Dominion (and later Republic) of India. He was often away, and her mother was frequently bed-ridden. Indira was educated mostly at home, although at times also in Switzerland, before attending Viswa Bharati University in Shantiniketan, and then Oxford University. She left Oxford before completing her studies. While in Europe, she became better acquainted with Feroze Gandhi (unrelated to Mahatma Gandhi), whom she had known from Allahabad, and who was studying at the London School of Economics. They married in 1942 according to Hindu rituals, and against the wishes of Indira’s father, and had two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay.

In the 1950s, Indira Gandhi served her father unofficially as a personal assistant during his tenure as prime minister. After his death, in 1964, she was elected to the Rajya Sabha (upper house), and Lal Bahadur Shastri, who had succeeded her father as prime minister, gave her a place in his cabinet. And when he died abruptly, the Congress Party sought a docile successor, and appointed Gandhi; but she proved anything but docile, surprising her father’s old colleagues by sacking high-level officials and leading with a strong hand. She brought about great change in agricultural policy which improved the lot of her country’s poor, and, for a time, was hailed as a hero. In 1971, she intervened in the Pakistan Civil War, in support of East Pakistan, and was influential in the creation of an independent Bangladesh.

Increasingly, Gandhi ruled with an authoritarian hand, and corruption was rife within her administration. She was found guilty of a minor infraction, and then there were demands for her resignation. Gandhi responded by calling for a state of emergency which allowed her more central control, in particular of states ruled by opposition parties. In 1977, though, her popularity slumped, and the Congress Party lost an election. Subsequent efforts by opponents to bring her to trial only served to gain her more support, and in 1980 she won a landslide election. That same year, her son Sanjay, who had been serving as chief political adviser, died in a plane crash. Thereafter, Indira’s younger son, Rajiv, took over as Indira’s heir apparent. (He would become prime minister on the death of his mother, and then be assassinated himself in 1991.)

In the new term of office, Gandhi was preoccupied by efforts to resolve political problems in the state of Punjab. In an attempt to crush the secessionist movement of Sikh militants, led by Jarnail Singh Bindranwale, she ordered an assault upon the holiest Sikh shrine in Amritsar, the Golden Temple. ‘Operation Bluestar’, as it was called, in June 1984, led to the death of Bindranwale and many civilians, and caused damage to the sacred Golden Temple itself. Many Sikhs bitterly resented Gandhi for the attack, and she was assassinated by two of her own Sikh bodyguards on 31 October 1984. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, Cultural India, a Guardian review of a modern biography, the BBC, or a Googlebooks preview of Mother India: A Political Biography of Indira Gandhi by Pranay Gupte.

I have not been able to find online any definitive information that Indira Gandhi kept a diary, but there are a couple of sources which imply that she did at different times. Pupul Jayakar, in her biography (published first by Viking, New Delhi, in 1992), quotes several entries from Gandhi’s childhood diary, (although they appear as though they might have been taken from an agenda rather than a journal). She says that 12 year old Indira was angry at being denied active participation in the freedom struggle by Congress and so set about, with vigour and determination, to form her own children’s brigade, the Vanar Sena (army of monkeys): ‘Indira’s diary, written neatly in a tiny scrap book, indicates her precise down-to-earth mind - adult in its planning and concerns, with an understanding that it is the little things that make great events possible, an astonishing state of mind for a twelve-year-old child.’

6 September 1930
‘Papu’s interview at 10:00 A.M.
Meeting of the Students’ Working Committee at 12:30
Meet Gupta about Vanar Sena’s work in different wards.
Katra Vanar Sena’s meeting at Katra Ashram at 6.00 P.M. to 9.00 P.M.
Drill and meeting of Vanar Sena & Bal Sangh at Swaraj Bhawan at 5.00 P.M.’

8 September 1930
‘Boycott week Programme for Vanar Sena.
The whole week Prbahat Pheris - 6-8 A.M.
Procession starting at Khadi Bhandar at 5:30 P.M.
Meeting at Purshottam Das Park.’

13 September 1930
‘Strike in schools on behalf of Jatindra Das
Procession and meeting.’

Jayakar quotes also from other diaries, notably the prison diary kept by Gandhi’s father Jawaharlal Nehru (more about which can be read in Sankar Ghose’s biography available to preview at Googlebooks).

Then there are also the prophetic words Gandhi wrote on the day before her death which are widely quoted on the internet, and which some sources say were culled from her diary. However, an article in India Today about the memorial at her old office, 1 Safdarjung Road, states that these words were found among her private papers.

30 October 1984
‘If I die a violent death as some fear and a few are plotting, I know the violence will be in the thought and the action of the assassins and not in my dying; for no hate is dark enough to overshadow the extent of my love for my people and my country and no force strong enough to divert me from my purpose and my endeavour to take this country forward.’

Finally, it is worth noting that Bishan Narain Tandon, a senior official in Indira Gandhi’s office kept a diary for 20 months, during a period of political crisis. This diary was published in two parts, by Konark Publishers, as PMO Diary-I: Prelude to the Emergency (2002) and PMO Diary-II: The Emergency (2006). According to Konark, ‘the reader gets an accurate and fascinating glimpse into the persona of Indira Gandhi as well as her working style.’ But reviews of the diary, such as one at India Today, reveals a rather unflattering portrait of Gandhi.

Perhaps - I’ve no idea in truth - Tandon’s diary has helped undermine the memory of Gandhi. Many Indian-sourced media articles in the last few days, reporting on the 30th anniversary of her assassination, have drawn attention to how the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party), which took over government from the National Congress Party earlier this year, has been downplaying Indira Gandhi’s legacy in favour of (Sardar or Chief) Vallabhbhai Patel, who was another leader of the Congress Party, and deputy prime minister under Jawaharlal Nehru. See: India Today - Congress cries foul on Indira Gandhi being ‘sidelined’; The Times of India - [Prime Minister] Modi hails Sardar Patel, links Indira Gandhi’s death anniversary to 1984 riots; and Wall Street Journal blog - Is Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Eclipsing Indira Gandhi?.

N. tinkering with diaries

It is half a century since the death of Nettie Palmer, one of Australia’s most well known literary figures of the 20th century. She and her husband, Vance, were very active supporters of Australian writers, and promotors of Australian literature. In their 50s, and at their own expense, they published a diary - or more accurately an anthology in journal form - called Fourteen Years. Although initially only 500 copies were printed, the book came to be seen as a unique record of Australian culture between the wars, and has been much studied, and reprinted.

Nettie was born in Bendigo, Victoria, the niece of Henry Bournes Higgins, a leading Victorian political figure and later a federal minister and justice of the High Court of Australia. She studied education at the University of Melbourne, and literature in Germany and France. In 1908, she met Vance Palmer, and they married in London in 1914. With the outbreak of war, they returned to Australia, and campaigned against conscription.

The Palmers lived in the fishing village of Caloundra, Queensland, and had two daughters - Aileen and Helen. They focused mostly on their writing, short stories, poetry and journalism. In 1924, Nettie published an academic study of Australian literature, and, in 1931, a biography of her uncle, Higgins. In the mid-1930s, the Palmers travelled to Europe, but before returning to Australia, one of their daughters, Aileen, joined the International Brigades in Spain.

By the time of the Second World War, neither Vance nor Nettie were in the best of health, but they continued their literary endeavours. Nettie, in particular, became one of Australia’s foremost literary critics, and was a great champion of Australian literature. Aileen suffered a mental breakdown in 1948, and Vance was attacked as a communist ‘fellow traveller’ in the 1950s. Nettie died on 19 October 1964. Further biographical information is available at the Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Library of Australia, and Wikipedia.

According to Robin Lucas, who studied Nettie Palmer at the University of Melbourne, she ’was an indefatigable and life-long diary and notebook-keeper’. A fragment of an early European diary can be found on the university’s website. Information on her ‘Commonplace book’ 1907-1936 can be found at the National Library of Australia. However, Palmer herself published, in 1948, a book of diary entries, and called it Fourteen Years: extracts from a private journal. This book has become a classic of Australian literature, and was republished in 1988 by the University of Queensland Press in Nettie Palmer: Her private journal Fourteen Years, poems, reviews and literary essays (edited by Vivian Smith). This latter tome - all 550 pages of it - is freely available as a pdf at UQP’s ‘institutional digital repository’.

Also freely available online are various texts by Robin Lucas about Fourteen Years - a masters thesis and an article entitled A Fine Ruddy Mess for the La Trobe Journal. Lucas argues that, although the original book was published under the Meanjin Press imprint (based in Melbourne), it was effectively self-published with the Palmers paying the production and other costs for the initial print run of 500. She explains how the whole process involved ‘confusion and frayed tempers’, hence the title of the La Trobe article. Lucas also notes that Fourteen Years was not so much a straightforward diary, but that it was ‘compiled from a miscellany of sources: work diaries, notebooks, letters, articles and family memories’. Prior to publication, both Nettie and Vance had worked on the book since 1945.

Vivian Smith, in her introduction to Nettie Palmer, says: ‘There is no other work quite like Fourteen Years in Australian writing and it is a text that has gained increasing importance for historians and those interested in the development of Australian culture between the wars.’ She explains how Fourteen Years is ‘in part a reconstruction, and in part a highly selective reassembling of original materials’; and she then provides some extracts from Palmer’s pocket diary for 1947 to illustrate the process that had been involved in assembling the book. Here are a few of those extracts:

2 Sept 1947
‘V. let N. read through some Notes. Decided time now come to sort them out into 8 period-places (Caloimdra, Kalorama, Barcelona, Melbourne, etc.). Need folders for what material I had here by now. Each folder has at least something, some a great deal already in it.’

3 September 1947
‘V. looked through N.’s file of rejected printed articles and advised on keeping only a few. Notes already done are enough on general literary subjects: those need interweaving with more personal ones. Drew up a list of names that must be included in some way practising writers and their purposes. Must get some characteristic phrases and appearances for each from appropriate periods. V. began re-reading old family diaries V. had bought for me, 1934, fitting in with some literary notes on visitors: Pfeffer, Ravitch, Huebner. But need to follow our own writers now - it’s just a matter of sorting more than writing.’

4 September 1947
‘N. tinkering with diaries and fitting persons in like mosaic. N.B. must write some of it . . .’

8 September 1947
‘Did notes. V. says too warm, too much informed after the event, on Len Mann at Kalorama 1933. Found phrases of his in old diary. Moral: keep good diaries with people’s phrases in them.’

4 October 1947
‘N. finishing note on Masefield in Melbourne; begin one on E.T. Brown . . . . Our worst years were 1937-39, when we were entangled in politics to no avail. We knew what was coming and no one would believe us except some fanatics who believed everything in advance. We knew too many people, for insufficient reasons.’

13 October 1947
‘Grey day. V. planning to begin on London and N. sat down to it after breakfast without doing a stint of housework first, and wrote two London pieces in the morning: on Shelley Wang and Christina Stead (and her husband). Tried to do Ogden too, but got wrecked on his learning.’

Fourteen Years, Smith says, is best looked on as an anthology in journal form. It is divided into eight sections which correspond to the main places in which the Palmers lived for varying lengths of time during this period: Caloundra 1925-29; Melbourne 1929-32; Green Island 1932; Kalorama 1932-35; Paris 1935; London 1935-36; Barcelona 1936; and Melbourne 1936-39.

Here then are several extracts from Fourteen Years itself.

20 September 1925
‘Early this morning, we watched a man on a ridge behind Mrs. T.’s house lassooing the branch of a tree with a length of rope. What was he doing? Stretching a clothes-line? But why so high up, and on that slope?

Here in South Queensland, life moves lightly and intimately; you’re always looking out of doors at this sunny end of winter. From the narrow shelf of the front veranda, there’s the bush sloping towards the ocean in one direction, and towards the Passage with its wide water in another. Along the western skyline stand the unbelievable Glasshouses. Then from the back windows, you look across the open ridges to forest country. You see the casual events of your neighbours’ lives, especially when you sit at breakfast in the open sun.

You see dreamily, and often without understanding. That clothes-line? I met Mrs. T. at the end of the morning while we both waited for our mail at the lighthouse post-office. She was bubbling kindly: ‘My son-in-law from town’s just fixed a radio aerial, and the crystal set he’s brought is clear as can be. Would you come in this evening and hear it? It’s the first wireless set in Caloundra.’

This evening we went along in the moonlight. In Mrs. T.’s open lounge there must have been sixty visitors. Fishermen and their women; lighthouse-keeper and ex-keeper, wives and families. Children sucking large black humbugs solemnly. And in the place of honour, the new miracle of communication, the wireless. (The son-in-law was a self-effacing showman. At eight o’clock, and before we noticed the instrument was turned on, came heavy strokes - the Post Office clock, Sydney: ‘as if they were right in the room,’ sighed someone voluptuously). Then came a weather report: squally, we heard, as the calm moon listened in with amusement.

What next? Some ‘music’ so nondescript that people mostly relapsed into friendly talk while it lasted - as if it were real-life music. So far no statics or interference. The son-in-law muttered technicalities to the few eager youths who could lap up his learning. A speech is announced on the air: ‘it’s a lecture on Christian Science,’ says the son-in-law. For five minutes of it, everyone listens; even the children with their still-revolving jaws. It’s so wonderful to have any opinion conveyed whole, like eggs by plane from Sydney. Then people begin asking one another questions. Can everything be caught up by wireless? Could you use it like a listening telescope and direct it to a cathedral service or a trade union meeting? No? Well, who decides what you’ll have? It all comes so clear it might be important some day.

The Sydney clock struck the hour again. The children had sucked away their issue of humbugs. Time to thank Mrs T. and her son-in-law and go home. We drifted in the moonlight along the strip of rough road. There stood that other aerial mast, the lighthouse, mild winds humming in its flagpole ropes. Its light blinked regularly against the moon, that supreme mistress of communication. Long before wireless, the light was: long before the light, the moon. What was it Andrew Tripcony said yesterday, as patriarchal fisherman in these parts: ‘Th’ moon’s useful; y’ always know the tides by her. Quarterflood over the Bar at moonrise. Same at moonset.’

Will the wireless ever catch up with such established guides of mankind?’

19 March 1931
‘For a long time I’ve been paying, in casual articles and notes, my humble tribute to Edmund Wilson as the most penetrating critic in the modem literary world - the Anglo-Saxon one at any rate - and yesterday an unlooked-for response came from him in the form of a signed copy of his new book ‘Axel’s Castle.’ I’ve found it hard to keep my mind from it ever since. It has all the brilliant clarity of his occasional critiques, together with the thematic backbone you expect from a book - in this case the idea that the six writers he chooses as significant figures in the literature of today are guided, like Axel, by a will toward refusal.

The six figures are Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Gertude Stein, Proust and Paul Valéry. At first you are a little surprised at the choice of names, but Edmund Wilson shows how certain socially-minded writers before the war - Shaw, Wells, Bennett, Anatole France - have lost credit, while his half-dozen have gained by producing masterpieces in isolation, almost secretly.

These books revealed new discoveries, artistic, metaphysical, psychological; they mapped the labyrinths of the human consciousness; they made one conceive the world in a new way. What wonder then that for those who survived the war these writers should have become heroes and leaders?’

7 April 1932
‘THIS island, now we’re here, is a flat oval of jungle-covered coral sand (almost forty acres, they say) on the inner edge of the Great Reef. Not even eight feet above sea-level, it’s protected from the outer seas by an irregular circling reef that encloses a lagoon - shallow enough to wade through when the tide’s out, but deep enough to float a small fleet when the tide rushes back again through the narrow opening. There’s always five or six feet of water at the end of the long ricketty jetty that gives a berth to the Cairns launch bringing the Sunday crowd of holidaymakers - and our supplies and mail. Our camp is on the sheltered side of the island, looking toward the mainland. Sometimes at high tide the water softly laps the roots of the great trees that lean over our tent and down over the beach.

Before I came here I’d imagined the Barrier Reef as a great wall running along the line of the coast - a rampart of pure coral rising from the depths. Now, looking out from our knob on its edge, it seems a straggling assortment of honeycomb reefs in all stages of growth, varied by fragments of sunken mainland, such as the great hump of Fitzroy Island to the south. Our island is one of the coral cays that have come to maturity. It has fully emerged from the sea, collected its cover of humus, created a beautiful safe jungle in which you can lie unaware of the sea, though never fifty yards from the beach.

This gleaming little forest of vines and evergreens can seem at times even more wonderful than the coral reef itself. There’s a gentleness about it - no thorns, poisonous reptiles, stinging insects. Instead, there are the unafraid birds - tiny silver-eyes, ground-pigeons with lustrous wings of dark-green - and the bright, flickering butterflies, all seemingly sure of being in some forest fastness.’

The Diary Junction

Washed out exoticism

‘If in a hundred years we have not established contact with some other planet (but we will), or, next best, with the earth’s interior, humanity is finished.’ This dramatic prophesy was made by Henri Michaux, a Belgian-born experimental writer and artist, in a diary he kept while on a trip to Ecuador in the late 1920s. He died 30 years ago today, but is remembered as much for his books on mescaline as for his poetry and painting.

Michaux was born in Namur, Belgium, in 1899, the son of a Catholic lawyer, and raised in Brussels, being educated at a Jesuit school. He planned to join the priesthood, but, after a religious crisis, took up medicine before dropping his studies altogether in favour of a life at sea in the French merchant navy. He travelled widely in Europe, in the Americas, and in Asia. He was inspired to write by reading the poetry of Comte de Lautréamont, and attracted some attention with his poems Qui je fus (Who I was) in 1927. Through meeting artists such as Paul Klee and Max Ernst in Paris, he also took up painting and held his first one-man exhibition at the Librairie-Galerie de la Pléiade in 1937. In time, he took up residence in Paris, and became a French citizen.

In 1941, the French writer, André Gide published a study that made Michaux’s poetry popular for a while. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Michaux’s view of the human condition is bleak; his poems emphasize the impossibility of making sense of life as it impinges on the individual. Against the futility of real life, Michaux sets the richness of his imagination, and the contradictions of his surrealistic images serve as a foil to the absurdity of existence.’

Following the death of his wife in a fire in 1948, Michaux began experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs; and in the 1950s published several books dealing with his experiences of taking mescaline. His painting at this time was also affected by these experiences. A large exhibition of his works was held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1957; and a retrospective was organised in Frankfurt/Main in 1959. In 1966, he published the autobiographical Les grandes épreuves de l’esprit et les innombrables petites, translated into English in the 1970s as The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones (Secker and Warburg). Michaux died on 19 October 1984. Further, somewhat scanty, information can be found at Wikipedia, the Poetry Foundation, the Tate, Art Directory, and Moma; and there is an interesting article on Michaux by the Mexican writer, Octavio Paz, freely available at The Guardian.

Early on in his travels, Michaux tried out the diary form on a trip to Ecuador, and this became one of his earliest published works - in 1929. It was reissued in 1968, and then translated by Robin Magowan and published in English with the title Ecuador: a travel journal. Some of this can be read freely at Googlebooks.

22 January 1928
[After Panama] ‘The sea resolves all difficulties. It brings on few. It’s a lot like us. It lacks the earth’s hard, pulseless heart, and, be it ever so prompt to drown, we have only to take against this eventuality reasonable precautions for it to be once again our friend, quite brotherly, and understanding us perfectly.

It does not offer us these unmatched spectacles wherein the earth excels (provided we journey a few hundred miles), spectacles that make utter strangers of us, as if we were newly born and unhappy.

Who knows one sea knows the sea. Its anger, like ours. Its inner life, like ours. What is more, it does not like the earth offer in a single vista thousands of independent, different, and personal points - trees, rocks, flowers.

To the Ancients these personal points were not negligible, and it was My Lord Rock, Madam River. The professors, after the Jews and Christians, ruined all that.

Who can speak fittingly of a grove?’

1 February 1928
‘No, I have already said it elsewhere. This earth has had all the exoticism washed out of it. If in a hundred years we have not established contact with some other planet (but we will), or, next best, with the earth’s interior, humanity is finished. There is no longer a means of living, we explode, we go to war, we perpetrate evil of all sorts; we are, in a word, incapable of remaining any longer on this rind. We are in mortal pain; both from the dimensions as they now stand, and from the lack of any future dimension to which we can turn, now that our tour of the earth has been done to death. (These opinions, I know, are quite sufficient to have me looked down upon as a mind of the fourth order.) ’

Mid-February
‘A countryside or foreign city may be set apart as much by what it lacks as by what is uniquely its own. One explanation is this: as you can say about a work of art, ‘Oh, that’s very lovely, but it’s not alive, there are too many vital details left out’; in the same way you cannot wholeheartedly accept a new town, and if the trip there takes too little time, nothing remains and you end up exclaiming, ‘This trip passed like a dream.’ Exoticism has played a trick on us.

Despite the three weeks or so I have been here, Quito does not yet seem to me completely real, with that kind of naturalness and homogeneity a city we know well has (however varied its aspects may be to a stranger). What I miss in a foreign scene - and I am saying foreign - is never grandeur, but smallness.

Let’s examine my impressions calmly, then, and I will tell you what I miss in both Quito and its surrounding countryside. I miss pushcarts, pine trees, ants. There is not one tree (aside form the eucalyptus), not a single click of wooden wheels, no cart of any description, or cats during the day (by the way, the wheel was not invented by the Incas).’

The Diary Junction

The Kon-Tiki man

Today marks the centenary of the birth of Thor Heyerdahl, the great Norwegian adventurer who, by sailing primitive rafts and canoes, showed that ancient peoples could have made oceanic voyages, across the Pacific, and across the Atlantic. An archive of his papers, now registered of world importance by Unesco, holds some diaries, though there is no evidence of these ever having been published in their original form. Heyerdahl wrote several international bestsellers about his adventures, and these occasionally refer to the diaries.

Heyerdahl was born in Larvik, Norway, on 6 October 1914, the son of a brewer. He studied zoology and geography at the University of Oslo, but also became very interested in Polynesian culture and history. He was able to consult books and papers in the Kropelien Polynesian library, then the largest such collection in the world. In 1936, he married Liv Coucheron-Torp, and together they travelled to the island of Fatu Hiva, part of the Marquesan archipelago, in the Pacific. They remained a year studying the indigenous plants and animals, but Heyerdahl became more interested in cultural anthropology than zoology. They had two sons.

During the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany, Heyerdahl served with the Free Norwegian Forces from 1944, in the far north province of Finnmark. After the war, he persisted with his anthropological studies, developing a theory that Polynesian people might have originated from South America, having travelled across the Pacific Ocean in pre-Columbian times.

To test his idea, Heyerdahl mounted an expedition - funded by private loans, with US army equipment, and the help of a Peruvian dockyard - which would become one of the most famous adventures of all time - the Kon-Tiki expedition. With a small team, Heyerdahl built a raft, named Kon-Tiki, out of balsa logs and other native materials with the design and know-how as recorded in illustrations by Spanish conquistadores. The trip began on 28 April 1947, and the raft sailed for 101 days, over 6,900km, before smashing into a reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands - i.e. in Polynesia - on 7 August. Heyerdahl soon published a book on the experience; it became a best seller, and has been translated into many languages.

Following the Kon-Tiki success, Heyerdahl campaigned often on environmental issues, and undertook further adventures. In 1955–1956, he organised the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Rapa Nui, which uncovered much new, of scientific and popular interest. In 1969 and 1970, he twice tried to cross the Atlantic, from Morocco, in canoes built from papyrus based on Ancient Egyptian designs. The first expedition - in Ra - failed, but the second - in Ra II - made it from Morocco to Barbados, thus showing that seamen from long ago could have crossed the Atlantic using the Canary Current. He also undertook expeditions in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, as well as in Azerbaijan (searching for an ancient civilisation with links to Odin).

Heyerdahl married again in 1949, to Yvonne Dedekam-Simonsen, and they had three daughters. They divorced in 1969. Heyerdahl married a third time in 1991, to Jacqueline Beer, and they lived in Tenerife, Canary Islands, actively involved in archaeological projects. Heyerdahl died in 2002. He was given a state funeral by the Norwegian government. Indeed, he had been much honoured in his life, by state and academia, including being awarded the Grand Cross of the Royal Norwegian Order of St Olav in 1987, and the UN International Pahlavi Environment Prize. More biographical information can be found at Wikipedia, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Royal Scottish Geographic Society, the The Thor Heyerdahl Institute. For an alternative view of some of Heyerdahl’s theories, see The Maldives Royal Family website.

Many of the Thor Heyerdahl archives are kept at the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, and were recently included in the Memory of the World Register, a Unesco initiative to safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity. According to the Register, the Thor Heyerdahl collection of documents ‘encompasses diaries, original book and article manuscripts, private letters, expedition plans, articles and newspaper clippings.’

Although I have not been able to find any evidence online of Heyerdahl’s diaries being published, there are various references to such diaries in publications by him, or about him and his expeditions. A feature published by Business Insider earlier this year includes a photograph of a page from Heyerdahl’s diary on the day the Kon-Tiki expedition found land (held by The Explorer’s Club in New York). There are other documents about the expedition available online at the Kon-Tiki Museum, though these are largely log books rather than diaries.

Heyerdahl, himself, refers to something called ‘the diary’ in The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas (first published in Norwegian in 1948, and in English in 1950, but since republished many times, most recently by Simon and Schuster in 2013, titled simply Kon-Tiki - partly available online at Googlebooks). In the book, Heyerdahl writes about the marine life they saw, and caught and ate, and then says: ‘But we did not run up against acquaintances [i.e. fish they knew the names of] only, as we lay drifting over the sea’s surface. The diary contains many entries of this type:’

11 May 1947
‘Today a huge marine animal twice came up to the surface alongside us as we sat at supper on the edge of the raft. It made a fearful splashing and disappeared. We have no idea what it was.’

6 June 1947
‘Herman saw a thick dark-coloured fish with a broad white body, thin tail, and spikes. It jumped clear of the sea on the starboard side several times.’

16 June 1947
‘Curious fish sighted on the port bow. Six feet long, maximum breadth one foot, brown, thin snout, large dorsal fin near head and a smaller one in the middle of the back, heavy sickle-shaped tail fin. Kept near surface and swam at times by wriggling its body like an eel. It dived when Hermann and I went out in the rubber dinghy with a hand harpoon. Came up later but dived again and disappeared.’

18 June 1947
‘Knut observed a snakelike creature, two to three feet long and thin, which stood straight up and down in the water below the surface and dived by wriggling down like a snake.’

There are slight references, also, to diaries kept during the Ra and Ra II expeditions, but actual extracts from such diaries are elusive, at least online. In The Kon-Tiki Man - Thor Heyerdahl by Christopher Ralling (BBC Books) which accompanied a documentary in 1990, or thereabouts, Ralling employs texts from Heyerdahl’s own books. And, indeed, the book’s blurb says it is ‘profusely illustrated with photographs’ and ‘the text includes many excerpts from Heyerdahl’s diaries and published works’.

Personally, I could find only one reference to a diary in this book, as follows: In writing about the first attempt to sail west from Morocco in a papyrus boat, Ralling says Heyerdahl and his team made ‘remarkable progress’ but ‘Thor was much more worried than he was prepared to admit. He had sent radio messages to Yvonne to send out a photographer in a motor vessel in order to take some shots of Ra at sea. In his heart, he confided to his diary and later recorded in The Ra Expeditions, he knew that this might turn into a rescue mission, for the hurricane season was beginning.’

And Rawling then quotes an extract dated 9 July and other dated extracts as though they were quotes from a diary (i.e. the date on one line, and the quotes starting on the next). Reference, however, to Heyerdahl’s original book The Ra Expeditions shows that the quotes by Ralling were actually taken from Heyerdahl’s continuous narrative (written up later, possibly from his diaries, but not actually quoting them). Here is part of that narrative for 9 July - it would be only days before he and his crew abandoned Ra to the waves (and soon after that, they would be starting work on Ra II).

‘On July 9th we had just discovered that the sea which had gone over the cabin roof had also forced its way through the lid of a cask containing almost two hundred pounds of salted meat, which soon rotted. It was during this morning inspection that an agitated Georges came to report something much worse. All the main ropes which secured the outermost papyrus roll on the windward side to the rest of Ra had been chafed through as the floor of the cabin shifted to and fro under the onslaught of the waves. Georges was pale and almost speechless, In one leap I was on the other side of the cabin with Abdullah. The boat was split in two lengthwise. The big starboard bundle, supporting one mast, was moving slowing in and out from the rest of the boat down its entire length. The roll was attached to Ra only at bow and stern. Every time the waves lifted the big papyrus roll away from the rest of the boat we stared straight down into the clear blue depths. Never had I seen the Atlantic so clear and so deep as through that cleft in our own little papyrus world. Abdullah would have turned pale, had he been able. With stoic calm, and without a tremor in his voice, Abdullah said coolly that this was the end. The ropes had worn away. The chain was broken. The rope links would unravel themselves one by one and in an hour or two the papyrus reeds would be drifting away from each other in all directions. [. . .]

Then Norman was suddenly standing beside us, glaring like a tiger about to spring.

“Let’s not give up, boys,” he said through clenched teeth.

Next moment we were all on the go. Carlo and Santiago pulled out coils of rope and measured and chopped up lengths of our thickest cordage. Georges plunged into the waves and swam crosswise under Ra with a thick rope end. Norman and I crawled all over the boat examining the chafed lashings to find out how long it would be before we fell apart. Papyrus stems were floating in our wake, singly and in sheaves. Abdullah stood with the sledge-hammer, driving in Ra’s huge sewing needle, a thin iron spike with an eye at the bottom, large enough to take a rope one quarter of an inch thick. With this needle, we were going to try to sew the ‘paper boat’ together. Yuri stood the gruelling turn at the rudder-oar alone, hour after hour. First Georges swam crosswise under the boat four times with our thickest rope, which we cinched up on deck like four big barrel hoops, in the hope of holding the bundles together so that the straddled mast would not burst open at the top. Then he ducked under the papyrus bundles to the spot where Abdullah’s big sewing needle had been pushed through. In the depths Georges had to pull the thin rope out of the needle’s eye and re-thread it a moment later when Abdullah pushed the needle down again empty in another place. In this way we got the fatal gap ‘sewn’ up again to some extent, but we had lost a lot of papyrus on the starboard side and were consequently lying harder to windward than ever before. The straddled mast was askew, but Ra was still sailing so fast that Georges had to be held on a rope. We were delighted to be able to haul him on board for the last time without his having been spiked through the head by the sharp giant needle.

Carlo apologized for the meal: spume was constantly washing into the galley chest and putting out the fire.’