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Lincoln in Norway – Wiegers Calendar April

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Wiegers calendar AprilAbraham Lincoln seems to be everywhere in the world. In April of my monthly series, the David Wiegers calendar takes me back to Oslo, Norway, where Lincoln makes an appearance in Frogner Park.

Frogner Park includes an area many unofficially (and incorrectly) refer to as Vigeland Sculpture Park because of the more than 200 large sculptures by Gustav Vigeland in bronze, granite, and cast iron. For anyone who hasn’t experienced Vigeland’s work, you’ll be surprised, and perhaps even shocked, by the bizarreness of some of his statues. Favoring grotesquely caricatured nudes, Vigeland’s statues offer a variety of shapes, sizes, and attitudes of the human spirit. Many are of children, including The Angry Boy, a bronze statue that captures well the strife of the terrible twos (or maybe sevens). The vast majority of the sculptures are made of Iddefjord granite, including its most striking sculpture called The Monolith. A museum has more artwork and explanations of Vigeland’s creative process. Here’s some trivia – Vigeland also designed the medal given as the Nobel Peace Prize.

As with January’s Lincoln statue in Edinburgh, I feel foolish for not seeing the Lincoln statue in Oslo because I was there, and indeed spent quite a few hours roaming Frogner Park and the Vigeland statuary. Yet somehow I missed it. Apparently it stands just outside the park. Designed by Norwegian-American sculptor Paul Fjelde and donated in 1914 by the U.S. State of North Dakota, the large bronze bust of Lincoln sits on a granite pedestal flanked on either side by bronze tablets reading: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth” and “Presented to Norway by the people of North Dakota, U.S.A.”

While I missed Lincoln, my visit to Norway was heartwarming and inspirational. Several venues in Oslo brought out my science traveling side. The Viking Ship and Fram Museums highlight the long history of seaborne adventure in Norway. The Kon-Tiki Museum allowed me to relive my marine biology days and fascination with the Thor Heyerdahl’s thrilling adventues on both the Kon-Tiki and the Ra Expeditions. Downtown I got to tour the Nobel Peace Center where the aforementioned Nobel Peace Prize is awarded (I had also visited the Nobel Center in Stockholm, Sweden, where all the other Nobel Prizes are awarded).

Frogner Park Vigeland

A train to the western coast of Norway got me outside of Oslo, along with a side trip via a cog railway into the mountains and a boat trip through the fjords where hundreds of waterfalls from the precipices into the deep waters. The hills around Bergen offered a grand view of the coastline. There was even an aquarium in Bergen to add to my ever-expanding list.

In these days of COVID-19 quarantine, where travel is on perhaps long-term hold, these Wiegers calendar pages provide a chance to see Lincoln sculptures around the world while letting me reminisce about my previous travels. They also give me some ideas of places I want to see once the coronavirus that plagues the world has passed.

David J. Kent is an avid science traveler and the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, in Barnes and Noble stores now. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.

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Chasing Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki Raft

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Today (August 7, 2017) marks the 70th anniversary of Thor Heyerdahl’s amazing 4300-mile, 101-day sailing of a balsa wood raft named Kon-Tiki from Peru to an island near Tahiti. And I got to see Kon-Tiki in Oslo recently.

Heyerdahl was a Norwegian anthropologist. He and his wife spent a year living on the island of Fatu Hiva in the South Pacific. They noticed that the ocean waves always struck the eastern shore of the island, which got them wondering if the original inhabitants had settled from the east, not the western lands that were closer. After 11 years of getting no support for his theory, Thor decided the best way was to prove it was possible that prehistoric South Americans could have colonized the Polynesian islands by drifting on ocean currents.

Kon-Tiki raft, Oslo

And the Kon-Tiki raft was born.

Using balsa wood and other indigenous materials from the Peruvian coast, Heyerdahl and a five-person crew built a 40-square foot raft and named it after a “mythical white chieftain.” Not surprisingly, the trip was rather eventful as they survived many storms, sharks, whales, and ambling men overboard. After leaving Peru on April 28, on August 7, 1947 they smashed into a reef on Raroia, an atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago that makes up part of French Polynesia. They had made it!

Heyerdahl went on to write a bestselling book about the expedition, which I eagerly read as a budding marine biologist in my youth. He also produced a documentary film that won an Academy Award. These widely publicized his theory and the adventure, which led to further exploits including sailing a reed raft named Ra from Morocco to Barbados. Ra was also in the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo.

Kon-Tiki, Oslo

It was thrilling for me to see in person both Ra and Kon-Tiki given they played a role in my youth inspiring me to marine biology. As for Heyerdahl’s theory that the Pacific islands were settled by drifting South Americans, that idea has never really gained favor. More recent studies relying on DNA and genome identification show clearly that the dominant genetic make up is Polynesian, meaning that the prevalent idea that Heyerdahl was trying to disprove is probably the right one after all.

David J. Kent is an avid traveler and the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, now available. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World (both Fall River Press). He has also written two e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.

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Ships Abound in Oslo

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I’m still science traveling in Scandinavia, but here’s a few photos of something that’s a big deal here in Oslo – ships! This old sailing ship is used as a tourist boat when it’s not showing the contrast with the modern Opera House in the background. You can walk all over the roof of the latter, which goes all the way to the water and a cool glass sculpture floating in the fjord like a sailing ship in its own right.

But all the cool ships are on a separate spit of land best reached by a water taxi.

Which gets us to a series of small museums highlighting several Viking ships, the Kon Tiki, and the Fram. The Fram is an old (1890s) wooden ship taken into the Arctic, and later, the Antarctic. It’s a fascinating story I’ll have more on later. Here’s the Fram.

But my favorite was the Kon Tiki. Thor Heyerdahl sailed this balsa wood raft from Peru to Tahiti in 1947. I read about it many years ago. Even cooler, I was surprised to see that the museum also had the Ra, a papyrus boat he built in Egypt and sailed from Morocco to Barbados in 1969. I’ll definitely be writing more about these later as they are true science traveling.

[Note: This was from a trip in May 2015]

David J. Kent is an avid science traveler and the author of Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World (both Fall River Press). He has also written two e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate. His next book, Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, is scheduled for release in summer 2017.

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