"It was so unusual to hear real breathing out at sea, where all living creatures wriggle silently about without lungs and quiver their gills, that we really had a warm family feeling for our old distant cousin the whale, who like us had strayed so far out to sea." To me, this quote, like most of the first part of this chapter, expresses relationships between people and other animals. Although technology and lifestyles have since the time the primitive peoples traveled across the Pacific, Heyerdahl felt a connection to them while he was on the Kon-Tiki raft. Heyerdahl and his crew lived off the resources around them just as the primitive peoples would have long ago. The crew also felt a relationship to the animals around them. An example of this would be the whale mentioned in the quote above. This new found relationship came from the common diet of plankton. The crew began to gather and eat plankton, which was both appetizing and nutritious. The crew became upset with the fish who tore apart the mesh bag, which the crew was using to gather the abundant plankton, in order to obtain the plankton inside. The crew jokingly remarked that the fish should act more like the whale, who would fill his mouth and then blow the water out through his mustache. The subject of the whale evoked thoughts of another breathing animal out on the sea other than the Kon-Tiki crew.
"But, when we got hold of it, the pirates' treasure turned into millions of tiny glittering shrimps and phosphorescent fish larvae that glowed in the dark like a heap of live coals." Heyerdahl uses this simile to describe the plankton that his crew gathers for food.
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