August 7 1947 Kon-Tiki completes 4,300 mile voyage

[J. Dillon]

August 7:
1947 : Wood raft makes 4,300-mile voyage

On this day in 1947, Kon-Tiki, a balsa wood raft captained by Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl, completes a 4,300-mile, 101-day journey from Peru to Raroia in the Tuamotu Archipelago, near Tahiti. Heyerdahl wanted to prove his theory that prehistoric South Americans could have colonized the Polynesian islands by drifting on ocean currents.

Heyerdahl and his five-person crew set sail from Callao, Peru, on the 40-square-foot Kon-Tiki on April 28, 1947. The Kon-Tiki, named for a mythical white chieftain, was made of indigenous materials and designed to resemble rafts of early South American Indians. While crossing the Pacific, the sailors encountered storms, sharks and whales, before finally washing ashore at Raroia. Heyerdahl, born in Larvik, Norway, on October 6, 1914, believed that Polynesia's earliest inhabitants had come from South America, a theory that conflicted with popular scholarly opinion that the original settlers arrived from Asia. Even after his successful voyage, anthropologists and historians continued to discredit Heyerdahl's belief. However, his journey captivated the public and he wrote a book about the experience that became an international bestseller and was translated into 65 languages. Heyerdahl also produced a documentary about the trip that won an Academy Award in 1951.

Heyerdahl made his first expedition to Polynesia in 1937. He and his first wife lived primitively on Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas Islands for a year and studied plant and animal life. The experience led him to believe that humans had first come to the islands aboard primitive vessels drifting on ocean currents from the east.

Following the Kon-Tiki expedition, Heyerdahl made archeological trips to such places as the Galapagos Islands, Easter Island and Peru and continued to test his theories about how travel across the seas played a major role in the migration patterns of ancient cultures. In 1970, he sailed across the Atlantic from Morocco to Barbados in a reed boat named Ra II (after Ra, the Egyptian sun god) to prove that Egyptians could have connected with pre-Columbian Americans. In 1977, he sailed the Indian Ocean in a primitive reed ship built in Iraq to learn how prehistoric civilizations in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and Egypt might have connected.

While Heyerdahl's work was never embraced by most scholars, he remained a popular public figure and was voted "Norwegian of the Century" in his homeland. He died at age 87 on April 18, 2002, in Italy. The raft from his famous 1947 expedition is housed at the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, Norway.

[Champagne]

Fyi, a Norwegian film production is currently ongoing, making a new KON-TIKI film due to screen on cinemas this summer.

Information about the film:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1613750/

Trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4DZ7svBw7I

Thor Heyerdahls grandson, Olav Heyerdahl, have completed a Peru-Tangaroa-Peru expedition in 70 days with a modified balsa wood raft as well as sailing around in a plastic raft constructed from plastic bottles to make people aware about the massive plastic pollution that is ongoing on the worlds oceans. http://www.theplastiki.com/static/press/bio_oh.pdf

More information about the Museum in English:

http://www.kon-tiki.no/Images/NOENTY.pdf


Brgds

Kim

[Paul Pless]

Kon Tiki was one of my absolute favorite books as a child and remains influential in my continued desire to go 'voyaging', although maybe not in quite such an adventuresome manner.

[Ian McColgin]

A day after my parents' wedding and a year and three days before my birth.

Now that we've established that pelagic anthropology is all about me . . . I don't recall a time in my life not knowing of Kon Tiki and Hyerdahl. He anticipated by some decades what became a wave of ocean voyages in primitive craft, establishing that levels of human exploration were at least possible. Even though the settlement of Oceana now appears more likely to have come from the west, it's still quite possible that questing people from South America also drifted from the east and may have had some cultural impact. And perhaps one day we'll have the data necessary to see if there could have been a genetic impact as well.

Sail on.