

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.
Taken from:
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history [07.08.2012]
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