Norway - Thor Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki Raft

On 28 April 1947, a raft made of balsawood carrying six men and a parrot sailed out of Callao, Peru. Its skipper was the then 33-year-old Thor Heyerdahl, and their destination was Polynesia.

The expedition was a result of the theory Heyerdahl had been pondering ever since his stay on Fatu Hiva: this group of islands in the South Pacific could not have been populated solely by peoples from the west. It must also have been populated by indigenous South Americans. Among the circumstantial evidence Heyerdahl pointed to, was the story of Kon-Tiki Viracocha, a native chief who, legend has it, sailed west from Peru into the sunset on a large balsawood raft.

Heyerdahl had presented his theory to a group of leading American anthropologists in the spring of 1946, but they gave him the cold shoulder. One of them, Herbert Spinden, even went so far as to challenge Thor:

“Sure, see how far you get yourself sailing from Peru to the South Pacific on a balsa raft!”

Heyerdahl took the challenge to heart and immediately set about planning the expedition that would take him and a crew across the Pacific Ocean on his own balsa raft.

First Heyerdahl had to recruit a crew. This proved relatively easy, and he soon had five well-qualified men on his team. Together they traveled to Ecuador to procure balsa timber for the raft and then on to Peru to build it.

Through personal contacts Heyerdahl corresponded with representatives of the American military and was able to obtain everything from sleeping bags, field rations, suntan lotion and canned goods, to navigational instruments and radio equipment.

After 14 days at sea Heyerdahl and his crew were confident that the raft was indeed seaworthy. And not just that: their vessel was
“a fantastic seagoing craft,” Heyerdahl wrote in his log.

After 101 days at sea the Kon-Tiki ran aground on a coral reef by the Raroia atoll in Polynesia. The expedition had been an unconditional success, and Thor Heyerdahl and his crew had demonstrated that South American peoples could in fact have journeyed to the islands of the South Pacific by balsa raft.

Heyerdahl’s book, “The Kon-Tiki Expedition” published in 1948, has been translated into more than 70 languages, and tens of millions of copies have been sold to date.

The original raft is preserved at the Kon Tiki Museum in Oslo, Norway.