The raft of Thor Heyerdahl

On the 7th of August in the year 1947, tossed by the waves crashing on the rocks, a raft of balsa wood and bamboo hit the reef that protected the quiet lagoon Raroria, a remote island in the Marquesas archipelago, in the middle of ‘Pacific Ocean.

After a long struggle with the breakers, the six men on board reached the shore, carrying what they had managed to recover from the wreck.

If he had witnesses (with the exception of the occupants) the scene would have appeared to them amazing. For generations, it did not look like a boat in those waters; in the direction from which it came. Eight thousand miles of ocean separating the island from the nearest land. Eight thousand miles on a raft of logs? It had to be shipwrecked! But they were not shipwrecked. One of the men had just landed the Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl. He was tired and a little ‘bruised, he had spent one hundred and one days at the mercy of the Pacific, but he had just proved his theory. Heyerdahl was born in 1914 in the village of Norvik in Norway, his early research interests were in biology and zoology, but soon began to take care of ethnology. During a trip to the Marquesas Islands in 1933 with his wife, Liv, was suddenly struck by some similarities between certain Polynesian traditions and those of ancient Amerindian peoples. The legendary founder of the Polynesian people, the Tiki god, son of the Sun, had led his people from those islands from somewhere “on the other side of the sea “:” a mountainous country burnt by the sun. “ With curious symmetry, a legend Andean spoke of a Sun King called Kon-Tiki, who fled by sea westward to escape his enemies. Heyerdahl was so convinced that the “mountainous country” was the South America and the Polynesians descended (at least in part) from an ancient Amerindian population that had preceded the Inca civilization.

The hypothesis had only one weak point: no one thought possible to reach a Polynesian island starting from the coast of South America having only a stone-age technology.

A vast stretch of water separated the American continent from these tiny land masses, a distance that posed a challenge even for experienced navigators. Motivated by this, Heyerdahl decided to practically demonstrate his theory. He aimed to trace the footsteps of the Polynesians’ ancestors: to reach the Marquesas Islands using a raft constructed from logs, the same type of vessel available on the coasts of Chile and Peru during the presumed period of migration.

The raft was built using nine large balsa logs from Ecuador, joined solely by hemp ropes. The ‘deck’ consisted of a bamboo lattice; in the middle of the raft was a hut made of bamboo and woven straw to shield the occupants from the sun; at the stern, there was a long steering oar. Slow but unsinkable, the raft set sail from Callao on the coast of Peru on April 28, 1947.

Onboard were Heyerdahl and five other companions, a diverse crew composed of individuals without maritime experience (the ancient indigenous people had none), with a small radio on board. A large square sail attached to a bamboo spar, inflated by the southeast trade winds, propelled the Kon-Tiki towards the open ocean. After 101 days of navigation and enduring two storms, subsisting almost exclusively on fish, mollusks, and sometimes plankton, the six finally arrived safely in the Marquesas archipelago. This proved the possibility that such a journey was at least feasible. Risking their lives and those of the crew, all for the sake of supporting a theory. Interestingly, Heyerdahl had a fear of water and did not know how to swim.

In the following years, Thor Heyerdahl undertook similar ventures, constructing replicas of ancient Egyptian boats with which he crossed the Atlantic and reed boats that navigated the Persian Gulf. Furthermore, he led several archaeological expeditions to Easter Island, the Maldives, and the Canary Islands.”