Kon-Tiki was the name given to a raft by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl in his 1947 expedition. It was named after the Inca sun god, Viracocha, for whom "Kon-Tiki" was said to be an old name. Kon-Tiki is also the name of the popular book that Heyerdahl wrote about his adventures.

Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in the south Pacific in Pre-Columbian times. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to them at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so.

Heyerdahl and a small team went to Peru, where they used trees and other native materials to construct a balsawood raft in an indigenous style (as recorded in illustrations by Spanish conquistadores). Accompanied by five companions, Heyerdahl sailed it for 101 days over 4,300 miles across the Pacific Ocean before smashing into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947. The only modern equipment they had was a radio.

The book Kon-Tiki was a best-seller, and a documentary motion picture of the expedition won an Academy Award in 1951.

The original Kon-Tiki is now on display in the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo.

Crew

The Kon-Tiki was crewed by six men, all Norwegian except for Bengt Danielsson, who was from Sweden.

• Thor Heyerdahl was the expedition leader.

• Erik Hesselberg was the navigator and artist. He painted the large Kon-Tiki figure on the raft's sail.

• Bengt Danielsson took on the role of steward, in charge of supplies and daily rations. Danielsson was a sociologist interested in human migration theory. He also served as translator, as he was the only member of the crew who spoke Spanish.

• Knut Haugland was a radio expert, decorated by the British in World War II for actions that stalled Germany's plans to develop the atomic bomb. (See also Norwegian heavy water sabotage)

• Torstein Raaby was also in charge of radio transmissions. He gained radio experience while hiding behind German lines during WWII, spying on the German battleship Tirpitz. His secret radio transmissions eventually helped guide in British bombers to sink the ship.

• Herman Watzinger was an engineer whose area of expertise was in technical measurements. He recorded meteorological and hydrographical data while underway.

Anthropology

While this was an interesting experiment that demonstrated the seaworthiness of Heyerdahl's raft, his theory of the Polynesians' origins is now widely discounted by anthropologists. Physical and cultural evidence had long suggested that Polynesia was settled from west to east, migration having begun from the Asian mainland, not South America. In the late 1990s, genetic testing found that the mitochondrial DNA of the Polynesians is more similar to people from southeast Asia than to people from South America, showing that their ancestors most likely came from Asia. The Kon-Tiki adventure is often cited as a classic of pseudoarchaeology, although its daring and inventive nature is still widely acclaimed.

It should be noted that Thor Heyerdahl never set out to prove that the current Polynesians were descended from South America. According to Heyerdahl, some Polynesian legends say that Polynesia was originally inhabited by two peoples, the so-called long-eared and the short-eared. In a bloody war, all the long-eared peoples were eliminated and the short-eared people assumed sole control of Polynesia. Heyerdahl asserted that these extinct people were the ones who could have settled Polynesia from the Americas, not the current, short-eared inhabitants. However one of the problems with this argument is that traditions involving long-ears and short-ears are found only at Easter Island, and are unknown in the rest of Polynesia.

Heyerdahl further argues in his book American Indians in the Pacific that the current inhabitants of Polynesia did indeed migrate from an Asian source, but via an alternate route. He proposes that Filipino natives (whom Heyerdahl asserted held cultural and physical affinities with Polynesians) travelled with the wind along the North Pacific current. These migrants then arrived in British Columbia. Heyerdahl points to the contemporary tribes of British Columbia, such as the Tlingit and Haida, as the descendants of these migrants. Again Heyerdahl notes the cultural and physical similarities between these British Columbian tribes, Polynesians, and the Old World source. Heyerdahl notes how simple it would have been for the British Columbians to travel to Hawaii and even onward to the greater Polynesia from their New World stepping-stone by way of wind and current patterns. Heyerdahl's claims aside, however, there is no evidence that the Tlingit, Haida or other British Columbian tribes have any special affinity with Filipinos or Polynesians. Linguistically, their morphologically complex languages are about as far from Austronesian and Polynesian languages as it is possible to be, and their cultures evince their undeniable links to the rest of the peoples of North America.

Popular culture

It was parodied in an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures called Kon-Ducki. It featured Plucky Duck as Pluck Heyerdahl, Hamton J. Pig as his assistant Koom-bye-ah, and Sweetie Pie. Pluck attempts to prove that he is able to, like his ancestors from the 1970s, sail on a raft apparently filled with ABBA 8-tracks and Screaming Yellow Zonkers and make it to Salinas, California. It features a famous running gag; Pluck reclines in a sunlounger, opens a bottle of drink and says, "Ah, Mango Juice", and the mast of the raft falls on top of him.

Tangaroa Expedition

On April 28, 2006, a Norwegian team attempted to duplicate the Kon-Tiki voyage using a newly-built raft, the Tangaroa, named after the Māori sea-god Tangaroa. Again based on records of ancient vessels, this raft used relatively sophisticated square sails that allowed sailing into the wind, or tacking. It was 16m long by 8m wide. It also included a set of modern navigation and communication equipment, including solar panels, portable computers, and desalination equipment. The crew posted to their web site, www.tangaroa.no. The crew of six was led by Torgeir Higraff, and included Olav Heyerdahl, grandson of Thor Heyerdahl. The voyage was completed successfully in July 2006 and a documentary film is forthcoming.

External links

• Kon-Tiki Museum

Notes