Thor Heyerdahl set sail on the Kon-Tiki raft across the Pacific
On this day · 28 April 1947
On April 28, 1947, Thor Heyerdahl launched a balsa-wood raft from Peru to argue that ancient South Americans could have reached Polynesia.
On April 28, 1947, a raft built of balsa logs slipped out of Callao, Peru, carrying six men and a parrot. Its skipper was the 33-year-old Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl, and his destination was Polynesia, thousands of miles west across open ocean.
Heyerdahl had a theory to prove. The islands of the South Pacific, he argued, could not have been settled only by peoples drifting in from Asia; ancient South Americans might have reached them too. Scholars scoffed that such a primitive craft could survive the voyage, so Heyerdahl resolved to make the crossing himself.
The raft, named Kon-Tiki, rode the Humboldt Current and trade winds for 101 days before grounding on a reef at Raroia, having covered roughly 4,300 miles.
The voyage proved a balsa raft could, in fact, cross the Pacific.
The trip did not settle the academic debate about who first peopled Polynesia, but it became one of the century’s most celebrated feats of experimental adventure, retold in a best-selling book and an Oscar-winning film.
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