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The audacity of Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 balsa-log voyage from South America to Polynesia inspired followers to seek similar fame and fortune. This author knew some of them
Kon-Tiki
"We were proto-hippies. To escape civilization, Liv and I had marooned ourselves in 1937 on Fatu Hiva, a Polynesian island visited only once a year by a small copra schooner. Few clothes, no medicines. Committed to living off the fruits of land and sea as long as our honeymoon might last. Or until the schooner might return."
Thor Heyerdahl said that he and Liv were sitting by their dying campfire on the beach one evening with old Tei-Tetua. A former cannibal who had twelve wives, Tei-Tetua sat on his naked haunches, stirring the embers. He leveled a firebrand at dark swells rolling out of the east and breaking onto moonlit boulders. "From far out there, Tiki brought my ancestors to these islands. They carved the stone giants," he said, speaking of idols Thor and Liv had seen in Fatu Hiva's forests. The monoliths looked like those of lost Andean civilizations.
Early Americans settled Polynesia? How could they have crossed four thousand miles of open ocean? The search for answers transformed Thor's entire life. Upon his return to Norway, Thor turned in his specimens of flora and fauna and took up anthropology of the Andes and the South Seas in order to get to the bottom of the Till legends. He studied oceanography to understand the Humboldt Current-the popular name of the Peruvian current that sweeps up the west coast of South America then veers towards Polynesia. He learned about lightweight balsa-wood rafts steered by guaras, various adjustable centerboards. One such raft, loaded with trade goods, was captured in 1526 by the first explorers to sail the Peruvian coast.
Spanish chroniclers had written that Emperor Tupa Inca Yupanqui vowed not to curb his conquests until he reached the uttermost sea. Around 1460, Tupa first beheld the ocean near Manta, Ecuador, where the creator, Kon-Tiki Viracocha, had bidden farewell to his people and set out across the Pacific by walking on the water. Sea merchants on sailing rafts came from faraway islands ringed by reefs. Tupa Inca's court necromancer-said to possess the art of flying through the air-verified...