the kon tiki expedition by thor heyerdahl

They successfully completed the 3,270 nautical-mile voyage to Barbados in 57 days. Undaunted, Heyerdahl and his crew set sail again from Morocco in a new papyrus reed boat named Ra II in 1970. In 1969, to demonstrate that other types of ancient vessels were capable of transporting people across vast oceans, Heyerdahl and an international crew of seven men headed west across the Atlantic from Safi, Morocco, in a 50-foot papyrus reed boat of ancient Egyptian design and named Ra in honor of the Egyptian sun god.Īfter covering 2,700 miles in eight weeks, the Ra became waterlogged in a storm and had to be abandoned 600 miles from Barbados in the West Indies. It is a conveyor and not an isolator,” he wrote in the foreword of the 35th edition of “Kon-Tiki.” “The ocean has been man’s highway from the days he built the first buoyant ships, long before he tamed the horse, invented wheels and cut roads through the virgin jungles.” “The Kon-Tiki expedition opened my eyes to what the ocean really is. Through organizing other raft voyages and archeological digs-in the Galapagos Islands, Easter Island, Peru and elsewhere-Heyerdahl devoted his life to searching for proof to support his theory that there was more contact between peoples of the past than most anthropologists once thought. Khrushchev later visited the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, where the famous raft is displayed, the Cold Warrior wistfully offered to serve as a cook on the next expedition. Hailed as a national hero in Norway, Heyerdahl was invited to the White House and Buckingham Palace. In 1951, a black and white documentary of the voyage won an Academy Award. Heyerdahl’s lively chronicle of his remarkable voyage, “Kon-Tiki, Across the Pacific by Raft,” became a bestseller that has sold 30 million copies and has been published in 67 languages. The voyage of the Kon-Tiki captured the imagination of a postwar public and made the raft’s blue-eyed captain a global celebrity.

The kon tiki expedition by thor heyerdahl