Kon-Tiki was the raft used by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl in his 1947 expedition
across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands. 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 Heyerdahl's book; the Academy Award-winning documentary film chronicling
his adventures; and the 2012 dramatised feature film nominated for the Academy Award for Best
Foreign Language Film. Heyerdahl believed that people from South
America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. Although most anthropologists as of
2010 had come to the conclusion they did not, in 2011, new genetic evidence was uncovered
by Erik Thorsby that Easter Island inhabitants do have some South American DNA, lending credence
to at least some of Heyerdahl's theses. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was
to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that
there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so. Although the expedition
carried some modern equipment, such as a radio, watches, charts, sextant, and metal knives,
Heyerdahl argued they were incidental to the purpose of proving that the raft itself could
make the journey. The Kon-Tiki expedition was funded by private
loans, along with donations of equipment from the United States Army. Heyerdahl and a small
team went to Peru, where, with the help of dockyard facilities provided by the Peruvian
authorities, they constructed the raft out of balsa logs and other native materials in
an indigenous style as recorded in illustrations by Spanish conquistadores. The trip began
on April 28, 1947. Heyerdahl and five companions sailed the raft for 101 days over 6900 km
across the Pacific Ocean before smashing into a reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on
August 7, 1947. The crew made successful landfall and all returned safely.
Thor Heyerdahl's book about his experience became a bestseller. It was published in Norwegian
in 1948 as The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas, later reprinted as
Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft. It appeared with great success in English in
1950, also in many other languages. A documentary motion picture about the expedition, also
called Kon-Tiki was produced from a write-up and expansion of the crew's filmstrip notes
and won an Academy Award in 1951. It was directed by Thor Heyerdahl and edited by Olle Nordemar.
The voyage was also chronicled in the documentary TV-series The Kon-Tiki Man: The Life and Adventures
of Thor Heyerdahl, directed by Bengt Jonson. The original Kon-Tiki raft is now on display
in the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo.
Crew Kon-Tiki had a six-man crew, all of whom were
Norwegian except for Bengt Danielsson, a Swede. Thor Heyerdahl was the expedition leader.
He was also the author of the book of the expedition and the narrator of the story.
Heyerdahl had studied the ancient people of South America and Polynesia and believed that
there was a link between the two. Erik Hesselberg was the navigator and artist.
He painted the large Kon-Tiki figure on the raft's sail. His children's book Kon-Tiki
and I appeared in Norwegian in 1949 and has since been published in more than 15 languages.
Bengt Danielsson took on the role of steward, in charge of supplies and daily rations. Danielsson
was a Swedish sociologist interested in human migration theory. He also served as translator,
as he was the only member of the crew who spoke Spanish. He was also a voracious reader;
his box aboard the raft contained many books. Knut Haugland was a radio expert, decorated
by the British in World War II for actions in the Norwegian heavy water sabotage that
stalled what were believed to be Germany's plans to develop an atomic bomb. Haugland
was the last surviving crew member; he died on Christmas Day, 2009 at the age of 92.
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 Allied bombers to sink the ship.
Herman Watzinger was an engineer whose area of expertise was in technical measurements.
He was the first to join Heyerdahl for the trip. He collected and recorded all sorts
of data on the voyage. Much of what he recorded, such as weather data, was sent back to various
people, since this area of the ocean was largely unstudied.
The expedition also carried a pet parrot named Lorita.
Construction
The main body of the float was composed of nine balsa tree trunks up to 45 ft long,
2 ft in diameter, lashed together with 1¼ inch hemp ropes. Cross-pieces of balsa logs
18 ft long and 1 ft in diameter were lashed across the logs at 3 ft intervals to give
lateral support. Pine splashboards clad the bow, and lengths of pine 1 inch thick and
2 ft wide were wedged between the balsa logs and used as centreboards.
The main mast was made of lengths of mangrove wood lashed together to form an A-frame 29 ft
high. Behind the main-mast was a cabin of plaited bamboo 14 ft long and 8 ft wide
was built about 4–5 ft high, and roofed with banana leaf thatch. At the stern was
a 19 ft long steering oar of mangrove wood, with a blade of fir. The main sail was 15
by 18 ft on a yard of bamboo stems lashed together. Photographs also show a top-sail
above the main sail, and also a mizzen-sail, mounted at the stern.
The raft was partially decked in split bamboo. The main spars were a laminate of wood and
reeds and Heyerdahl tested more than twenty different composites before settling on one
that proved an effective compromise between bulk and torsional rigidity. No metal was
used in the construction. Supplies
Kon-Tiki carried 275 US gallons of drinking water in 56 water cans, as well as a number
of sealed bamboo rods. The purpose stated by Heyerdahl for carrying modern and ancient
containers was to test the effectiveness of ancient water storage. For food Kon-Tiki carried
200 coconuts, sweet potatoes, bottle gourds and other assorted fruit and roots. The U.S.
Army Quartermaster Corps provided field rations, tinned food and survival equipment. In return,
the Kon-Tiki explorers reported on the quality and utility of the provisions. They also caught
plentiful numbers of fish, particularly flying fish, "dolphin fish", yellowfin tuna, bonito
and shark. Communications
The expedition carried an amateur radio station with the call sign of LI2B operated by former
World War II Norwegian underground radio operators Knut Haugland and Torstein Raaby. Haugland
and Raaby maintained regular communication with a number of American, Canadian, and South
American stations that relayed Kon Tiki's status to the Norwegian Embassy in Washington,
D.C. On August 5, Haugland made contact with a station in Oslo, Norway, 10,000 miles away.
Kon Tiki's transmitters were powered by batteries and a hand-cranked generator and operated
on the 40-, 20-, 10-, and 6-meter bands. Each unit was water resistant, used 2E30 vacuum
tubes, and provided approximately 6 watt of RF output; the equivalent of a small flashlight.
Two British 3-16 MHz Mark II transmitters were also carried on board, as was a VHF transmitter
for communicating with aircraft and a hand-cranked Survival radio of the Gibson Girl type for
500 and 8280 kHz. The radio receiver used throughout the voyage,
a National Radio Company NC-173, once required a thorough drying out after being soaked during
a shipwreck. An "all well, all well" message was sent via LI2B to notify would-be rescuers
of the crew's safety. The call sign LI2B was used by Heyerdahl again
in 1969–70, when he built a papyrus reed raft and sailed from Morocco to Barbados in
an attempt to show a possible link between the civilization of ancient Egypt and the
New World. The voyage
Kon-Tiki left Callao, Peru, on the afternoon of April 28, 1947. To avoid coastal traffic
it was initially towed 50 miles out by the Fleet Tug Guardian Rios of the Peruvian Navy,
then sailed roughly west carried along on the Humboldt Current.
The crew's first sight of land was the atoll of Puka-Puka on July 30. On August 4, the
97th day after departure, Kon-Tiki reached the Angatau atoll. The crew made brief contact
with the inhabitants of Angatau Island, but were unable to land safely. Calculations made
by Heyerdahl before the trip had indicated that 97 days was the minimum amount of time
required to reach the Tuamotu islands, so that the encounter with Angatau showed that
they had made good time. On August 7, the voyage came to an end when
the raft struck a reef and was eventually beached on an uninhabited islet off Raroia
atoll in the Tuamotu group. The team had travelled a distance of around 3,770 nautical miles)
in 101 days, at an average speed of 1.5 knots. After spending a number of days alone on the
tiny islet, the crew were greeted by men from a village on a nearby island who arrived in
canoes, having seen washed-up flotsam from the raft. The crew were taken back to the
native village, where they were feted with traditional dances and other festivities.
Finally the crew were taken off Raroia to Tahiti by the French schooner Tamara, with
the salvaged Kon-Tiki in tow. Anthropology
Heyerdahl believed that the original inhabitants of Easter Island were the migrants from Peru.
He argued that the monumental statues known as moai resembled sculptures more typical
of pre-Columbian Peru than any Polynesian designs. He believed that the Easter Island
myth of a power struggle between two peoples called the Hanau epe and Hanau momoko was
a memory of conflicts between the original inhabitants of the island and a later wave
of Native Americans from the Northwest coast, eventually leading to the annihilation of
the Hanau epe and the destruction of the island's culture and once-prosperous economy.
Most historians consider that the Polynesians from the west were the original inhabitants
and that the story of the Hanau epe is either pure myth, or a memory of internal tribal
or class conflicts. In 2011 Professor Erik Thorsby of the University of Oslo presented
DNA evidence to the Royal Society which whilst agreeing with the west origin also identified
a distinctive but smaller genetic contribution from South America. However, this result has
been questioned because of the possibility of contamination by South Americans after
European contact with the islands. Later recreations of Kon-Tiki
Seven Little Sisters In 1954 William Willis sailed alone on a raft
Seven Little Sisters from Peru to American Samoa, successfully completing the journey.
He sailed 6,700 miles, which was 2,200 miles farther than Kon-Tiki. In a second great voyage
ten years later, he rafted 11,000 miles from South America to Australia with a metal raft
Age Unlimited. Kantuta
In 1955, the Czech explorer and adventurer Eduard Ingris attempted to recreate the Kon-Tiki
expedition on a balsa raft called Kantuta. His first expedition, Kantuta I, took place
in 1955–1956 and led to failure. In 1959 Ingris built a new balsa raft, Kantuta II,
and tried to repeat the previous expedition. The second expedition was a success. Ingris
was able to cross the Pacific Ocean on the balsa raft from Peru to Polynesia.
Tahiti-Nui A French seafarer, Éric de Bisschop, committed
himself in a project he had had for some years: he built a Polynesian raft in order to cross
the eastern Pacific Ocean from Tahiti to Chile; the Tahiti-Nui left Papeete with a crew of
five on November 8, 1956. When near the Juan Fernández Islands in May 1957, the raft was
in a very poor state and they asked for a towing, but it was damaged during the operation
and had to be abandoned, but they could keep all the equipment aboard.
Tahiti-Nui II In Chile a second Tahiti-Nui was built in
Constitucion; they left on April 13, 1958, towards Callao, then towards the Marquesas,
but they missed their target. His crew built a new smaller raft, the Tahiti Nui III, in
the ocean out of the more buoyant parts of the Tahiti Nui II and were swept along towards
Cook Islands where on August 30, the raft went aground and was wrecked at Rakahanga
atoll. Eric de Bisschop was the only person who died in this tragic accident.
Tangaroa A Peruvian expedition led by Carlos Caravedo
crossed the Pacific Ocean in 1965 in 115 days in a raft named Tangaroa, of which 18 days
were used by the crew to cross Tuamotus, the Tuamotu Archipielago, making Tangaroa the
only raft that has managed to cross that dangerous archipelago of French Polynesia by its own
means. On November 18, 1965, the Tangaroa ended its journey on the Fakarava island.
Fakarava is where the Tangaroa is currently preserved.
Las Balsas The 1973 Las Balsas expedition was the first
multiple-raft crossing of the Pacific Ocean in recent history. It is the longest-known
raft voyage in history. The expedition was led by Spaniard Vital Alsar, who, in 1970,
led the La Balsa expedition, only on that occasion with one raft and three companions.
The crossing was successful and, at the time, the longest raft voyage in history, until
eclipsed in 1973 by Las Balsas. The purpose of the 1973 expedition was three-fold: to
prove that the success of 1970 was no accident, to test different currents in the sea, which
Alsar maintained ancient mariners knew as modern humans know road maps, and to show
that the original expeditions, directed perhaps toward trade or colonisation, may have consisted
of small fleets of balsa rafts. Tangaroa
In the spring of 2006, a Scandinavian 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 a relatively sophisticated square sail that
allowed sailing into the wind, or tacking. It was 16 m high by 8 m wide. The raft also
included a set of modern navigation and communication equipment, including solar panels, portable
computers, and desalination equipment. The crew posted to their website.
Tangaroa's six-man crew was led by Norwegian Torgeir Higraff and included Olav Heyerdahl,
grandson of Thor Heyerdahl, Bjarne Krekvik, Øyvin Lauten, Swedish Anders Berg and Peruvian
Roberto Sala. Tangaroa was launched on the same day that Kon-Tiki had been—April 28—and
it reached its destination on July 7, which was 30 days faster than Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki
which had taken 101 days for the voyage. Tangaroa's speed was credited to the proper use of the
quara centerboards in navigation. Heyerdahl had not known how to correctly use them. In
addition, the Tangaroa had been constructed both wider and higher. It also boasted a larger
sail than the Kon-Tiki. A DVD documentary, The Tangaroa Expedition,
was produced by Videomaker, 2007, shot by photographers Anders Berg and Jenssen.
An-Tiki On January 30, 2011, An-Tiki, a raft modeled
after Kon-Tiki, began a 3,000 mile, 70-day journey across the Atlantic Ocean from the
Canary Islands to the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas. The expedition was piloted
by four men, aged from 56 to 84 years, led by Anthony Smith. The trip was designed to
commemorate the journey in an open boat of survivors from the British steamship Anglo-Saxon,
sunk by the German cruiser Widder in 1940. The raft ended its voyage in the Caribbean
island of St Maarten, completing its trip to Eleuthera in the following year with Smith
and a new crew. Kon-Tiki
Kon-Tiki is a 2012 Norwegian historical drama film about the 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition. It
stars Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen as Thor Heyerdahl and is directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen
Sandberg. It was the highest-grossing film of 2012 in Norway and the country's most expensive
production to date. See also
Experimental archaeology Polynesian navigation
Tupac Inca Yupanqui References
Bibliography Heyerdahl, Thor. Kon-Tiki. Rand McNally & Company.
At Internet Archive. Hesselberg, Erik. Kon-Tiki and I : illustrations
with text, begun on the Pacific on board the raft "Kon-Tiki" and completed at "Solbakken"
in Borre. Allen & Unwin Andersson, Axel A Hero for the Atomic Age:
Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki Expedition ISBN 978-1-906165-31-4
External links Media related to Kon-Tiki at Wikimedia Commons
Kon-Tiki Museum National NC-173 receiver
Quick Facts: Comparing the Two Rafts: Kon-Tiki and Tangaroa Azerbaijan International, Vol
14:4 Testing Heyerdahl's Theories about Kon-Tiki
60 Years Later: Tangaroa Pacific Voyage Azerbaijan International, Vol 14:4
Kon-Tiki in Reverse: The Tahiti-Nui Expedition TV2Sumo WebTV programme "Ekspedisjonen Tangaroa"
– Norsk Acali 1973 – expedition by raft across Atlantic
Librarything, 2007 Hsu-Fu 1993 – bamboo raft across Pacific
personal.psu.edu Kon-Tiki 1947 Documentary