On this date… 7 August 1947
Kon-Tiki expedition lands at Tuamotu Islands
Perhaps one of the most noted modern-day expeditions, Norwegian explorer, writer, and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl led a group of five companions (four other Norwegians and a Swede) from Peru to a Polynesian island on the famous Kon-Tiki balsa raft. Later turned into a bestselling travelogue and Academy Award winning documentary film, the Kon-Tiki expedition was a bonafide success from a travel perspective. After a voyage of more than 4,300 miles that lasted 101 days, it ran aground on a coral reef in the Tuamotu Island chain in French Polynesia on this date, 7 August 1947.
While first visiting the Hawaiian Islands in 1778, British explorer Captain James Cook (after failing to find Bouvet Island years before) was struck by the fact that a member of his crew, a high priest named Tupaia from Tahiti and Ra‘iatea, some 2500 miles away, could speak with the native Hawaiian inhabitants in their mutually intelligible languages. Cook was amazed and coined the term “Polynesian,” or the people of “many islands.” The three points of the “Polynesian Triangle” in the Pacific, New Zealand (Aotearoa) in the Southwest, Hawaii in the North, and Easter Island in the East, encompass more than 1,000 islands and cover some 16 million square miles of ocean. That’s larger than Russia, Canada and the United States combined. The fact that they could converse without resorting to basic pidgin languages convinced Cook, and later others, that the peoples of the region were all connected.
Yet what confused the intellectual white Westerns of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, were how so-called “primitive” peoples with no formal math or writing systems could cross such vast ocean distances west to east in open boats to locate other tiny dots of land. Especially since they would likely be sailing against the Humboldt Current – the cold ocean current that flows north along the west coast of South America and then follows the equator west – and the prevailing east to west winds. The obvious, and correct, conclusion was that the Polynesians had once been great navigators, but who had lost some of their skills through centuries. That posed problems for the European colonizers of the time, who saw themselves as superior.
Thor Heyerdahl subscribed to the racist “superior” belief, especially that of hyperdiffusion, or the theory that certain historical technologies or ideas were developed by a single people or civilization and then spread to other cultures. Heyerdahl believed that a group of technologically advanced and superior people – naturally fair-skinned, almost Viking-like stock similar to himself – spread across the world from Europe westward, so that hundreds of years before Columbus, early ocean travelers spread human culture to the most remote corners of the earth. Thus, he believed that a white race reached Polynesia, long before any Polynesian people, by traveling from South America and drifting westward on the currents.
Yet even when Heyerdahl first proposed his theory in 1946, the “primitivism” of previous ages had gone by the wayside and he was met with scorn and ridicule from the academic and research community. Eventually, archaeological, linguistic, cultural, and genetic evidence showed that Polynesians spread eastward from Southeast Asia using sophisticated sailing technologies and navigation techniques beginning sometime around 3000 to 1500 BCE.
What Heyerdahl’s trip did prove, however, was that the voyage of the Kon-Tiki was a great adventure – spending three months on the open sea on a raft, drifting at the mercy of the winds and currents – and that such drift voyaging was possible.