Kon-Tiki is 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. Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times.
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. Heyerdahl and a small team went to Peru where they constructed the raft out of balsa logs and other native material in an indigenous style. The trip began on April 28, 1947. The Kon-Tiki carried 250 liters of water in bamboo tubes. For food, they took 200 coconuts, sweet potatoes, bottle gourds and other assorted fruit and roots.
The ship 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 7, 1947, the raft struck a reef and was eventually beached on an uninhabited islet off Raroia Island in the Tuamotu group. The team had traveled a distance of around 3,770 nautical miles in 101 days.
