A team of tough guys
On April 28, 1947, a steam tug sailed from the port of Lima in Peru, towing a strange raft about fifteen metres long. On board, a Norwegian team, mainly composed of former Norwegian resistance fighters, tough as nails, passed through SOE (Special Operations Executives - British Foreign Secret Service during the Second World War) with a smile on their face. What did these men come here to do, more than 18,000 km from home on this raft?
Honeymoon Fatu Hiva
At the head of this crew, the explorer Thor Heyerdahl. Born in 1914, after a childhood spent skiing and exploring nature in Norway, Thor Heyerdahl moved to Polynesia in Fatu Hiva in 1936, accompanied by his young wife. He returned home on the eve of the Second World War. From this episode of his life, he drew the story "American Indians in The South Pacific" published after the war.
It is from this slice of life that his obsession to demonstrate the settlement pattern of these islands was born. He developed a theory for this settlement in two waves.
The first left Peru around 500 AD to populate Easter Island and then Polynesia, while the second, from British Columbia, arrived in Hawaii around the year 1000.
A soldier who is not shy
With the declaration of war, Thor Heyerdahl joined the free Norwegian forces in 1941: the resistance. Paid into paratroopers and the intelligence branch, he volunteered to be parachuted into Norway for sabotage actions. It is there that he will meet some of the five acolytes who will accompany him on the Kon-Tiki to realize a transpacific in 1947.
3700 miles estimated
Your-Tiki is the name of the Inca sun god. Heyerdahl and his crew (6 men and a parrot) have set off on a "small" 3700 mile excursion across the Pacific! They sailed at high esteem, directing their raft with the appearance of oars. Although generously stocked with American supplies, they cooked every morning the flying fish that fell on their ship without free board during each night!
The ecosystem that appeared under their shells, composed of algae and crustaceans, attracted a whole range of fish fauna, from dolphins to tuna and 10-metre-long whale sharks that almost sank their frail skiff!
Arrival in French Polynesia
After 101 days of sailing, carried by the Humboldt current, the Kon-Tiki made a violent landfall: hitting a reef in Raroia, a paradisiac atoll in Tuamotu (French Polynesia) on August 7, 1947. They all landed unharmed except for their parrot, abducted by a treacherous blade, one night in bad weather.
Although his theory of Polynesian settlement was later partially challenged (as sometimes happens in the human sciences), Thor Heyerdahl and his friends have successfully demonstrated, it is possible to cross the Pacific from Peru by drifting with the sandstone of the currents..
After writing the memories of this expedition in his book "Kon-Tiki" published in 1950, Heyerdahl continued his exploratory existence by setting up various expeditions to Easter Island, Egypt or the Canaries. He died in Norway in 2002 at the age of 87.
