The Wild Story Of Thor Heyerdahl, The Explorer Who Sailed Thousands Of Miles Across The Ocean In A Homemade Raft — Three Times

The Wild Story Of Thor Heyerdahl, The Explorer Who Sailed Thousands Of Miles Across The Ocean In A Homemade Raft — Three Times

Determined to prove that ancient peoples could have made contact with one another across the oceans, Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl built a raft out of balsa logs and hemp rope — and successfully used it to cross the Pacific Ocean in 1947.

On August 7, 1947, Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl completed his 101-day journey of approximately 4,300 miles across the Pacific from Peru to French Polynesia on a homemade raft built only with balsa logs and hemp rope — proving that ancient peoples could have made the same astonishing voyage.⁠

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Fascinated by the similarities between Indigenous South American and French Polynesian cultures, Heyerdahl theorized that long before anyone from the West had managed to contact the inhabitants of the islands in the South Pacific, seafarers from South America used rafts to travel all the way there. But despite Heyerdahl's accomplishment, the scientific establishment remained unconvinced by his theory, though various versions of his ideas are widely accepted today. 

Learn more about the daring adventures of Thor Heyerdahl

When Thor Heyerdahl looked at the ancient world, he saw patterns. Artifacts, language, and cultural activities like pyramid building in disparate cultures convinced Heyerdahl that ancient people might have interacted with one another across oceans. And so he set out to prove it.

Over 30 years, Heyerdahl completed several transoceanic voyages to prove that ancient people could have influenced each other. Traveling by simple boat, he and his small team traversed thousands of nautical miles to demonstrate that such travel could have been possible in ancient times, too.

In the end, Heyerdahl’s voyages didn’t prove anything definitive, but they did suggest that ancient people could have embarked on similar ones. And though Heyerdahl’s beliefs were largely dismissed in his day, some modern-day scholars see what he was seeing.

How Thor Heyerdahl Became An Adventurer

Born on October 6, 1914, in Larvik, Norway, Thor Heyerdahl developed a fascination with the world at a young age. His mother, Alison, was the head of the Larvik area museums association and inspired her son’s interest in nature and animals.

In pursuit of that interest, Heyerdahl enrolled in the University of Oslo to study zoology and geography in 1933. But Heyerdahl’s academic career was short-lived. Restless and eager to see the world, he dropped out in 1936 and went to live in Polynesia with his new wife, Liv Coucheron Torp.

There, living on Fatu-Hiva in the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, Heyerdahl began to wonder how early people had settled there. According to The New York Times, he concluded that they had probably ridden eastern ocean currents to navigate from South America.

History Daily reported that Heyerdahl came to this conclusion for a couple of reasons. The first being that Polynesians ate South American plants like sweet potatoes and seemed to share certain myths and legends with Peruvians. Heyerdahl believed that this wasn’t a coincidence, but rather evidence that the ancient civilizations had somehow interacted with each other.

He began to develop his ideas as the years passed, though his pursuit of answers was briefly put on hold during World War II. Then, Heyerdahl served in the Free Norwegian armed forces in the north of the country. But once the war ended, he turned back to his research.

There was just one problem — most academics didn’t support Heyerdahl’s theory. They argued that ancient people had migrated to Polynesian from the west, from Asia, and that ancient South Americans would not have been able to cross the ocean.

So, Thor Heyerdahl decided to prove that such a crossing was possible. In 1947, he prepared to sail from Peru to French Polynesia in a simple boat.

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