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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. 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...