RAFTING FEVER.

• Author: McIntyre, Loren

The audacity of Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 balsa-log voyage from South America to Polynesia inspired followers to seek similar fame and fortune.

Kon-Tiki

"We were proto-hippies. To escape civilization, Liv and I had marooned ourselves in 1937 on Fatu Hiva, a Polynesian island visited only once a year by a small copra schooner. Few clothes, no medicines. Committed to living off the fruits of land and sea as long as our honeymoon might last. Or until the schooner might return."

Thor Heyerdahl said that he and Liv were sitting by their dying campfire on the beach one evening with old Tei-Tetua. A former cannibal who had twelve wives, Tei-Tetua sat on his naked haunches, stirring the embers. He leveled a firebrand at dark swells rolling out of the east and breaking onto moonlit boulders. "From far out there, Tiki brought my ancestors to these islands. They carved the stone giants," he said, speaking of idols Thor and Liv had seen in Fatu Hiva's forests. The monoliths looked like those of lost Andean civilizations.

Early Americans settled Polynesia? How could they have crossed four thousand miles of open ocean? The search for answers transformed Thor's entire life. Upon his return to Norway, Thor turned in his specimens of flora and fauna and took up anthropology of the Andes and the South Seas in order to get to the bottom of the Tiki legends. He studied oceanography to understand the Humboldt Current the popular name of the Peruvian current that sweeps up the west coast of South America then veers towards Polynesia. He learned about lightweight balsa-wood rafts steered by guaras, various adjustable centerboards. One such raft, loaded with trade goods, was captured in 1526 by the first explorers to sail the Peruvian coast.

Spanish chroniclers had written that Emperor Tupa Inca Yupanqui vowed not to curb his conquests until he reached the uttermost sea. Around 1460, Tupa first beheld the ocean near Manta, Ecuador, where the creator, Kon-Tiki Viracocha, had bidden farewell to his people and set out across the Pacific by walking on the water. Sea merchants on sailing rafts came from faraway islands ringed by reefs. Tupa Inca's court necromancer-said to possess the art of flying through the air--verified the islands' existence.

Fascinated, the emperor built a great fleet of balsalog rafts and ventured into the Pacific with an army of twenty thousand. After a year he returned with black people, gold, and the jawbone of a horse. The sea stow so excited Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, the Spanish viceroy's historian, that he set sail from Peru for the rumored isles in 1567. His ship's captain missed the coral atolls, but sailed on to discover the Solomon Islands.

"Too bad Sarmiento missed Mangareva," Thor reflected in 1974 while picking out some of my slides of early Peruvian artifacts. "Until the 1800s its lagoon sheltered log rafts busy with inter-island trade."

All experts consulted by Thor before World War II ridiculed his theory that American Indians rode the Humboldt Current to Polynesia. Most insisted that Polynesia was settled from Melanesia or from Asia. None believed wooden rafts could weather a four-thousand-mile oceanic crossing. After the war Thor resolved to prove his theory by actually building and launching a balsa-log raft into the current. Old comrades dropped everything to join his crew. They felled balsa trees in Ecuador and assembled a log raft forty feet long in Callao, Peru. On April 29, 1947, Thor sailed for Polynesia on Kon-Tiki. His companions were four Norwegians, one Swede, and a parrot.

In May, June, and July, Peruvian naval officers and I gathered every day around a Pacific Ocean chart at the Escuela Naval in Callao, where I served on the U.S. Naval Mission. We moved a little flag westward on the chart whenever the Norsemen radioed their position. When reception faltered we feared the flag might be marking a place in mid-ocean where Kon-Tiki's logs and lashings had fallen apart.

On the 101st day Thor confounded the skeptics. Breakers cast the raft onto a reef of Raroia atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago, forty-three-hundred nautical miles from Callao, after a voyage so fabulous that the Kon-Tiki...