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My FlipGrid.

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This 85 year old man set out to in a way re create the Con-Tiki voyage. This relates to the book because it is about exploration.

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Anthony Smith, a British author, explorer and inveterate adventurer who in his mid-80s - against the advice of well-meaning doubters - voyaged across the Atlantic Ocean on a sail-powered raft, died July 7 at a hospital in Oxford, England. He was 88.

The cause was acute respiratory failure, a Web site titled An-Tiki that is devoted to Smith and his exploits quoted Mr. Smith's son as saying.

Trained in science at Oxford University, Mr. Smith was a sailor, airplane pilot and balloonist. He traveled the length of Africa in both directions by motorcycle. He was seen frequently on television, was a correspondent for British newspapers and more than two dozen books carry his name as author.

But the voyage he planned in his 80s led people to question his sanity.

"Other people use that word, mad, all the time," he said in an interview for Tourism Today after his crossing. "But I was determined," he said. "So I just went ahead and did it."

Mr. Smith's five children, he told an interviewer, were not "totally cooperative."

His raft was named Antiki, a reference to Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki, which made a celebrated Pacific Ocean voyage in 1947.

Crew members for Mr. Smith's expedition were recruited through an advertisement seeking older people who were "serious adventurers only." Mr. Smith and his crew of three - Andrew Bainbridge, David Hildred and John Russell, none younger than 56 - set sail from the Canary Islands on Jan. 30, 2011.

No great sailing skill was demanded of those aboard the Antiki, which measured about 20-by-40 feet, and rested on an array of plastic pipes. The raft had no motor and was powered by a single sail.

"You don't have to do much," Mr. Smith said of navigating his craft. "The wind and the current take you."

Not without hardships and hazards, however.

In the first week, the raft's two rudders broke. After about three weeks, the supply of fresh food was gone. In 10 weeks, wind, current and the whim of the waves took Mr. Smith from the Canary Islands, off the African Coast, to the Caribbean island of St. Martin, which he reached on April 6 after more than two months at sea.

Raft travel was slow going. Sailing day and night, Mr. Smith and his crew made their way across the ocean vastness at about 2.4 miles an hour.

Because Mr. Smith missed his original destination of Eleuthera in the Bahamas, he embarked on a second trip in 2012, sailing from St. Martin to Eleuthera with a crew of two women and three men.

His voyage was inspired by his interest in a World War II story of survival at sea. After their ship was sunk, two British sailors drifted across the Atlantic in an 18-foot boat for 70 days before landing at Eleuthera.

"That whole story fascinated me," Mr Smith said. As a young man, lack of funds kept him from trying to duplicate the voyage, and later it was job responsibilities. Finally, he said, when he became "very much older," the idea of a raft voyage still gripped him.

Mourning for a lost youth was not for him. "Am I supposed to potter about, pruning roses and admiring pretty girls," he asked. "Or should I do something to justify my existence?"

Anthony Smith was born March 30, 1926, in the English county of Buckinghamshire and grew up on the celebrated estate of the Astor family, Cliveden, which was managed by his father.

During World War II, Mr. Smith served in the Royal Air Force Reserves. At Oxford, he studied zoology and as a young man made an expedition to Iran, exploring underwater tunnels and discovering a new living species of fish, which was named for him.

Later he wrote for the Manchester Guardian, as the British newspaper was then known. He left to head a South African magazine called Drum, which he described as "the voice of black unrest."

His return trip to England was made by motorcycle. He again worked for the Guardian and later spent six years as science correspondent for the Daily Telegraph.

On leave from that job, he flew a hydrogen-filled balloon around Africa - a trip that supplied material for another book. He was believed to be the first Briton to make a balloon crossing of the Alps.

As a founder and longtime head of the British Balloon and Airship Club, he was a consultant on the airship sciences in the films "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" (1968) and "Superman II" (1980).

Mr. Smith was also the author of "The Body" (1968), which was praised by commentator Alistair Cooke as a masterpiece and became a best-seller. Years later, Mr. Smith published a companion volume, "The Mind."

He continued to make other expeditions by boat and balloon, which led to more books. Mr. Smith also appeared on radio and television shows about nature and geography.

His raft voyage generated still another book, " The Old Man and The Sea," which is scheduled to be published in February.

His marriages to Barbara Newman and Margaret Ann Holloway ended in divorce. According to a report in the Telegraph, survivors include three children from his first marriage; a son from his second; and a daughter from another relationship.

As justification for confronting the hazards of the sea at an advanced age, Mr. Smith would quote a line from T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets," saying, " 'Old men ought to be explorers.' "

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Anthony Smith led a small crew in a transatlantic crossing by raft when he was 85. He died at 88.

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Anthony Smith, a British author, explorer and inveterate adventurer who in his mid-80s - against the advice of well-meaning doubters - voyaged across the Atlantic Ocean on a sail-powered raft, died July 7 at a hospital in Oxford, England. He was 88.

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Although this may not be relevant to the book it is relevant to the topic of ocean exploration. This article tells about a man who kayaked across the Atlantic ocean

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Hoping to use the tides and weather conditions to his benefit, Bertish plans to paddle about 30 miles a day - mostly at night, to avoid exposure to the sun - for more than 120 days. On a typical day, Bertish said, he will alternate between resting and paddling every two or three hours. He will continuously hydrate and will nourish himself with protein shakes, freeze-dried meals with endurance additives, and salty jerky to replenish the electrolytes he will lose through sweating.

His expected route will take him to the Canary Islands, across the Atlantic Ocean to Anegada of the British Virgin Islands, and then finally to a finish in Florida.

If he makes it.

The last attempt to cross the Atlantic on a stand-up paddleboard, or SUP, did not end well. This year, the Frenchman Nicolas Jarossay tried to make the crossing; one night a week into the trip, a rescue crew pulled him from the water. The crew found him clinging to his paddleboard, which had capsized.

"You have to be ready for difficult times and difficult storms that you're going to get caught in," Bertish said. "And that's definitely going to happen."

When storms hit, Bertish can take cover inside a cabin on his customized paddleboard and stabilize the vessel using anchors and drogues. The craft is also capable of righting itself after capsizing and submerging.

Designed for the crossing by Phil Morrison, a naval architect, the vessel took six months to build, at a cost of $120,000. It resembles a tubular rocket, marrying elements of trans-Atlantic rowboat craft and a standard SUP. A main cabin at the front of the craft helps the vessel right itself faster if it overturns and increases buoyancy. The aerodynamic profile deflects headwinds and provides easier control downwind, and a center plate helps Bertish remain on course.

"There's nothing like it on the planet," Bertish said.

Inside the watertight, coffinlike chamber of the cabin, Bertish is able to sit upright, with his head just barely brushing the roof. He can stretch out his 5-foot-7, 155-pound frame to rest, and all navigational and communications instruments are within arm's reach.

Surrounding a small sleeping space are satellite weather forecasting equipment, logistics and routing services, stationary and hand-held VHF radios, satellite phone and tracking systems, several personal locator beacons and GPS systems, an autopilot system, water-storage bladders and two sets of solar panels to power all those electronics and batteries.

Bertish also has several GoPro cameras and a drone on board to document the trip on social media.

He has backups for all steering, navigational and communications systems, should they fail, as well as a satellite phone and a standard compass. If things really go bad, there is an emergency grab bag, flares and a life raft.

"The only way to achieve this is to be overprepared," Bertish said. "If problems come up - and they will - you have to be ready for it. You have to be able to work through it."

For example, he is traveling with four paddles. But he also took his guitar, and he is taking requests on Twitter.

There are no dedicated toilet facilities, however. "It's all around the craft," he said. "The ocean is a terrific sustainable toilet."

Bertish's musical catalog is made up of Eddie Vedder, Creed, INXS and Clegg, a South African, and he has eight recordings provided by his mental coach, which he will play at appropriate moments for encouragement.

"He has me breaking it down into bite-size chunks so I'm not looking at it as some insurmountable goal like looking up at Everest," Bertish said. "I have mini-goals. Just one stroke at a time."

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South African Sets Out to Paddle Across the Atlantic

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Hoping to use the tides and weather conditions to his benefit, Bertish plans to paddle about 30 miles a day - mostly at night, to avoid exposure to the sun - for more than 120 days. On a typical day, Bertish said, he will alternate between resting and paddling every two or three hours.

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Website about the Kon-Tiki museum. Also tells about crew members other than Thor.

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In 1947, Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Pacific Ocean on Kon Tiki, a rudimentary raft made of balsa wood. We took a trip to see the legendary vessel.
"Your mother and father will be very grieved when they hear of your death," Thor Heyerdahl was told as he prepared to cross the Pacific by raft.

The raft's dimensions were wrong, it was so small it would founder at sea, the balsa logs would break under strain or become waterlogged a quarter distance into sea, gales and hurricanes would wash the crew overboard, and salt water would slough the skin right off their legs - there was no end to the warnings.

In fact, according to the experts, "there was not a length of rope, not a knot, not a measurement, not a piece of wood in the whole raft which would not cause us to founder at sea," Heyerdahl wrote in his first-hand account of the perilous journey.

And yet the Norwegian explorer persisted with his so-called suicide mission. His aim? To prove the theory that migrants from South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. Critics called it impossible and warned that the makeshift rafts of pre-Incan peoples could not navigate thousands of miles of open ocean to reach the distant islands using stone age technology.

The Kon Tiki's route across the Pacific

For the Kon Tiki expedition, Heyerdahl aimed to complete the journey using only the materials and equipment available in pre-Columbian times and in doing so to prove that such a voyage was possible. The expedition carried some modern equipment, such as a radio, charts, sextant and metal knives, but Heyerdahl argued they were incidental in proving that the raft itself could make the journey.

On an extended research trip in Polynesia's Fatu Hiva, Heyerdahl had noted the presence of South American plants such as the sweet potato, as well as similarities between stone figures on Fatu Hiva and the structures erected by ancient South American civilisations. He also saw similarities in the physical appearances, rituals and myths of the Polynesians and South Americans, and heard Polynesian elders speak of a demigod named Tiki who came to the islands from a big country beyond the eastern horizon.

Despite his lack of sailing experience - and the fact that he couldn't swim - Heyerdahl set out to prove that his theory was possible. He gathered funds through private loans, donations of equipment from the US army, and a crew of five men with a promise of "nothing but a free trip to Peru and the South Sea islands and back".

An open bamboo cabin provided Kon Tiki's only shelter from the elements

Heyerdahl's small team comprised Erik Hesselberg, navigator and artist; Bengt Danielsson, translator and steward in charge of supplies; Knut Haugland, radio expert; Torstein Raaby, radio operator; and Herman Watzinger, engineer.

The men journeyed to Peru and built the 30ft x 15ft Kon Tiki out of nine balsa wood logs lashed together with hemp ropes in an indigenous style recorded in illustrations by Spanish conquistadors. An open bamboo cabin with a roof made of banana leaves provided the only shelter from the elements.

With a smash of a coconut against the bow, the raft was named Kon Tiki after the Peruvian sun god who was said to have vanished westward across the sea; a mythical figure who mirrored the Polynesian demigod, Tiki, who arrived from the east.

Kon Tiki set off from Peru on the afternoon of 28th April 1947, starting its epic journey across the Pacific Ocean.

Original images of the Kon Tiki expedition

It was this legendary raft that we went to see on our recent trip to Oslo in Norway. We made the short bus journey from Oslo center to Bygdøy with its trio of museums: the Fram, the Kon Tiki and the Viking Ship Museum.

Peter, being a Polar exploration junkie, most looked forward to seeing the Fram. I, having read Heyerdahl's book several years earlier, was more excited to see Kon Tiki.

We unwrapped our many layers in the foyer of the Kon Tiki Museum and made our way straight to the main attraction. There, in muted light, stood the vessel of legends.

I stared at it for a minute feeling surprisingly unmoved. It seemed unreal somehow: a replica or a cartoon version of something more serious. I double checked and confirmed that it was indeed the original raft. It looked too clean, too intact.

The main attraction at the Kon Tiki Museum

I walked around the raft, trying to conjure images of the six men navigating by the sun and stars, guided by winds and currents as they beat against waves that towered above their masts. Given their remote location, rescue would have been near impossible.

As I stood there next to Kon Tiki, my impassivity was perhaps best explained by the surrealism of it all. Heyerdahl and his men sailed for 101 days across 6,900km (4,300mi) of the Pacific Ocean. I've seen about the same distance of the same ocean and couldn't quite fathom how they did it in a makeshift raft with stone age technology.

After 101 days at sea, Kon Tiki crashed onto a reef on Raroia island on 7th August 1947.

The men were greeted by locals from a nearby island who arrived in canoes after spotting flotsam from the raft. Heyerdahl and his men were taken to Tahiti - the salvaged Kon Tiki in tow - and were soon enjoying international acclaim for successfully completing the journey and proving that Heyerdahl's theory could indeed be right.

Sadly, in later years, linguistic and genetic research proved that Polynesia was settled by peoples from Asia who arrived in an eastward migration. Heyerdahl had thought it impossible that the navigators would set sail against prevailing winds. In truth, it was exactly the fact that they could use the westward wind to safely return home in event of failure that encouraged these ancient explorers to sail into the Pacific abyss.

That it was difficult to reconcile the vessel in the museum with Heyerdahl's legendary journey speaks to the magnitude of his accomplishment. It may be impassivity that I felt first but seeing Kon Tiki in the flesh reminded me of the courage of the explorers of our past. Even though there is little left of the world to discover, there is much of it still to explore and we'd all do well to draw deep on our courage and try something new even when there's a good chance we'll fail.

Kon Tiki Museum: The Essentials

What: Visiting the Kon Tiki Museum in Oslo and seeing the legendary raft that crossed the Pacific Ocean.

Where: We stayed at Scandic Vulkan Hotel, a contemporary and eco-friendly hotel in the vibrant neighbourhood of Vulkan, not far from the centre of Oslo. The hotel is Norway's first Energy Class A hotel - meaning that it generates almost all of its own energy.

The stylish rooms have floor to ceiling windows providing views across the surrounding neighbourhoods while the breakfasts - complete with waffle maker and cappuccino machines - are bountiful!

Right next door is the Mathallen food hall with a range of boutique restaurants and bars as well as the river Akerselva, perfect for post-breakfast walks.

When: For the best weather, spring and summer (May to August) are the best times to visit Oslo. Out of season, you can expect the days to be cold and wet beneath dark skies.

From late autumn, the ferries stop running, meaning buses are the only alternative. Although regular, the buses are nowhere near as enjoyable as the ferries and offer far more mundane views.

How: The Kon Tiki Museum in Oslo is located at Bygdøy, a short bus or ferry ride from the city centre. The ferry, which runs from early April to early October, leaves from Pier 3 behind the City Hall (Oslo Rådhuset) and takes 10-15 minutes. If the ferry isn't running, take the number 30 bus instead. This can be boarded at the quayside near the City Hall or from the city centre and takes around 15 minutes.

Scattered across the Bygdøy peninsula there are several other noteworthy museums including the Fram, the Viking Ship, the Norwegian Maritime and Norwegian Folk museums. All are within a 15-minute walk of each other.

With this in mind it's worth buying an Oslo Pass which includes free entry to more than 30 Oslo museums and attractions as well as free travel on all public transport. The pass comes in three denominations:

24 hours: 335 NOK (40 USD)
48 hours: 490 NOK (58 USD)
72 hours: 620 NOK (74 USD) - we opted for this one

We flew from London to Oslo via a budget airline. Book via Skyscanner for the best prices.

Oslo is served by three airports: Gardermoen, Torp Sandefjord and Rygge. We recommend using Gardermoen if possible as the other two are further out and require a longer and more expensive transfer. All airports are served by trains and buses. More information can be found on the Visit Oslo website.
Additional photography: Fair Use

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Visiting Kon Tiki, the raft that crossed an ocean | Atlas & Boots

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In 1947, Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Pacific Ocean on Kon Tiki, a rudimentary raft made of balsa wood. We took a trip to see the legendary vessel. "Your mother and father will be very grieved when they hear of your death," Thor Heyerdahl was told as he prepared to cross the Pacific by raft.

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Thor Heyerdahl Interview (in Noorwegen)

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Aspekte   Vor 13 Jahren   Thor Heyerdahl Interview

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Uploaded by BundestagMedia on 2014-10-19.

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Original 1950 Documentary. Has actual footage from the voyage and is very informative.

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Kon-Tiki (Documentary Film 1950) A documentary about the Kon-Tiki expedition of the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl.

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History Channel brief documentary, although not as good as the 1950's one its still informative.

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On this day in 1947, Kon-Tiki, a balsa wood raft captained by Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl, completes a 4,300-mile, 101-day journey from Peru to Raroia in the Tuamotu Archipelago, near Tahiti.Heyerdahl wanted to prove his theory that prehistoric South Americans could have colonized the Polynesian islands by drifting on ocean currents.

Heyerdahl and his five-person crew set sail from Callao, Peru, on the 40-square-foot Kon-Tiki on April 28, 1947. The Kon-Tiki, named for a mythical white chieftain, was made of indigenous materials and designed to resemble rafts of early South American Indians. While crossing the Pacific, the sailors encountered storms, sharks and whales, before finally washing ashore at Raroia. Heyerdahl, born in Larvik, Norway, on October 6, 1914, believed that Polynesia's earliest inhabitants had come from South America, a theory that conflicted with popular scholarly opinion that the original settlers arrived from Asia. Even after his successful voyage, anthropologists and historians continued to discredit Heyerdahl's belief. However, his journey captivated the public and he wrote a book about the experience that became an international bestseller and was translated into 65 languages. Heyerdahl also produced a documentary about the trip that won an Academy Award in 1951.

Heyerdahl made his first expedition to Polynesia in 1937. He and his first wife lived primitively on Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas Islands for a year and studied plant and animal life. The experience led him to believe that humans had first come to the islands aboard primitive vessels drifting on ocean currents from the east.

Following the Kon-Tiki expedition, Heyerdahl made archeological trips to such places as the Galapagos Islands, Easter Island and Peru and continued to test his theories about how travel across the seas played a major role in the migration patterns of ancient cultures. In 1970, he sailed across the Atlantic from Morocco to Barbados in a reed boat named Ra II (after Ra, the Egyptian sun god) to prove that Egyptians could have connected with pre-Columbian Americans. In 1977, he sailed the Indian Ocean in a primitive reed ship built in Iraq to learn how prehistoric civilizations in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and Egypt might have connected.

While Heyerdahl's work was never embraced by most scholars, he remained a popular public figure and was voted "Norwegian of the Century" in his homeland. He died at age 87 on April 18, 2002, in Italy. The raft from his famous 1947 expedition is housed at the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, Norway.

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Wood raft makes 4,300-mile voyage - Aug 07, 1947 - HISTORY.com

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On this day in 1947, Kon-Tiki, a balsa wood raft captained by Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl, completes a 4,300-mile, 101-day journey from Peru to Raroia in the Tuamotu Archipelago, near Tahiti.Heyerdahl wanted to prove his theory that prehistoric South Americans could have colonized the Polynesian islands by drifting on ocean currents.

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Erik Hesselberg plays the guitar as another day passes aboard the Kon-Tiki.

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A view strait down from the crows nest

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Knut Haugland is shown here staring the raft through some rather large waves.

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Thor with a Bluefin Tuna

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A more science based look at the voyage. This website also goes further in-depth about the history of the Indians.

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Smithsonian geographer Doug Herman explains the traditional science of traversing the ocean seas

smithsonian.com

As part of its three-year circumnavigation of the globe, the Hawaiian voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa arrived in Tahiti this summer on the first leg of its worldwide voyage. When the Hōkūleʻa visits, Tahitians say, Maeva, a hoi mai, meaning "Welcome home." There is a well-documented tradition of voyaging between the two island groups, and it is clear that in the 13th century, Tahitians used sophisticated navigational skills to travel the 2,500-mile distance and settle the Hawaiian Islands. Archaeological and linguistic evidence shows that navigators from Tahiti's neighbor islands the Marquesas had settled the islands even earlier. Skepticism over the validity of those navigational methods has long muddied the waters. A most notable naysayer was ethnologist Thor Heyerdahl whose 1947 Kon Tiki raft expedition advanced the drift idea that colonization occurred only as vessels simply traveled on the tides. But the 1976 voyage of the Hōkūleʻa-guided by Micronesian navigator Pius "Mau" Piailug -resolved the debate. Piailug demonstrated his profound skill for reading the night sky and the ocean swells and safely guided the massive ocean-going canoe from Hawaii to Tahiti.

Navigation is as much an art-and a spiritual practice-as it is a science. It requires enormous knowledge of the night sky and how it changes both with latitude and throughout the year. With that knowledge, the rising and setting of stars form a compass, a clock, and a means to calibrate latitude. The story of how these skills have been lost, and then rediscovered, and practiced once again, has been made fraught by European notions of racial superiority. My guess is that many more know of the Kon Tiki-documented in an Academy-Award-winning film, than of the far more significant Hōkūleʻa that Piailug piloted. Here's why it should be the other way around.

Captain James Cook had spent a lot of time in the South Pacific before he crossed the equator and came across the hitherto unknown Hawaiian Islands in 1778. Cook had brought with him Tupaia, a high priest from Tahiti and Ra'iatea 2,500 miles to the South. Surprisingly, Tupaia was able to converse with these new islanders in their mutually intelligible languages. Amazed, Cook posed the now-famous question, "How shall we account for this Nation spreading it self so far over this Vast ocean?" With that, Cook created "The Polynesian": the people of "many islands" who inhabit the Pacific from Easter Island in the East to New Zealand (Aotearoa) in the Southwest, to Hawaii in the North. These three points define what is called the "Polynesian Triangle." Geographically, it is the largest nation on Earth, more than 1,000 islands spread over some 16 million square miles of ocean-larger than Russia, Canada and the United States combined. The linguistic connection proved beyond a doubt that the peoples of this region were all connected. Cook's question, however, haunted scholars for the next 200 years.

Westerners were hard-pressed to explain how "stone-age" peoples with "no math" or writing could cross thousands of miles of ocean in open boats-long before Columbus even thought of sailing the ocean blue-and probably against the wind and currents, to locate tiny dots of land in a vast ocean. The initial and obvious correct conclusion was that the Polynesians had once been great navigators, but that posed a problem for the European colonizers of the 19th century, who saw themselves as superior.

One solution, dubbed the " Aryan Polynesian" bordered on the ridiculous, but it imparted a certain ingenuity with its intricate and convoluted reasoning. To show that Polynesians descended from Europeans, Abraham Fornander in Hawai'i, and Edward Tregear and J. Macmillan Brown in New Zealand, built the case at the end of the 19th century using the emerging science of linguistics to trace Polynesian languages back to Sanskrit and to European languages. Professor A. H. Keane, in his 1896 , described Polynesians as "one of the finest races of mankind, Caucasian in all essentials; distinguished by their symmetrical proportions, tall stature...and handsome features." Ethnologist S. Percy Smith was one of several scholars who praised the Polynesians' "intelligence, their charming personalities, and-one likes to think-their common source with ourselves from the Caucasian branch of humanity."

This was a handy argument for British colonists in New Zealand, living side-by-side with the subjugated Maori (Polynesian) population. Enter the Maori scholar Te Rangi Hiroa, known better for his anglicised name Sir Peter Buck. Buck set about tracing oral traditions of voyaging throughout the Pacific, and presented his evidence in his 1938 work entitled Vikings of the Sunrise. He documented a step-by-step migration eastward from Southeast Asia, a theory that came very close to the truth.

But skeptics remained, the most famous-but by no means the only-was Thor Heyerdahl. Not only did he reject the voyaging tradition, but he rejected the West-to-East migration as well. Heyerdahl argued that the Pacific had been settled by accidental drift voyaging from the Americas. His argument was based largely on the wind and current patterns in the Pacific, which flow predominantly from East to West. Where the oral tradition posed Polynesians voyaging against the wind, Heyerdahl argued it was far more likely that American Indians drifted with the wind. He made his bias particularly clear by designing his Kon Tiki raft to be unsteerable.

There is no doubt that the voyage of the Kon Tiki was a great adventure: three months on the open sea on a raft, drifting at the mercy of the winds and currents. That they did eventually reach Polynesia proved that such drift voyaging was possible. But all other evidence pointed to Southeast Asian origins: oral tradition, archaeological data, linguistic structures and the trail of human-introduced plants. Today we have strong evidence that Polynesians actually reached the Americas, not vice-versa. Nonetheless, Heyerdahl remains famous. His notion of "drift voyaging" was taken up by Andrew Sharp, whose 1963 book discredited step-by-step the possible means by which Pacific Islanders might have navigated and fixed their position at sea.

But a decade later, in 1973, a team of computer modelers showed that the settlement of the island Pacific by drift voyaging was "extremely unlikely," and that Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island could not have been settled by a drift process. One way or another, there had to have been intentional navigation. About the same time, British sailor David Lewis went out to remote Pacific islands to find and study with traditional navigators. His book We, the Navigators: the Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific laid out for the first time the actual methods of traditional navigation. Lewis became a member of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and was aboard the Hōkūleʻa for its 1976 voyage to Tahiti.

It was on the 1976 voyage that a traditional navigator was engaged for the first time. By successfully navigating the 2,500 miles to Tahiti and making landfall, Mau Piailug demonstrated the efficacy of the various techniques of navigation and landfinding. He showed that the rising and setting of the sun can be used to set direction by day. For a navigator with detailed knowledge about the rising and setting of many stars, the night sky provides direction and latitude. But even more intriguing was the use of ocean swells for both direction and finding land. Mau was able to identify up to eight different directional swells in the open sea, and maintain the canoe's course by the angle of a certain swell to the hull of the canoe. On one voyage where he was not the master navigator, Mau woke out of a dead sleep and told the steersman that the canoe was off course, just by the feel of the swells hitting the hulls of the canoe.

Since reflection and refraction of the swells off islands alters their patterns, a sensitive navigator can detect land below the horizon. Certain species of land-based birds indicate proximity to land, and for a trained navigator, the flight patterns of birds can indicate in which direction that land lies. A very careful reading of clouds on the horizon can also reveal the presence of land. Most importantly, the navigator keeps track of position by a form of dead reckoning-keeping a mental record of distance travelled, speed, drift and currents. For this reason it is said that one can identify the navigator on the canoe as the one with the bloodshot eyes, for the navigator sleeps rarely or never.

Today the Hōkūleʻa uses a star compass developed by Nainoa Thompson, who as a young crewmember on the first voyage became fascinated with traditional navigation, and set about to figure it out for himself. His own voyage of rediscovery is beautifully documented in Sam Low's book Hawaiki Rising and also in Will Kyselka's An Ocean in Mind. In more than 40 years of voyaging, the Hōkūleʻa has "rediscovered" all the island groups of the Pacific. What was left to do? Circumnavigate the globe. Not to prove anything this time, but to show that traditional knowledge teaches us how to live right on this planet.

About Doug Herman

Doug Herman, Senior Geographer at the National Museum of the American Indian, specializes in the cultural knowledge of Hawaii and Pacific Islands. His work focuses on the revitalization of traditional knowledge and values as lessons for all people on how to live more sustainably today.

Read more from this author | Follow @RDKHerman

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How the Voyage of the Kon-Tiki Misled the World About Navigating the Pacific

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smithsonian.com As part of its three-year circumnavigation of the globe, the Hawaiian voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa arrived in Tahiti this summer on the first leg of its worldwide voyage. When the Hōkūleʻa visits, Tahitians say, Maeva, a hoi mai, meaning "Welcome home."

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An argumentative view towards the book. This article attempts to prove flaws in the voyages discovery.

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The Polynesian islands are some of the most remote in the world - lying thousands of miles west of South America and thousands of miles east of Asia.

The established theory has always been that Polynesia was colonised via Asia around 5,500 years ago.

This has been backed up by archaeology, linguistics and some genetic studies.

But in 1947, Heyerdahl controversially claimed that Easter Island's famous statues were similar to those at Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, and sailed a raft from Peru to French Polynesia to prove it could have been colonised from America.

Now Professor Erik Thorsby of the University of Oslo in Norway has found clear evidence to support elements of Heyerdahl's hypothesis.

In 1971 and 2008 he collected blood samples from Easter Islanders whose ancestors had not interbred with Europeans and other visitors to the island.

Prof Thorsby looked at the genes, which vary greatly from person to person.

Most of the islanders' genes were Polynesian, but a few of them also carried genes only previously found in indigenous American populations.

Prof Thorsby found that in some cases the Polynesian and American genes were shuffled together, the result of a process known "recombination".

This means the American genes would need to be around for a certain amount of time for it to happen.

Prof Thorsby can't put a precise date on it, but says it is likely that Americans reached Easter Island before it was "discovered" by Europeans in 1722.

Prof Thorsby believes there may have been a Kon-Tiki-style voyage from South America to Polynesia.

Alternatively, Polynesians may have travelled east to South America, and then returned.

However, Prof Thorsby said that his new evidence does not confirm Heyerdahl's theory that the islanders were originally all from South America.

The first settlers to Polynesia came from Asia, and they made the biggest contribution to the population, he said.

"Heyerdahl was wrong but not completely," he said.

The work was presented at a Royal Society talk in London and reported in the New Scientist.

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Kon-Tiki explorer was partly right - Polynesians had South American roots

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The Polynesian islands are some of the most remote in the world - lying thousands of miles west of South America and thousands of miles east of Asia. The established theory has always been that Polynesia was colonised via Asia around 5,500 years ago. This has been backed up by archaeology, linguistics and some genetic studies.

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A brief history.

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Born on October 6, 1914, in Larvik, Norway, Thor Heyerdahl was no armchair anthropologist. He gained worldwide fame in 1947 when he crossed the Pacific Ocean on a primitive balsawood raft to prove his theory that South Americans could have originally populated Polynesia. On the 100th anniversary of Heyerdahl's birth, look back at his historic Kon-Tiki voyage.

In 1937, fledgling Norwegian zoological researcher Thor Heyerdahl traveled to the South Pacific with his newlywed wife to study the flora and fauna of the isolated Marquesas Islands. As he collected a menagerie of specimens on the tiny Polynesian island of Fatu Hiva, however, Heyerdahl's curious mind drifted from thoughts of living creatures to those of ancient civilizations.

Aware of the prevailing scholarly wisdom that people from Southeast Asia had arrived from the west to first populate Polynesia, the Norwegian couldn't help but notice the trade winds and breakers rolling across the Pacific Ocean from the east. Heyerdahl noted the presence of South American plants such as the sweet potato in Polynesia and the similarities between stone figures on Fatu Hiva and the monoliths erected by ancient South American civilizations. He saw parallels in the physical appearances, rituals and myths of Polynesians and South Americans, and around the glow of a fire, he listened as an elder spoke of a demigod named Tiki who brought his ancestors to the island from a big country beyond the eastern horizon.

Heyerdahl returned to Norway with fish, jars of beetles and a new dream-to challenge conventional wisdom and demonstrate that the first people who settled Polynesia came from the east, not the west. He abandoned his zoology studies and developed an ethnological theory that two waves of people from the Americas populated the South Pacific. The first wave, Heyerdahl said, arrived around A.D. 500 from pre-Incan Peru by way of Easter Island on rafts that drifted on the currents of the Pacific Ocean; the second came approximately 500 years later from the coast of British Columbia by way of Hawaii. Critics thought the theory impossible and said the open rafts of South America's pre-Incan civilizations were hardly seaworthy enough to make an oceanic crossing.

Heyerdahl, however, was determined to prove that such a voyage was possible-even if it meant risking his life. Although the Norwegian had no sailing experience and couldn't even swim, he announced plans to make the perilous crossing on a log raft built only with tools available to pre-Columbian South Americans. "Your mother and father will be very grieved when they hear of your death," one skeptical diplomat told Heyerdahl when hearing of his plan. Promising "nothing but a free trip to Peru and the South Sea islands and back," Heyerdahl recruited a five-man crew who built a 30-by-15-foot raft made of nine balsawood logs harvested from the Ecuadorian jungle lashed together with hemp ropes. An open bamboo cabin with overlapping banana leaves covering the roof provided the only protection from the elements.

With a smash of a coconut against the bow, the vessel was christened Kon-Tiki after the legendary Peruvian sun god who had vanished westward across the sea, a mythical figure who served as the mirror image to the Polynesian demigod Tiki who had arrived from the east. On April 28, 1947, Kon-Tiki departed Callao, Peru, with six men and a Spanish-speaking green parrot aboard. Borne along by the northeast-east trade winds that billowed the massive square sail bearing the image of the bearded Kon-Tiki, the raft groaned and creaked as it drifted across the vast blue desert of water.

Although the vessel carried a radio that the crew used to provide daily meteorological and oceanographic observations, a rescue would have been nearly impossible given their remote location in the ocean. They navigated with just the sun, stars, currents and winds as their guides. They maneuvered the raft with only the sail, paddles and a temperamental steering oar as they beat against waves that in stormy conditions towered higher than their masts.

Each morning the cook collected the flying fish that flopped onto the deck overnight. The seaweed and shellfish that grew on Kon-Tiki's underside lured sardines, tuna, dolphins and at least one unwelcome visitor. One day when crewmember Knut Haugland leaned over to wash his hands, he came face-to-face with a 30-foot whale shark, the world's largest fish species. "Its body rose to the surface like a small mountain," he recalled in his diary. After circling the vessel for an hour, the enormous sea monster thankfully found other ocean prey.

On the voyage's 93rd day, Heyerdahl and his crew finally spotted palm trees on the horizon. The winds and currents, however, kept the vessel out at sea. More than a week later, as dawn broke on August 7, they spotted a reef on the starboard side. As the fragile timber raft approached the jagged reef, the cresting waves grew and sent tons of water splashing over Kon-Tiki. The crew clung to whatever they could as the mast snapped and the swells heaved them onto the Raroia atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago near Tahiti.

All arrived safely-except for the parrot that had vanished during a storm out at sea-after covering 4,300 nautical miles in 101 days, an average speed of 42.5 miles per day. Heyerdahl had proved that an ancient voyage from South America to Polynesia was possible. However, he could not prove that it had actually occurred, and most scholars continue to dismiss his theory and believe the first Polynesian settlers arrived from Southeast Asia.

Heyerdahl recounted the epic voyage in the bestselling 1950 book "Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft" and in a documentary the following year that won the Academy Award. He continued to conduct research expeditions to Easter Island, the Galapagos Islands and South America until his death in 2002, and he led voyages across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in primitive vessels similar to Kon-Tiki to prove how other ancient civilizations may have been interconnected. The raft he sailed across the Pacific Ocean in 1947 is now on display at the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo.

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Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki Voyage - History in the Headlines

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Born on October 6, 1914, in Larvik, Norway, Thor Heyerdahl was no armchair anthropologist. He gained worldwide fame in 1947 when he crossed the Pacific Ocean on a primitive balsawood raft to prove his theory that South Americans could have originally populated Polynesia. On the 100th anniversary of Heyerdahl's birth, look back at his historic Kon-Tiki voyage.

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National Geographic Article

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First alive Snake Mackerel ever discovered by man, before this only bones were found. This shows that the Kon-Tiki voyage was one that made many different scientific discoveries.