Most of us, when crossed on our opinions, will bristle up and defend them to a point. We’ll argue for hours, take to social media, do quick Google searches to verify our facts, or ask ChatGPT to find the logical flaws in our opponents’ argumentation (okay, so maybe that’s something only classically educated Zoomers do).
But we won’t usually set out to prove what we argue is possible by building a boat and floating from South America to the Polynesian Islands. That, however, is exactly what Thor Heyerdahl set out to do on April 28, 1947.
Heyerdahl (as his name suggests) was a Norwegian scientist, adventure-seeker, and collector. He was the kind of person who would get married and, a day later, whisk his wife off to a secluded valley on an island in the South Pacific to talk to locals and track wind and ocean current patterns — not exactly the honeymoon every woman dreams of.
One way or another, Heyerdahl gradually became convinced that the original settlers of the Polynesian Islands were not the Polynesian people, but bearded, red-haired, white men (a group of people he named the Tiki people) sailing from South America, over 5,000 miles away. The only trouble was that scientists told him such a voyage was unlikely.
So Heyerdahl found a crew of men, built a prehistoric-style, raft out of balsa wood (of course, without any steering aparatus), christened it Kon-Tiki, and set sail from Peru. After floating at the mercy of wind and sea for 101 days, he and his crew successfully landed on the islands with just one casualty — the crew’s pet parrot, which had drowned in a storm.
Although Heyerdahl proved that the voyage was technically possible, he was never quite able to convince the scientific community that such a trip had actually happened. Archeological and DNA evidence supporting Heyerdahl’s hypothesis never materialized.
Despite his rather long record of somewhat questionable historical theories (the Kon-Tiki trip was not the last time Heyerdahl would build a prehistoric boat to prove a point), the Norweigian’s collection has proved rather valuable to scientific research. He may have been wrong about what the artifacts he collected meant, but he was at least willing to brave the unknown to collect them.