Kon-Tiki arrived at Raroia atoll - August 7, 1947

On this day in 1947, Thor Heyerdahl and his crew made it to the Raroia atoll in Polynesia on a raft called the Kon-Tiki.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Welcome to This Day in History Class, where
History waits for no One. Today is August seven. The

(00:25):
day was August seven nine. Norwegian ethnographer Tour higher Doll
and his crew on the kon Tiki made it to
the Arroya at All in the two Amotu Archipelago near Tahiti.
Higher Doll's goal was to show that Native Americans could
have migrated from east to west to reach Polynesia. At

(00:47):
the time, prevailing thought was that Southeast Asians traveled from
the west eastward to populate Polynesia. Polynesia comprises more than
a thousand islands in the Pacific shan and The Polynesian
Triangle has Hawaii at its north eastern island in the east,
and New Zealand in the southwest. Tahiti is near the

(01:09):
middle of the triangle. In his book Vikings of the Sunrise,
Maori doctor and scholar Tehrani Heroa, also known as Sir
Peter Henry Buck, trades the migration of people eastward to Polynesia,
but hier All thought differently. He has studied zoology, geography,
and Polynesian history and culture. He also spent time in

(01:32):
the Marqueses, a group of volcanic islands in the southern
Pacific Ocean, and he came to believe that South Americans
traveled west to populate Polynesia. He figured that they got
to the islands by accidentally drift voyaging. He came to
that conclusion because wind and current patterns in the Pacific
Ocean mainly flow from east to west, and he thought

(01:56):
that Native Americans would have drifted with the wind other
than traveled against the wind, as people coming to the
islands from the west would have had to. He noted
how South American plants like the sweet potato were in Polynesia,
and he noticed similarities between monuments on the Fatu Hiva
and the Marqueses and those from ancient South American civilizations.

(02:20):
He also drew connections between the appearance and cultural traditions
of Polynesians and South Americans. Hired All hypothesized that people
arrived in Eastern Island from pre Incan Peru around five
hundred CE, and another group of people, he said, arrived
in Hawaii from British Columbia about five hundred years later.

(02:42):
So Hired Doll set off on a mission to show
that South Americans could have drift voyage to the Polynesian islands.
He assembled a crew of five men for Norwegians and
a Swede to make the journey from Peru to Polynesia
to demonstrate how the South Americans could have died there
with the wind and currents. He had the crew build

(03:03):
a raft made of balsa wood logs. He named the
raft Kuntiki, after an alternative name for an Incan creator guide.
The team's trip began on April ninety seven when they
left Kayao, Peru, along with a Spanish speaking parrot. They
had an amateur radio station that they used to communicate

(03:25):
with North and South American stations. Otherwise, they looked to
the sun, stars, currents, and winds to keep them on track.
They used sales paddles and a steering oar to guide
the craft. On July they spotted land, and on August
seven the crew arrived at the Arroyo. At all they

(03:46):
had traveled more than four thousand miles or six hundred
kilometers in one hundred and one days. Pira Dollar had
proved that it was possible for South Americans to travel
to Polynesia on the tides, but oral tradition, archaeological data,
linguistic structures, and plants still pointed to the west to

(04:07):
east vigration theory being the more probable one. Scholars still
rejected his east to west theory, and researchers built models
showing that it was highly unlikely that Polynesia was populated
through the drift process. Hired All later led more expeditions
to islands and voyages and primitive vessels. In the nineteen fifties,

(04:30):
New Zealander Andrew Sharp proposed that Polynesians did come from Asia,
but that their vessels and navigational tools were too crude
to get them from Tahiti to Hawaii or New Zealand intentionally.
In nineteen seventy six, traditional Micronesian navigator Maupa Luke showed
that intentional voyaging was possible using non instrument navigational and

(04:54):
land finding techniques, and Polynesia could have been populated that way.
I'm Eve Jeff Code, and hopefully you know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday. If you
have any burning questions or comments to tell us, you
can find us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook at t

(05:15):
d i h C Podcast. Thank you so much for listening,
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