Heyerdahl's grandson hopes to repeat Kon-Tiki voyage
11:39 am CDT May 03, 2006
(TheOceans.net) Nearly sixty years after the great Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Pacific on his balsa raft Kon-Tiki, history repeats itself.
"The Tangaroa Expedition," manned by a six-member crew including four Norwegians, one Swede and one Peruvian, (and a parrot) set sail from the Peruvian port of Callao yesterday in an exact copy of Heyerdahl’s raft.
Grandson part of crew
Among the crew is Thor's grandchild Olav, a carpenter, building engineer and diver who helped build the raft and will see to repairs during the voyage. The 8,000 km (5,000-mile) voyage to the shores of Polynesia has been timed with Nordic precision.
Expected to complete the passage within 3 months, the expedition will coincide with Norway's centennial celebrations, marking 100 years since the country broke out of a forced union with Sweden in 1905.
Thor Heyerdahl, who died in Italy at age 87 of brain cancer in April 2002, made the trip in 1947, proving that oceans couldn't isolate civilizations and ancient mariners.
History repeats itself
The modernized 2006 Kon-Tiki version, called “Tangaroa” (Polynesian for ‘God of the Sea’) was rowed by a crew of 16 naval officers about 200 meters offshore on Monday. Measuring 16 meters long by 8 meters wide, the vessel was then pulled by tugboat another 8 km out to sea, according to Agence France Press.
Present during the lift off was Thor Junior who came to wish his son a safe passage during what will be Olav’s first sea expedition of this magnitude.
‘Power’ steering
Although the Tangaroa will be primitive, it will carry modern technology: Solar panels, satellite navigation and communications to transmit dispatches throughout the voyage.
It is also equipped with slightly better steering than the 1947 Kon-Tiki: A 90 meter sail and 9 rudders. The original balsa raft was largely subject to the whim of wind and currents since it could not sail against the wind. At the end of its 101 day grueling journey, the raft crashed onto a reef because the crew couldn't change course.
"We want to test the navigation system of the indigenous people of the Peruvian coast. We'll do this to survey environmental damage and to follow the path of Thor Heyerdahl," Olav Heyerdahl told AFP.
Heyerdahl’s theory
The modernized vessel is a larger scale version than its predecessor which Heyerdahl built using ancient rafts as models to prove his theory that pre-historic South Americans may have crossed the Pacific Ocean to Polynesia – a theory that was later dismissed by scientists and anthropologists who say the Islands were settled by peoples from Indonesia.
Thor Heyerdahl was just 23 years old when he and his first wife, Liv Coucheron Torp, first set off for Polynesia. They spent a year in the then-remote Marquesas, studying the native population and its origins. The couple later divorced, with Liv marrying into the American Rockefeller family and Heyerdahl remarrying as well.
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