★★★★☆ Adventure and science

Kon-Tiki: Across The Pacific By Raft

Thor Heyerdahl

The biggest obstacle to the adoption of the most radical new scientific ideas is that they just seem crazy. Darwinian evolution, Quantum mechanics, Einsteinian relativity, the Big Bang, Continental drift, the endosymbiotic theory (this is the idea that the organelles in our cells were once bacteria) all faced this obstacle. All of those have been shown beyond any reasonable doubt to be true. Thor Heyerdahl had a crazy idea, that the South Pacific islands were settled by voyagers from South America. No one believed this, and it is pretty clear now that he was mostly or entirely wrong. However, the main objection back in the day was that it was not possible to cross 8000 km of ocean in a small open boat of the kind that the people of Peru built.

Heyerdahl proved this objection wrong in the most direct way possible. He built a balsa raft modeled as closely as possible on those the indigenous people of Peru used to build and sailed 8000 km across the Pacific Ocean from Peru to the Angatau atoll. Kon-Tiki: Across The Pacific By Raft describes the construction of the raft and the voyage. I read this not long after I began high school -- I'm guessing 1969. I loved it. It was a great adventure story, but also great science. Like Jane Goodall's books (not yet published at that time), it was a demonstration that good science could be adventurous.

Sadly, Heyerdahl persisted in his belief that Polynesia was settled from South American until the end of his life, not accepting the abundant linguistic and genetic evidence for a western origin of the Polynesian peoples. But after Heyerdahl, no one who wanted to be taken seriously would ever be able to say, "They couldn't have crossed thousands of miles of ocean in an open boat." That is Heyerdahl's legacy.

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