Thor Heyerdahl of ‘Kon-Tiki’ Fame Dies

Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian scientist who gained worldwide fame more than half a century ago when he sailed a primitive balsa-log raft called the Kon-Tiki halfway across the Pacific from Peru to Polynesia, has died. He was 87.

Heyerdahl, who was hospitalized recently, died of brain cancer Thursday at the family retreat in Colla Micheri in northern Italy.

In 1947, Heyerdahl and five Scandinavian companions set sail on their raft from the port of Callao in Lima, Peru, to demonstrate Heyerdahl’s controversial theory that the South Pacific islands may have been settled by ancient Peruvian Indians using similar watercraft--a theory that defied the prevailing anthropological view that all South Pacific peoples originally came from Southeast Asia.

Some critics warned the Oslo University-trained zoologist that his primitive balsa sailing vessel, named after the Peruvian sun god, would become waterlogged and sink within two weeks.

But after 4,300 nautical miles and 101 days at sea, the Kon-Tiki landed on an uninhabited Polynesian atoll.

Heyerdahl’s feat didn’t prove that ancient South Americans had reached Polynesia, but it did show that the prehistoric rafts of Peru were capable of making long voyages over the open ocean.

The voyage of the Kon-Tiki captured the imagination of a postwar public and made the raft’s blue-eyed captain a global celebrity.

Heyerdahl’s lively chronicle of his remarkable voyage, “Kon-Tiki, Across the Pacific by Raft,” became a bestseller that has sold 30 million copies and has been published in 67 languages. In 1951, a black and white documentary of the voyage won an Academy Award.

Hailed as a national hero in Norway, Heyerdahl was invited to the White House and Buckingham Palace. When Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev later visited the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, where the famous raft is displayed, the Cold Warrior wistfully offered to serve as a cook on the next expedition.

Through organizing other raft voyages and archeological digs--in the Galapagos Islands, Easter Island, Peru and elsewhere--Heyerdahl devoted his life to searching for proof to support his theory that there was more contact between peoples of the past than most anthropologists once thought.

“The Kon-Tiki expedition opened my eyes to what the ocean really is. It is a conveyor and not an isolator,” he wrote in the foreword of the 35th edition of “Kon-Tiki.” “The ocean has been man’s highway from the days he built the first buoyant ships, long before he tamed the horse, invented wheels and cut roads through the virgin jungles.”

In 1969, to demonstrate that other types of ancient vessels were capable of transporting people across vast oceans, Heyerdahl and an international crew of seven men headed west across the Atlantic from Safi, Morocco, in a 50-foot papyrus reed boat of ancient Egyptian design and named Ra in honor of the Egyptian sun god.

After covering 2,700 miles in eight weeks, the Ra became waterlogged in a storm and had to be abandoned 600 miles from Barbados in the West Indies.

Undaunted, Heyerdahl and his crew set sail again from Morocco in a new papyrus reed boat named Ra II in 1970. They successfully completed the 3,270 nautical-mile voyage to Barbados in 57 days.

Heyerdahl also organized and led a third voyage, aboard a Sumerian-type reed boat called the Tigris, from Iraq to the Red Sea in 1977 to demonstrate the possibility of contact between the great ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, the Indus valley and Egypt.

To help fund his many projects, Heyerdahl wrote many popular books, including “Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island,” which chronicled his 1955 archeological expedition on the Polynesian island closest to South America.

Although highly honored for his work--he received numerous gold medals from geographical and anthropological societies around the world as well as 11 honorary doctorates--Heyerdahl remained controversial throughout his career.

“I think he was basically an adventurer, someone who felt passionately about understanding the past and was willing to engage in all sorts of nontraditional ways of making an argument,” said Richard Burger, a professor of anthropology at Yale University, who met Heyerdahl several times.

But Burger said most scientists remain skeptical of Heyerdahl’s theory that ancient South Americans reached Polynesia.

“There are various pieces of [archeological] evidence that people might argue over,” he said, “The general consensus right now is if there was contact it was probably not terribly significant.”

As for Heyerdahl’s view that there was intercontinental contact between early civilizations, Burger said, “there is even more skepticism about that.”

The more widely accepted view, he said, is that there was more independent development throughout the world than was previously appreciated--that similar characteristics such as pyramid building arose spontaneously in different areas.

Critics, however, never caused Heyerdahl to veer from the course he set more than six decades ago.

“I don’t listen to the people who sit behind desks and think they know everything,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1991. “It is utterly illogical to think cultures developed independently without direct contact after man developed seagoing vessels about 5,000 years ago.”

Dan Sandweiss, a professor of anthropology at the University of Maine who worked with Heyerdahl in Peru, believes he’ll be best remembered for the Kon-Tiki voyage.

“It just captured the public imagination in such a tremendous way for putting his life on the line to support his scientific theories, Sandweiss said. “He put his life and money on the line over and over again.”

All of Heyerdahl’s voyages, Sandweiss said, were made to eliminate the idea that contacts between peoples in the past at particular times were impossible because of a lack of boating technology.

Sandweiss, a co-author of Heyerdahl’s 1995 book “Pyramids of Tucume,” said that in the last decade “fairly definitive archeological proof has come out” showing contact between South America and Polynesia in prehistory.

“Many of Thor’s detractors have never appreciated that he really was a scientist,” Sandweiss said, “and he’s a scientist because he had creative ideas and he tested them. He understood tests are not proof. They’re support for an idea or against an idea.”

From a scientific point of view, Sandweiss said, “the most important things that Thor has done in his life is to have new ideas and to force the scientific world to react to them.”

Heyerdahl was born in the coastal town of Larvik, Norway, on Oct. 6, 1914. His father was the president of a brewery and mineral water plant; his mother was chairwoman of the Larvik Museum. As the only child of two older parents, he found himself spoiled and overly protected while growing up.

“I reacted against them by going on treks with a Greenland dog, braving storms and sleeping in the snow just to prove that I could do things alone,” he told a British reporter in 1995.

Ironically, for a man who risked his life on perilous seafaring expeditions, Heyerdahl had a childhood fear of water: At age 5, he nearly drowned after falling into an ice hole in a frozen lake.

In late 1936, after studying zoology and geography at the University of Oslo, Heyerdahl and his wife, Liv, moved to the Polynesian island of Fatu Hiva, where they spent a year living a primitive life and conducting botanical and zoological research.

On Fatu Hiva, Heyerdahl first began piecing together his theory about an early South American connection to Polynesia.

He discovered a number of plants that were native to South America, including the sweet potato. He also observed that the trade winds blew in from the east--across 4,000 miles of ocean from the coast of South America.

And he met an old native man who told him about the legend of the god-chief known as Tiki.

“It was Tiki who brought my ancestors to these islands where we live now,” the old man said. “Before that, we lived in a big country beyond the sea.”

It struck Heyerdahl that the huge stone figures of Tiki in the jungles greatly resembled the monoliths left by extinct civilizations in South America.

Returning to Oslo, Heyerdahl published a book on his South Seas adventure (“On the Hunt for Paradise”) and quit his zoological studies to begin researching the legendary Tiki.

War Interrupted Career

By 1940, Heyerdahl had begun investigating whether Native Americans as far away as the coast of the Pacific Northwest may also have reached the South Seas. That year, he was studying rock carvings in British Columbia that bore many similarities to ones done in Polynesia when the Germans invaded Norway.

Returning home, he joined the Free Norwegian armed forces, serving primarily as a parachutist.

After the war, Heyerdahl failed to interest New York publishers in his manuscript, “Polynesia and America: A Study of Prehistoric Relations.” And scientists scoffed at his notion that prehistoric men could have crossed the vast Pacific.

The only way his theory could gain credence, he thought, was to show how it would have been done.

After finding funding for his project and assembling his crew, he headed for Peru.

Working from drawings of ancient Peruvian vessels, he supervised the building of a reproduction of a primitive raft using 12 huge balsa logs bound together with hand-woven hemp ropes. No nails or other metal materials were used.

Split bamboo was used for the 45-foot raft’s deck and bamboo canes and slats formed a small open cabin on the stern. The raft, which had a long steering oar, was topped with a large square sail decorated with a likeness of Kon-Tiki.

Heyerdahl and his crew left the Callao harbor on April 28, 1947. After enduring lulls and storms in which they had to tie themselves down so they wouldn’t be washed overboard, they ended their 101-day voyage by smashing into a coral reef on an uninhabited Polynesian atoll east of Tahiti.

Despite the feat, Heyerdahl’s critics still discounted his theory.

“They couldn’t understand how a guy from Norway who was not an academic could do something they said couldn’t be done,” Heyerdahl told the Chicago Tribune. “Before Kon-Tiki, nobody thought ancient Peruvians navigated the oceans. Recent excavations have proven there was a highly developed maritime culture.”

In 1953, Heyerdahl organized and led the first archeological expedition to the Galapagos Islands 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador. In examining pottery fragments, his team of archeologists determined that the predecessors of the Incas had visited the island 1,000 years before Columbus.

In 1955, Heyerdahl led the first real archeological expedition to Easter Island, the Polynesian island 2,000 miles off the Chilean coast where he laid the foundation of Easter Island’s prehistory.

Although many scientists disagree with his interpretations, Heyerdahl concluded that the architectural record showed several periods of occupation: two by South Americans and the final one by Polynesians.

On to Peru and Pyramids

By the late ‘80s, Heyerdahl had moved to Tucume, Peru, where he organized an archeological project to excavate the largest complex of pyramids in the Americas.

His team of archeologists discovered mud friezes showing reed rafts, which demonstrated the importance of seafaring to the area’s ancient people, as well as objects that suggest a link to Easter Island.

Those who knew him describe Heyerdahl as a man of integrity and good humor, a gentleman in the old-fashioned sense of the word.

A charismatic man who spoke five languages and wrote more than a dozen books, Heyerdahl could hold readers in thrall with his written prose and charm audiences with his oftentimes poetic speech.

“He sees things from his own angle--quite different very often from the real scientists,” longtime friend and fellow archeologist Oystein Koch Johansen once said of him. “Thor very often believes in myths and oral stories and used them more or less as guidebooks.”

And Heyerdahl never lost his boundless capacity for wonder.

“Standing with him on the rim of Vesuvius is like being with a child on New Year’s Eve,” Thor Heyerdahl Jr. said of his father, then 80, in 1995. “He still exhausts everyone, and if anything, he’s getting worse.”

Heyerdahl’s final project took him to Azov, a Russian town on the Don River delta.

Early last year--at 86--he put up $100,000 to begin digging for traces of the lost city of Asgard, where, according to an epic history of Norway by 13th century Icelandic poet and chieftain Snorri Sturluson, once lived a great conqueror named Odin.

Once again, Heyerdahl faced critics, who say Odin and the lost city of Asgard are pure mythology. Scoffed a University of Oslo professor of early Norse religions: “It’s like digging for the Garden of Eden.”

But Heyerdahl, whose book “The Hunt for Odin,” was published in Norway last year, remained characteristically unmoved by his critics.

“This is not my theory,” he told Newsweek in August. “It’s Snorri’s. I’m just putting it to the test. . . .”

After his recent hospitalization, he returned to the Colla Micheri estate he bought and restored in the 1950s and refused further treatment.

“He wanted to go there, to use his words, because it was time to hand up his oars and ride into the sunset,” his son told reporters.

Heyerdahl is survived by his third wife, Jacqueline, a former actress and onetime Miss France; four children; eight grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

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Carol J. Williams, chief of the Times’ Berlin bureau, contributed to this report.