Olav Heyerdahl, the grandson of Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, set out in the balsawood raft Tangaroa in April of 2006 from Callao Peru to reenact the famous Pacific crossing in 1947 of Thor’s raft Kon-Tiki. Olav arrived in French Polynesia 31 days faster than Kon-Tiki due in part to the addition of vertical steering boards added to his flat bottomed raft.
Thor Heyerdahl originally tried to prove the South Pacific Islands may have been populated by people’s migrating in rafts from South America. Though largely dismissed as a valid theory one could envision a plausible occurrence after reading Thor’s other raft book “The Tigris Expedition”. The marsh Arabs of the Tigress River Delta (land of ancient Assyria now Iraq) have been building reed vessels for thousands of years. They may have gotten the idea of a reed boat by observing the crescent moon. In this part of the hemisphere when a crescent moon is on the horizon - looking out to sea - it’s pointy ends are up with the ‘belly’ of the moon in the water – looks like a boat (?). If any of these large (60 to 100 plus feet) reed boats slipped past the Strait of Hormuz, and were caught in offshore storms in ancient times, they may have been forced to follow western flowing wind and current past Africa to land on the eastern coasts of South America. These ancient peoples could put together raft vessels (weather logs or reeds) AND had the knowledge to build triangular structures called pyramids…
Below is a photo of the Tangaroa moving across the Pacific with sail a-flying and a graphic of the route.
(Acknowledgement: National Geographic Magazine)Attachment: Tangaroa.jpg (Downloaded 17 times)
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