Kon-Tiki

(named after the god of the Incas), the name of a raft made of balsa wood, with a reed sail, which was modeled on ancient Peruvian rafts. In 1947 the Norwegian ethnologist T. Heyerdahl and five companions, taking advantage of favorable currents and trade winds, spent 101 days aboard the KonTiki (approximately 100 sq m in area), sailing the 8,000 km from Callao (Peru) to the Tuamotu Islands in the Pacific Ocean in order to demonstrate the possibility that Polynesia might have been settled from the east. The raft is preserved in the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo (Norway).