Thor Heyerdahl's Errors: Ra Reed Boats, a Burned Tigris, the Odin Hunt

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian adventurer, zoologist, and ethnographer who lived from 1914 to 2002, nearly drowned twice as a boy in Larvik and grew up terrified of the water. His mother passed on her fascination with Charles Darwin, and he kept a homemade zoological museum with a live viper in his bedroom. In 1936, the day after marrying Liv Coucheron-Torp, he left for Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas under a cover story of studying animal migration, hoping to live off the grid. Disease drove them home after about a year, but the east winds and currents battering the island gave him his theory: that South Americans drifted west to settle Polynesia. Rejected by academics, he built the Kon-Tiki from green balsa and hemp in Peru in 1947 and drifted 101 days and about 5,000 miles before wrecking on a reef in the Tuamotus. His book reached 70 languages and his film won an Academy Award in 1951.

Critics called his Tiki people idea, with its bearded, light skinned sun worshippers and supposedly inferior Asian migrants, hyperdiffusionism, and in 1976 the Polynesian Voyaging Society's Hokulea sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti against the wind by traditional wayfinding, while DNA later confirmed an Island Southeast Asian origin. Heyerdahl turned to the Atlantic with papyrus boats: Ra broke apart in 1969 after missing a tension rope seen in ancient drawings, and Ra II, built with Aymara craftsmen from Lake Titicaca, reached Barbados in 1970 with a crew from the US, the USSR, Egypt, Mexico, and Italy. In 1978 he burned the seaworthy Tigris in Djibouti to protest war and the arms trade. His later theories grew stranger, and he died in 2002 after refusing food and medication, receiving a Norwegian state funeral.

• A wealthy Oslo wine merchant's private library of Pacific books fueled his early Polynesia obsession.
• Locals in Tahiti persuaded the unprepared couple to take at least a machete and a cooking pot to Fatu Hiva.
• The Ra voyages collected some of the earliest data on marine oil pollution for the United Nations.
• Excavations of the Güímar pyramids in Tenerife found 19th century pottery and an 1848 seal, showing they were farm terraces.
• His Search for Odin linked the Aesir to the Russian city of Azov and the god Tyr to Turkey through sound alike words.