Kon-Tiki expedition begins - April 28th, 1947

On the 28th of April, 1947, Thor Heyerdahl, Erik Hesselberg, Bengt Danielsson, Knut Haugland, Torstein Raaby & Herman Watzinger set sail from Callao on the coast of Peru on a Balsa wood raft in an attempt to prove that Pre-Columbian stone-age people could have settled Polynesia. The expidition was named after an ancient nickname of the Peruvian sun god who was supposed to have left South America with his followers & headed west across the Pacific when the Incas came to power.

Only using tools & supplies available to the indiginous peoples of South America, the Kon-Tiki expidition cut down giant Balsa trees, stripped their bark, lashed them together into a raft, and set sail for Polynesia.

They had modern equipment such as radio and military expedition food, but found they could live off the fruits of the ocean, as the raft attracted lots of marine life.
After 101 days at sea, and crossing 4300 miles, the then leaking Kon-Tiki raft ran aground on the island of Raroia in Polynesia.

The documentary of the voyage won an Oscar in 1951 and the book about the expedition has been translated into more than 66 languages. A replica of Kon-Tiki is now on display in the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo.

Although Thor Heyerdahl proved such a voyage was possible, physical, linguistic, anthropological & DNA evidence point to the islands of Polynesia being settled from west to east, migration having begun from the Asian mainland, not South America. However, it should be noted that Thor Heyerdahl never set out to prove that the current Polynesians were descended from South America. According to some Polynesian legends, Polynesia was originally inhabited by two peoples, the so-called long-eared and the short-eared. In a bloody war, all the long-eared peoples were eliminated and the short-eared people assumed sole control of Polynesia. Heyerdahl asserted that these extinct people were the ones who could have settled Polynesia from the Americas, not the current, short-eared inhabitants.

Other Historical Highlights for today are:

• 1789 - Mutiny on the HMAV Bounty. Captain William Bligh and 18 sailors are set adrift and the rebel crew sets sail for Pitcairn Island.
• 1878 - Lionel Barrymore, actor, elder brother of Ethel and John Barrymore, is Born. He is perhaps currently best known as Mr. Potter, the miserly banker, in It's a Wonderful Life (d. 1954)
• 1906 - Kurt Gödel, mathematician, is Born (d. 1978)
• 1908 - Oskar Schindler, businessman, Nazi, svior of 1,200 Jews during WWII, is Born (d. 1974)
• 1926 - Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, is Born
• 1926 - Zip the Pinhead, born William Henry Johnson, one of the World's Greatest Freaks, died (b. 1857)
• 1932 - A vaccine for yellow fever is announced for use on humans.
• 1937 - Saddam Hussein, former leader of Iraq, is Born
• 1941 - Ann-Margret, actress, Sex Bomb, is Born.
  
• 1945 - Benito Mussolini Il Duce and Clara Petacci, were shot, hanged upside down, and mutilated
• 1948 - Terry Pratchett, author of the Diskworld novels, is Born
• 1950 - Jay Leno, comedian, TV Talk Show Host, is Born
• 1965 - United States troops land in the Dominican Republic to "forestall establishment of a Communist dictatorship" and to evacuate U.S. citizens & their Rum.
• 1988 - Near Maui, Hawaii, a flight attendant is sucked out of an Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 and falls to her death when an upper part of the plane's cabin area rips off in mid-flight. Metal fatigue is later found to be the cause of the failure.
• 2001 - Millionnaire Dennis Tito becomes the world's first space tourist
• 2002 - Ruth Handler, inventor of the Barbie Doll, died (b. 1916)

Rev. Dr. Frederick J. Freelance, Ph.D., D.F.S

[ Edited by: freddiefreelance on 2005-04-28 09:24 ]

• 2005 - Feelin' Zombified takes time out of a hectic work day to imagine sailing off to a deserted island with Ann-Margret on the Kon-Tiki.

:)

-Z