Thor Heyerdahl, extraordinary 20th century explorer and author

Ra II
Originally uploaded by MGSpiller

Thor Heyerdahl (1914 - 2002) was a Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer with a scientific background in zoology and geography, says Wikipedia. Heyerdahl became famous for his Kon-Tiki expedition, in which he sailed 4,300 miles (8,000 km) by raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands.

In 1969 and 1970, Heyerdahl built two boats from papyrus and attempted to cross the Atlantic from Morocco in Africa. Based on drawings and models from ancient Egypt, the first boat, named Ra, was constructed by boat builders from Lake Chad in the Republic of Chad using reed obtained from Lake Tana in Ethiopia and launched into the Atlantic Ocean from the coast of Morocco. After a number of weeks, Ra took on water after its crew made modifications to the vessel that caused it to sag and break apart. The ship was abandoned and the following year, another similar vessel, Ra II was built by boatmen from Lake Titicaca in Bolivia and likewise set sail across the Atlantic from Morocco, this time with great success. The boat reached Barbados, thus demonstrating that mariners could have made trans-Atlantic voyages by sailing with the Canary Current.[1] While the purpose of the Ra voyages was merely to prove the seaworthiness of ancient vessels constructed of buoyant reeds, others contentiously have cited the success of the Ra II expedition as evidence that Egyptian mariners could have journeyed, by design or happenstance, to the New World in prehistoric times.

Heyerdahl built yet another reed boat, Tigris, which was intended to demonstrate that trade and migration could have linked Mesopotamia with the Indus Valley Civilization in what is now modern-day Pakistan. Tigris was built in Iraq and sailed with its international crew through the Persian Gulf to Pakistan and made its way into the Red Sea. After about 5 months at sea and still remaining seaworthy, the Tigris was deliberately burnt in Djibouti, on April 3, 1978 as a protest against the wars raging on every side in the Red Sea and Horn of Africa.