The Polynesians Crossed 7,000 km To America — And How They Did It Makes No Sense!

The Polynesians Crossed 7,000 km To America — And How They Did It Makes No Sense! A sweet potato is a strange thing to hang a mystery on, but there it was, growing in Polynesian gardens centuries before any European reached the Pacific, a crop first domesticated thousands of miles away in South America. It had no business being there, and it meant someone had crossed seven thousand kilometres of open ocean in a direction the textbooks said never happened. Thor Heyerdahl was so certain he knew how that in nineteen forty-seven, after the experts told him not to, he built a balsa raft he called Kon-Tiki and drifted from Peru to prove it. He proved a raft could float across. He never proved who actually did it, and that took blood, not driftwood. What stops me cold is the navigation, because these people aimed canoes at islands they could not see, carrying no compass and nothing written down, reading the swell through the hull in the dark and watching for the green of a hidden lagoon thrown up onto the belly of a cloud. In nineteen seventy-six, seventeen thousand people gathered at a Tahitian harbour to watch it done the old way again. Stay for what the DNA finally confirmed.