"In 1947 a crazy Norwegian with a crazier idea sailed west from South America on a raft."

On April 28 1947, a raft set sail off the Peruvian harbour of Callao. On board were a six-men crew and one parrot: for three months, they would drift on 7,000 km of endless Pacific sea.
This is not a pirate story: it is the story of the Kon-Tiki journey, and to tell it from the beginning, let us go a few years back in time, when a young couple left Norway to spend their honeymoon in the romantic Pacific Islands.

Thor Heyerdahl is a 22-year-old Norwegian zoologist: in 1936, when he and his wife Liv set out for the isolated islands of the Pacific, the newly married couple is nominally on an academic mission to study the local fauna. Yet —as Thor would later write — the real purpose of that journey is to escape from civilization and return to nature.

While living in Fatu-Hiva — the southernmost island of the Marquesas Islands, in French Polynesia — Thor hears about the ancient myth of Tiki the God.
Tiki, so legend has it, was the son of the Sun: he and his people had come to the Pacific islands from a faraway, eastern land overseas.
Thor is struck by the story: back to Norway, he decides to give up on zoology and study the history of the South Seas instead.
He discovers some similarities between the Polynesian Tiki legend and the Inca myth of Kon-Tiki. According to the latter, Kon-Tiki, the Sun god, used to rule on the Lake Titicaca — currently on the border of Bolivia and Peru — until the Inca ancestors conquered his land and massacred his legendary people.
Kon-Tiki himself and a handful of men were the only survivors: they made their way to the West coast and disappeared over the sea.
Thor is persuaded that the two legends bear trace of the same real event: the colonization of Polynesian islands by pre-Inca populations in the prehistoric era.
The scientific community is sceptical and Thor decides to prove his theory in the most spectacular way: he finds a crew, builds up a raft using pre-Inca native material and technologies and sails from the port of Lima to reach the Polynesian islands.

Five fellow adventurers are with him:
Bengt Danielsson, a Swedish sociologist interested in human migration theory who takes on the role of steward, cook and translator: he is the only member of the crew to speak Spanish. Erik Hesselberg, navigator (the only on board) and artist: he paints the large Kon-Tiki god red figure on the raft's sail. Herman Watzinger, an engineer specialised in technical measurements and weather. Knut Haugland and Torstein Raaby, in charge of the radio transmission, are two World War II heroes: both were part of the Resistance fighting against Nazi occupation in Norway. Lorita, a female pet parrot completes the crew.
After 101 days and over 6,900 km across the Pacific Ocean, the Kon-Tiki is shipwrecked off the coast of Raroia, an atoll in the Tuamotus, on August 7, 1947. They did not make it through as planned, but they eventually did it: the journey is over, and Thor has demonstrated that a prehistoric expedition across the ocean was possible.