Kon-Tiki Museum

Listen for a moment. Inside this hall the air is cool and still, and it smells faintly of old wood and dry reed. In front of you sits a raft. It looks almost too simple to be real. There are pale logs lashed together with rope, a small bamboo hut, and a square sail painted with a bearded face. This is not a replica. This is the actual raft that six men sailed across the Pacific Ocean.

Welcome to the Kon-Tiki Museum, on the Bygdøy peninsula in Oslo. Bygdøy is a green, quiet stretch of land just west of the city centre. It holds several of Norway's museums about the sea, and they sit close together near the water. Here, the story belongs to one man and his very large ideas. His name was Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian explorer born in 1914 in the coastal town of Larvik.

Heyerdahl had a theory that most scholars of his day rejected. He believed that people from South America could have reached the islands of Polynesia long ago, travelling on simple rafts. The experts told him it was impossible. A balsa raft, they said, would soak up water and sink long before it crossed an ocean. Heyerdahl decided the only answer was to try it himself.

In 1947, he and five companions set out from the coast of Peru. Five of the crew were Norwegian, and one was Swedish. They built the raft from balsa logs, a very light tropical wood, using methods based on old accounts of South American rafts. Look closely at the joints. There are no nails, no screws, and no wire holding the main logs together — only rope.

The voyage lasted about one hundred and one days. The raft had no engine and only a limited ability to steer. It drifted west on the ocean currents and the trade winds, moving slowly across thousands of kilometres of open water. The crew lived in that small hut you can see on the deck. They fished, they kept watch, and they sent radio messages that amateur operators around the world picked up.

The ocean was not empty around them. The men wrote about flying fish landing on the deck at night, and about sharks circling the logs. One day a whale shark, the largest fish in the sea, swam close beneath the raft. Before you leave, go down to the lower level of this hall. Beneath the raft, the museum shows a model of the deep sea, and a large whale shark hangs in the dark water there.

The journey ended suddenly. The raft did not land on a gentle beach. Instead, it crashed onto a coral reef in the Tuamotu Islands of French Polynesia. The waves pushed it across the sharp coral, and the crew had to hold on as the logs broke against the reef. All six men survived. They waded ashore to a small uninhabited island, and they were later found by people from a nearby village.

Here is the first surprise. The world followed this voyage almost as a kind of adventure serial. Heyerdahl's book about the trip was translated into many languages and sold in enormous numbers. His film of the voyage, shot by the crew on board, won an Academy Award for best documentary. For many people in the years after the Second World War, this little raft was a symbol of courage and curiosity.

Now turn toward the other large boat in the museum. It is made not from wood but from bundles of papyrus reed, tied together in a long, curved shape. This is Ra Two. In 1969, Heyerdahl tried to cross the Atlantic in a first papyrus boat, but it began to fall apart and the crew had to abandon it. The next year, in 1970, he tried again with this boat. It sailed from Morocco and reached the island of Barbados in the Caribbean.

The crew of Ra Two came from many different countries, including nations that were on opposite sides of the Cold War. Heyerdahl chose them on purpose. He wanted to show that people from different backgrounds could live and work together in a small space under hard conditions. Look at the reed bundles as you walk around the boat. You can see how the stems are packed tight and bound, almost like a giant basket.

The museum also tells the story of Heyerdahl's other expeditions. He led an archaeological expedition to Easter Island in the 1950s, and you will find a large copy of one of the island's famous stone heads, called moai, in the collection. There is also material about the Tigris, another reed boat. At the end of that voyage, in 1978, Heyerdahl and his crew burned the boat themselves. It was a protest against the wars in the region around them.

Here is the second surprise, and it is an honest one. Most scientists today do not agree that Polynesia was settled from South America. Evidence from language, archaeology, and DNA shows that the main settlers came from the west, from Asia and the islands of the western Pacific. But genetic studies have found traces of early contact between Polynesians and Native Americans. So Heyerdahl was wrong about the big picture, yet the ocean was perhaps not quite as closed as his critics believed.

That tension is part of what makes this place worth your time. It is a museum about a man who was stubborn, brave, and sometimes mistaken. It shows how a single experiment can capture the imagination of millions of people. And it reminds us that old seafarers, with reeds and rope and wood, were far more capable than many modern experts once assumed.

Before you go, stand once more beside the raft. Look at the worn ropes, the faded face on the sail, and the narrow deck where six men slept for more than three months. Then step outside. You will hear the water of the Oslofjord close by, and gulls calling over the harbour. It is the same kind of sea that carried this raft, just colder, greyer, and very much closer to home.