He made more than 70 airplane trips around the world in the last year of his life, relatives said, lecturing and supporting projects he liked. Heyerdahl may be one of the last of the great terrestrial adventurers. He crossed three oceans in primitive rafts and boats to prove theories about where man has been and how he got there.

The scholarly Norwegian adventurer was a daring navigator who was never a sailor, and a college dropout who spent a fortune trying to win acceptance from academia.

Heyerdahl said his life was dominated by three challenges: to live in harmony with nature and improve it, to make his mark on the scientific community, and to build on his conception of the basic unity of mankind.

New Polynesian Theory

As a student at the University of Oslo, he read about Pacific cultures and primitive island life, only to find that none of the experts agreed on how humans first came to Polynesia.

Heyerdahl developed a theory: Polynesia was not first settled by sailors from Indonesia, but by South American Indians crossing the oceans on primitive craft, taking the prevailing winds and currents near the Equator. It was not until later that the peoples of Southeast Asia, traveling via the Japan current, took prevailing winds toward North America and then circled back down to the South Pacific.

The heart of his theory was that primitive navigators always followed the winds and currents. The first proof came from botany.

When the first Europeans found the islands of Polynesia, the sweet potato and other plants already had been introduced and were available in abundance, just as they were in South America. At the time, those foods were unknown in Southeast Asia.

Later Heyerdahl found links between the ancient art, stone engravings and even the Indians of Canada, South America and Polynesia.

Always the maverick, Heyerdahl began his field research in the Marquesas Islands in the late 1930s as a zoologist. Then he switched to anthropology, dropping out of the University of Oslo in his fourth year so he could study the Bella Coola Indians of Western Canada.

"I graduated in nothing," he says. "I quit zoology. Obviously, this is why I had a terrible fight with the whole world in the beginning, because I had gone my own path."

In Canada, Heyerdahl elaborated one major part of his theory that Polynesians came to the West Coast of North America from Southeast Asia before they returned to the sea and sailed westward across the Pacific.

"All the early explorers pointed out the similarities between the people of New Zealand and the people of British Columbia," he said. "The physical types. The similarity in the canoes. The similarity of the maori (statues) and the Northwest totem poles. ... Every single element was pointed out by them."

Despite his evidence, he found no publisher for his conclusions.

Research Expands

It was after World War II, in 1947, that he was able to offer his most dramatic proof. He boarded the balsa raft Kon-Tiki for the 101-day journey across the Pacific from Callao, Peru. An authority on primitive navigation wrote that a balsa raft could not possibly float for two weeks.

Heyerdahl remembered the triumph he felt when he and his five crewmen pulled themselves from the surf on the Polynesian atoll of Raroia.

"I crawled up on the dry sand and counted the men around me. That feeling can never be matched. We had really made it and we were all alive!"

Heyerdahl led an expedition to the Galápagos Islands, 600 miles off Ecuador, in 1952 and found pre-Inca pottery and other artifacts.

He followed that expedition in 1955 with his first study of Easter Island. That trip proved to be a benchmark in two critical areas: It was a turning point in his campaign for academic acceptance, and it left him broke.

The excavation team found the mysterious, brooding stone statues of Easter Island actually were twice as large as previously thought, and that the island had been inhabited 1,000 years earlier than previously believed.

The University of Oslo changed its bylaws so it could award Heyerdahl an honorary doctorate, an award previously reserved for foreigners. The Royal Geographical Society in London awarded him a gold medal.

Another scientific conclusion challenged by Heyerdahl was that papyrus reed would dissolve after two weeks in water.

"That papyrus had been tested in a bathtub," Heyerdahl said. "Any kind of reed will rot in stagnant fresh water. But in clean ocean water it is preserved. The longer it is in seawater the tougher it gets."

Heyerdahl's papyrus ship Ra remained afloat eight weeks in the Atlantic. It disintegrated shortly before reaching Barbados because of faulty construction of the stern. The Ra II completed the crossing in 57 days.

After his Ra voyages were plagued by petroleum refuse, he denounced pollution from oil tankers and off-shore wells. He crusaded for an ocean cleanup in the United Nations and in lectures, radio and television appearances in 23 countries.

Source United Press International 2002