Thor Heyerdahl, who made a career of sailing the seas on fragile craft, was terrified of the water until he fell into a raging river at age 22 and was forced to swim. On Thursday, he'll be 80.
"If you had asked me as a 17-year-old whether I would go to sea on a raft, I would have absolutely denied it," he said in an interview at the Kon-Tiki museum in Oslo, which is devoted to his voyages.But he did go to sea on a raft, the Kon-Tiki, and in the reed boats Ra, Ra II and Tigris, to test his theory that civilizations were spread by ancient mariners.
Heyerdahl's books describing his voyages captured the world's imagination. His film of the 101-day, 4,300-mile Kon-Tiki voyage won an Academy Award in 1951.
At the close of his eighth decade, the Norwegian scientist and adventurer shows no signs of slowing down. He has projects going in Africa, South America and Asia.
"If there is any change, it is that I have more to do than ever," he said during a brief visit to Oslo from work in Peru and the Canary Islands.
He now is writing about five years of excavations at a complex of 26 pyramids in the Tucume area of northwestern Peru, which he believes may have been settled by people arriving on rafts like the Kon-Tiki.
"We have hardly even touched the surface," he said. "There is enough for a hundred years of excavation."
An ocean away, at Tenerife island off the hump of Africa, Heyerdahl is investigating more pyramids.
"We have found the completely unbelievable," he said. "There lies a pyramid complex that no researcher had been to look at."
Heyerdahl believes the stepped pyramids at both sites, which resemble those of ancient Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq, suggest contact between the oldest civilizations.
In China, Heyerdahl plans to investigate fair-skinned, blond people buried hundreds or thousands of years before the first known contact between Europe and that vast country.
"They have found the mummies of European-type people that the Chinese did not announce for seven years because it did not conform to their accepted ideas," he said.
He believes ancient mariners could have settled Polynesia, and in 1947 sailed Kon-Tiki, a 40-foot raft of balsa logs, from Peru in an attempt to prove it.
"Everyone said the logs would be waterlogged and the raft would sink within two weeks," he said. After more than three months, the nearly wrecked Kon-Tiki reached a tiny atoll east of Tahiti.