It has been a half century since Thor Heyerdahl and five other Scandinavians made history by sailing the Kon-Tiki raft across the Pacific, nearly drowning at the end of the 101-day voyage when they smashed into a coral reef of an uninhabited Polynesian atoll.
Once ashore with their salvaged equipment, they cranked up the radio and sent a message to the world: ''This is the Kon-Tiki. We are stranded on a desert island in the Pacific.'' A ham operator in Colorado in the United States picked up the signal, but didn't believe them.
Desperately, they broadcast another message: ''All well. All well. All well.''
Faintly, another ham somewhere in the world answered: ''If all's well, why worry?''
Heyerdahl, who has died aged 87 after being diagnosed with a brain tumour, described the voyage's comic end in his book Kon-Tiki, Across the Pacific by Raft, a best seller that catapulted him and the balsa log raft to international fame.
''The Kon-Tiki expedition opened my eyes to what the ocean really is. It is a conveyor and not an isolator. The ocean has been man's highway from the days he built the first buoyant ships, long before he tamed the horse, invented wheels and cut roads through the virgin jungles,'' the Norwegian scientist and adventurer wrote in the foreword to the book's 35th edition.
Heyerdahl spent the rest of his life-gathering evidence - from astronomically oriented pyramids to ancient art depicting reed boats - that seafaring sun-worshippers crossed the oceans in prehistoric times.
To prove his theories, Heyerdahl made other voyages after Kon-Tiki, sailing reed boats woven by Peru's Aymara Indians from North Africa to the Caribbean and from Iraq to the Red Sea. His rafting travels continued into the late 1970s.
It was 1947 when Kon-Tiki left the Lima, Peru, port of Callao, acting on Heyerdahl's radical idea that ancient Peruvians could have made the same trip 1400 years earlier, settling in Polynesia 600 years before the Hawaiians conquered the region.
The idea was ridiculed by mainstream scientists who said the logs would waterlog and the raft would sink. But the post-war public, anxious for peacetime heroes, thrilled at the audacity of the six young men, risking their lives for science. The voyage was the moon-landing of its time.
They braved raging storms and ocean calms, with a shortwave radio their only contact with the outside world. At the end of the 4300-nautical mile voyage, wind and currents forced them aground on uninhabited Raroia atoll in the Marquesa Islands.
Heyerdahl's book on the voyage, published in 67 languages, has become a classic. A documentary film of the journey won an Oscar in 1951.
Kon-Tiki, named after a pre-Inca sun god, became a household word. The raft sits in Oslo's Kon-Tiki museum.
Heyerdahl, in his last interview, scoffed at the idea that Leif Ericsson or Christopher Columbus was the first to sail to America. ''We Europeans are so one-track minded when it comes to our own history that we say to the world that Europe discovered the whole world,'' he says.
''I say that no European has discovered anything but Europe.''
The Kon-Tiki voyage upset scientists by undermining their pet theories, Heyerdahl said. ''When I sailed Kon-Tiki, that started the bombardment. I shouldn't have proven my theory correct.'' Heyerdahl remained involved in the study of step pyramids which - along with reed boats and prevailing winds and currents - support his theories about the spread of civilisation by ancient seafarers.
In 1978, he sailed in the Middle East and Indian Ocean on the Tigris reed vessel, to mimic ancient trade routes.
He insisted that the world had got marine design wrong. He said he felt far safer in a storm on a small, buoyant craft that simply popped up after a battering from waves than on a giant modern ship with a rigid hull.
Last year, he issued a book, The Hunt for Odin, saying that the Nordic god might have been inspired by a king who lived in what is now southern Russia 2000 years ago.
Heyerdahl said his voyages proved the oceans were no barrier to Stone Age mariners.
Heyerdahl was born on October 6, 1914, in the southern Norway town of Larvik. He was
the son of a widely travelled banker and a mother with a scientific bent, who gave him anthropology books instead of children's books to read when he was sick.
The school in his hometown was renamed the Thor Heyerdahl Secondary School in 1995.
Heyerdahl, a frequent visitor to the Kon-Tiki museum in Oslo which maintained an apartment for his use, maintained a staggering pace of research, lectures, and public debate well into his 80s, even after a major cancer operation in 2001. His wife, Jacqueline, said he boarded 70 flights in 2001.
He spent his final days at Colla Michari, a Roman-era Italian village he bought and restored in the 1950s. His permanent home since 1990 was on Tenerife where he studied the ancient step pyramids which he believed could show maritime links between ancient civilisations.
He had nearly drowned twice as a child in Larvik, Norway, and overcame his fear only at age 22, when he fell into a raging river in Tahiti and swam to safety.
''If you had asked me as a 17-year-old whether I would go to sea on a raft, I would have absolutely denied the possibility. At that time, I suffered from fear of the water,'' Heyerdahl once said.
He is succeeded by his third wife Jaqueline, four of his five children, eight grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.
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