In September 1519, the Portuguese sailor, Magellan, set out with five ships to try reaching the East Indies by the western route. He crossed the Atlantic to Brazil and then turned south. Eventually he reached the strait at the tip of South America that was later named after him. He sailed through the strait into an ocean that was so calm and smooth that he called it `the peaceful (pacific) ocean.’

He reached the Philippines in March 1521 where he was killed by the Filipinos. But the Victoria- one of Magellan’s five ships under Sebastian Del Cano-continued to sail west wards and reached Spain in September 1522. This was the first time people had sailed around the earth proving the earth to be round.

Thor Heyerdahl, a young Norwegian, wanted to prove to the world that the Polynesian people who live on islands in the South Pacific, had traveled from South America to those islands about 1500 years ago. Some people laughed as they did not believe that a raft could sail nearly 8,000 kilometers in an open ocean. Five other adventures joined Heyerdahl in South America they were to build a balsa wood raft just like the ones the ancient Inca Indians used hundreds of years ago and would sail it across the ocean them selves.

Logs of balsa wood were used by the ancient Indians because balsa is very light and floats in water. But balsa was hard to obtain. They had to go to the jungles on the slopes of the Andes Mountains of Equator. This was not a very pleasant journey as they met with snakes, gigantic ants, scorpions, giant lizards and alligators in the streams in the course of their journey.

Find equator on your map. It is very near the equator. This area is very hot and the adventures found the heat terrible. At last they found nine suitable trees. These trees were cut down and lashed together with lianas and the rough raft floated down a fast flowing river to the sea.

From there the raft was taken by ship to a place in Peru called Callao. Here the raft was rebuilt to the same design that the Indians had used long ago. Over the logs of the raft, there was a deck of split bamboo and a small open cabin of bamboo canes with walls of plaited bamboo leaves. Two masts of hard mangrove wood leaned towards each other and were lashed crosswise at the top. A big square was attached to the masts.