I have not read much of Heyerdahl's work, but I did read Kon-Tiki several times. The article may be right to dismiss Heyerdahl as wrong, but its depiction of h

I have not read much of Heyerdahl's work, but I did read Kon-Tiki several times. The article may be right to dismiss Heyerdahl as wrong, but its depiction of his approach is not in line with what he wrote himself in Kon-Tiki. The article says: > He made his bias particularly clear by designing his Kon Tiki raft to be unsteerable. which makes it sound like a conscious decision to use the expedition to mislead. In fact, Heyerdahl says clearly that he and his crew were trying to preserve their project's integrity by keeping the design of the ship as close as possible to the original South American rafts he studied, even to the point of preserving elements professional sailors said would sink the raft. They did eventually discover that some pieces on the raft whose purpose they didn't understand at first could be used for marginal steerage (though not for sailing into the wind or current, certainly), so the article is factually wrong that he did not include any steering mechanisms. He might have been entirely wrong about where the Polynesians came from, but I think the article paints him as more dishonest than he was.