Adventurer Heyerdahl, 87, dies from cancerous tumor

OSLO, Norway -- Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian adventurer who crossed the Pacific on a balsa log raft and detailed his harrowing 101-day voyage in the book "Kon-Tiki," died Thursday night. He was 87.

Heyerdahl stopped taking food, water or medication earlier this month after being diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor.

"Norway has lost an original and spectacular researcher, explorer and adventurer," Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik said.

Experts scoffed at Heyerdahl when he set off to cross the Pacific aboard a balsa raft in 1947, saying it would get water logged and sink within days.

After 101 days and 4,900 miles, he proved them wrong by reaching Polynesia from Peru in a bid to prove his theories of human migration.

Later expeditions included voyages aboard the reed rafts Ra, Ra II and Tigris. His wide-ranging archaeological studies were often controversial and challenged accepted views.

Daunting pace

Until his illness, Heyerdahl had maintained a daunting pace of research, lectures and public debate over his unconventional theories on human migration. His third wife, Jacqueline, said he made 70 airline trips last year.

Relatives said he died in his sleep at home in Colla Michari, Italy. He had been hospitalized there in late March when he became ill over the Easter holidays.

His final days were spent surrounded by family at Colla Michari, a Roman-era Italian village he restored in the 1950s. His home since 1990 was on the Spanish island Tenerife in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Morocco.

Though he lived abroad for decades, Heyerdahl was a national hero in his homeland, where one newspaper crowned him Norwegian of the Century in a millennium reader poll. He is survived by his third wife, four of his five children, eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

After Heyerdahl's 1947 voyage, conventional anthropologists dismissed the college dropout's theories, saying they were only the work of a gifted amateur. But the adventurer gained worldwide fame with the voyage. His book about that trip sold tens of millions of copies and his 1951 movie about the Kon-Tiki voyage won an Academy Award for best documentary.

He followed that trip with expeditions on reed rafts seeking to show that ancient people could have sailed from the Old World to the New.