Hawaiki via Spirits Bay, Cape Reinga and the Three Kings Islands at the extreme north of the North Island of New Zealand — giving a possible pointer as to the direction in which Hawaiki may lie. Until , many anthropologists had doubts that the canoe-legends described a deliberate migration, tending to believe that the migration occurred accidentally when seafarers became lost and drifted to uninhabited shores. In 1947 Thor Heyerdahl sailed the "Kon-Tiki", a balsa-wood raft, from South America into the Pacific in an attempt to show that humans could have settled Polynesia from the eastern shores of the Pacific Ocean,
Thor Heyerdahl after him, as are HNoMS "Thor Heyerdahl", a Norwegian Nansen class frigate, along with "MS Thor Heyerdahl" (now renamed "MS Vana Tallinn") and "Thor Heyerdahl", a German three-masted sail training vessel originally owned by a participant of the Tigris expedition. Thor Heyerdahl Upper Secondary School in Larvik, the town of his birth, is also named after him. Heyerdahl's numerous awards and honours include the following: Thor Heyerdahl Thor Heyerdahl (; October 6, 1914 – April 18, 2002) was a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer with a background in zoology, botany, and geography. He became notable for his "Kon-Tiki" expedition in 1947,