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 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, in which he sailed 8,000 km (5,000 mi) across the Pacific Ocean in a hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands. The expedition was designed to demonstrate that ancient people could have made long sea voyages, creating contacts between separate cultures. This was linked to a diffusionist model of cultural development. Heyerdahl subsequently made other voyages designed to demonstrate the possibility of contact