Gonzalo Figueroa Garcia Huidobro is) widely accepted, but from South America. In 1947, Heyerdahl successfully sailed the balsa-wood raft "Kon-Tiki" from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands in an effort to prove it could be done. The subsequent Rapa Nui expedition was meant to be less of an adventurous experiment and more of a true scientific expedition. Figueroa was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in archaeology at the University of Chile and working at Santiago's natural history museum when he joined Heyerdahl's expedition as the official representative of Chile and liaison officer, or, as Edwin Ferndon referred to him, "a 'watchdog' representative." He was also to
Tuamotuan language they were settled c. 700 AD by people from the Society Islands. Europeans first discovered the islands in 1521, when Ferdinand Magellan reached them while sailing across the Pacific Ocean. Subsequent explorers visited the islands over the centuries, including Thor Heyerdahl, the famous Norwegian ethnographer who sailed the Kon-Tiki expedition across the Pacific in 1947. The effects of early European visits were marginal as they had no political effects. The language, however, was ultimately affected by the Tahitian language, which was itself affected by European expansion. The eventual arrival of European missionaries in the 19th century also led to loanwords,