Kon-Tiki expedition raft "Seven Little Sisters" from Peru to American Samoa, successfully completing the journey. He sailed , which was farther than "Kon-Tiki". In a second great voyage ten years later, he rafted from South America to Australia with a metal raft "Age Unlimited". In 1955, the Czech explorer and adventurer Eduard Ingris attempted to recreate the "Kon-Tiki" expedition on a balsa raft called "Kantuta". His first expedition, "Kantuta I", took place in 1955–1956 and led to failure. In 1959 Ingris built a new balsa raft, "Kantuta II", and tried to repeat the previous expedition. The second expedition was a success. Ingris
Mau Piailug prevent debate among scholars. Before the "Hōkūle‘a" voyage in 1976, academic debate about the settlement of Polynesia was divided between several schools of thought. Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl hypothesized that the Pacific was settled by voyages from South America and set out to prove that with his "Kon-Tiki" expedition. Scholars did not take Heyerdahl's hypothesis seriously. New Zealander Andrew Sharp proposed the accidental voyaging hypothesis in 1957, which (erroneously) argued that Oceania was too vast to have been settled by intentional voyaging so migrations must have happened by accidental drift voyages. Sharp granted that Polynesians likely settled the Pacific from