Kon-Tiki expedition was able to cross the Pacific Ocean on the balsa raft from Peru to Polynesia. A French seafarer, Éric de Bisschop, committed himself in a project he had had for some years: he built a Polynesian raft in order to cross the eastern Pacific Ocean from Tahiti to Chile (contrary to Thor Heyerdahl's crossing); the "Tahiti-Nui" left Papeete with a crew of five on November 8, 1956. When near the Juan Fernández Islands (Chile) in May 1957, the raft was in a very poor state and they asked for a towing, but it was damaged during the operation and had
Pre-Columbian rafts It was during these trade voyages that South American sailors may have introduced metallurgy to Mexico. The purported trade between Ecuador and Mexico consisted of luxury items, including Spondylus (spiny oyster) and Strombus (conch) shells, which were prominently traded from their origins in the warm ocean waters of Ecuador throughout the Andes and up and down the coasts of South America. Since the voyage of the Kon-Tiki in 1947, there have been numerous crossings of the Pacific Ocean by raft from South America to Polynesia. In the 1990s, four attempts to sail a raft from Ecuador to Mexico failed, although