Ochroma 5th and 6th generations of the Chevrolet Corvette had floor pans composed of balsa sandwiched between sheets of carbon fiber reinforced plastic. Norwegian scientist and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, convinced that early contact between the peoples of South America and Polynesia was possible, built the raft "Kon Tiki" from balsa logs, and upon it he and his crew sailed the Pacific Ocean from Peru to the Polynesian Tuamotu Archipelago in 1947. However, the Kon Tiki logs were not seasoned and owed much of their (rather slight) buoyancy to the fact that their sap was of lower density than seawater. This serendipitously
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