536 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1961 



not be seaworthy and that they would by no means be suitable craft 

 on which to cross the ocean. Heyerdahl then decided to make a faith- 

 ful copy of an old Peruvian balsa raft, and on this, witli five com- 

 panions, he attempted to cross the eastern Pacific driven by wind and 

 by currents. As mentioned above, this daring voyage succeeded and 

 the raft and its passengers arrived in good condition on the reef of 

 Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands. The raft was equipped as it might 

 liave been 1,500 years ago with the exception of a wireless set and 

 certain other modern inventions. In addition to fruits and tubers 

 which they took along, the travelers obtained from the sea sufficient 

 food for the voyage. Such a journey liad great appeal to the general 

 public, and Heyerdahl's popular account became a bestseller and 

 was translated into many languages. But wlien we ask ourselves 

 what was proved by this adventurous expedition, we must answer 

 that the voyage established only that it is possible to cross this part 

 of the Pacific Ocean from east to west by means of a balsa raft pro- 

 vided with sails. The trip did not prove that the pre-Incas or any 

 other South American inhabitants left Peru in that way and formed 

 the original population of Polynesia. To be fair to Heyerdahl, one 

 must add that he never made such a claim. The popular book de- 

 scribing this voyage, "The Kon-Tiki Expedition" (1948), provided 

 its author with enough income so that he was able to fit out another 

 expedition, this time to Easter Island, where he collected more data 

 to support his theory. 



In 1952 Heyerdahl published a detailed voluminous work, "Amer- 

 ican Indians in the Pacific," in which he collected all the arguments 

 in favor of his theory. In the present review I omit the arguments 

 borrowed from language, cultures, mythology, anthropology, zoology, 

 and other disciplines. I wish only to remark here that the author 

 gives evidence of his wide knowledge of both western South America 

 and Polynesia, but on the other hand he appears to be not very familiar 

 with Indonesia. In the following pages I restrict myself to a discus- 

 sion of his botanical documentation, especially in the field of ethno- 

 botany. Such documentation we find assembled in a special chapter 

 of his book. 



Before Heyerdahl's study appeared, the occurrence and use of the 

 sweet potato, Ipomoea 'batatas (L.) Lam., in Polynesia had already 

 been amply discussed in the ethnobotanical literature. In a publica- 

 tion by Dixon (1932, p. 40), we find the problem summarized in the 

 following words : 



If we accept the present conclusions of the botanists that the sweet potato 

 is a plant of undoubted Central or South American origin, then the fact of its 

 widespread occurence in Polynesia in the eighteenth century, as reported by the 



