Kon-Tiki Revisited

In 1526, ships of a Spanish expedition entered the Pacific from the Straits of Magellan. The San Lesmes, a caravel of eighty tonnes with a crew of fifty-three, was separated from the fleet by a storm and never seen again. Four centuries later, in 1929, four iron cannons were found on the reef of the Amanu atoll, French Polynesia. The find created little interest until 1975, when Robert Langdon argues in The lost caravel that the cannons were from the San Lesmes, the crew had survived and intermarried, and that vital aspects of the wider development of Pacific Island communities needed to be readdressed. In Kon-Tiki revisited Langdon makes his final outstanding contribution to our knowledge of Polynesian origins.