Subtitle: Rafting Adventures in the Wake of Kon-Tiki
Author: P. J. Capelotti
Subject: Recreation/History
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2978-6
Pages: 232 pp., with maps and illustrations

View the table of contents for Sea Drift
Read an excerpt from Sea Drift
Read an interview with P.J. Capelotti - Click here!

Description: Exciting tales of transoceanic raft expeditions between 1947 and 2000.

It was the original Survivor series, only without the omnipresent cameras, paramedics, and faux tribal rituals. Between the spring of 1947 and the summer of the year 2000, more than forty expeditions sought to sail the oceans of the world on rafts made from straw, from bamboo, and from the same kinds of wood that children use to make model airplanes. These audacious raft voyages began with the legendary Kon-Tiki expedition, under the leadership of the renowned Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl. The Kon-Tiki balsa-wood raft drifted more than four thousand miles from Peru to Polynesia, and remained afloat months after experts predicted it would sink to the bottom of the Pacific. Heyerdahl's radical thesis of a prehistoric world where ancient mariners traveled between continents on ocean currents electrified the postwar world. His Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft sold twenty million copies in sixty-five languages.

Sea Drift is the first and only book to document all of the transoceanic raft expeditions that were organized and carried out in the half century after Kon-Tiki. But it is much more than a simple history of exploration. Readers learn of the Mormon who drifted to Hawaii to prove that wise men from Israel had colonized America, and the Frenchman who squeezed drinking water from the flesh of fish as he drifted alone across the Atlantic in a rubber boat. Then there was the anthropologist who put five men and six women on a raft to see who would make love to whom first.

Spanning more than fifty years and recounting more than forty expeditions, Sea Drift is a riveting chronicle of human daring, endurance, and folly.

P. J. Capelotti wrote the introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition of Kon-Tiki as well as By Airship to the North Pole (Rutgers University Press). He teaches archaeology and American studies at Penn State University, Abington College.

Praise for Sea Drift

"If you dream of the romance and adventure of rafting across oceans, you had better read Sea Drift first."-Captain Norman Baker, navigator and second-in-command on Thor Heyerdahl's reed boat expeditions Ra, Ra II, and Tigris

"Sea Drift offers a marvellous way to enjoy the adventures of Heyerdahl and subsequent raft voyagers without mashed fingers, killer waves, and those dreadful sinking feelings."-Ben Finney, author of Voyage of Rediscovery

"Journeying to Ecuador with sketches of native rafts drawn by the earliest European explorers of South America, Heyerdahl harvested nine enormous balsa logs and floated them down the Palenque River to Guayaquil, and thence to the naval yard at Callao on the coast of Peru. The logs were lashed together to form the deck of the raft he would soon christen Kon-Tiki. With the raft complete, Heyerdahl and five crew members-two of them heroes of the Norwegian Resistance during the Second World War-departed Callao on 28 April 1947. One hundred and one days and 4,300 miles later, the raft smashed into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands, and then scholars joined in debate that continues today."-from Sea Drift: Rafting Adventures in the Wake of Kon-Tiki