"'Am going to cross Pacific on wooden raft to support a theory that the South Sea islands were peopled from Peru. Will you come?...Reply at once.' That is how six courageous and inquisitive adventurers came to seek a dangerous path in order to test a hypothetical theory. On a primitive raft made of forty-foot balsa logs, named 'Kon-Tiki' in honor of a legendary sun king, Thor Heyerdahl and his five comrades set out, risking their lives to prove that ancient Peruvians could have made the 4,300-mile voyage to the Polynesian islands on a raft similar to theirs. Every page of Kon-Tiki--from the building of the raft and the dangerous adventures at sea, to a spectacular crash landing and the dances of the native islanders--chronicles of a true-life, spellbinding escape from the twenty-first century"--Cover, p. 4.