Raft Leaves Peru For Pacific Journey

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28911, 3 June 1959, Page 17

Raft Leaves Peru For Pacific Journey

Western Samoa is the objective of the raft Cantuta 11, which left Callao on April 12 to attempt to make the crossing from Peru to Polynesia. Western Samoa is 6500 miles from Callao. The raft is built of two-foot diameter balsa logs from Ecuador, has a bamboo deck house and a scissors mast of Oregon pine. The canvas sail carries designs of the cantuta flower.

The Cantuta II is manned by a crew of four, under Eduard Ingris, a 48-year-old Czechoslovak film producer, composer, and explorer.

With him are 36-year-old Josef Matous, also of Czechoslovak birth, a textile technician, radio operator and navigator; 38-year-old Joaquin Guerrero, an Argentine sportsman and adventurer; and 28-year-old Jaime Toledo, a Peruvian technician and navigator.

The first recorded crossing of the South Pacific by raft from Peru was that of the now-famous six-man Norwegian Kon Tiki expedition, led by Thor Heyerdahl, in 1947.

This sailed from Callao Bay by way of the northward-flowing South Equatorial current to a crash-landing at Raroia Reef in the Tuamotu Archipelago, some 4700 miles from Callao. Place of Honour The raft Kon Tiki was salvaged, towed to Tahiti and now occupies a place of honour in a museum at Oslo, the capital of Norway. The second trans-Pacific crossing by raft was made singlehanded by 61-year-old William Willis, an American navigator, on the raft Seven Little Sisters, in 1954.

Leaving Callao, he reached Pago Pago in American Eastern Samoa on October 15. 1954, after being at sea for 115 days and travelling some 6008 miles. A third venture, led by Eduard Ingris. organiser and leader of the fifth expedition, ended in failure in 1956. rT " e raft Cantuta I, with a crew of /e. including a woman, sailed from Talara, in northern Peru, and, missing the South Equatorial current, was carried into the doldrums. north of the Equator and north-west of the Galapagos Islands. Crew and raft were rescued and taken to Panama by a United States naval vessel. The fourth venture was that of the Tahiti Nui 11, a five-man expedition under the leadership of Captain Eric de Bisschop a 67-year-old French navigator and adventurer. Sailing from Callao on April 13, 1558, the raft was wrecked on

August 31 on the reefs of Rakahanga Atoll, one of the northern outlying atolls of the Cook Group, a dependency of New Zealand. Captain de Bisschop suffered fatal injuries when the raft crashed on the reef. He died a few hours after his four companions had succeeded in getting him ashore.

The Tahiti Nui II was built of cypress, logs at Constitution, in Chile, whence it had sailed north with the Humboldt current, some 1700 miles to Callao, before it left on the trans-Pacific journey. Badly Battered The Tahiti Nui II was named after the first Tahiti . Nui, a bamboo log raft on which Captain fie Bisschop with four companions had sailed from Tahiti in 1957 to within 400 miles of the Chilean coast, where the raft, badly battered by storms, was abandoned and the crew rescued by a Chilean naval frigate. Equipment on board the Cantua II includes a radio receiver and transmitter, two compasses, two sextants, two cinema cameras, one designed for underwater photography, two still cameras, a Jkw electric generator, two lifeboats, one made of rubber, an outboard motor, a large steel wire basket to protect cameramen from sharks, harpoons, 30 sticks of dynamite, four 55-gallon barrel? of petrol, two pressure stoves and a supply of paraffin, thermometers, wind gauge, five large barrels of water, tinned foodstuffs, and fresh vegetables and fruit for the first part of the journey, which is expected to last from four to four and a half months. The raft was also carrying such miscellaneous items as 40 charts and, as mascots, a parrot and a monkey, from the Peruvian Amazon region.

For experimental purposes, a four-metre (about 13ft) long reed boat, of balsa, is being towed by the Cantuta II at the special request of Thor -Heyerdahl, to determine the 'Controversial question of whether these unusual picturesque craft would prove seaworthy in salt water.

It has been claimed that they would disintegrate or that the reeds would be attacked and consumed by marine life. If the balsa survives its long trip across the Pacific, arrangements have been made to ship it to Norway,- where it will be placed in the museum with the Kon Tiki raft.