Last Kon-Tiki crew member Knut Haugland dies at age 92
By APSaturday, December 26, 2009
Last Kon-Tiki crew member dies at age 92
OSLO — A museum official says Knut Magne Haugland, the last of six crew members who crossed the Pacific Ocean on board the balsa wood raft Kon-Tiki, has died. He was 92.
Kon-Tiki Museum Director Maja Bauge said Saturday that the former Norwegian resistance fighter and explorer died of natural causes in an Oslo hospital on Friday.
Haugland, decorated by the British in World War II for helping prevent the German nuclear program from getting heavy water to make weapons, joined Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl’s expedition in 1947 as a radio operator.
The Kon-Tiki team sailed the raft with basic equipment 4,900 miles (8,000 kilometers) from Peru to Polynesia in 101 days to prove Heyerdahl’s theory that ancient mariners may have migrated across ocean stretches.
