A balsa raft is a vessel built from logs of the lightweight balsa tree lashed together, used historically by coastal peoples of Ecuador and Peru for fishing and long-distance trading voyages along the Pacific coast of South America. Spanish explorers recorded encountering large sailing balsa rafts on early sixteenth century voyages, and the type became widely known internationally after Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition, in which a raft built to a pre-Columbian design was sailed from Peru to Polynesia to test a theory of ancient trans-Pacific contact.
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