When my family lived abroad in the 1960s, a feature of my childhood television viewing was a tea-time series about what seemed the never-ending voyage of the Kon-Tiki, a representation of the 1947 expedition led by the adventurous ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl. The series was, necessarily, in black and white and though I can’t find a record of it, it most likely cannibalised his Academy Award-winning 1950 documentary. Pacific waves bounced against the balsa wood raft as it drifted 4,500 miles from Peru to Polynesia, following the same currents as early travellers who Heyerdahl was convinced had made that journey west towards the setting sun. Heyerdahl, who died in 2002, was a heroic figure to my generation: unlike so many explorers or sportsmen, he really looked the part, tall and str