AFTERWORDS.

THOR HEYERDAHL sailed the Atlantic Ocean twice in huge reed boats. RA I he built of papyrus reeds in the shadow of the Pyramids. It sank at sea in 1969. RA II, built in Morocco by Aymara Indian craftsmen brought from Lake Titicaca, reached Barbados, barely afloat, in 1970. Seven years later, in Iraq's legendary "Garden of Eden," the same Titicaca craftsmen built a reed boat like those of the ancient Sumerians. With an international crew of eleven, the Tigris sailed from the Persian Gulf into the Arabian Sea. Denied entry to the Red Sea after 144 days afloat, Heyerdahl set fire to the Tigris off Djibouti.

Books: The Kon-Tiki Expedition; American Indians in the Pacific; Aku-Aku (Easter Island); Sea Routes to Polynesia; The RA Expedite; Fatu Hiva; The Art of Easter Island; Early Man and the Ocean; The Tigris Expedition; The Maldive Mystery; Pyramids of Tucume.

Books about: Senor Kon-Tiki and The Kon-Tiki Man.

WILLIAM WILLIS disappeared at sea according to a Tass News Agency release of September 30, 1968. Quoting the captain of a Soviet trawler that hoisted aboard a small boat with a broken mast found drifting in the Atlantic 330 miles west of Ireland: "We found a passport, a logbook, a notebook, calling cards, and unmailed letters, as well as a little money, three cans of cereal and flour, and empty water cans. The last date crossed off a calendar was July 20, 1968." One month short of the sea hermit's seventy-fifth birthday.

Books: Hell, Hail, and Hurricanes (poems); The Epic Voyage of the Seven Little Sisters (The Gods Were Kind) (first voyage); An Angel on Each Shoulder (Whom the Sea Has Taken) (second voyage); Damned and Damned Again (Devil's Island); The 100 Lives of an Ancient Mariner

EDUARD INGRIS, at age sixty, became a U.S. citizen and married singer Nina Karpuschkin. The couple toured the lecture circuit with three films: La Kantuta; Untamed Amazon; and Sailing the South Seas. Ingris composed and conducted the scores of the films. He died in 1991. Video: La Kantuta, PO Box 15240, South Lake Tahoe, CA 96151.

ERIC DE BISSCHOP

Book: Tahiti Nui Book about: From Raft to Raft, by Bengt Danielsson.

VITAL ALSAR, with 483 days of Pacific voyages under his sea legs, switched to fresh water. In 1977 he and followers walked across the Andes from Guayaquil to the upper Amazon. In the Ecuadoran rain forest they built three galleons and sailed down the Amazon to emulate its discovery in 1541 by Francisco de Orellana. From Belem, the galleons were shipped to Tampico, Mexico, and rebuilt. They set sail for Spain in May 1968. Long becalmed in the Gulf of Mexico, then beset by storms, they reached Santander after five months at sea. Alsar then built a 450-ton ship modeled after Columbus's Santa Maria to commemorate its 1492 voyage into the unknown. Second-in-command of all Alsar's maritime adventures was Marc Modena of Montreal. Seven years older than Alsar, "Pepere" was a professional sea dog. He had served five years in the French navy. In 1956 he had crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Nova Scotia to England on a raft of red cedar logs.

Books: La Balsa: The Longest Raft Voyage in History, an international bestseller. Porque imposible describes the three-raft expedition from Ecuador to Australia.

Current Affairs: Pacific Ocean currents seem to be transporting more drifters now than during the decade after Kon-Tiki. In May 1997 Mata Rangi I, the seventy-ton totora-reed sailboat of Kitin Munoz, with a crew of eleven plus two stowaways, fell apart off Chile's Easter Island. In May 1999, with a smaller balsa, Munoz reached Polynesia eighty-eight days out of Arica Chile. The Spaniard's Mata Rangi II was built of fifty tons of totora. In July 1999 a shipwreck foiled U.S. adventurer John Haslett's fourth attempt to demonstrate that log rafts traded between Peru and Mexico in pre-Columbian times. In April 2000, U.S. mountain climber Phil Buck beached a fifty-two-foot reed boat, Viracocha, built In Lake Titicaca, at Easter Island, ending the first lap of his proposed circumnavigation of the earth.