num_pages: 336
description: In 1995, John Haslett went to a tiny fishing village in Ecuador to begin building a thirty-thousand-pound raft made entirely of balsa wood, bamboo, and manila rope. Inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's famed Kon-Tiki voyage, Haslett intended to sail five thousand nautical miles across the open sea to Hawaii. What transpired, however, was anything but a recreation of Heyerdahl's famous voyage. Over the next five years, Haslett and his crews journeyed through a surreal odyssey of madness, mutiny, obsession, and survival. They lived aboard primitive rafts for months at a time, were marooned in alien worlds, saw one vessel sunk, another abandoned, and another wrecked. Ultimately, Haslett and his colleagues would emerge with new discoveries about a lost culture. Voyage of the Manteno is an ancient sea tale, lived by modern men. It is a compelling adventure brought to life by a cast of characters who vary from the ordinary, to the heroic, to an Ahab-like crewman who teetered on the brink of insanity. A tale of hope, survival, and discovery, Voyage of the Manteno is the true story of two harrowing expeditions in the late 1990s.
language: English
title: Voyage of the Manteno: The Education of a Modern-Day Expeditioner
titlecomplete: Voyage of the Manteno: The Education of a Modern-Day Expeditioner
genres: Animals, Adventure, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 190
publisher: St. Martin's Press