The Plastiki's name is wordplay off the "Kon-Tiki, " a balsa raft made famous by Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl, who in 1947 sailed the vessel from Peru to the Polynesianislands.
How this tiny dot in the middle of the South Pacific came to be inhabited is the subject of some debate, but the most widely accepted theory is that Polynesian seafarers arrived from the west around 400 AD, perhaps from their nearest neighbour, the Pitcairn Islands.