OSLO, April 10: Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer famed worldwide for his 1947 Kon Tiki raft expedition across the Pacific, has abandoned cancer treatment in hospital and gone home to his family to die, his son said.

“My father has made it known he wants to end his days close to his family and ‘sail into the sunset’ in the company of his loved ones,” Thor Heyerdahl junior said, echoing one of his father’s favourite metaphors.

“It’s a question of hours, at most a few days,” he added, explaining that his father was refusing to eat and had abandoned the cancer treatment he had been undergoing since being hospitalized last week in Italy.

“He had an operation last year to remove a cancer but it’s now spread to his brain and is incurable,” Heyerdahl said.

Heyerdahl led a six-man expedition which left Callao, Peru on April 28, 1947, and sailed on a balsa raft to prove that the Pacific Islands were inhabited from migrants from South America and not only from Southeast Asia.—AFP