100 Tala - Tanumafili II Kon-Tiki

The Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947 saw Thor Heyerdahl and five crew members drift 4,300 miles across the Pacific on a balsa raft to prove that pre-Columbian South Americans could have settled Polynesia. Samoa's decision to commemorate it four decades later fit neatly into a broader Pacific-issued collector series of the late 1980s, when small island nations were actively licensing gold proof programs through international mint contractors to generate foreign revenue.

Heyerdahl's theory has since largely fallen out of favor with anthropologists, who cite genetic and linguistic evidence pointing to Southeast Asian origins for Polynesian settlement.