Sounds like part of Thor Heyerdahl's larger theory of vikings everywhere. Part of the story was folks settling the Pacific from South America, recreated in the Kon-Tiki expedition.

Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have reached Polynesia during pre-Columbian times. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_expedition