The Tigris Expedition

by Heyerdahl, Thor

  As no one had to attend to the rudder oars, we were all eleven together for the first time, and one by one we crawled into the cozy cabin for a good night's sleep. There were men seated at our table whom I knew really well and others who were completely new acquaintances. Our ages ranged from twenty to sixty-three. Our nationalities and characters were no less diversified.

  There was my old friend Norman Baker from the United States. Wiry and strong. All skin and muscle. He seemed small in a winter coat and big in swimming trunks. Our wakes had first crossed in Tahiti twenty years earher; he came saihng from Hawaii and I with my expedition ship from Easter Island. Norman was now in his late forties; commander in the U. S. Navy Reserve, but a New York building contractor in private Hfe, he had been my second in command on both the Ra expeditions. Norman alone was enough to make me feel like skipper Noah. He was as agile as a monkey, strong as a tiger, stubborn as a rhinoceros, had a canine appetite and in a storm could be heard hke a trumpeting elephant.

  At his side sat our robust Russian bear, Yuri Senkevitch, forty years old, built like a wrestler, as peaceful as a bishop, doctor to Soviet astronauts, who had also become a popular Moscow television announcer since we had last seen him. He had sailed with us as medical oflBcer on both Ra expeditions and had later turned into a bit of a globetrotter, introducing the weekly Sunday travel programs for a hundred million Soviet television viewers. Yuri could

  hardly open his mouth without laughing or cracking a joke. He said he had acquired this habit when he flew to Cairo to join us on Ra I: he had emptied half a bottle of vodka on board the Soviet aircraft as my letter of invitation to the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences had stressed that I wanted a Russian doctor, but one with a sense of humor.

  Carlo Mauri of Italy, in his late forties, had also been with us on both reed-ship voyages across the Atlantic. Resembhng Noah more than I did, because of his impressive fiill beard, and being blonder and more blue-eyed than any Nordic Viking, Carlo was one of Italy's most noted mountaineers, a professional alpinist who had chmbed up and down the steepest and highest rock walls in all continents and hung in more ropes and tied more and better knots than any man I have known. Latin by temperament. Carlo could turn from a domesticated lamb into a roaring lion, and the next moment grab pen and paper to write poetic accounts of his experiences. Carlo could hve without food and comfort, but not without a rope in his hand. He was to take the expedition's still pictures. And he was to twist his brain and improvise the most ingenious knots and crisscross lashings each time a cabin, a mast foot, or a leg of the bridge began to wobble and dance.

  Detlef Soitzek from Germany I had never known before. Twenty-six years old, one of the youngest captains in the West German merchant marine, he was also an enthusiastic sportsman and a cHmbing instructor at Berchtesgaden. He was recommended to me by German friends when I was looking for a good representative of post-Hitler Germany. Detlef was a naturalist and ideahst. Peace-lover, antiwar, antiviolence, antiracist. He rarely spoke without good reason, but was a keen listener and would chuckle more than any at a good joke.

  Gherman Carrasco, fifty-five, industriahst and amateur film producer from Mexico, was our entertainer. There was no relationship between his body and his soul. With his chubby build and mustache he seemed likely to be most at home in a wide sombrero under a cactus. But not at all. The motto of his private film collection is: The world is my playground. The urge within him makes him leave his four rubber factories in Mexico City several times a year to fly around the world. It was he who swam under the polar ice and filmed Ramon Bravo, when a polar bear bit him in the leg. A scar around his eye testifies to the day when he fell from a jungle

  J^ The Tigris Expedition

  tree in Borneo while filming orangutans. He had been in trouble with sharks in Polynesia and the Red Sea, and he had filmed for his own pleasure in every nation on the map, with Red China as his favorite hunting ground. Before I knew him he had asked in vain to join the Ra. But now I knew him. He had trampled with me in the burning sand of the Nubian desert filming rock carvings of pre-dynastic ships, and we had waded together in the pouring jungle rain of the Mexican Gulf filming Ohnec and Maya pyramids and pre-Columbian statues of bearded men. Furthermore, he was two doors away from me when the Hotel Europa in Guatemala City collapsed and buried us in bricks and dust, while all those in the room between us and twenty thousand others lost their lives in the great 1976 earthquake.

  I was never more surprised than when Gherman asked me to come to his oflBce to see his museum. He pressed a button behind his desk, and a huge painting of three fat angels drifting like pink balloons on blue canvas swung aside and revealed an opening in the wall hke the hatch in a submarine. Inside were four big rooms filled from floor to ceihng with shelves and glass cases stacked with properly labeled archaeological objects of Maya, Aztec, Toltec, Mixtec and Olmec pottery of all shapes and colors, stone statues, ceramic images and figurines, rehefs, gold objects, a priceless fragment of a paper codex, and minute carvings in shell and bone. At that time this was all Gherman's property, but Mexican law later confiscated all pre-Columbian art in the country for the nation's benefit. Four students and a professor spent many months cataloging his collection of tens of thousands of items. But Gherman was appointed custodian of the collection and the museum remains where it was behind the angel painting.

  And now Gherman sat with us on the boat. Beside him sat a completely new friend. Torn Suzuki, a Japanese underwater photographer in his middle forties. I knew very little about him yet, except that he had spent several years filming marine life at the Great Barrier Reef and now ran a small Japanese restaurant somewhere in Australia. I had accepted him blindly on the recommendation of Japanese friends. In Japan, more than in most countries, national pride and self-control tends to reduce the danger of acquiring a problem maker on an expedition. Toru's Enghsh was remarkably fluent; he was a well-built athlete of few words, but always ready with a bright smile and a helping hand. I felt I had handpicked him myself.

  In this mixed company the two Scandinavian students seemed hke twins. Both were chosen on the recommendation of the United World College headmasters, and were graduate students from Atlantic College in Wales. Asbjorn Damhus from Denmark, twenty-one, HP Bohn from Norway, twenty-two, typical descendants of the Vikings. Men like Asbjorn were probably with the Danes when they invaded medieval England and carried off gigghng girls, while HP might well have been waving in the mast top when Leif Eiriksson sighted Vinland. They were always up to something, working together to devise the most unexpected practical jokes. Full of resource, they were technically minded and clever with their fingers. They were as much at home in turbulent water as in a bathtub, and looked forward to any form of adventure before returning to their university desks.

  Youngest of all was Rashad Nazir Sahm, twenty years old, an art student from Iraq. Slender but athletic, the young Rashad had a keen brain, always eager to hsten and learn and yet not without his own strong opinions. He was an impassioned Arab patriot but full of good humor and far from aggressive. He had come to the Garden of Eden with his letter of recommendation and spoke modestly of himself in flawless English. He knew Europe since the days when his father was an Iraqi diplomat; now the diplomat had turned into one of Baghdad's most notable painters, and Rashad wanted to follow in his footsteps.

  I could see the eleventh man, half a head taller than all the others at the table: Norris Brock. Professional U.S. cameraman, forty years old. Tall and thin but remarkably agile. I did not know him. I had not chosen him. He was, until we met him, an inevitable clause in the contract with the consortium that had lent me funds for the enterprise. Norris used his eyes more than his mouth. He seemed to be ever-present and always with his baby at his chest, an especially built and waterproofed sound camera with a long microphone on top that looked like a baby's bottle. He would nurse it at the top of the mast and even dive with it from the cabin roof while it was working. Until I got to know him and his abili
ties I thought the National Geographical Society had chosen him because of his height. He was supposed to film us even if we sank, and by the looks of it he would be able to keep on filming with his head above water while all the rest of us were disappearing under. Until they got used to his ever-present camera that had the privilege of record-

  ing anytihing we did or said, the men came to me to find out what kind of fellow this tall character was. I could not answer the question. All I knew was that during the previous year he had been sent in the same manner on an expedition with a fiberglass double canoe that sailed in the wake of the ancient Polynesians from Hawaii to Tahiti. Another photographer had filmed from an escort vessel, but tall Norris had sat in cramped quarters inside the canoe, filming all the way at close range. Nothing had happened on that journey except a violent psychological storm and a dramatic spfit between the Polynesian crew and the foreign leaders on board. Nobody had tried to hide that they expected he would have to film even worse mental storms among the mixed lot on board Tigris. The psychological drama and conflict story had been the theme of the recently released film of the canoe adventure, and as sails and waves can only be of interest to the viewers for a few minutes, our eleventh man obviously had his orders not to miss the moment when we began to punch each other's noses. This, I said—and I never tire of repeating it before every ocean expedition in small craft—this is what we know as "expedition fever." It is worse than any hurricane to men sharing cramped quarters for a long time at sea, and is as certain to come as any shark if one is not ready for it, to shut one's mouth the moment the urge to yell at one's neighbor is felt, because he has left his fishhook in yoiu: mattress or used the windward side of the raft for his toilet.

  The men hstened, and I began to suspect that Norris's ever-present baby could perhaps become the most effective Httle device any expedition leader could dream of to quench expedition fever at its beginning. Then I was not so sure. After all, Norris had carried the same baby on his previous trip, and had come back nevertheless with a record of squabbling on board. And Carlo had aheady begun to grumble because Norris was free only to shoot movies while he. Carlo, as still photographer, also had to cook spaghetti and store cargo.

  When the rest were not listening, I had admitted to Norris that he was free to behave as a passenger; but for his own sake, I added, so as not to feel isolated as an outsider, he ought to take the same steering watches, kitchen cleanings and other routine duties shared by us all. He could be relieved anytime there was something he wanted to film. Norris answered that he had in fact intended to ask for this. He wanted to become one of us. And he did.

  We remained three days anchored beside the reeds, repairing and strengthening our steering bridge with better lashings and more crosspoles. Also, two men were ashore buying thick brown buflPalo hides which we cut up and tied on to the reed bundles where the oar shafts and anchor ropes would tend to wear. We even began to build two tiny outboard toilets, one on either side aft, which we screened with coiled chola mats obtained from the Marsh Arabs. The sunrise and the big southern moon were spectacular, but the north wind was biting cold at night and we pulled the canvas down on one side of the cane wall, which was so airy that we could see the stars between the wickerwork. The day temperature sank to 17° C. (62° F.).

  On the afternoon of the third day we hoisted sail and continued the voyage downriver. Norman had cut up one of our rowing oars and tried with the Russian carpenter to add something to the oval rudder-oar shafts at friction points to make them round. Failing this, they tried to plane oflF the thickest side. The oars still jammed. They remained as two monsters threatening to destroy the bridge whenever we turned and there was heavy pressure on the blades. Norman had to defend his system against growing criticism from Carlo, Yiui and me. The discussion died down when we saw Norris's head over the cabin roof and heard something that sounded like baby hiccups inside the forward cabin. That meant that his voice recorder was working. It was radio-linked to a tiny mechanism in his back pocket. We quickly agreed that we had to pull the rudder oars ashore at the first place we could dock and reduce the steering colossi closer to their original size.

  The saihng was good, with an estimated three knots, when the sun went down and we were seated around our kerosene lamps eating Rashad's Arab rice with raisins and onions. The two helmsmen on the steering bridge, with heads above the roof, shouted that ahead long flames were licking their way toward the river. We all chmbed up on to the table and roofs. Norris was already in the mast top. In the darkness we saw three long horizontal flames from tall gas chimneys flickering over the river. We held close to the other bank with our reed ship, which still rode high and very dry, and it was a spectacular and even dramatic moment as we sailed past the huge flames that seemed almost to reach us and ht up everything on board from sail to cabins and our own faces. They even lit up all the palms on the opposite side of the river. Shortly afterward we

  sighted long, empt)' cement docks on the same right banks, and our pilot balam helped us by laying to between us and the cement as a wooden fender. Norman was again struck suddenly with a very high fever for a couple of days. Even Yuri now confided to me that he had severe pains in the chest.

  At sunrise we began to see clearly the vast industrial complex to which the mole belonged. West German engineers came and with their crane helped us to hft the two gigantic rudder oars ashore. We cut oflF one third of each blade, and with his Russian adze Dimitri chopped down the sides of the oval shafts so that they became much Hghter and fairly round. Friendly German and Swiss engineers invited aU of us to lunch and to dinner. They were building a modem paper mill beside the large section already in operation. With the other mill under construction far up the river, these plants would suffice to make deforested Iraq self-supporting in paper manufactured from canes and reeds from the marshes. The kassab was especially suitable and was rafted to the miU as large gdre. An enormous field next to the plant was stocked with thousands of tons of cane, ready to be converted into paper pulp.

  This was to be our next nightmare, never experienced by the Sumerians. We had observed that the Shatt-al-Arab was very polluted in this area, but not until we came to the pier in high spirits after a late party did we notice sheets of some white substance floating down the black water. With our flashlights we saw no water at all around our golden reed ship; everything looked like whipped cream with streaks of yellow butter. In the chilly night wind we felt as if we had come to the Arctic. Large floes and flakes of ice, some capped with snow, appeared to come slowly drifting out of the night to build up hke pack ice around Tigris.

  Some of the men ran upstream and found the white foam coming in a solid flow down a canal from the big factory buildings. An engineer confirmed that the old mill was washed out at night. The modem one would not pollute the water in the same way when it was ready for operation. Meanwhile, here was our Tigris, afloat in the thick chemical spiUage of a plant that converted cane into paper!

  With the blades of our rowing oars we tried to scoop away the deep layers of white and golden foam, but it built up again against the reed bundles as fast as we got a moment's ghmpse of black water. We wanted to escape but could not. Our heavy mdder oars

  were ashore in the dark, and the reshaped blades were so far only partly covered with new asphalt.

  Next morning all the men swore that Tigris lay considerably deeper in the water. Norman was convinced the chemicals in the pollutants had penetrated and damaged the reeds. We hoisted the oars aboard and set sail as fast as we could. But it was lunchtime before we had everything ready for departure. As we sailed on we passed foam caps that sailed slower than ourselves, and all that day and all the next we had them with us.

  It was a great relief to have round steering-oar shafts that now rotated against smooth buffalo leather. But the wind died down. Completely. The river still ran. Slowly. A beautiful, undisturbed landscape. Except for the .whitecaps of foam. Date plantations. Water buffaloes. Geese, ducks and kassab canes.
Small villages on the riverside with happy dancing children, some running with us, others chmbing date palms. Barking dogs. Women in colorful dresses, but always covered by long black cloaks. Some with sheep, some with bottle gourds and some with aluminum containers on their heads. Pottery had gone out of use. We saw a couple of canoes with fishermen. Nothing else. Peace. The red sim set behind palms. The river stopped running. We anchored before it started flowing the other way.

  Next day we again reached modern civilization, as if with the wave of a magic wand. We passed Sindbad Island and had to take a tow between the colossal pillars of the new bridge which aheady spanned the other half of the river, beyond the island. I had been down before we started building and spoken to the German engineers who constructed this superbridge with a frightening speed. In another month they would have the whole bridge completed, and so low that no masted reed ship could ever again sail down to the sea. On the pillars of the bridge, and from now on, through all the hectic ports of Basra harbor, enormous crowds awaited us. Police boats escorted us and the balam that towed us. All the cargo ships blew their sirens and rang their bells. The Iraqi Navy vessels had their oflBcers and crews lined up in salute on deck and dipped their flags. Hooting and whistling were everywhere, so Yuri grabbed our own bronze foghorn, jumped onto the roof and trumpeted right and left while the rest of us clung together to the wide mast ladder or waved and shouted from the steering bridge. I had to yell myself when Carlo pointed out a Norwegian ship from my own Httle hometown of Larvik.