The Tigris Expedition

by Heyerdahl, Thor

  temper of eleven angry men of the expedition, the consortium sent us a peace messenger. The amiable Peter Clark, whom nobody could blame for the confusion, flew from London to Karachi to straighten out the misunderstandings. When last seen he had barely had time to climb on board and say hello as we passed through the Iraqi river port of Basra; now he landed just as we were ready to depart from Karachi. He had been commissioned to reassure us that from now on correct news about our voyage would be distributed. He marveled at the fact that Tigris was just as perfect and undamaged as the day he had seen us pass on the river, and he waved us oflF to fly straight back to London with the comforting news of what he had seen. Three days later, on the day we got the crazy news about oiir trying to reverse Kon-Tikts voyage, we received a panicky question over Bahrain Radio from another ojBBce of our same London consortium: "Why had Tigris broken its back?"

  We all asked Norman to shut down his radio. We had to take it as a joke. If our shore-based contacts could not commimicate across a corridor, how could we help across the oceans?

  That day Tigris had been afloat for three months. The cigar-shaped twin bundles curved as much below as above water and still floated higher than Ra II did after three weeks. None of us now had any fear of Tigris losing buoyancy quickly. None of the crew had wanted to give up in Pakistan, although they could have had air tickets home, and although we were to leave Asia with an unknown destination. Everyone knew that the risk of running into a storm was overwhelming, and there was a chance of a cyclone. Nobody feared that the bundle body might be ripped apart by wind or waves. It would take something like a steel hull or coastal chff to destroy the springy, yielding bundles.

  The air had turned misty. There were rain showers diuring the day and new thick clouds were building up around us. It was warm and oppressive. That day I wrote in my diary:

  Watch set back again one hour at noon. As I he on my mattress I can see the dancing ocean on both sides of the ship simultaneously through the two door openings; when it rolls hke these days I see the water rise up above the door and above the cabin roof on one side while it disappears under the deck on the other, and vice versa. I cannot remember that we had so much roUing on the two Ras, but then we always sailed along

  with the elements and not across them; now we steer for given destinations or to avoid dangerous coasts or shipping lanes. Where do we sail now? Nobody knows. Madagascar, the Red Sea, or any African coast in between seem most likely and most tempting.

  Around the deck table we began to discuss our future course. Norman had just finished reading a book about a yachtsman who spared no phrases when it came to describe the horrors of the Red Sea, and he strongly advocated that we set course for the Seychelles, described as a modem island paradise. Yuri, on the other hand, had no greater desire than to sail straight for Kenya; his dream was to visit the great animal reserves. Carlo favored steering for the Red Sea; the waters of the ancient Egyptians ought to be linked with those of the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia if these people had really known about each other in early times. We had all seen that Baghdad Museum had a whole roomful of beautiful Egyptian ivory work, excavated from archaeological sites in Iraq. Gherman had also impressed everybody with his descriptions of the fabulous marine Hfe he had seen in the Red Sea. Otherwise nobody voiced any specific opinion; the first-time reed-ship sailors just seemed to enjoy life on board and were happy merely steering into the infinite blue. It was for me to make the decision.

  The expedition had taken a somewhat different pattern from what I had anticipated. At one time I had seen the main purpose of the experiment was to test the buoyancy of a Smnerian ma-gur built from berdi cut at the correct time. I had visualized sailing with no predetermined goal as long as the berdi kept afloat. If it did not sink we could cross the Indian Ocean with the monsoon at our back, and if it stiU kept afloat we might even sail down the coast of Africa and perhaps again cross the Atlantic to tropic America. That last leg from South Africa would have been the easiest of aU, for we would have had the winds and currents with us all the way, just as on the drifts with the two Ras. But instead we had followed the trade routes of Sumerian merchants. We had spent so much time visiting prehistoric remains in Bahrain, Oman and Pakistan that my finances had started to run low. Besides, the buoyancy test of Tigris had more than stood up to the time requirement for any straight, longdistance voyage. The abihty to navigate to given destinations had become more of a challenge than conducting long-distance runs

  that had been demonstrated possible by previous expeditions. We had so far voyaged between the legendary Dilmun, Makan and Meluhha of the Sumerian merchant mariners. Across the Indian Ocean lay the Horn of Africa, Somaha, considered by all scientists to be the legendary Punt of the Egyptian voyagers. If we could reach that coast also, then we would have closed the ring. Then we would have tied all the three great civihzations of the Old World together with the very kind of ship all three had in common. We had hnked Africa with the New World before, with the same kind of ship, and the New World had in turn been shown to have access to the mid-Pacific, where Easter Island was the nearest speck of land, with its stone statues and vestiges of an undeciphered script which some scientists claim has a strong resemblance to the Indus Valley writing.

  Our discussions around the deck table were interrupted as distant lightning flashes suddenly leaped across the sky, splitting the black clouds above the mast with a violent clatter. The wind had turned from east to south and increased in strength. We were outside all traffic lanes and had seen only a single sailing dhow from India that day. Those of us who were not on steering turn preferred to crawl into our cabins and roll down the cotton canvas. The heavy clouds soon began to spill hke torn goatskin bags ripped open by the flashes, and good drinking water again cascaded down upon the Tigris as we were swallowed up in complete darkness. It was indeed good to know we were alone in these waves. Inside the cabin we could hear every word shouted between the two men on steering watch. I could in fact thrust my finger between the canes at any place and feel the thin cotton canvas that had been pulled down, yet the roar of ocean and wind so deafened the men on the bridge that they could not hear a word of what we shouted from inside.

  Thus began the night described in the first pages of this book, when I asked myself if I would have embarked on this adventure had I known that such a moment awaited us. This was the beginning of a roaring gale that swept the Indian Ocean and reached the eastern part of the gulf with fierce sandstorms in Dubai and Abu Dabi. Our fittle boat was tossed about hke a toy vessel between and over mountainous waves, when those of us who still slept were awakened by the familiar call: "All hands on deckl" It was Norman's voice with an undertone of despair cutting through all the turmoil outside.

  In the faint light of swinging kerosene lamps, colliding wave crests rose around us like small volcanoes smoking with foam and spray. When the thick topmast broke and half the mainsail dragged like a water-filled parachute in the sea, heavy as a small whale, we all feared the worst that might have happened: that we could have lost the rigging and been left adrift on a heavy raft-ship with only the rowing oars to propel us. The straddle masts could have torn loose from their lashings to the bundles, but we knew by now that the twin-bundle ship was too broad and sturdy to turn bottom up. Indeed, either half was too heavy to be lifted into the air and too buoyant to be forced down underwater; capsizing was no threat. Unable to hear an order from stem to midship, each man filled his place where most needed, and aU hands together managed to empty the sail and pull it on board. Neptune got nothing from • oinr deck.

  AU night the storm raged. The wind howled and whistled in the empty rigging and the canvas-covered cabin. Like Noah we waited inside cover for the weather to abate. The rudder oars were abandoned, lashed on. There was nothing to do but wait. It was an incredible comfort to aU of us to know we were on a compact bundle boat and not inside a fragile plank hull. No worry about the vessel springing a leak; no need for bailing. But without sail our
elegantly raised tail was of no avail, and the ungovernable vessel just turned side on to the weather, with breaking seas tumbling on board by the tens of tons, up on the benches, everywhere. But next moment aU the frothing water whirling around the cabins was gone, dropping straight down through the sievelike bottom. And the bundle boat rose from the sea like a surfacing submarine, glitteringly wet in the lamphght, and sparkling intensely with the phosphorescent plankton trapped on board. No wonder that this simple kind of self-bailing craft was the first to give primitive boatbuilders the security to venture upon the waves, and the one that paved the way for further progress in more sophisticated and demanding maritime architecture.

  By morning the storm abated. The wind turned to ESE. Sporadic rain squalls continued, and the warm easterly wind again brought a distinct smell of jungle. A warm, spicy, botanical aroma of a tropical rain forest was wafted into our nostrils, from India far beyond the horizon. What was more amazing, the wind had brought a rain of insects across the sea. Several beetles, ants, a few

  big moths, a dragonfly and some fair-sized spiders came down from the sky to join our old company of grasshoppers, who for some time had been silenced by the storm. Seven sharks had taken to our sides in the rough weather, and showed no sign of leaving. The side-on rolling to the sea without sail was terrific after the storm. I timed it; two and a half seconds between each violent jerk, when it felt as if we dropped brutally down into a deep trench. The stepladder in the empty mast looked hke a naked skeleton against the gray morning sky. It was hard to keep balance around the breakfast table. We praised the presence of the mouse as the food that spilled during meals was not easily swept up from between the thousand berdi stalks beneath us. The stowaway crabs, too, were growing in size and number and helped keep the ship clean, operating like toothpicks between the reeds.

  Clearly we had not yet had time to rid ourselves completely of all continental bacteria. Soaked by seas and chilled by rain and storm, four men caught colds and were confined to quarters by Yuri, who said that they all ran temperatures.

  We hoisted the mainsail to the foot of the broken topmast and succeeded in maintaining a fairly even southerly course, although the northeast monsoon never showed up. The wind varied between ESE and SW, and at times we had to fall off and turn all about to fill the sail from the opposite quarter and then continue our interrupted course. We were masters of our progress. We could have done better with more oar blades or leeboards in the water, but we were indeed no drift voyagers. We held our own in contrary wind, and even managed to force Tigris some few degrees against the wind direction. The best we managed, according to Norman s observations, was to advance 80° into the wind. We tested broad tables and rowing oars lashed to the side bundles as leeboards, and we tested similar boards lowered as centerboards or guara in the open slots between the twin bundles fore and aft. Any such addition to the underwater keel effect already provided by the large rudder oars and by the longitudinal groove between the twin bundles helped reduce leeway. An interplay of guara fore and aft had an immediate effect on the coiurse, but although of paramoimt importance for maneuvering South American balsa rafts, and probably even South American reed boats, the big rudder oars suflBced for guiding our vessel, and the boards gave the same keel effect whether lowered between or outside the bundles.

  Norman and HP spent much of the four days after the storm lashed to the top of the waving bipod mast. It was no easy job to hang on up there and chisel out the broken base of the topmast which had been mortised deep into the wooden block that joined the two legs of the straddle mast. The hardwood topmast, thick as a man's leg, had broken crosswise and splintered lengthwise, so no piece could be reused. On Carlo's suggestion, Asbjom skillfully adzed one of the big ash rowing oars into shape, and it was wedged in as a new topmast, allowing us to gain speed again on our way southward in constant struggle with changing winds.

  The men recovered quickly from their colds, and the spirits of us all seemed higher than ever. Nobody would leave this vessel imtil it sank under our feet.

  The second day after the storm the sky was blue and the sea calm. As we rose from the lunch table Norris, a head higher than the rest of us, exclaimed in surprise: "Look at thati What can it be?" Ahead of us on starboard side was something like blood topping the small waves along the blue hori2K>n. We climbed the mast. A narrow belt ran like a painted river through the ocean as far as the eye could see. Asbjom and HP inflated the rubber dinghy and went ahead of us to check what we were about to run into with our reeds.

  The two scouts came back and reported that the colored liquid was as thick as paint but that it did not seem to be a chemical product. We sailed alongside for a while and then ventured to steer across it. There was a strange fishy odor that could be smelled even within the cabin. The belt was rarely more than a fathom or two wide, but it stretched from horizon to horizon in a straight line from NNW to SSE. We crisscrossed through the orange-red belt, unable to determine what it really was. I had seen a similar "red tide" of algae caused by pollution oflF the coast near Rome. But there was no coast here. How could this distinctive belt keep its narrow path like a red carpet laid out for untold miles across the open ocean? We sailed along it all afternoon and saw neither beginning nor end. There were occasional small patches of red on either side of the band, but the general picture was a clearly defined gold-red river across a blue sea. A sample glass could fool anybody into accepting it as thick orange juice but for the fishy smell which gave it away. A closer inspection revealed that the colored belt, and the sea on either side and as deep as we could see, was polluted by billions of

  tiny, almost invisible fibers and tufts as from dissolving cotton. There were asphalt-like oil clots, too, but they did not appear to be more concentrated than what we had commonly seen, and they were tiny, not the large tar balls we had fished up all across the Atlantic. In the red soup were large quantities of short sHmy bands of greenish-gray fish eggs, a few bird feathers and many small dead coelenterates, just as we had seen in thickly oil-polluted areas traversed with Ra.

  Somehow this red band did not seem the work of natiure alone. The sea oflF northern Peru turns red at intervals of years, a frightening phenomenon called "the Painter," caused by the sudden death of immense quantities of fish and birds which discolors the water. The marine disaster of the Painter occurs when the equatorial water of the Nino Current from Panama nms abnormally far south and enters an area with a biotype adapted to the cold Antarctic water of the Humboldt Current. But there was no difference in temperature on the two sides of the red belt we crossed in the Indian Ocean.

  We turned away from the painted path in the evening and saw it no more. The last thing we observed in that area was a huge hammerhead shark, twice the size of any of us on board, that came chasing toward Tigris at a ferocious speed, then rushed like a rocket to the buoy we towed behind, zigzagged with undiminished speed around us once more, and then shot off, fin above water, along the colored belt.

  A floating island

  Thunderclouds and lightning continued to circle around the horizon for a couple of days, particularly in the direction of India, but as we entered the second half of February all storm clouds disappeared, just as predicted by the harbor authorities in Pakistan. Yet the monsoon did not show up. Its continued absence might have disastrous effects on the rainy seasons in Asia and Africa. We sailed into a blue world, all sky and water, a planet where all land was hidden deep below the sea. No ships, no planes. For days and weeks we were the only human beings, but not the only life.

  We did not see a single fishing boat in this ocean. There was supposed to be nothing to catch in the local waters, which were sometimes described by oceanographers as a marine desert. Perhaps this supposition was correct. But if this was a desert, then our reed

  ship was indeed a floating oasis. Whatever roamed about in the surrounding emptiness must have seen our shadow as we drifted silently like a cloud over the sunlit blue sky. Day by day the swimming company arou
nd us increased. One marine species after another turned up, multiplied, and the hfeless sea became reanimated until in the end we felt as if floating in a packed fish hatchery.

  To the swimming creatures joining us on our southbound course, and to ourselves whenever we dived overboard and looked up, Tigris was a small floating island, a green meadow turned upside down. Broad and jovial, with no propeller, with a cozy valley where other ships have a sharp keel, we waddled along, all vegetable matter, waving with spring-green seaweed and with a speed appealing to the drowsiest creatures of the sea. Tiny crabs had no difiSculty cHnging to the reeds, and felt at home between the long sea grass, hke fleas in the beard of Neptune. No grass was greener, softer and more pleasing to the eye than the uncut marine lawn growing upside down on Tigris, with goose barnacles growing like mushrooms, and minicrabs and minute fish crawHng about like beetles and grasshoppers in a meadow. Why should not all kinds of homeless vagrants be allured to the only garden floating in the blue?

  We never tired of hanging with our heads over the side bundles or trailing on a rope outside, watching the changing world on the yellow reeds. By now the white goose barnacles, small when we left Oman, were as big as flat pigeon eggs, each standing on a long black leg and rhythmically unfolding feathery crowns hke yellow wings waving to bring food and oxygen into the broken egg. Our speed made them a permanent spectacle, a large procession of waving banners, surrounded by tiny, legless common barnacles, hidden hke minitents in the greenery. Between them crabs the size of fingernails patrolled mechanically Hke armored tanks, but quick to take cover between the reeds if they saw our giant heads coming down from heaven. In a few places the sun glittered as if upon gold wire wound up into balls, which proved to be marine worms that never unwound and performed no other visible movement than to grow slowly in size. But nothing was stranger than the sea hares. We had never had them travehng with us on previous raft-ships; now two types were crawling slowly about, feeding on our sea grass. The smallest was as yellow as a banana and as big as a thumb; the