To Yvonne
NINE
In the Clutches of the Sea 188
TEN
Into American Waters 224
ELEVEN
Ra 11. By Papyrus Boat from Africa to America 285 Postscript 337
1. Reed boat of Easter Island
2, 3, 4, 5. Reed boats in use on Lake Chad, Lake Zwai, Lake Tana and in Sardinia
6, 7. Reed boats in Mexico and on Lake Titicaca
8. Ancient reed boat models
9. Egyptian relief: papyrus gathering
10. Egyptian relief: papyrus binding
11. Egyptian relief: naval action with papyrus boats
12. Egyptian mural: noble on board a papyrus raft
13. Egyptian relief: cattle freighting
14. Egyptian relief: straddled mast
15. Bjorn Landstrom drawing a papyrus boat
16. Examining a papyrus reed
17 to 22. Stages in building the papyrus ship
23. Finishing the stern
24. The ''paper boat" on the desert sand
25. 26. Dragging the papyrus ship to the water 27 to 33. Seven men from seven nations
34. The expeditions members
35. The participants' flags
36. A model of Ra is presented
37. The naming ceremony at Safi
38. Yuri checking the provisions
39. Stowing the wooden boxes in the cabin
40. Egyptian hardtack
41. Some of the 160 ceramic storage jars
42. The Ra leaves Safi harbor
43. Bon voyage by rocket and siren
44. Steerage gear of the Ra
45. On the open Atlantic
46. The sail is hoisted
47. Under full sail
48. Alone on the ocean
49. Experimenting with rigging and steering gear
50. Streaming sea anchors
51. Splicing the broken rudder-oars
52. Norman with his sextant
53. Safi the monkey
54. Slicing salt meat
55. A broken jar of nuts
56. Eggs preserved in lime paste
57. The galley
58. Jar damaged by chafing
59. 60. Flying fish on board
61. A dorado caught by the author
62. Lunch round the chicken coop
63. The author's "nosometer**
64. Norman operating the transmitter
65. Changing watch
66. Basket cabin interior
67. Georges trims Santiago's hair
68. 69. The steering oar breaks again
70. Norman at the masthead
71. Yuri shaving
72. 73. Atlantic pollution
74. Papyrus life belt
75. Georges teaching Abdullah to write
76. African Neptune crossing our bow
77. Sack sent by African Neptune
78, 79. The sack's contents
80, 81. Ra photographed from African Neptune
82. Shipboard feast at halfway point
83. Chart of a month's voyage
84. Opposite list from ordinary boats
85. Problems begin aft
86. The after deck sags
87. Abdullah praying
88. The afterdeck submerges
89. The life raft is cut up
90. Carlo helps secure the sea anchor
91. Abdullah's magic remedies
92. Georges and Abdullah fixing bulwarks
93. Abdullah discovers the sea is salt
94. New bunk sites
95. Sharks gather
96. Results of the last storm
97. Norman and author at the receiver
98. An American yacht arrives
99. The Ra as seen from the yacht
100. The mast is cut away
101. Everything of value transferred to yacht
102. Starboard side under water
103. Port side undamaged
104. 105. Farewell Ra
106. Thanks for the ride, Ra
107. Ra II at sea
108. Madani Ait Ouhanni from Morocco
109. Kei Ohara from Japan
110. Ra II under gray skies
111. Ra II at nightfall
THE RA EXPEDITIONS
Chapter One
ONE RIDDLE, TWO ANSWERS AND NO SOLUTION
/V REED flutters in the wind.
We break it off.
It floats. It can bear a frog.
Two hundred thousand reeds flutter in the wind. A whole meadow billows like a green cornfield along the shore.
We cut it down. We tie it into bundles, like great corn sheaves. The bundles float. We go on board. A Russian, an African, a Mexican, an Egyptian, an American, an Italian, and myself a Norwegian, with a monkey and a lot of clucking hens. We are off to America. We are in Egypt. It's blowing sand, it's dry and hot, it's the Sahara.
Abdullah assures me that the reeds will float. I tell him that America is a long way off. He does not think people like black skins in America, but I assure him he is wrong. He does not know where America is, but we will get there in any case, if the wind is blowing that way. We will be safe on the reeds as long as the ropes hold. As long as the ropes hold, he says. Will the ropes hold?
I felt someone shaking me by the shoulder and woke up. It was Abdullah. "It's three o'clock," he said. "We are starting work again." The sun was baking inside the hot tent canvas. I sat up and peered through a gap in the door opening. The dry heat and blinding sunshine of the Sahara thrust at me from outside. Sun, sun, sun. A
sun-soaked expanse of sand met the bluest thing God has created, a cloudless desert sky unfolding in the afternoon sunshine above a world of golden-gray sand.
A row of three large and two small pyramids were set like shark's teeth against the arch of sky. They had stood so, motionless and unchanging, since the time when men were part of nature and built in accord with nature. And in front of them, down in the shallow depression, lay something timeless, built yesterday, built ten thousand years ago: a boat in the desert sand, a sort of Noah's ark stranded in the wilderness of the Sahara, far from surf and seaweed. Two camels stood beside it, chewing. What were they chewing? Trimmings from the boat itself, perhaps, "the paper boat." It was built of papyrus. The golden reeds were lashed together in bundles taking the form of a ship with prow and sternpost which stood out against the blue sky like a recumbent crescent moon.
Abdullah was already on his way down there. And two coal-black Budumas in fluttering white robes were clambering on board, while Egyptians in colorful garments dragged up fresh bundles of papyrus reed. There was work to be done. "Bot! Botl" shouted Abdullah. "More reeds!" I staggered out onto the hot sand as if I had awakened from a thousand-year sleep. After all, they were working for me, it was I who had conceived the absurd idea of reviving a boatbuilder's art that the Pharaoh Cheops and his generation were already beginning to abandon at the time they ordered the building of those mighty forms, the pyramids which now stood there like a solid mountain range, hiding our timeless shipyard from the twentieth-century maelstrom whirling in Cairo's hectic city streets down in the green Nile Valley on the other side.
Our world, outside the tents, was bare sand. Hot sand, pyramids, more sand, and huge stacks of sun-dried reeds, brittle, combustible papyrus reeds, which the men were dragging over to the licorice skinned boatbuilders who sat on the crescent moon, tightening rope lashings with the aid of hands, teeth and naked feet. They were building a boat—a papyrus boat. A kaday they called it in their Buduma tongue, and they knew what they were building. Busy fingers and teeth strapped the loops round the reeds as only experts could. "A paper boat," said the people at the Papyrus Institute do
wn in the Nile Valley. For there they soaked these reeds in water and
beat them into a crisp paper, to show tourists and scientists the material on which the world's most ancient scholars had painted their hieroglyphic memoirs.
A papyrus reed is a soft, sappy flower stem. A child can bend and crush it. When dry, it snaps like a matchstick and burns like paper. On the ground in front of me lay a tinder-dry papyrus reed, savagely screwed and fractured into a zigzag tangle. It had been thrown there in the morning by an indignant old Arab who mangled it between his fingers before flinging it away from him on the sand, spitting after it and pointing scornfully. "That thing," he said, "that wouldn't even hold a nail; it's only a reed, and how could you fix masts to a thing like that?" The old man was a canny boat-builder who had taken the bus up from Port Said to conclude a contract for masts and rigging for the vessel we were building. He was so outraged that he took the next bus back to the coast. Were we trying to make fun of an honest craftsman, or were the men of today completely ignorant of what was needed to build a decent boat? It was no good explaining to him that many boats of reed were painted on the walls of the ancient burial chambers out here in the desert. After all, he said, these tombs also contain paintings of men with the heads of birds and serpents with wings. Anyone could see that a reed was a soft stalk in which neither nails nor screws could find a grip. Material for a haystack. A paper boat. Thanks for the return ticket.
What now? Boats must have masts. Our three black friends from Lake Chad in the heart of Africa declared that the boatbuilder was an idiot; he could never have seen a proper kaday, because they were always made from these reeds. On the other hand, they had never seen masts on a kaday, and what did we want with one? If people wanted to cross the water they used paddles. Lake Chad was large, the sea could not be larger, they claimed. Stoically unperturbed, they continued to lash the bundles of papyrus together. That was their specialty. The Arab from Port Said was an ignorant bluffer who had never seen a kaday.
I went up to the tent again and dug out of the portfolio the sketches and photographs of ancient Egyptian boat models and wall paintings. True, there were, of course, no spikes in the papyrus boats. The mast was fixed to the reeds in a very special way. A thick, wide
A THE RA EXPEDITIONS
footplate was made fast with rope on top of the reed bundles where the mast was to stand, and it was stepped into this solid block of wood and secured with rope. I pushed the drawings aside and lay down on my back on a heap of ropes and canvas stacked along one wall of the tent. It was cooler here and I could think. What was I really taking on, and what reason had I to think that such a craft could be used outside the Nile Delta? I admitted to myself that the suspicion was based as much on intuition as on concrete facts.
At the time when I decided to build the Kon-Tiki raft of balsa logs, my reasoning had been quite different. True enough, I had never seen a piece of balsa wood then and never sailed a boat, let alone a raft, but I had had a theory, solid scientific evidence and a logical conclusion. This time I had none. Before I ventured to set sail with Kon-Tikiy I had already accumulated enough material to fill a very bulky manuscript with evidence proving to my own satisfaction that an offshot of the oldest civilization in Peru had reached the Polynesian Islands before any voyagers had reached the East Pacific out of Asia. The balsa raft was considered the nearest thing to a boat known in ancient Peru, and I therefore concluded that it had to be seaworthy. How else could the ancient Peruvians have come across to Polynesia? I had no other reason to trust the abilities of a balsa raft. But the conclusion held good.
This time things were different. I had no theory that the ancient Egyptians had carried their civilization to distant islands or continents. There were many others who believed so and argued that the Egyptian pyramid-builders had brought cultural inspiration to tropical America long before Columbus. I had no such theory: I had never found any conclusive evidence favoring it, but neither had I found any evidence to the contrary. Besides, pyramids were built in Mesopotamia also. I was fascinated by the problem, but in no position to see any tenable solution. Science lacked too many pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. Anyone seriously looking for a possible connection between the ancient cultures of Egypt and Mexico could not avoid finding very serious stumbling stones: wide gaps in the chronology, inexplicable contradictions, and an ocean gap ten thousand times wider than the Nile.
For water travel the ancient Egyptians originally had only bundle boats made of papyrus reed. Later they made themselves long wooden ships of planks, dovetailed and sewn together, vulnerable in a heavy sea, but eminently suited to all kinds of transport and trading on the calm waters of the Nile. A few hundred yards from the tent where I lay, at the foot of the Pyramid of Cheops, my Egyptian friend Ahmed Joseph was busy piecing together one of the magnificent wooden ships of the Pharaoh Cheops. Archaeologists had recently discovered that a large ship lay buried on each side of this large pyramid; four ships in all were lying there, hermetically preserved. They lay in deep, airtight chambers, covered with enormous stone slabs. Only one pit had been opened so far, revealing hundreds of thick sections of cedanvood planking piled in stacks, as fresh as when they were buried over 4600 years ago—some 2700 years before Christ. Now, Egypt's chief curator, Ahmed Joseph, was busy threading new rope through all the thousands of small holes where the ship had once been held together by hemp. The result was a ship over 140 feet long, so perfectly streamlined and elegant that the Vikings had not built anything more graceful or larger when some millennia later they began to sail the high seas.
There was only one essential difference between the two t)qDes of ship: the Viking ships were built to bear the brunt of the ocean rollers, while Cheops' ship was built for pomp and ceremony on the placid Nile. Wear and tear on the wood where the ropes had chafed furrows showed that Cheops' ship had been in proper use, and had not been just a "solar-ship" built solely for the Pharaoh's last voyage. Yet the streamlined hull would have collapsed on its first encounter with ocean waves. This was truly amazing. The exquisite lines of the ship were specialized to perfection for true ocean voyaging. Its gracefully curved hull with elegantly upthrust and extremely high bow and stem had all the characteristic features found only in seagoing vessels, specially shaped to ride breakers and towering waves. Here was something to puzzle over. Perhaps the real key to an unsolved mystery. A Pharaoh, living on the calm shores of the Nile nearly five thousand years ago, had built a boat which in practice could stand up only to the peaceful ripples of the river, yet he had built it on architectonic lines which the world's leading seafaring nations never surpassed. He had built his frail river boat to a pattern
created by shipbuilders from people with a long, solid tradition of sailing on the open sea.
Then one could begin to guess. There were only two possibilities. Either this seagoing, streamlined shape had been developed locally by Egyptian seafarers of the same brilliant generations which had already evolved the arts of waiting and pyramid building, the science of mummification, cranial surgery and astronomy; or else the Pharaoh's shipvvrights had been trained abroad. There are facts that point to the latter. No cedars grow in Egypt. The material of which Cheops' ship was built came from the cedar forests of Lebanon. Lebanon was the home of the Phoenicians, experienced shipbuilders who sailed the whole of the Mediterranean and even part of the Atlantic with their ships. Their principal port, Byblos, the oldest known city in the world, imported papyrus from Egypt because Byblos was a center of book production in ancient times (hence the word Byblos, or Bible, which means book). There were lively trade relations betveen Egypt and Byblos at the time the Pyramid of Cheops was built, so Cheops' shipbuilders might have copied their specialized design abroad. Maybe.
The trouble is, however, we know little or nothing about the appearance of Phoenician wooden ships. All we can say with certainty is that they can scarcely have been papyriform, that is, built on the lines of a papyrus boat, since the Phoenicians imported papyrus fr
om Egypt because it did not grow in Lebanon. This is just where the problem arises. The Pharaoh Cheops' ship was papyri-form, and all the other large wooden ships depicted from Pharaonic times in Egypt were also papyriform; they all had the older papyrus boat as their direct model. This is noteworthy, for it was precisely this model, built of papyrus, which had all the seagoing ship's characteristics, with prow and stern soaring upward, higher than a Viking ship, to ride out breakers and high seas, not to contend v^dth little ripples on the Nile. It was the papyrus ship that had been the prototype ship, not the other way round. The design of the papyrus ship was already fully developed when the first Pharaohs were entombed along the Nile. They had their mythical ancestors, the gods, painted on the walls of their tombs as standing on papyrus ships. Sun-god and bird-headed men, the legendary forefathers of the first Pharaoh, are not portrayed as passengers on Phoenician wooden
ONE RIDDLE, TWO ANSWERS AND NO SOLUTION y
ships, nor on rafts or flat river barges, but on upswept papyrus ships of the type the Pharaoh Cheops' boatbuilders faithfully copied, even to the sharply incurved stem, with the calyx shape of the papyrus flower at its tip.
In order to build a ship as the Egyptians did at the dawn of Mediterranean culture, one needs neither an ax nor a carpenter's skill, but a knife to cut reeds and some rope. That was what my African friends Mussa, Omar and Abdullah were now doing, down there near the foot of the pyramids of Cheops, Chephren and Men-kaw-ra. We had chosen our buildingsite in the desert sand, and they were building a papyrus boat of the same design as the ancient ships painted on the walls of the tombs around us here.
Why? What was I trying to prove? Nothing. I did not want to prove anything. I wanted to learn something. I wanted to find out if it was true, as the experts believed, that the Phoenicians had to come to the Nile to gather the papyrus, because the Egyptians themselves were unable to sail their reed boats outside the Nile Delta. I wanted to find out if the ancient Egyptians had originally been able boatbuilders and seafarers, before they settled down along the Nile to become sculptors, Pharaohs and mummies. I wanted to find out if a reed boat could withstand a sea voyage of 250 miles, the distance from Egypt to Lebanon. I wanted to find out if a reed boat would be able to sail even farther, even from one continent to another. I wanted to find out if a reed boat could make the journey to America.
The Ra Expeditions Page 1