The Ra Expeditions

by Thor Heyerdahl

  One of the last theorists who quite unreservedly let the peoples of antiquity sail round the world was the Englishman Percy Smith. He observed that the ancient cultures of Mexico and Peru had so many special features in common with the civilization of ancient Egypt that there must have been some form of transoceanic contact. When he also discovered the same remarkable similarities on Easter Island and other Polynesian groups nearest to the Peruvian coast, he reached for his ruler and his flat world map and drew a line from Egypt via the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, all the way to Polynesia and South America. That, he wrote, was how the sun-worshipers reached America. Via Easter Island.

  Others consulted a round globe and shook their heads. A voyage from Egypt to Easter Island was meaningless. Easter Island was closer to Egypt by way of America than by way of India. The round globe shows the Pacific alone as a complete hemisphere that extends over half the circumference of the world. If Egyptians had sailed

  twenty-five hundred miles eastward, they would barely have reached India, and would still have exactly half the world left in order to reach Easter Island. On the other hand, if ancient South Americans had sailed twenty-five hundred miles westward from their coast, they would have passed Easter Island. With the Kon-Tiki raft built on the ancient Inca model, we traveled forty-three hundred miles westward from the coast of South America and passed Easter Island halfway through our voyage.

  Easter Island. The world's loneliest inhabited island. It lay off the open coast of Peru, not off the Nile Delta. Easter Island. On this sea-girt lump of lava almost a thousand abandoned stone colossi in human shape raised their heads mutely to the sky when Europeans eventually reached those shores and "discovered" the island in 1722. "Easter Island" we call it, because a Dutchman sailing from South America stumbled upon it on Easter Sunday. "The Navel of the World" was what the Polynesians called it when they landed there in dugout canoes a few centuries earlier and found the little island already inhabited by still older seafarers who carved on the chests of some of their stone giants large representations of reed boats with masts and sails. These sickle-shaped reed boats were also painted on the stone walls of Easter Island's oldest ceremonial village together with sun symbols and mythical men with bird heads. It was at the same ceremonial site that the sun, locally known as ra, was observed and worshiped, and the entire population of the island was united in an annual bird-man cult, swimming to offshore bird islets, supported by small reed boats. This custom survived until missionaries put a stop to it with the introduction of Christianity in 1868.

  Reed boats on Easter Island. At this my thoughts stopped turning. One thing was quite clear. It was there that reed boats began for me. Yet perhaps it was here, geographically speaking, that the history of reed boats had finally come to an end.

  I had indeed seen reed boats long before I went to Easter Island. We had used them on Lake Titicaca in the high Andes when I was there studying the South American monoliths of human form which had been abandoned in the plains around the great inland sea. I had been impressed by the carrying capacity of these vessels, which had once been used to ferry huge blocks weighing many tons across the lake to the ruined city of Tiahuanaco. But I had regarded

  ONE RroDLE, TWO ANSWERS AND NO SOLUTION ly

  this peculiar type of bundle boat mainly as a curiosity. Like everyone else who had read the history of the Inca empire, I knew that these reed boats on Lake Titicaca were simply the surviving remnants of a pre-Columbian watercraft, which had been in general use all along the Pacific coast of Peru when the Spaniards landed. In fact, at that time they were still seen as far north as Mexico and what became known as California. The smallest of these reed vessels was shaped like a curved elephant tusk and could bear no more than one man, supporting his chest on it while svdmming. The biggest the Spaniards saw each had a crew of twelve; tied together in pairs such vessels were strong enough to help the colonists transport cattle and horses by sea. In Peru the reed boat went back as far as the balsa log raft; as far, in fact, as the earliest pre-Inca civilization, because the first pyramid-builders on the coast of Peru, the Mochica people, seldom failed to include seagoing reed boats in their versatile pictorial art.

  When I decided to build the Kon-Tiki raft I had a choice. Three types of seagoing vessel had been used in the ancient Inca empire. Rafts of balsa logs usually brought from the jungles of Ecuador; reed boats made of totora, a reed that grew wild in the mountain lakes and was cultivated by irrigation along the entire Pacific desert coast; and pontoon floats made of two big inflated sealskin bags joined together with cross bars in the form of a plow.

  I had no difficulty in making my choice. The air was inclined to escape from the inflated sealskin pontoons when they had been at sea for days on end, and the Indians had to swim alongside and blow them up at regular intervals. They did not tempt me very much. I had no particular faith in the reed boats either. One usually thinks of reeds and straw as exceptionally fragile, delicate things. One clings to them, figuratively, when all else has failed. One does not put to sea on flower stalks of one's own free will. So I thought then. And everyone else agreed. If we were to go, then we were to go on the balsa-wood raft, a solid platform of light, untrimmed timber. And so we did. The balsa-log raft was tried and found amazingly seaworthy. And so the reed boat was discarded and forgotten —for the time being.

  Chapter Two

  WHY A REED BOAT?

  It was on Easter Island. The surf was breaking on the eastern shore. Four old brothers, their skin wrinkled like tobacco leaves, trotted down the beach and into the breakers, carrying a small, banana-shaped craft between them. The sun was dancing on the blue ocean waves and painting the banana boat with gold. The four nimble old men pushed the vessel out between the foaming crests and jumped on board, paddles whirling, just in time to send the boat through the froth of a retreating breaker. Hoop-la! Like a see-saw it rocked over the next rising breaker, and the next, and then it was out among the rollers on the open sea. It was just as dry inside as before the breakers had surged over it. All the water that had showered on board had run out again in the same instant through a thousand fissures in the bottom. There were no sides to the boat, no hollow hull; the four men sitting on the flat deck were, in fact, sitting on top of the thick bottom. Fore and aft, the raft boat curved up in snout-shaped points, the better to ride the seas. It rode them like a golden swan.

  This was in 1955, the first time for a hundred years that a reed boat of this type had put out to sea from Easter Island. It had been made by the elders of the island, who wanted to show us a type of boat made by their ancestors for sea fishing. It was a

  miniature of the larger vessels in the illustrations from the island's bygone golden age; but it was large by comparison with the tusk-shaped one-man boats, pora, which the islanders had used in their bird-man contests. It was a solemn moment for the natives of Easter Island when they saw the four old fishermen paddling out of the open inlet in a boat they all knew so well from their fathers' tales, a boat that meant to them what the Mayflower means to the average American, or the Viking ship to us in the north. The little craft slithered over the wave like an air bed with the crew perched on top, still dry, up and down, over and round the waves, no matter which side they came from. As the four brown bodies in the golden boat rounded the point where we were busy re-erecting the first of all Easter Island's overthrown giant statues, more than one of the old people on land whispered with shining eyes that the island's dead past was about to be resurrected.

  To me, however, it was a vessel once used far beyond the eastern horizon which had been resurrected. There was a striking similarity here to the boats I had seen on Lake Titicaca, and a still greater similarity to the crescent-shaped reed boats of pre-Inca times that the old Mochica people had so often portrayed in their realistic ceramic art on the Pacific coast. The water flowing round our legs on this beach came straight from that very coast. I myself had drifted past here by raft on these eternally flowing masses
of water. The suspicion was bom. The same boat united by the same flow of water.

  Up in the crater of the extinct volcano Rano Raraku, six men were sinking a twenty-five-foot steel bore into the edge of the marsh. Round about us, high in the crater walls, lay many unfinished stone giants bearing witness to the sculptor's suddenly interrupted work. Some were completed in every detail except for their backs which were still firmly embedded in the rock as part of the crater wall itself. They lay v^th closed eyes and hands flexed on their stomachs, petrified in a giant's version of the Sleeping Beauty. Others had been hacked free and raised on end to give the sculptors a chance to complete the rugged back, which was to be made arched, slim and elegant like the rest of the giant. These standing figures were scattered at random round about the rock galleries, some covered up to the chin by silt from the quarries. Thin lips compressed, they

  craned in all directions, as if critically appraising what these six little dwarfs of flesh and blood were up to, with their steel bore, down there on the brink of the crater lake.

  The long steel spike sank inch by inch into the soggy mud. Rain and a thousand years of sludge had changed the bottom of the deep, dead crater into a glassy blue lake where the sky was mirrored. Small, white trade-wind clouds seemed to be drifting across the surface and disappearing into the green reeds in an eternal procession from east to west. Three such rain-filled crater lakes encircled by tall reeds were the only water supply available on Easter Island. Here the islanders had fetched their drinking water since the days when they had burned down the primeval forest and changed the wooded landscape into one of open grass and bracken slopes, where all the brooks gradually seeped down into the porous lava floor and vanished.

  The mud we extracted with the long bore had much to tell us about this early destruction. At the tip of the long steel rod was a revolving blade and a small cavity with a lid that opened to allow the chamber to fill with mud, clay or sand, according to what lay in the depths we wanted to study. The deeper we bored, the further we delved into the past. The swamp edge was like a closed book, with the first page at the bottom and the last on top. At the lowest level there was nothing but solidified lava and volcanic fall-out from the days when Easter Island rose fire-spitting from the ocean floor. Above this sterile bottom layer, clay and mud had begun to ooze down from the weathered crater rim of the dead volcano, and as time had passed, the layers of mud farther up began to contain more and more hermetically preserved flower dust, pollen. By studying the stratification of different kinds of pollen, a professional pollen expert could tell us the order in which different species of grass, fern, bush or tree had spread to the new-born island, carried by the current, the wind, birds and finally man. Every plant has its own characteristic form of pollen. Seen under the microscope they resemble fantastic fruits and berries of the most extraordinary shapes and patterns.

  A detective hides behind many names: some call themselves paleobotanists and thus escape common people's curiosity. They are the ones who sort out pollen grains with the same thoroughness as

  others identify fingerprints. We tamped our small pats of soil down in numbered tubes of glass, for delivery to just such a vegetable detective agency in Stockholm. That was how we came to know a little about things that had happened in Easter Island's forgotten past, a little about where they had come from, those first, mysterious sculptors who raised their gigantic monuments on the island, unobserved under the cover of the darkness of history.

  The pollen borings revealed a secret. The European "discoverers" found this island barren and naked, with mere savages living amid fields of sweet potatoes, abandoned quarries and giant monuments from a forgotten past. Yet the pollen now revealed that the island had originally been wooded, and that swaying palms had covered what are now arid cones and crater walls. In the midst of this virgin greenery skilled stonemasons landed long before the Europeans knew the Pacific. These masons set fire to the woods. Smoke and particles of soot from their burnings rained down upon the lakes in the dead volcanoes and were deposited at the bottom together with the last pollen from palms and forest trees. The trees suddenly began to vanish. The newcomers burned down the forest to clear space for large fields of the American sweet potato, which was their staple diet. They wanted clearings for their stone houses, and for large temple plazas with stepped pyramidal platforms of giant dressed blocks resembling the religious structures of ancient Peru and the mastabas of Egypt. They destroyed the palms and tore turf and earth away from the volcanic slopes to gain access to the solid rock which their expert sculptors converted into smooth building blocks and monolithic statues of deceased priest-kings. The trees that fell were ignored as building material, for the first settlers of Easter Island were accustomed to working with rock and not timber. Stone was their traditional raw material; single blocks as heavy as six, eight or ten elephants and as high as houses were transported from one end of the island to the other, raised on end as monoliths, or hoisted on top of one another and meticulously fitted into sun-oriented megalithic walls, the like of which the world has never seen except in Peru and Mexico, and among the ancient Mediterranean sun-worshipers handling stone in the very same manner on the opposite side of the globe.

  The detectives digging into our pats of soil had more to tell.

  Not only had the early settlers destroyed Easter Island's natural vegetation, but they had partly replaced the exterminated species with cultivated plants that could only have traveled across the ocean in the care of human beings. The strictly American sweet potato had been brought to Easter Island and neighboring Polynesia from Peru before Columbus reached America. We had known this before. The Easter Islanders call it kumara, the name given to the same plant throughout Polynesia and among the aboriginal population in vast areas of the ancient Inca empire. But in our pats of earth there were remnants of another plant which was of greater importance to a seafaring nation.

  The reed. The totora" reed.

  The uppermost layers of mud, after the forest had been burned down, were yellow with destroyed pollen from totora reeds, mingled with a network of tough shreds from the reed stalks. Huge quantities of decayed reed fibers formed a floating mat over most of the crater lake. Down to the layers containing the rain of ash which marked the coming of man, the pollen of only one other water plant was mingled in the sludge. Below that, before man's arrival, there was no pollen from fresh-water plants. Before the stone sculptors came, nothing grew in Easter Island's crater lakes; they lay open; the extinct volcanoes were filled with clear rain water.

  Here were clues for a detective: fingerprints in the mud. That the two fresh-water plants had been brought by sailors across the sea was easy to understand. Both were useful species; one a principal building material, the other a medicinal plant. Neither was a species which could have been transplanted by ocean currents, birds or wind. They generate only by new shoots from their suckers. In order to become established in three fresh-water lakes inside deep volcanoes on lonely Easter Island, they must have been planted as living bulbs brought dry across the salt ocean. And now we were on the right trail. For both plants belonged to species which grew nowhere else in the world except the American continent. The totora reed, Scirpus totora, was one of the most important used by the aboriginal population all along the desert coast of the Inca empire. The coastal peoples of Peru cultivated it in irrigated swamps and used it to make large and small reed boats, house roofs, mats, baskets and rope. The second imported water plant, Polygonum acuminatum, was used

  by the South American Indians as a medicine. Both plants served precisely the same purpose in the Inca empire as among the inhabitants of Easter Island.

  With a piece of the light, sun-dried totora reed in my hand I stood watching the four old Polynesians bobbing about on the wavetops out on the open sea, as nonchalantly as they would trot round on horseback ashore on their rocky island. I had known for a long time that one of the great mysteries of Pacific botany was how this American fresh-water plant cam
e to grow down in the three crater lakes hidden away on the world's loneliest inhabited island. Here was one simple solution. Perhaps those old voyagers from Peru had not reached the Pacific islands with balsa rafts alone. Perhaps a second of their three old forms of watercraft had gone with them across the ocean. Perhaps they had imported the practice of building reed boats as well, and even living tubers, so that they could continue the old tradition udth identical material.

  As we dragged the crescent-shaped reed boat up the beach I was no longer in any doubt that the Easter Islanders had inherited the art of building these remarkable vessels from the old pyramid-builders in Peru.

  Five years later I was sitting round a large table with the leading Pacific archaeologists gathered for a world congress at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. Five years had passed before the diversified material from the excavations on Easter Island had been analyzed by colleagues who were specialists in different branches of science. Skeletons and stone tools, blood samples, pollen and carbon from hearths and bonfires, all had their tale to tell to the scientific detectives whose task it was to find out what had happened on the loneliest island in the world long before Columbus reached America, and thus opened the road for the Europeans into the Pacific.

  Our results from the Easter Island expedition had been presented by my collaborators at the congress. Those of us seated around the large table were ready to sign a scientific document, a resolution. The text declared that South America, together with Southeast Asia and its adjacent islands, represented the main homelands of the ancient peoples and cultures on the Pacific islands. I had nothing against signing. Indeed, it was to call attention to the possibilities of such mixed settlement that I had sailed from Peru to