The Ra Expeditions

by Thor Heyerdahl

  the islands on a balsa raft. This bilateral origin of Polynesian culture was what I had suspected, long before the Kon-Tiki voyage, when I was living for a year as a Polynesian among Polynesians on the lonely island of Fatuhiva in the Marquesas group, where the surf pounded on the east coasts, and clouds and seas, day and night, came scudding and rolling in the same direction from South America. The resolution was read out to the three thousand Pacific scholars participating in the plenum meeting and unanimously approved. I left the Tenth Pacific Science Congress with a mandate to promote further excavations on those of the Pacific islands which were facing South America, and the South American coast was formally included for the first time in the areas of concern to oceanic archaeology. The gateway between Peru and Polynesia was left open, the Pacific had acquired two sides even in retrospect to pre-Columbian times.

  The reed boat, however, sank into oblivion once more. Then came the moment when it was dragged back into the limelight in a totally unexpected way and from a totally unexpected quarter. A well-known anthropologist at the University of California pointed out in the professional journal American Antiquity (January 1966) that the reed boats of ancient Peru resembled the reed boats of ancient Egypt. And, he said, the two ancient cultures bore a striking resemblance to each other in more ways than one. The article contained a list of sixty special features, of a quite unusual nature and restricted world distribution, which were characteristic of the ancient cultures of the eastern Mediterranean (with Mesopotamia and Egypt) and pre-Columbian Peru. The reed boat was only one of sixty different items on the list.

  Now it is usual in science to interpret a single cultural feature, or even two or three, which crops up in the same form in widely separate areas, as a matter of coincidence, a result of independent evolution along parallel lines. Human beings are so alike all over the world that it is natural for them to have similar notions. But if a really varied and numerous array of similarities or indentities occurs and these are of such a specialized nature that no equivalents are found outside two clearly defined geographical areas, then one must be aware of the possibility of some former contact between these two cultural centers. The list of sixty specific cultural parallels was

  a textbook example of the latter category. It therefore sounded the alarm: tread warily. So I was not alone in my astonishment. Not because the list was impressive and thought-provoking. It certainly was. But because it had been drawn up by an isolationist. The autiior was known as one of the most zealous advocates of the theory defending a total isolation of America before Columbus: only the ice in the north could have provided a passage for human beings. Nevertheless, he had now produced a list which Percy Smith and his old school of diffusionists would have envied: sixty specialized cultural parallels between ancient Peru and Egypt.

  This list could provoke conclusions. It was, in fact, intended to do so. The author of the article concluded that, since Egypt is in eastern Africa and Peru in western America, there are two continents and a whole Atlantic Ocean between them. Two cultures both of which used reeds for boatbuilding could not have had contact across such distances. A reed boat cannot traverse an ocean. Accordingly the sixty cultural parallels must have arisen independently of each other; they could not for practical reasons have been the result of a human voyage. The lesson to the reader: diffusionists, those who believe that America received inspiration from across the sea before 1492, must stop nosing around after cultural parallels, because it is hereby demonstrated that such parallels prove nothing.

  The diffusionists reacted vigorously. They could not swallow the reasoning. They remained convinced that Middle America with Peru had received some early impetus from across the sea. But which sea? And by what ships? They could not agree. The waves of discussion refused to subside. The answer had not yet been given.

  In the same year the organizers of the Thirty-seventh International Congress of Americanists summoned representatives of the two contending doctrines to a scientific duel. Every other year this congress assembles scholars from all over the world who specialize in America's aboriginal population. This time it was held in Argentina and I had been asked to invite speakers to a symposium for and against transoceanic contact with America before Columbus.

  The meeting was in session. The doors were closed. The author of the sixty points of resemblance was invited, but did not show up. But the diffusionists who believed in contact attended in strength, with speakers from four continents. The isolationists were also present

  in strength, but only in the audience. Tlieir tactic was usually to let the others speak and then shoot down their arguments. They had always stayed on the defensive, deliberately leaving the burden of proof on anyone suspecting that America could have been reached by sea before Columbus. The diffusionists never lacked arguments, but they always lacked proof. Therefore, said the isolationists, the oceans had not been crossed.

  The Icelandic sagas, written down in detail by Viking historians long before Columbus, were one of the themes for discussion. No one could deny that Norwegian Vikings had settled Iceland and later the whole southwestern coast of Greenland, where they had lived continuously for nearly five hundred years before Columbus hoisted sail. They had left behind the ruins of countless farmsteads, graveyards, sixteen churches, two monasteries and an episcopal residence that kept in touch with the papal throne via regular sea communications with Norway. This pre-Columbian colony on Greenland paid taxes to the king of Norway.

  The distance across the North Atlantic from Norway to the Norse settlements in Greenland was as great as the distance across the South Atlantic from Africa to Brazil. It was only a negligible jump of some two hundred miles further west from Greenland to the coast of the American mainland, but it was this last hop that had not been made, said the isolationists.

  It had been made, said the written text in the ancient Viking sagas. Bjarni Herjolfsson was recorded as the first to make the full Atlantic crossing as his ship went astray in a fog. But instead of landing on the long, unknovm coastline he had discovered in the far west, he put about and returned to the colony in nearby Greenland. His ship was bought by Leif Ericsson, the son of Greenland's discoverer, Eric the Red, who in about the year 1002 set sail with thirty-five men for the reported coastline southwest from the colony in Greenland. Leif and his men were the first to set foot on the new coast, which they named Vinland, and there they built houses and spent the vdnter before returning home to Greenland. His brother, Thorvald Ericsson, made the crossing next year and settled in Leif's deserted houses with his people. Two years later, on a voyage of discovery along the wooded coasts of this new continent, he was

  killed by an arrow in a fight with the natives. His thirty men buried him in Vinland and sailed home to Greenland.

  Thorfinn Karlsefne and his wife Gudrid were the next to make the journey, with two ships and a large number of people. Eric the Red's daughter Freydis was with them, and this time the emigrants took cattle along. Gudrid gave birth to her son Snorri in their newly built home in Vinland, but steadily increasing attacks by large numbers of Indians, Skraelings, made life in the new land intolerable so that in the end the colonists left their farms, after bloody losses, and went home to Greenland and Europe. The handwritten sagas were crammed with prosaic facts. Coasts and travel routes were described in detail. There could be no doubt about it. The Vikings really had discovered Vinland and tried to settle the new country, in the first ten or fifteen years after the year looo.

  But where was Vinland? How can we know that Vinland was America? This is what the isolationists had been asking for years. And now came the sensation. The congress was given proof.

  At Lanse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland proof had been found showing beyond doubt that the Vikings had landed and attempted a brief settlement about the year looo. The embankments from a cluster of house foundations in typical Viking style had been discovered, well preserved under the turf. The charred fragments of wood had been dated and the r
esults checked ten times over by a series of radiocarbon analysis. The houses had been inhabited at the very period, about a.d. looo, referred to in the Viking sagas. No American Indians had known iron before Columbus. And here were remnants of iron nails from doors, and bog-iron from a primitive smithy. The Indians in the north could not weave. And under the turf was a typical Norse spinning wheel of soapstone.

  The discovery was made by the noted Norwegian expert on Greenland, Helge Ingstad, who had hit upon the site through a practical geographical appraisal of the old Icelandic records; and the excavations were led by his wife, the archaeologist, Anne Stine Ingstad, with the aid of leading American colleagues. These were sober scientific facts. No one could protest. No one tried to raise any more objections. The Vikings had been in Newfoundland. They had

  reached America by crossing the Atlantic, and recorded the events before anyone else. But, said the isolationists, they had come and gone without leaving any traces other than a few grassy mounds. Their visit had had no bearing on the course of history. The savage Indians in the north had driven them out and their own ancestral way of life had not been influenced. According to the sagas the Vikings had given them no more than a few strips of red cloth before fights and slaughter put a stop to further trading.

  The Vikings never got a lasting foothold in America. Still, America had at least been reached, both from east and west, in the Arctic north, before Columbus crossed in the tropical latitudes.

  But in the tropical belt the isolationists won the battle. And this was the main battlefield. No one could present tangible proof of landings in Mexico before the Spaniards. The written records made by Mexico's aboriginal scribes were taken even less seriously than the sagas of the Vikings. Their tales about the landings of white and bearded men before Columbus could not be proven. The diffusionists' mustering of ever more cultural parallels was as easily repulsed as before. Cultural affinities on two sides of an ocean were interesting observations but not proofs. Apart from the Viking visit in the far north, the isolationists remained unshattered on their sea-girt island when the duel was over. Two large oceans defended their position. One important argument seemed clearly in their favor. An ocean crossing required a seaworthy craft, like those of the Vikings. If anybody had sailed across from Africa and acquired such a strong foothold in America that they taught the Indians to build with bricks and write on paper, then the least one could expect was that they should also have taught them how to build seagoing vessels. No mariners could cross the Atlantic with architects and astronomers capable of building pyramids without also bringing their own shipbuilding traditions with them. At least 2700 years before Christ, the Eg}'ptians had learned to build properly framed wooden ships, with hollow hulls and decks and cabins of trimmed planks, but the idea of a ship's hull built of planks had never reached the Indians. In the whole of America before Columbus, no one had learned to build vessels other than reed boats, rafts, various kinds of pontoon floats and canoes made of skin or dug-out tree trunks. That was a fact which could not be disputed. Columbus and his

  companions introduced the art of true shipbuilding to the New World. Nobody before him.

  Reed boats and rafts. Here they were again. The balsa raft had been proven seaworthy, but it could only set sail away from America, for before the Spaniards came the balsa tree had grown in no other part of the world. But the reed, reeds of different types, grew everywhere, not least on the Nile and in Asia Minor, where boats were built from reeds, like in America.

  "Yvonne, we must return to the Andes and take a second look at the American reed boats," I said to my wife. The Ingstads came with us, to witness that the Vikings were not the only ones who could build elegant vessels. On the day the congress closed, we climbed into an aircraft for La Paz in Boli'ia, and next day we were up by sky-blue Lake Titicaca on the roof of the world, 12,500 feet above sea level, surrounded by snow-covered peaks that soared still another 6000 to 9000 feet higher into clear space. Behind us on the plateau lay the ruins of South America's mightiest pre-Inca capital, the old cultural center of Tiahuanaco, with the devastated Akapana pyramid, megalithic walls and gigantic statues of unknown priest-kings carved in stone.

  In the strong breeze out on the lake some Aymara Indians maneuvered to and fro as they fished. At a distance one could see only the wind-filled sails. Tattered canvas had been hoisted on most of the boats, but a few had stuck to tradition and hoisted a big mat of golden totora reed on two straddling masts joined at the top. Three of them steered straight for us, sailing flat out, and soon we could see the Indians in their rainbow striped stocking caps looking out from behind the sail, while the shape of the boat itself appeared above the waves. Glorious. They were expertly built. Each reed was placed with maximum precision to achieve perfect symmetry and streamlined elegance, while the bundles were so tightly lashed that they looked like inflated pontoons or gilded logs bent into a clog-shaped peak fore and aft. They cut through the water at high speed and ran right up to the shore in a clearing between the reeds, where they were driven firmly aground in the mud. The Indians waded ashore with their catch of fish.

  Boats of this distinctive type are still built in their hundreds on every side of this enormous inland sea. They were built exactly in

  this way by the Aymara and Quechua Indians' fathers and grandfathers. This is exactly how they had looked four hundred years ago also when the Spaniards came to this lake and discovered Tiahuanaco's deserted ruins with their stepped platforms, pyramid and stone colossi, abandoned vestiges which according to consistent traditions among the primitive Aymara Indians were not the work of their own ancestors. They firmly believed the spectacular constructions to have been left since the morning of time by the yiracocha people. These were described as white men with beards, whose priest-King was Con-Ticci-Viracocha, the sun's representative on earth. At the outset, the viracocha people had settled on the Island of the Sun out in Lake Titicaca. Legend has it that it was they who built the first reed boats. The white and bearded men, it was claimed, had come forth in a flotilla of reed boats when first appearing to the local Indians who at the time were ignorant of sun worship, architecture, and agriculture. These legends, which the Spaniards wrote down four hundred years ago are still alive among the lakeside Indians. Many times I was addressed as Viracochdf still the word for "white man,"

  I did not know what to believe. Again, I was filled with admiration as I gazed at the enormous blocks, weighing fifty to a hundred tons, carved to perfection and fitted together to a fraction of a millimeter, while down on the lake the elegant reed boats plied the waves today as they had when ferrying the giant blocks from Kapia, the extinct volcano miles away over on the opposite shore. There was no reason to doubt that modern science is right in suspecting that this vanished civilization was somehow connected vidth the other ancient American cultural centers that European discoverers found abandoned and overgrown, strung through the tropical jungles from Mexico all the way down to this wind-blown highland plateau. Before the giant pre-Inca structures of Tiahuanaco tumbled into ruins, this had been the capital of one of the world's mightiest empires, with an influence covering all of present Peru and adjacent parts of Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, and the Argentine. A coastline of at least fifteen hundred miles was under the influence of the art and religion radiating from the empire's inland capital at the mountain lake, and this vast coastline was washed, then as now, by the mighty ocean current that carried our Kon-Tiki raft straight

  to Polynesia. Ceramic sherds of Coast Tiahuanaco origin have been excavated on the Galapagos Islands, six hundred miles offshore, and the oldest statues encountered below the soil on Easter Island closely follow Tiahuanaco prototypes. Like the reed boats. There could be no doubt that the original Easter Island culture was but one of the many branches of this expansive pre-Inca civilization, perhaps the very last off-shoot.

  But where were the roots? Here in America? Or on the other side of the Atlantic? Who were right, the isolationists or the diffu
sionists? At the congress none of them had seemed convincing. As chairman of the symposium I had taken a neutral stand. But I was certain of one thing. Both isolationists and diffusionists underestimated the qualities of the ancient Tiahuanaco boat. The reed boat would not have held its own against four hundred years of European cultural contact had it been an inferior craft.

  True enough, plank-built ships were known on only one side of the Atlantic. But reed vessels were known on both sides. After all, this was one of the sixty points of resemblance. The art of building reed boats was an ancient heritage both in Egypt and Peru. Only in those two places? No. And this was where I had discovered a tiny crack in the logic. Reed boats were not quite as isolated as some of the other fifty-nine points of resemblance on the list. Scarcely anyone had bothered to study their earlier distribution. But I had noticed one or two things. For instance, they had been in use also in Mesopotamia, on various Mediterranean islands, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco below Gibraltar, and in ancient Mexico as well. The jump from Morocco to Mexico was not as startlingly absurd as the distance between the farthest points, Egypt and Peru.

  I decided to build a reed boat.

  Chapter Three

  TO THE INDIANS

  IN THE CACTUS FOREST

  1 HE COAST. A glimpse of the sea between giant cacti. A make-believe world. Feeling very small, I tilted my head back to look up at the tops of the green, spiky, giant cacti that towered above me like organ pipes and huge candelabra in a world of swollen, overfed vegetation. Overfed and overgrown. And yet the ground I was walking on was nothing but a bone-dry crust of hard-baked, barren sand, without grass or flowers except for red and yellow ones peeping out between spiny tufts on the sinews of the cactus giants themselves. This was the cactus world. On the ground between the giants stood, lay and swarmed all manner of spiky plants, globular, sausage-shaped, articulated. In the evening sunlight some looked like silhouettes of dishes and cutlery superimposed in a fantastic state of equilibrium, others like worn-out shoe soles bristling with nails, bent ends of barbed wire, or long, waving cat's tails. This was a still and silent forest. Not even a rustle from the leaves of the gnarled iron trees that stood here and there, writhing as if to avoid the prickles on their ubiquitous neighbors.