The Ra Expeditions

by Thor Heyerdahl

  Soon we were on our way down the mountainside, the four Indians in front, each with his big bundle of bound reeds over his shoulder, the rest of us following with the camera tripods and equipment. As we scrambled down I noticed that the Indians had dropped a reed here and there. Down on the level ground the Indians began to scatter, and soon we found ourselves in front, with them following. So that we should not go astray before the sun sank behind the mountains, I searched for the tracks we had made and followed them zigzag fashion, while the Indians insisted on bringing up the rear. After all, they had the heaviest burdens to cope with, even if it

  did seem to me that they had shrunk a bit during the descent from the mountain.

  The sun was just going down as we regained the boat. We knew we would see the hght of the campfires on Punta Chueca after dark, so we waited patiently for the four Indians. One after another, they appeared padding silently onto the beach. Chuchu came last, smiling bashfully, with three, literally three, reeds on his back. The others had none.

  "Mucho trabdjo" one of them muttered, and was applauded by number two, who was drying his face with his pigtail while Chuchu carefully laid his three reed stalks in the boat. Caitano was already on board.

  My three Mexican friends were bitterly disappointed and expressed their lack of appreciation of the results in no uncertain terms. Three stalks, after a whole day's hard walking on an island without food or drink. When we first came we had expected to find reeds on the mainland shore. My own disappointment was mingled with satisfaction. Three reeds did not make a boat. But they told me something more important. I had learned that the Sonora desert was not the original homeland of the reed boat.

  In the village, Chuchu and his helpers were subjected to loud-voiced ridicule from the old people when he threw his three reed stalks down by the wall of the hut. One ancient crone was particularly irate and vociferous. In the end she stumped off, bent double, to her own hut and shouted through the opening. A moment later a wrinkled old Indian appeared and was dragged reluctantly out by his wife. He was almost blind and wore blue glasses. When he straightened up we could see that he had been an unusually fine figure of a man, tall and strong with distinguished features. The Seris Indians were diflFerent from all the other Indian tribes in Mexico. The Spaniards who saw them first described the natives of Shark Island as giants. The old man hobbled round the hut with his wife, we followed, and there on the garbage heap lay a reed boat. Its thin, bamboo-like reeds were gray and brittle with age and the ropes were rotten, but there was the boat in complete form. We helped to drag it in front of the hut door. Its wrinkled owner was intent on proving that a proper Seris Indian could build an askam.

  The old giant turned out to have been the tribe's former chief. As dawn was breaking the next morning he took out a home-made coil of rope and a dagger-length wooden needle, polished smooth with use. Blind as he was, he groped his way and with his huge needle he sewed his crisp craft together, trying to strain the collapsed prow up into an elegant curve again. Luck was with us after all. The rubbish heap had given us exactly what we came for.

  The last reed boat of the Seris Indians, and perhaps of all Mexico, was carried into the water. Caitano and son jumped on board. They settled themselves comfortably with a pair of old paddles and a long wooden spear with a running line. Paddling was something they could do, and soon we saw the brown backs with the black pigtails disappearing over the ripples on the long, slender reed boat. When they came back a huge turtle was waving its flippers on the reed floor between them. The half rotten reeds had absorbed a great deal of water but they were afloat.

  This was Mexico. Where had the Seris Indians' tribal ancestors learned this? From one of the many neighboring tribes. Once there had been people on all sides using reed boats, from the Inca empire in the south to California in the north, and also on the inland lakes in Mexico itself. As late as the beginning of the last century, the French painter L. Choris painted three Indians paddling a reed boat along the wooded coast by San Francisco harbor. In Mexico itself reed boats similar to those of Peru had been observed on lakes in no fewer than eight different states, according to the noted Maya authority. Dr. Eric Thompson.^

  I watched regretfully as Caitano's struggling captive was carried over to the turtle pen, while the lifeless hulk of the Seris people's last askam was thrown forever on the rubbish heap behind the old man's hut. There it lay, like a full stop to the last chapter of an unwritten book on the reed boat's story, forgotten for all time in the central regions of America.

  ^Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, 1951, Vol. 79.

  Chapter Four

  WITH BEDOUIN AND BUDUMA IN THE HEART OF AFRICA

  iLFRicA, No continent has a more evocative name. Hear the word and the image appears before your eyes. A wall of green jungle, the huge tropical leaves pushed aside as lines of Negro porters with loads on their heads walk straight-backed into the camera lens. Giraffes and baboons loping slowly across the screen. Tom-toms. The roar of lions. I had never been in the African interior, only glimpsed it as if through a window, in the darkness of a movie or pressed between the pages of a book.

  But there I was, in the African interior, in the heart of Central Africa itself. In a little hotel room in Fort Lamy, capital of the Chad Republic. I could not have been further from the sea. And that was a little paradoxical, because the visit was the first stage in preparing a voyage by primitive means across the Atlantic. The only water in the vicinity was a tranquil river. I could see it through the window: brown jungle water, red banks of clay, green landscape. Colors sparkled in the sun. A band of fishermen, their wet skins shining like licorice, stood up to their knees in water on a clay bank, pulling in a net. They had fixed a dense thicket of bamboo poles in the river bottom as a fish barrier. Yesterday I had seen seven hippopotami loafing on another bank farther up the river. Here in the capital they were protected. Crocodiles had been virtually exterminated be-

  WITH BEDOUIN AND BUDUMA IN THE HEART OF AFRICA A^

  cause the skin was once an important part of the country's exports. The traffic at this season was hmited to flat-bottomed canoes made of hollowed-out tree trunks: there had been no rainfall since the rainy season ended six months before, so the water was too shallow for motor boats.

  The Shari River flowed smoothly and steadily northward, but the water it carried from the jungle never reached the distant ocean. From the vast jungle near the Congo border in the south it passes through savannah and semidesert on its way to the great inland Lake Chad on the southern borders of the Sahara. Here the heat is so intense that the water evaporates as quickly as it flows in. Lake Chad has many tributaries, but no outlets other than the blue sky, arching cloudlessly over the vast surface of the desert lake and insatiably absorbing the invisible vapor.

  This was the lake I wanted to visit. But, easy as it might be to find on the map, it was extremely difficult to reach. On all the maps it stands out as the blue heart of Africa, but no two maps give the lake the same shape. Now it is drawn as round as a plate, now curved like a hook, and then again scalloped hke an oak leaf. The honest maps show this inland sea with dotted outlines, for no one knows the shape of Lake Chad. It is variable. Thousands of floating islands drift about on the surface, sometimes sailing in one direction, then setting course for another part of the lake. They collide and amalgamate, they drift ashore and are transformed into coastal bogs and peninsulas. They are torn apart and sail off in different directions to new, unknown destinations. The lake, which sometimes covers an area of ten thousand square miles (the size of Lake Erie), often dries up to half that size, because the depth varies from three to fifteen feet. Nineteen feet is the greatest depth. In the north much of it is so shallow that papyrus reeds cover large areas, and papyrus also grows on most of the floating islands that sail around in an everlasting regatta.

  The Republic of Chad gained independence from France in i960. It has no railways. Nor are any roads open all the year round. It is
a paradise for sportsmen and for those who want to see one spot in the world that does not simply reflect our own ubiquitous existence. The capital has first-class hotels, chemists, bars and ultramodern administrative offices full of black officials, most with parallel scars

  on chin or cheek signifying their tribal origin. The wide asphalt roads between the small gardens of French bungalows from the colonial period become more rugged and exotic as they run out into the sand between rows of Arab houses in the suburbs, and finally they disappear across the landscape as interminable caravan routes between isolated groups of round, native kraals. When the rains begin one must ride or fly to make a journey overland. But then the river is navigable for small boats, right down to the trading stores in the marshes where it runs into Lake Chad.

  Three days earlier I had flown across the Mediterranean and the whole of the Sahara in a French plane that stops once a week at Fort Lamy on its way to more southerly parts of Africa. Anything destined for the Republic which is unsuitable for weeks of camel transport must be brought in by air: cars, bulldozers, refrigerators, gasoline. Yes, even lobsters and tender beef for the master chef at "La Tchad-ienne." They all come by air.

  We left the plane, three men laden with film equipment and goods for barter with potential African boatbuilders. My companions were two cameramen: the Frenchman Michel and the Italian Gianfranco. We were going to study and film local boat construction. I had stumbled on a picture illustrating a travel article on Central Africa. It showed some ebony-colored natives standing by the water with a very remarkable and distinctive craft: the same type of reed boats I knew so well from South America and Easter Island. The picture had been taken on Lake Chad and the author himself was very emphatic about the striking similarity between this craft in the African interior and the type of boat which had been built since time immemorial by the Indians on Lake Titicaca in the Peruvian uplands. In Egypt this ancient African vessel had died out long ago, but here, isolated in the heart of the continent it still survived.

  An old caravan route ran from the Upper Nile area through the mountains to Chad. In more recent times it was known as the trans-African slave route. I knew that the anthropologists had reason to believe that part of the Chad population had its ancient roots in the Nile Valley. This could explain why the Egyptian type of reed boat was paddled about side by side with dugout canoes carved from giant jungle trees. Chad was an African melting pot. Here the tropical sun burned down on a welter of human t}'pes and you would

  WITH BEDOUIN AND BUDUMA IN THE HEART OF AFRICA AH

  have to be a specialist to distinguish between the different tribes and languages. But one thing was clear to everyone. Just as Chad represents a gradual transition from the Sahara Desert, whose sand dunes roll in over the national frontiers in the north to the boundless jungles of tropical Africa rolling in from the south, so is the northern part of the country full of Bedouins and other Arabs, while the southern part is inhabited by various Negroid people. They meet on the central plains and in the capital, Fort Lamy, where they join in a common effort to forge a nation from what chance once demarcated as a temporary French colony.

  After a cold shower in our air-conditioned hotel we crawled into a scorching hot taxi and drove to the official national tourist bureau. The wide main road was seething with cars, bicycles and pedestrians. Here and there among various shades of Africans we saw a few white faces. These were French officials and colonists who had chosen to stay on in the capital after the liberation. The tourist chief was one of them.

  We explained that we had come to ask the best way of reaching Lake Chad, as we could find neither railway nor road marked on the map. The tourist chief spread out a colorful chart and some illustrated literature on lions and al kinds of jungle game. We could go and shoot them all for a reasonable fee, but we would have to travel south, in the opposite direction from Lake Chad. We explained that it was the lake we wanted to visit, that it was the only place where we could see papyrus boats. The tourist chief folded the map and said that if we did not want to go where he, the expert, recommended he could not help us. He calmly aimed his paunch in the direction of his inner ofEce and left. I had to fish out of my passport an impressively stamped letter of recommendation from the Norwegian Foreign Minister and send a clerk in with it. The tourist chief's paunch reappeared in the doorway. This time he explained kindly that it was impossible to get to Lake Chad before the river reached high water level. In any case, to find papyrus one had to go round to the village of Bol on the northeastern shore and one could only reach that by air. Did I wish to charter a plane?

  If that was the only way, I did.

  The tourist chief picked up the telephone. There were two single-engine aircraft in the country. Both were in hangars, under repair.

  zj8 THE RA EXPEDITIONS

  A third taxi-plane had two engines, and therefore needed eight hundred yards to land in. The landing strip at Bol was only six hundred yards long. The tourist chief added that filming was forbidden in the country except with a government permit.

  Moreover there was serious unrest in the Repubhc at the time. The Arab population in the area behind Bol was Mohammedan and had begun to rise against the Christian Africans in the south, which held power in the government. So it was very unsafe to venture into the northern part of the country just now. To prove his good intentions the chief placed the tourist ofSce car and driver at our disposal. We could drive round and see anyone we liked in Fort Lamy and question people who knew conditions at the lake.

  One address he gave us produced a smiling sturdy Frenchman with tattooed arms who was here to study the possibilities of improving the stocks of fish and developing modern fishery in Lake Chad. He explained that the only way of reaching the papyrus swamps near Bol was to drive by Jeep across the desert east of the lake. This was confirmed by a French doctor who was an animal trainer and the most enthusiastic traveler in the country. Both called attention to the present unrest in that quarter of the country, however, adding that there was in fact a large river boat on the lake, which made periodic round trips, buying up a sort of native corn. But it would be impossible to find it now.

  Not many countries felt the need to keep an embassy in the Chad Republic, but France had one in its former colony. Michel presented us there, but the ambassador had only been there a month and none of his staff had ever been to the lake.

  This was our third day in Fort Lamy and all we had done was to go from office to office, from bungalow to bungalow, calling on friendly people who offered us coffee, cold beer or whisky and gave us the address of someone else who might be able to offer a solution. Now we had come full circle, the last people we saw gave us the address of the tourist chief and people we had questioned the first day.

  We decided to try to reach Bol on our own, by Jeep. We had the formal permission of the authorities. They had installed in Bol the only radio telephone in the whole lake area, and as a safety measure the Minister for Home Affairs would inform the sheriff in Bol of

  our arrival. I had only to go to the Minister of Information and get a document that would authorize us to use our movie cameras. Here, as usual, there were Negroes, not Arabs, in almost all the public posts. The Minister ran his fingers through his crinkly hair and roared with laughter as he proofread the document his secretary had transcribed from his dictation.

  "The man is an archaeologist, ar-chae-o-log-ist," he told her, handing the paper back as he nodded toward me. "Change that to ar-chae-o-log-ist, otherwise the Mohammedans will chop off his head in the area he's got to cross."

  I peeped cautiously over the frizzy-haired beauty's shoulder. French was the official language of the Republic, the only one that the many different ethnic groups had in common. On the paper I had been entered as "archeveque" instead of "archeologue," an archbishop instead of an archaeologist

  The mistake was rectified and the Minister reassured us that there was thus no question of becoming involved in religious controversy on the government's
side.

  With appropriate documents and two coal-black drivers, of whom one, Baba, said he had been in Bol before, we set out on the road from Fort Lamy long before sunrise next morning. We thought it safest to divide up into two Jeeps in case of accident in the desert, and this proved a very wise decision. In the lead car we had a yellow map without contours, on which the names Fort Lamy, Massakory, Alifari, Kairom, Ngouri, Isseirom and Bol were underlined in red. We had no difficulty in finding the first villages. They were efficiently signposted and the sand roads were firm enough for us to drive across the flat country at over sixty miles an hour, with no escape from the dust clouds which we ourselves sent whirling up toward the night sky. Along the first stretch to the north, bulldozers and labor camps showed that many road gangs were busy raising the road up above surrounding ground level so that it would become usable also in the rainy season. The first hundred miles were behind us when the sun rose over the plain. But then we branched off onto smaller and smaller side roads and soon the twentieth century had vanished over the horizon. Even just outside the capital, the buildings had given way to scattered groups of round, straw-roofed native kraals, mostly deserted. Gradually we found ourselves crossing large uninhabited