The Ra Expeditions

by Thor Heyerdahl

  lOO THE RA EXPEDITIONS

  Next day we were still the chieftain's guests and, with the interpreter to help, we found out everything we wanted to know. The papyrus in Lake Zwai grew along such an inaccessible coast that it would not be feasible to transport it from this lake in large quantities. The marshes round Lake Tana were thus the only answer. But we learned something else from the Laki people. Their shafat and obolu were more reminiscent of the reed boats in Chad, Mexico and Peru than of the tanquas on Lake Tana, which were built by their own Ethiopian kinsmen. The Laki people did not build reed boats because there was no timber on the lake; they did so despite the fact that wood was more readily available than reeds. The fact that nobody from the vast Galla area around the lake could transport us to the islands also proved that it was not given to everybody to build papyrus boats, even if they happened to live on the same lake. The art of building pap}Tus boats had been imported to Lake Zwai; it was not a local invention, but an inheritance from ancestors who came from near the source of the Nile, just as it had been with the monks of Lake Tana. Apparently, the papyrus boat had a peculiar way of following migrator)/ people from the Nile Valley as part of their tradition.

  But the Laki people had the same unfortunate experience as the monks on Lake Tana. The papyrus must be dried after daily use. If an obolu or shafat were left lying in the water it would be unusable after eight, ten or at most fourteen days.

  I traveled back to Egypt with mixed feelings. Was it worth attempting the Atlantic?

  Chapter Six

  IN THE WORLD OF THE PYRAMID-BUILDERS

  1 ou WANT to rope off a bit of desert behind the Cheops Pyramid to build a papyrus boat?"

  The thickset Egyptian Minister adjusted his hornrimmed glasses and looked at me with a questioning smile. He glanced half dubiously at the Nor^vegian Ambassador who smiled politely back, as he stood erect and white-haired beside his compatriot as a sort of pledge that this stranger from the north was in his right mind.

  "Papyrus sinks after two weeks even on a river—not my words. They come from the president of the Eg}^tian Papyrus Institute," said the Minister. "And the archaeologists say that papyrus boats can never have sailed beyond the mouth of the Nile because papyrus dissolves in sea water and breaks up in the waves."

  "That is exactly what we want to test in practice," I explained.

  I had no better reasons to offer, faced v^ath such a body of papyrus specialists. The Minister of Culture and the Minister for Tourism had left no stone unturned, following a request from the Norwegian Ambassador. They had called in Egypt's foremost authorities as addsers and now we were seated round a large conference table with museum directors, archaeologists, historians and papyrus experts. The president of the Papyrus Institute, Hassan Ragab, had given his verdict in advance. He repeated it. But he admitted, laugh-

  ing, that since I was the only one of those present who had seen a papyrus boat in real life he would gladly support the idea if I were absolutely determined to make the experiment He had only tested bits of papyrus reeds in his laboratory tanks, since no one in Egypt today could build him a boat. I thought for myself that he might as well have tested a piece of iron and he would have come to the conclusion that Queen Mary would sink. The building material is one thing, the boat itself quite another.

  To the head of the Cairo Museum the idea of a pap^nrus boat on the ocean waves was absurd. Eg}^t had exported pap}T:us to Byblos for bookmaking in ancient times, he said, but of course the Phoenicians collected it themselves in their wooden ships, because only wooden vessels could cross this open corner of the inner Mediterranean. For a papyrus boat to cross the Atlantic was completely inconceivable, now as then. Any specialist could testify that a papyrus boat would not be able to go beyond the mouth of the Nile.

  A long technical discussion ranged from the properties of papyrus to the differences between Old World and New World pyramids and hieroglyphs. Finally it was the director general for all Egyptian archaeological relics. Dr. Gamal Mehrez, who had the last word, "If anyone would reconstruct a papyrus boat from the wall paintings in our old burial chambers and try it out in practice, that would be a valuable experiment," he stated. And that was that.

  The Minister of Culture authorized the controller of the Giza Pyramids to let us rope off the area we needed for the tent camp and building yard, in return for our promise not to dig into the sand, because we would be right in the middle of the ancient graveyard of the Pharaohs' families.

  At the bottom of the steps of the government building was the brick barricade characteristic of wartime Cairo, and sandbags were stacked in front of all the windows. Here we parted from the Deputy Minister for Tourism, Adel Taher, who shook my hand with a broad grin before disappearing up the steps again.

  "You must build that boat," he said. "We are all in favor of your experiment. It is a good thing to remind the world that Egypt does not only make war."

  I was left with the smiling ambassador and thanked him sincerely for his invaluable support. Peter Ankar had been a good friend

  from the start. Many years of work in the Middle East, both as a UN delegate and as Norwegian Ambassador, with ancient history as a personal hobby, had made him a walking encyclopedia on all questions of trade relations and cultural contacts in these parts, from the most ancient times.

  "That was fine," he declared. "You got the buildingsite, but no one shared your faith in the papyrus boat!"

  "If there were no controversy there would be no need to try out the boat," I remarked.

  In the hotel room I sat irresolutely on the edge of the bed. Certainly, I had the construction site. But I had not yet set all the wheels in motion. There was still time to withdraw. I had to decide now: full speed ahead on all fronts or drop the whole plan here and now. There was also the point that everything I owned was not nearly enough to carry out such a costly experiment. But publishers would probably be willing to gamble on the final outcome. What if there were no outcome? I sat fingering a small sheet of paper. The monks, the Laki people, the scientists and the papyrus experts all gave the papyrus boat a maximum of fourteen days in calm, fresh water and less in choppy salt water. I had personally sat for a few hours at a time on kaday, tanqua or shafat, and had the unpleasant experience of sitting in a papyrus boat while the reed bundle disintegrated. I knew that the totora reed in America was capable of long sea voyages and that it had a fibrous outer sheath and a spongy cellular center that resembled papyrus in every way, but perhaps papyrus absorbed water much faster than totora.

  I unfolded the scrap of paper. The childish handwriting on it read:

  Dear Thor in Italy,

  Do you remember Abdullah in Chad? I am ready to come to you and build a big kaday with Omar and Mussa. We are waiting for orders and I am carpenter with Pastor Eyer in Fort Lamy.

  Greetings, Abdoulaye Djibrine.

  The laughing, coal-black face of Abdullah with the tribal scar over his brow and nose appeared before me and I had to smile at the touching letter. It was a marvelous thing that this illiterate in the heart of Central Africa had had the initiative to take my address to

  a scribe in Fort Lamy and rouse me to action. Why did I hesitate? Abdullah was ready and Omar and Mussa were prepared to come with him. They built larger reed boats to freight their cattle on Lake Chad than those used by the Christians to escape alone and take refuge on Ethiopian islands, and they knew more about the floating capacity of papyrus than all the scholars in the world put together. They believed in their kaday. They were willing to build one big enough to float for months and they were willing to come on board themselves and sail to distant lands that I could only describe by the number of days and moons it took to reach them because they had not the faintest notion of geography.

  It was Abdullah's letter that put an end to further hesitation. I would rely on the men from Chad.

  That evening a telegram went back to Addis Ababa, to the Italian who owned the two big boats on Lake Tana. We had agreed that as s
oon as he received a telegram from me he was to send Ali with his people to the marshes along the western shores of Lake Tana and cut 150 cubic meters, or about 5000 cubic feet of papyrus reeds to be dried and collected in bundles at the northern shore of the lake. Commendatore Mario Buschi was a middle-aged businessman, broad, red-cheeked and bursting with initiative. He had personally organized the transport of his two ver)^ heavy iron boats from the Red Sea up to Lake Tana, and it was he who had ananged for the 180-ton Axum monolith to be moved from the Ethiopian mountains to Rome in 1937. He was now hoping to be asked to move it back again, since the Emperor of Ethiopia was pressing the Italian government for the return of the monument.

  My first thought had been to float the papyrus down the Nile, but this would have been too tricky, with all the waterfalls and the restrictions of the Sudanese Republic in between. Buschi accepted as a sporting challenge the task of transporting 500 papyrus bundles 450 miles across the Ethiopian mountains from Lake Tana down to the Red Sea, because even if the stack of unpressed reeds bulked as big as a small house, they would weigh only about twelve tons.

  There was not a day to be lost. It was nearly Christmas. If we were to cross the Atlantic before the hurricane season began on the other side, we must set sail from Africa in May. I was afraid of having the papyrus cut too soon, since old reed is not so strong, but unless it

  were cut now we could not be ready to start in May. Cutting two or three hundred thousand papyrus stems would take time, because it was high water in Lake Tana at present and if the reeds were to measure about ten feet long the stem must be cut far below the surface of the water. Afterward the reeds must be properly sun-dried or they would rot in their bundles. Then would come the difficult journey over the mountains and finally up the Red Sea. There was war in the Suez area and all traffic was at a standstill. I would have to fight for special permission to unload cargo in this area. In fact, the inflammable reed must be landed in Suez and transported along blocked roads to rejoin the Nile near Cairo. Before the papyrus load reached the pyramids, a camp with all conveniences including a cook and provisions must be ready in the desert for the necessary guards and labor force. The boatbuilding was to be headed by Buduma Negroes from Chad, who were still living their simple ancestral lives on floating islands in the most out-of-the-way desert corner of Central Africa. When all was set for the building to begin it would be a lengthy process to lash the hundreds of thousands of thin papyrus stems into a compact seagoing vessel forty-five feet long and fifteen feet broad. Also, plans and preparations had to be made in advance for the transport of the finished boat to its launching place at some African port on the Atlantic coast. Sail and rigging, ancient Egyptian steering mechanism, wickerwork cabin, specially made earthenware storage jars and ship's food prepared as in ancient times—there were a thousand things to prepare. And less than six months to do it in.

  So far I had only sent a telegram to Ethiopia. I sat dovm on the bed again, counting on my fingers: December to May. I felt my heart beating and began to pace the floor faster and faster. Paper and pencil: I must start all the wheels rolling right now. All at the same time. Most important of all, it would be necessary to find a crew who wanted to take part in the experiment.

  Naturally I thought first of my companions of a hundred and one days on the balsa raft Kon-Tiki. We still met on every possible occasion to revive old memories. But Knut Haughland, already busy as head of the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, had recently been appointed by the state to organize the immediate erection of a Norwegian Resistance Museum as well. Herman Watzinger, who had long been the FAO fisheries expert in Peru, was just taking over

  Captions for the following pages

  34. Expedition members. Different languages, political background and religion. From the left: Abdullah, Yuri, Norman, Santiago, Thor, Georges and Carlo. In the background the expedition's Belgian adviser, Captain De Bock. (Above)

  35. United Nations flags flank the row of those of participant nations, arranged in alphabetical order by Captain Hartmark from Norway. (Below)

  36. "I name you Ra in honor of the sun-god," said the papyrus ship's Berber godmother, Aicha Amara, wife of the Pasha of Safi, who received a model reed boat as a christening present from the author and his wife, Yvonne. (Above)

  37. Baptized in goafs milk, Ra was launched in the old port of Safi on the west coast of Morocco. Ra was the name of the sun in Egypt and in all the Polynesian islands. (Below)

  38. Yuri, the ship's doctor, checking the provisions, which consisted of dried meat, fish, Egyptian biscuits and durable natural products. (Above)

  39. Fifteen wooden boxes to provide floor and bunks for seven men in the basket cabin. They contained personal possessions, books, film equipment and a radio. (Below)

  40. Egyptian hardtack, baked according to a recipe from Cairo Museum, was both tasty and easy to preserve. (Above)

  41. Some of the 160 ceramic jars of ancient Egyptian design containing water, oil, honey, curdled butter and all kinds of dried fruit and nuts. (Below)

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  42. Good-by and good luck! The author's wife, Yvonne, waves as four rowing boats tow the raft-ship Ra and its crew out of Safi harbor, escorted by Moroccan fishing vessels.

  43. Bon voyage was expressed with flares and sirens from all the boats in the harbor. (Above)

  44. The papyrus ship was steered by three ordinary oars lashed forward and two long rudder-oars of the ancient Egyptian pattern aft. Abdullah, who still had not realized that the sea was salt, stood the first watch with the author. (Below)

  45. The open Atlantic was waiting outside Safi harbor as the Egyptian rudder-oars had their first test in historical times. (Above)

  46. The sail is hoisted on the straddled mast and the ancient Egyptian rigging is about to undergo its first trial. (Below)

  47. Under full sail, with the solar symbol pointing our course westward and away from the threatening coastal cliffs of Africa.

  responsibility for the department's head office in Rome. Bengt Danielsson, the lone Swede among five Norwegians, who since the trip had been based on Tahiti as a free-lance ethnologist, had just accepted the post of Director of the Ethnographical Museum in Stockholm. Erik Hesselberg was still the same chronic Bohemian, traveling the world with his guitar and his palette. He would say yes at once. But Torstein Raaby, who had once telegraphed "coming" in answer to the invitation to join the Kon-Tiki crew, had ended his adventurous life in the icy wastes northwest of Greenland as radio operator on an expedition that had set out to cross the North Pole on skis.

  On the Kon-Tiki we had been six Scandinavians. This time I felt tempted to assemble on the little reed boat as many nations as space would allow. If we crowded together we might manage seven men. Seven men from seven nations. Since I myself came from the northernmost country in Europe the southernmost part of Europe should provide a contrast, so Italy would be the obvious answer. Since we Europeans were "white" we ought to have a "colored" man with us, and the blackest Negroes I had ever seen were in Chad, so it would be logical to take one of the papyrus experts with us. Since the experiment was meant to demonstrate the possibility of contact between the ancient civilizations of Africa and America, it would be symbolic to take an Egyptian and a Mexican on the voyage. And, in order to have contrasting ideologies represented in this international group, it was an appealing idea to take one representative from the United States and one from the Soviet Union. All the other nations, excluded solely for want of space, could be symbolized by the flag of the United Nations, if we could get permission to fly it.

  The times called for every sort of effort to try building bridges between nations. Military jets thundered over Sphinx and pyramids, and cannon boomed along the closed Suez Ca
nal. Soldiers from the five continents of the world were at war in one foreign land or another. Where there was no war, men sat poised behind the atomic button, warheads primed, for fear of other nations. On a floating reed boat there was room only for people who could shake each other's hand. The voyage itself was intended as an experiment, a study trip into the dawn of civilization. But there was room for an

  experiment within the experiment. A study trip into crowded, over-populated tomorrow. With TV, jets, and astronauts, we were so busy shrinking the dimensions of our own globe that there was no elbow room left between the nations. The earth of our forefathers no longer existed. The once illimitable world can be circled in an hour and forty minutes. The nations are no longer divided by impassable mountain ranges and infinite ocean gulfs. The races are no longer independent, isolated; they are connected and becoming crowded. While hundreds of thousands of technicians are working on atomic fission and Laser rays, our little globe is whirling at supersonic speed into a future where we are all fellow-passengers in the same vast technical experiment and where we must all work together if we are not to sink with our common burden.