The Ra Expeditions

by Thor Heyerdahl

  Chapter Seven

  OUT IN THE ATLANTIC

  Oafi. The fresh scent of the salt Atlantic. The rollers broke against the steep coast, sending high white cascades up toward the old fortifications that Vasco da Gama's brother-in-law erected when the Portuguese took over the defense of the port in 1508 by agreement with the Berber chief Yahia ben Tafouft. Between medieval fortress walls and 450-year-old Portuguese castles an energetic community of Arabs and Berbers now work peacefully together in the world's largest sardine fishery, and the port teems with colorful fishing boats, while large ocean-going vessels glide in and out to collect sulphate or trade goods with Morocco's most important inland town, Marrakesh.

  We were sitting up in the Pasha's palm garden at the top of the town, looking down on the endless open sea stretching from harbor to horizon. Safi's harbor had been used by the Berbers for a thousand years before the Portuguese came, and by the Phoenicians for at least a thousand years before that, for they used to trade along this open coast farther down than the present Kingdom Morocco. Just below Safi they had an important outpost on the little island off Mogador where the archaeologists are constantly excavating Phoenician relics. So long before Christian times there were already seafarers and traders, as well as colonists, trafficking between the innermost Mediterranean coasts and these old ports on the western-

  lAA THE RA EXPEDITIONS

  most outpost of Africa's Atlantic coast, where the ocean current sweeps everything it can get hold of to the other side of the Atlantic.

  All those who passed through the Strait of Gibraltar, the ancient Pillars of Hercules, had found shelter here if they, like the Phoenicians, ventured down along these low Moroccan cliffs and open sandy beaches. A reed boat could also have made its way down here to Safi, by progressing in short hops along the curved coast of Africa, for no one doubted that such a vessel would float as long as it stayed close enough inshore to be dragged up at any time and dried when necessary. The question was: how long would it float if it left the coast and began to sail the open sea?

  We know that the reed boat was used on the Atlantic coast beyond Gibraltar. It survived tenaciously on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar. It is still in use among fishermen living in the shadows of the mysterious Nuraghi ruins on the west coast of Sardinia. Nor would our own version be the first the people of Morocco had seen. At the mouth of the Lucus River on the Atlantic coast between Gibraltar and Safi the reed boat survived as a fishing vessel and means of transport until it was finally replaced by Portuguese plank boats at the beginning of this century. In 1913 members of a Spanish scientific expedition found that the ancient El Jolot tribe in this area was still building reed boats that could carry five or six fishermen and were navigated by both oars and sail. They expressly pointed out that it was the same type of vessel as the ancient Egyptians had used and they also emphasized that this design had not only survived in Morocco but was still in use on the Upper Nile, in Chad, and on Lake Titicaca in South America. They invited ethnologists to find out what connection could have existed between boatbuilders in such widely separate places, and stressed that as far as these so-called madi on the Atlantic coast in Morocco was concerned, they seemed to be the most robust and sturdy of all known reed boats.^

  "You want to see a reed boat?" asked the head of the local coastal district, slightly offended when I proposed to visit the Lucus River. "Then you have come to Morocco a generation too late. Here we can show you boats of plastic!"

  1 A. Cabrera: "Balsa de juncos en el Bajo Lucus," Revista del Istituto de AntTopologia de la Universidad Nacional de Tucumdn. Vol. i. No. 2. Tucumdn, 1938.

  OUT IN THE ATLANTIC lAC

  Colorful mobs of many racial types had gathered to watch as the reed boat built by our friends from Chad came rolling along the streets of Safi on wheels. Now it was ready for launching in the midst of the beached fishing boats in the harbor. Abdullah tried hard to explain our project to Berbers and Arabs in his own dialect. Mussa and Omar had said good-by. They had flown back from Cairo to Fort Lamy via BChartoum with heavy suitcases and the means to buy both wives and cattle at home in Bol. On parting Mussa whispered that he had found a secret place in his fine new suit where he had hidden all his money so that no one could find it. Proudly he raised the lapel of his jacket and showed me an ordinary inside pocket. Omar had finished his treatment and was envious of Abdullah, who with his knowledge of French and perfect health had been chosen to sail with us on the kaday.

  Abdullah had no intention of returning to Chad until the guerrilla war was over. He was coming to sea with us at all costs, even without the consent of President Tombalbaye and his Council of Ministers. With our Italian camp organizer Corio, he accompanied the papyrus boat as a passenger on a Swedish cargo vessel supposed to sail directly from Egypt to Tangier in Morocco. No sooner had we waved good-by to Abdullah in Alexandria when the captain received orders to change course and call at Port Said on the Suez Canal for a cargo of onions. Here Abdullah had a chance to observe how the white man lives up to his own teaching. He was awakened by cannon thundering along the Suez Canal, while missiles exploded at random on ramshackle Arab houses ashore. He stood on the ship's deck beside the inflammable papyrus boat and looked up, startled but unafraid, as something came sailing over the ship and exploded in the harbor area. The dock-workers disappeared and the ship was delayed for several days before it got away from Egypt. But now the papyrus boat had come safely through to the starting point in Morocco and Abdullah was busy tidying it up. It had shaken down a little on the journey overland from Cairo to Alexandria and from Tangier to Safi. It seemed slightly broader and flatter and the horntips, fore and aft, were a little battered and scorched after butting everything from bridges to high tension cables en route. But day by day the golden reeds grew steadily more supple and firm as they absorbed the damp sea air.

  Today the reed boat was to be launched. It happened to be May 17 and Norway's National Day. The Pasha had personally organized the launching from the same slipway that was used to launch the fishing smacks of Safi. As the King's representative he had great authority, and he used it for the benefit of the expedition. From the day I arrived with the letter from his Moroccan friend, UN Ambassador Benhima, all doors in the Pasha's home were open and a spontaneous friendship arose between us. Pashsa Taieb Amara and his wife Aicha were exceptional people. Both were equally active, equally alert and interested in social problems. He had used his power to establish modern schools, youth centers, workers' housing, seamen's homes and libraries and had brought activity in place of idleness to the old seaport. Madame Aicha was one of the twenty ladies chosen for membership in King Hassan's council.

  She arrived in her long Berber robe with a brightly colored ceramic pitcher in her hand and we rose from our camel-skin pouffes to go down to the port.

  "Since I, a Berber, am to baptize the boat, I think goat's milk would be most suitable," she said, showing my wife, Yvonne, the white contents of the pitcher. "Goat's milk is Morocco's ancient symbol of hospitality and good v^shes!"

  The harbor was packed with colorful throngs of people. Our golden boat was decked out festively, with the flags of all the participant countries fluttering in the wind. Aicha smashed the fine pitcher into a thousand fragments against the wooden cradle, so that goat's milk and potsherds sprayed over papyrus and distinguished guests alike.

  "I name you Ra in honor of the sun-god."

  Chains and cogwheels began to screech at once. The crowd pressed back. As the papyrus boat began to glide down the slipway toward the water I exchanged looks vdth the loyal friend of the expedition. Ambassador Anker, who stood straight and smiling, with milk-spots on the lapels of his dark suit. He and his wife had come from Cairo to see us off. We must have been thinking the same thing: Let's hope the worst obstacles are behind us now. But others were thinking the opposite. Just as the bows touched the surface of the water a wide-eyed photographer leaned toward me and said:

  "What will you say if it goes
straight to the bottom now?"

  OUT IN THE ATLANTIC An

  There was no time to answer. Rd floated out. The wooden cradle sank slowly to the bottom with the iron truck to which it was secured, but Ka detached herself and lay on the water like a fat goose, while scraps of papyrus and wooden props from the sledge bobbed up round her and followed her out like a flock of goslings. A sigh of relief and admiration rose from the crowd on shore. Some had expected her to capsize. Most had thought that she was certain to list, because she had never been on trial and was not very symmetrical on either side of the center line. This was handwork, and measured along the railing, Mussa's side proved to be sixteen inches longer than Omar's. But the balance was perfect, no matter how many people jumped on board. The only part below water was the eight-inch depth of the three central rolls, which, as noted, formed a kind of keel almost six feet wide. The rest of the wide boat lay right on the surface, like a life buoy.

  A tugboat was ready to tow Ka over to a big barge, where we made fast, so that the papyrus would not be shredded to ribbons against the stone pier in the tidal water. We lay here for a week, allowing the reed below the water line to absorb its fill, while we fitted our vessel out for sea. In this week the various members of the Ra expedition met one another for the first time. I had planned it this way. There would be time enough to catch up on each other's life stories in the tiny bamboo basket that was to be our common home at sea in the weeks ahead.

  There was Norman Baker, from the United States. As the only real sailor on board he had been appointed the expedition's navigator and radio operator. Thorough and reliable, he sat in the cabin entrance examining his equipment, allowing no detail to pass without an expert check. My own previous acquaintance with Norman was rather fleeting. He had come aboard my ship once, in his modest, calm way, when I was in Tahiti with a Greenland trawler I had chartered for an expedition to Easter Island. Norman had just reached Tahiti then, as navigator of a tiny ketch that he and an American biologist had sailed a good two thousand sea miles from Hawaii. He could navigate. He was also a commander in the American Navy Reserve and an instructor in oceanography at the Navy School in New York, though in civilian life he was a building contractor in the skyscraper world of that vast city.

  "Have you really no experience of the sea?" asked Norman skeptically, turning to Yuri who sat, round and cheerful, beside him in the cabin opening, fingering a breathing apparatus.

  Yuri Alexandrovich Senkevich was Russian and the expedition's doctor. He grinned broadly.

  "I have been in a Soviet ship to the Antarctic and back," replied Yuri, and began to talk about luscious girls in Manila. But Norman was more eager to hear if Yuri had really spent a full year in the coldest place in the world. Yuri had. For a year he had been doctor to the Russian research station at Vostok, about ten thousand feet above sea level, right-on the South Polar icecap, where the temperature can drop to —100° Fahrenheit. Yuri was the only one of the men I had never met before. We were both on tenterhooks when his plane landed in Cairo. I had taken a chance by writing to the head of the Russian Academy of Sciences, President Keldysh, an intelligent and unassuming scholar who is in charge of all science in the Soviet Union, from sputniks to archaeology. I reminded him that he had once asked why I never took Russians on my expeditions. This was the opportunity. I needed a Russian and I needed a doctor; perhaps President Keldysh could recommend someone. My conditions were that the doctor must be able to speak another language besides Russian, and that he must have a sense of humor. The Russians had taken the last point very seriously. When Yuri emerged from the Aeroflot plane, loaded with gifts and medical supplies, he had taken a vodka for fear of not being funny enough. And Yuri fitted straight into the picture at once. His knowledge of English was minimal, but enough to ensure that the point of a joke was never lost. Son of a doctor and born in Mongolia, Yuri was something of an Asiatic. He had been chosen from among the younger scientists at the Soviet Department of Health, where he specialized in the problems of astronauts under acceleration and weightlessness. After inspecting the airy wickerwork cabin that was to be our living capsule at sea, he had a number of humorous comments to make in the astronauts' favor.

  The Italian Carlo Mauri was also quite a new acquaintance. He was to be the expedition's cameraman. A friend from Rome was to have come, a film producer who was one of Italy's best frogmen and had just been down filming the Andrea Doric at the bottom of

  OUT IN THE ATLANTIC lAQ

  the Atlantic. But when Abdullah landed in prison and I disappeared unexpectedly into the African interior, he had lost faith in the whole project and proposed Carlo Mauri as a substitute. Mauri, red-bearded and blue-eyed as a Viking, was also without the slightest experience as a sailor. He was a professional mountain guide and Italy's most noted alpinist. He had either led or participated in fourteen international mountain-climbing expeditions which had taken him to every continent. Many of the worst precipices in the Himalayas and the Andes were as familiar to him as some of the stiffest peaks in Africa, New Guinea or Greenland. One leg had been seriously fractured by a bad fall in the Alps, which finished his ski-teaching, but as a mountaineer he was more active than ever. Carlo happened to be down on the South Polar icecap when he heard about the papyrus boat project; and as he had gone there after filming polar bears in the ice channels of the North Polar icecap, he liked the idea of a spot of warm, ice-free bath water on the Equator.

  At the eleventh hour we had almost lost our Mexican member. My friend Ramon of the trip to the Seris Indians was rushed to the hospital for an extremely serious operation just as the papyrus boat left Alexandria en route to Morocco. The tragic message arrived in the middle of a press conference and was withheld until a journalist asked for the names of the participants. Our otherwise smiling ambassador sat serious-faced in the front row, fingering the paper.

  "From Mexico—" I began, when nervous fingers passed me the telegram. It stung like a whiplash. If only Ramon pulled through nothing else would matter. It was difficult to finish the sentence. The press grew restless.

  "From Mexico—Dr. Santiago Genoves!"

  The meeting adjourned. Two telegrams went off to Mexico at once. One to Ramon in the hospital and one to Dr. Genoves, the Mexican anthropologist who had said half in jest that he would come if he had a week's notice. Now he had a week's notice. And he came. That energetic man had even managed to stop over in Barcelona to receive Pope John XXIII's Peace Prize for 1969 as a reward for his campaign against war and aggression in the book Pax? which he was now in the process of filming. From Spain he had reached Morocco just in time to supervise the transport of the reed

  boat overland from Tangier to Safi. Now he was already in action as the expedition's quartermaster, busy stacking pear-shaped Egyptian jars on the uneven reed deck, where they toppled over unless propped against one another, padded with reed fragments and made fast with rope. Coconuts in the husk served excellently as fillers. We had had 160 of these amphorae made on the pattern of the ancient Egyptian jars in the Cairo Museum, and Santiago handled them wdth the same solicitous care as he handled the ancient Indian skulls at Mexico University. He numbered and listed jars, baskets and goatskin containers, writing it all down with a scientific thoroughness that reflected his long work as editor of the International Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, I had caught glimpses of Santiago at scientific congresses in many countries. He had escaped from Spain during the Cidl War, but since then I had met him there too, and now most recently in Mexico, where he was research professor at Mexico University, specializing in the problem of the mixed origins of the American Indian tribes. He, too, had absolutely no experience as a sailor. In one particular this muscular little scientist differed from all other scholars I knew. He had been a professional soccer player.

  If anyone could have had less knowledge of seamanship than Yuri, Carlo, and Santiago, it must have been Abdullah Djibrine, the desert dweller from Chad, who had grown up in the heart of Africa and did not e
ven know that the sea was salt. Now he was to join the expedition as papyrus expert. Perhaps it was this exotic character whom I knew best, after two journeys to Chad and seven weeks spent together behind the pyramids. Resourceful and quickwitted, but wary as a gazelle with ever^'^one and everything, perhaps Abdullah did not even know himself too well. All I knew about him, after discarding his own tall tales about trips to Paris and Canada, was that he had been bom in a littie village near the papyrus marshes of Lake Chad, where the men of the tribe had taken him from his mother by force in order to cut the distinguishing mark down his forehead and nose when he was so young that he could barely remember it. Apart from that, he had grown up to become a carpenter and a lady's man. As a good Mohammedan it was his right to have several wives, and my duty to provide for them. One Chadian wife with three children, and a second whom he had

  married at the last minute, created complicated monthly currency transactions with the Republic of Chad, and he had seized his chance to marry a third in Cairo during the one week when I was away on a quick trip to Morocco. A wedding feast in style had been postponed until I returned and could play host. It had taken place, with belly-dancing and Egyptian musicians, on the roof of his father-in-law's Arab house, and Mussa and Omar were so taken with the beautiful, shy bride that they stuffed most of their week's wages down her already well-filled brassiere. So now I had monthly foreign exchange problems in Egypt too, and vowed that in Morocco Abdullah would not be allowed out of our sight.

  The youngest of the party was the Egyptian, Georges Sourial, a gifted chemical engineer, professional frogman, incorrigible playboy, six time judo champion of Egypt and once of Africa. He stood six foot five in his stockinged feet and, with a body like Tarzan's, Georges had not done a stroke of work since his college days, but frolicked in the clubs of Cairo and the waves of the Red Sea. He horrified friends by breaking six bricks with one blow of his hand, he bore the scars of a shark bite on his leg and was the only man I knew who dared to dive down to deadly moray eels and feed them with fish held in his own mouth while patting the hideous beasts as if they were domestic pets. Georges was no sailor either; he knew the sea only from below, and when he asked to join us after reading the verdict of the papyrus experts he gave a charming reason for coming along. He said it was because he was happier under water than above it. Like other old Coptic families in Egypt, the Sourials also traced their origins back to the days before the Arabs arrived bringing the teachings of Mohammed to the land of the Nile. From the day he first glimpsed the ghosts of a chance of coming with us, Georges, who usually slept like a mummy for fourteen hours of the twenty-four, suddenly began to rise at dawn and make himself useful in the camp behind the pyramids. His odd acquaintances in the most obscure corners of Cairo brought us into contact v^ath an old sailmaker who still sewed with needle and thread, the basketmaker who wove the cabin by hand, a baker who could bake an Egyptian bread according to the recipe from the Cairo Museum, and a whole community of potters who lived on an isolated hillside in the suburbs. There they would stand waist-deep in clay slip, stirring it with their