bodies and limbs before they began to turn the potter's wheel with their bare feet. Thus our 160 amphorae were made according to the five-thousand-year-old example in the Cairo Museum.
Day by day the papyrus bundles absorbed more and more sea water as they lay bobbing on the waves, while on board there was hectic, almost feverish, activity. The weight of papyrus and rope had previously been about twelve tons, but ton after ton was absorbed below the water line without sinking the boat. At the same time tons of cargo and superstructure were being loaded on deck without the vessel heeling visibly. She lay steady as an island. The heaviest burdens were the great bipod mast, which was erected in front of the wickerwork cabin, and the bridge, built of lashed poles placed behind the same cabin so that we could see over its roof. With this weight added to that of the cabin, the heavy rudder and the spare timber for repairs that lay on deck, the papyrus rolls were carrying a good two tons of wood cargo in addition to over a ton of water in heavy jars and at least two tons of food supplies, containers and equipment.
Activity during the last week was frenetic. Each day the papyrus spent in sea water represented a day of its life lost, according to the experts, and that was reason enough to hurry. A no less compelling reason was that, with every day that passed, the hurricane season on the other side of the Atlantic drew nearer. As if by a miracle our schedule had held, with a failure margin of only one week, including the detour to Chad and all other obstacles. But now the bustle was reaching a real crescendo. We no longer had a day to lose. We packed and carried and rolled cargo on the dock side. We climbed and hauled and knotted on masts and stays. We cut and whittled and lashed with ropes and leather on steering bridge and oars. The deck seethed with willing helpers. Captain De Bock, veteran of the Franco-Belgian expedition to Easter Island and an experienced sailor, had calculated the probable line of drift of the papyrus boat before taking leave from his post as Harbor Pilot guiding 50-100,000 tonners in and out of Antwerp harbor. Now he stood, stout and reliable, on the papyrus deck supervising stowing and lashing according to the best nautical traditions. His Norwegian colleague. Captain Arne Hartmark, had previously captained my own expedition vessel to Easter Island. Here he was again, clinging to the masthead of Ra,
securing the rigging in a seamanlike manner with mountaineer Carlo Mauri. Herman Watzinger from the Kon-Tiki expedition had come from Peru, on his way to Rome, to give us a helping hand at the start, and Frank Taplin had come from New York with renewed good wishes from U Thant.
Our wives and the Pasha's wife, Aicha, squatted round the jars in the warehouse on land, packing sheep's cheese in olive oil, fresh eggs in lime solution, dried fish, nuts and mutton sausages in baskets and sacks. Aicha mixed ground almonds and honey, butter, flour, and dates, into sello, a sort of powdered substance that represented Morocco's oldest and most easily preserved traveling food. The last days, when the Pasha of Safi had to provide us with a police barrier so that the work on the dock would not be brought to a complete standstill press, photographers, and public jostled shoulder to shoulder in a spirit of amiable curiosity. One man fell over the edge of the wharf, jars were smashed, and a kerosene lamp was trodden flat.
Then the great day dawned. The Ra had now been lying in the harbor absorbing sea water for eight full days and had consequently lived out more than half its lifetime, according to the experts. The day dawned with a mild offshore breeze that increased in strength. By eight o'clock on the morning of May 25 the fluttering flags on both Ra and the old Portuguese citadel up on land were pointing straight out toward the open Atlantic. Rais Fatah, the sardine fishermen's spokesman and the expedition's local adviser, a black-skinned giant of an Arab, came rowing across the harbor with sixteen of his men, divided among four open rowboats which were to tow Ra out of the harbor.
There was hectic activity down on the long stone pier. The mass of people was jammed together in an impenetrable wall, and photographers were sitting in all the boats and on top of the cargo cranes. Aicha needed police help to get through to the dock side and present a parting gift: a lively little baby monkey, which the Pasha's people had recently caught for us in the Atlas Mountains and named Safi. It clung desperately to the ship's godmother until it noticed that one or two of the men on board had fur on their faces. Then it jumped happily over to the boat and played a vigorous part in a melee of farewell embraces and good wishes in many languages.
Captions for the following four pages
48. Alone on the ocean. Beyond the Moroccan coast, wind and current began to tug the papyrus ship away from the mainland of the Old World.
49. Experimenting with unknown rigging and steering gear. Before we learned the trick we had broken both rudder-oars and the yard that supported the sail.
50. Streaming two sea anchors, we drifted southward along the African coast without sail or steering oar. (Above)
51. The broken rudder-oars spliced with rope and hardwood by Abdullah the carpenter. (Below)
"^
1
^
^ y
^.^^
m
SFi'flvf
ftt
t^ij^^^
>«--^6*S
^-a^.
) K ^'-
".'••.l: -
'.f-
r
/r» V. V'l|F*^
'ii
y^k
:m
:^<*i^^
m. iff
4f^..-...
Captions for the preceding four pages
52. Norman emerged from the wicker cabin with his sextant after a bout of influenza, and announced that we were drifting toward the reefs of Cape Juby. (Above)
53. Scifl the baby monkey, a happy farewell gift from the Pasha of Safi, enjoying herself on the mast and swinging ropes. (Below)
54. Salt meat being sliced for soaking in sea water by Georges. (Above)
55. A broken jar of nuts solves the rationing problem for Safi. (Middle)
56. Fresh eggs having preservative lime paste rinsed off by chef de cuisine Carlo. (Below)
57. Galley under the bottom step of the mast, presided over by Georges and Santiago while the cook takes photographs. (Above)
58. Quartermaster Santiago found that the papyrus deck buckled so much that the jars had to be well padded in order not to chafe holes in each other. (Below)
59 and 60. Flying fish landed on board in large numbers and were either fried for breakfast or used as bait. (Above)
while the fishermen, unmoved by all the uproar, attached a rope from each of the four dinghies to the thick rope we had secured right round the reed boat at the water line. Now they were waiting for orders to row us away from the seething mass of people. One after the other we tore ourselves away and jumped down from the high stone wharf to the soft, vegetable deck of the papyrus boat. Abdullah, Georges and Santiago blew kisses, and handed autographs up to the dock side; Carlo gave his blond Italian wife a last farewell kiss; Norman, who was struggling with a sore throat, escaped from the good wishes and admonitions of the American ambassador; while the Russian ambassador gave Yuri a touching hug on this, his first departure from Soviet guidance and organization. I myself found a microphone stuck into my hand and paid a last debt of gratitude to all the expedition's friends and collaborators who were now suddenly left behind on the dock, although we felt that their place was on board with us; Ambassador Anker from Cairo, Pasha Amara and his Moroccan helpers. Captains De Bock and Hartmark, Corio the camp master, Herman Watzinger, Frank Taplin, Bruno Vailati. Then I jumped on board with the rest. It was almost like walking on a mattress. I signaled to Rais Fatah, the men on land cast off, and the fishermen leaned to their oars and began to row. The time was eight-thirty. Slowly our broad reed bundle began to move away from the quay.
Then began a shrill chorus of wails, so unexpected that at first everyone jumped and then every one of us was left with a lump in his throat. All the fishing boats in the harbor had started up their rending sirens, accompanied b
y deep blasts from factory and warehouse whistles on land. Ships' bells were rung, the crowd cheered, and a cargo ship lying at anchor outside the harbor began to send up crackling signal rockets which burst in a shower of stars and slowly settled on the water ahead of us in a blood-red carpet of smoke. It was a royal farewell that almost scared us. Time had not allowed us to test our vessel before departure. And now we stood on our strange boat, tugging experimentally as the curious rigging and fiddling about with two parallel, oarlike rudders, set aslant, of a type no man had tried since the last Egyptians recorded the system for posterity on their tomb walls, before the artists and their boats vanished from the surface of the earth. What if we could not make the mechanism
work? What if we came swimming back to the wharf from papyrus bundles scattered to the four winds by the waves outside the harbor wall? The whole harbor began moving behind us. An escort of fishing smacks, yachts and motorboats followed us past the farthest breakwater, while all the sirens and bells continued to sound as if for the New Year celebrations. Above us circled an Embassy plane and a helicopter that had come down from the capital, Rabat. Outside the breakwater the uproar died away, the ocean seas began their swell, the smallest escort vessels turned around and put back to calm waters and we were alone with the Atlantic and the big fishing boats accompanying us. Our four rowboats cast off, and with good wishes in Arabic the oarsmen headed back with the smaller motorboats toward the high pier.
For the first time we hoisted Ra's sail. Large and heavy, made of strong Egyptian sailcloth, it was a good twenty-six feet high and twenty-three feet wide along the yardarm at the top, narrowing downward in the ancient Egyptian manner to a mere fifteen feet, the breadth of the papyrus boat itself, at the lower end near the deck. A couple of light puffs of wind barely pushed the heavy yard clear of the straddled mast, showing that the good offshore wind was already dying away. And then the big, wine-colored sail hung almost motionless, displaying its rust-red sun disk, the bright, freshly painted symbol of Ra. The whole row of flags arrayed in alphabetical order hung idly like a colorful clothesline over the cabin roof: Chad, Egypt, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Norway, U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., flanked at either end by the United Nations' optimistic flag, with its white globe on a light-blue field.
Abdullah and I stood, each holding the tiller of a big rudder-oar, on the bridge behind the basket cabin, looking anxiously from the slack sail to the white breakers washing against the stone breakwater only a few hundred yards away. Were they coming closer? Yes. A sighting from the tip of the jetty up to a tower on the fortress wall showed that we were drifting slowly back toward land. Perhaps the long, mountainous point, which projected to the north and sheltered Safi, prevented the offshore wind from filling the sail. We tossed a rope end to the nearest fishing smack and soon we were moving at full speed in a straight line out to sea, with an escort of fishing smacks putt-putting all round us. At this speed we were not obeying
the laws of nature. The first thing to happen was that a Hne with a net full of live lobsters that we were towing spun into our wake and wound itself round one rudder-oar, whieh bent in an ominous arc and threatened to break. A slash with a sharp knife, and the oar blade was saved, but several days' banquets vanished in the waves behind us.
The next thing to happen was that one of the three thiek rowing oars we had bound to the side of Ra as a leeboard was snapped across by the speed alone. It was to this very oar blade that Norman had nailed our future life line to family and friends ashore: the copper plate that was to act as ground to our little portable radio. Metal obviously had no place on a springy papyrus boat; the oar blade had broken at the exact spot where the copper plate ended and was barely saved by being trailed along by the grounding vdre.
This was no good. Wind or no wind, we would have to manage on our own. We stopped the escort, hauled all our ropes on board, and hoisted our sail again. We noticed how violently the big fishing smacks round us were rolling by comparison with our own raftlike vessel which, like its predecessor, the balsa raft Kon-Tiki, simply rocked gently up and down on the long rollers. The wind blew first in light puffs, then with steadily increasing strength. But it was no longer an offshore wind. The northeasterly typical of the time of year had veered to the northwest and was blowing straight toward the low cliffs that stretched southward from the safe harbor of Safi. We were still so close inshore that we could make out all the houses. We could even see the treacherous surf creeping silently up and dovm the mustard-brown cliffs where the green lowlands of Morocco washed their sun-heated fagade in their eternal confrontation v^dth the sea. That was where the wind would send us, unless we succeeded in maneuvering the papyrus bundles.
All seven of us on board were equally in suspense about one thing—how the steering mechanism would function. This was the greatest lurking factor of uncertainty, for we had no teacher. Our hope was that, beyond the Moroccan coast, wind and current would carry us directly away from land so that we would have a week or two for experiment without risk of being washed up against the cliffs. It was the coast we were afraid of, not the open sea. We had avoided the sea outside the estuary of the Nile for our experiment, for fear of being washed up on the coast before we had discovered how the Egyp-
tian steering system worked. Out in the open Atlantic, off Morocco, we assumed there would be room for trial and error, because the elements there usually carried flotsam straight out to sea.
We had constructed the Ra's steering device according to the numerous models and wall paintings from the earliest Egyptian era. We had tried in vain to procure the cedar from Lebanon that the Egyptians had used for these huge rudder-oars, but the few surviving cedars in the ancient Phoenician kingdom were now protected in a national park. So we had to make do with a heavy Egyptian wood cenehar, for the bipod mast, and we had carved two twenty-five-foot steering oars, with blades as large and wide as the average writing desk, from an African jungle tree the Moroccans call iroco. These were now made fast slantwise aft on either side of Rcz's peaked stern. The lower part of the shaft, close to the blade, rested on a solid log lashed on across the boat aft. About twelve feet farther up and forward, the oar rested on a thinner cross log, which also served as the stern guardrail on the bridge. Where each of the two oar shafts met these crossbeams they lay in a rounded groove lined with leather and were rigidly lashed with thick ropes so that the oars could not jump out or swing sideways, but could only rotate round their own longitudinal axis. This made them useless as steering oars in the ordinary sense of the word. They could not be used like the long, free-swinging oars in the stern of Kon-Tiki, because they were tightly strapped top and bottom. Instead, each of them had a tiller of hardwood lashed fast at right angles across the shaft near the top, and a long thin rod hung horizontally from the end of one tiller to the other, secured with freely moving rope hinges, so that if a single person stood in the middle and pushed this horizontal rod from one side of the bridge to the other, both oars turned together round their own central axis, like two parallel, slanting rudders. The system was so ingenious and apparently different from the steering devices used by living peoples today that we all cheered with relief when for the first time I tentatively pushed the suspended crossbar to port and Ra slowly, but co-operatively as an amiable horse, obeyed the signal by turning her bows to starboard. I promptly pushed the bar over the starboard side and Ka swung slowly to port.
There was no doubt about it. We were using a steering mechanism which in historical perspective represented the forerunner of
the rudder, the missing hnk between a primitive steering oar and a modern tiller. At some point in antiquity the Egyptians had discovered that pushing a long steering oar sidevi'ays to make a sailing boat turn was unnecessarily laborious. All you had to do was to twist the shaft so that the blade was not perpendicular in the water and the vessel would swing just as well. So they put a crossbar on the shaft and had invented the steering device we were now testing. The thin rod suspended crosswise between the two tille
rs was simply an improvement to enable a single helmsman to control an oar on each side of the boat at the same time. All that was needed then was for the sailors of old gradually to discover that if they placed the oar blade with the shaft vertical instead of slanting, and continued to twist the little crosswise handle, they had invented what we know today as the rudder.
The Ra Expeditions Page 19