From experience v^dth the Kon-Tiki I already knew before we set out that the most dangerous threat to raft voyagers was to have a man overboard. We could not go about and sail into the wind, at least not with our present lack of experience. A good swimmer could not catch
lyO THE RA EXPEDITIONS
up with US at the speed we were moving. We had a huge crate containing a six-man hfe raft of foam rubber lashed fast between the legs of the steering platform aft, but that was only for use in extreme emergency and could not be launched without cutting away the whole bridge. An ax hung ready for that purpose. But even the rectangular life raft, if launched, would have no chance of overtaking the Ra and we would drift separately. Carlo Mauri had made each of us a six-feet life line with a mountaineer's hook on it, and we always had this rope tied round our bodies, with the hook ready to be slipped over lashings, stays or woodwork as soon as we moved outside the cabin. Therefore, rule number one was: stay on board. Never move from one place to another without your own rope's end ready for immediate attachment.
I stuck to this rule to the point of absurdity, regardless of the weather, and told my companions about Herman Watzinger, who had only just been saved by Knut Haugland when he fell overboard from Kon-Tiki. Georges the diving champion and Abdullah the Central African had difficulty in understanding that it was not enough for them to be roped up only when alone on nightwatch, or hanging over the crossbar aft, answering the call of nature. Georges finally took the order to heart when he realized it was important to me. But every other day I continued to find Abdullah singing happily on the very edge of the papyrus roll, v^th his life line hanging down like the tail of a monkey. Finally I went for him.
"Abdullah," I said. "This water is bigger than the whole of Africa and a thousand times as deep as Lake Chad where Georges can dive to the bottom."
"Ah, oui" said Abdullah, impressed.
"And it is full of fish which eat men. They are bigger than crocodiles and swim twice as fast."
''Ah, oui," repeated the receptive Abdullah, always grateful for new knowledge.
"But don't you understand that if you fall overboard you will drown, you v^dll be eaten, you will not see America?"
A broad and fatherly smile spread over Abdullah's face and he placed a huge hand kindly on my shoulder.
"You don't understand," he said. "Look here!"
He pulled up his thick pullover and revealed a well-filled black
stomach. Round it was tied a thick piece of twine, and from the twine four small leather pouches hung against the small of his back.
"With these, nothing can happen to me/' he assured me. He had been given the pouches by his father and they had been filled by a medicine man at home in Chad. Judging by others I had seen on sale in the market place in Bol they contained leopard claws, dyed pebbles, seeds and dry scraps of plant. Abdullah pulled the jersey down again conspiratorially and nodded in triumph. Was my mind at rest now? Nothing could happen to Abdullah. But to please me he, too, agreed to rope himself up.
Abdullah's first shock came when early in the morning he rushed to tell me that salt had got into the water. Into all of it. How had it happened? I, too, was seriously alarmed and asked him which jars he had tried.
"Not a jar, there!" said Abdullah, shaken, and pointed out to sea. This was the first time we realized he did not know the ocean was salt. When I explained that it was salt all the way from Africa to America he asked wide-eyed where all that costly salt had come from. After the geological explanation he was in despair. Santiago had said we must be economical with our drinking water on board; we could only have one liter, or slightly more than one quart per man per day. Abdullah said he would need at least five times as much, because as a Moslem he had to wash arms and legs, head and face every single time he prayed. He prayed five times a day.
"You can use sea water for your prayers," I assured him. But Abdullah could not. According to his religion, pure water must be used for the washing ceremony. There was salt in this.
The problem of the salt was still under discussion when Abdullah had another fright. Georges had pulled the sleepy baby monkey, Safi, out of her bed in a perforated cardboard suitcase where she had spent the night, and in her excitement the littie lady had made a tiny pool on Abdullah's mattress. Now Abdullah was really beside himself. Had the monkey done this? If a dog or monkey did his business on a believer's clothes he could not pray to Allah for forty days! Abdullah began to roll his eyes in utter desperation. Forty days without Allah!
Georges settled Abdullah's moral scruples with a white lie. It was not the monkey, it was sea spray. Practical wishful thinking made
Abdullah accept the explanation without poking his nose further into the slightly odorous problem. I decreed that in any case the monkey must begin to wear trousers and in addition must never again be allowed to sit on Abdullah's mattress.
"Abdullah/' I added, "you who need pure water for your prayers, have you ever thought how many monkeys and dogs live round all the wells in Chad? Out here there isn't a dog for miles around and the little that Safi produces we leave behind us. There is nowhere in the world where you can find purer water than at sea."
Abdullah listened and thought. A moment later he was subjecting a canvas bucket of sea water to lengthy scrutiny. Then the ceremonial washing began, at breakneck speed and with the graceful dexterity of a conjuror. After that Abdullah went up to the compass, where Yuri helped him to find the approximate direction of Mecca. With the sincerity of a convinced monk he knelt on his own mattress in the cabin opening and bowed repeatedly toward the east with his forehead to the mattress cover. Then he took out his long string of beads and began to reel off prayers. The prayers ran along the string of beads like peas out of a sack, but Abdullah's spirit was so genuine that all of us, whether Catholic or Protestant, Copt, nature philosopher, or atheist, had to respect his pious conviction.
The wind was increasing in strength. It became almost violent. Without rudder-oars we had absolutely no control of the craft, but Ra still chased along in a seemingly perfect direction. Abdullah, now feeling clean inside and out, joined me on the bridge with knife and drill. We had to find some way of lashing the broken oar blades back to their shafts. Abdullah was in high spirits, humming Central African jungle tunes while struggling to keep on his feet vidth his long white tunic catching the gusts of wind. Carlo joined us with his alpine knot-craft and we had almost repaired the first oar when the wind became really bad. A couple of powerful gusts from different directions suddenly took the sail aback and it twisted before we had a chance to readjust the sheets and tacks.
A head wind flung itself with all its strength against the big sail. While the heavy yard, twenty-three feet long, from which the sail hung, crashed so violently against the top of the straddled mast that the wood at the top threatened to break, the whole of the big mainsail flapped in savage jerks, threatening to split itself against the mast.
The thrashing sail overturned fruit baskets and caught on the chicken coop, making the poultry cackle and squawk to rival our shouted orders. A square provision basket was suddenly bobbing about in our wake. No one knew what was in it, because quartermaster Santiago was lying in bed with his list of inventory. Yuri almost had to hold him and Norman down in their bunks by force while I clambered onto the bridge and tried to lead the battle against the giant sail. A man's voice was faint in the stormy gusts that flung his words out over the foaming wavetops, together with the flaps, bangs and screeches from sail and papyrus bundles.
It was no good trying to lower the sail now; it would fly out to sea like a kite. We must get the vessel back on course, partly by turning the sail and partly by turning the hull. Big Georges, with an ordinary oar braced against the raised papyrus tail, was set to row Rd's stern section up into the wind. An umbrella-shaped canvas sea anchor was slung overboard on a long rope; nothing is more effective in reducing speed and keeping stern to the wind. On the bridge I saw the compass needle turning slowly while I fou
ght desperately to hang on without being pulled overboard by a sheet that jerked and lashed like a whip. I tried to secure it to the side of the bridge, making sure at the same time that the incomplete crew was hauling on the right ropes and yet properly secured by life lines. In the gusts of wind I bawled orders in Italian to Carlo, in English to Yuri, in French to Abdullah and in English, French or Italian, just as it came, to Georges, but the truth was that I did not even know the names in my own motiier tongue of the ropes I was asking them to haul on. So my admiration for the powers of comprehension of this international team of landlubbers reached a peak as the day went on.
When we had salvaged the precious sail, fastened the sheets, bound all our ordinary rowing oars like Indian guara to the side of the ship fore and aft and hauled the sea anchor in again, everything proceeded peacefully, as before. We had a httle breathing space in which I tried to invent some short words that everyone could understand when it was vital to save seconds, should anything of the sort happen again. Between the powerful gusts of wind, weak-voiced fragments of good advice emerged through the wickerwork walls from the feverish Norman. He had done his utmost in advance to teach all the rest of us the English expressions for pulling in, slacking off, or letting go
the halyard which hoisted the sail, the tack controlling each end of the long yardarm from which the sail hung, and the sheets attached to the sail's two loose bottom corners, to port and starboard. But practice had now shown us that, since three of the men fit for duty understood either little English or none, the result was always a gamble if I shouted to Yuri or to Carlo: "Pull in starboard tack!" or to Abdullah: ''Let go port side sheet!"
No sooner were the five of us sitting, panting but triumphant, on the bridge trying to work out a few short practical expressions, Esperanto style, than warning poundings started up again in the mast. Although this time everyone was at his post in a flash, sail and craft succeeded in turning round again. This happened time after time, time after time. We drifted farther on the same course, but sidewise or sometimes even stern foremost, with sail and yard struggling at chaotic angles. We had to make sure the sail was always filled to save the yard from breaking, but sometimes we only succeeded by turning the sail to the wrong side. By turning it round outside the port leg instead of outside the starboard leg of the straddling mast, the sail would willingly fill, but then we automatically sailed almost at right angles to the course we needed in order to keep clear of land. For painfully long periods at a time we headed under full sail straight for the African coast while we rowed, hauled on ropes, wrestled with the sea anchor and tried to lash the rowing oars in different positions, guard style, in our efforts to return to the proper course. But v^dthout the big rudder-oars the boat absolutely refused to accept any compromise. The sail sent the boat either directly southeast or directly southwest; nothing in between. Every time an unruly gust turned us about, so that we were stuck with Rd's nose pointing southeast, the coast of Africa came nearer and nearer. Carlo spent his time up at the wildly sv^nging masthead, but fortunately saw no sign of land. Nevertheless we knew that the coast, which swerved inward south of Safi, bulged out again toward us further down. No sooner had we got control of the sail one way than it twisted the other way and flapped about with such violence that every one of us had to grab it and use all his weight and strength in order not to be swept out to sea. One piece of headgear after another flew overboard; the most regretted was Abdullah's rainbow-colored Moslem cap, which was practically part
of Abdullah himself. But now each man was automatically making himself fast every time we changed places. The monkey had her own private little rope and performed rapturous gymnastics upside down on the mast stays. The poultry were safe in their cage, which by now had been covered over and made fast out of range of the sail.
As the day passed the changing wind blew in such mighty gusts that there was constant danger of losing the whole rigging before we regained control of the steering. The sail would have to come down. We had no alternative but to try to lower it in the squalls.
No sooner had two men loosed the halyard, while the other three of us stood ready with the sheets to guide the yard with sail down to the deck, than a mighty blast came and swept the heavy mainsail out like a flag over the sea. Yuri and Abdullah fought desperately to recapture the loose sheet that fluttered over the wave-tops to port. The other three of us hooked feet and knees round anything we could in order not to be lifted overboard with the starboard sheet—our last chance of preventing the sail from disappearing forever beneath the waves. There was a frightful creaking from the mast and all the ropes which held it, and the papyrus bundles shrieked and heeled over so that for the first time we had an uneasy feeling that our miracle boat might actually be capable of capsizing. One thing was certain: no other fifty-foot sailing boat in the world could have withstood this gigantic pressure without immediately capsizing, unless the mast broke first.
Inch by inch we managed to recapture the yard and most of the sail, but large sections of the sail still lay overboard on the combers in folds containing many bathtubfuls of water, and in our struggles to drag this heavy weight free of the sea's grasp we knocked off yet another of our precious rowing oars, which disappeared under a wave and bobbed up tantalizingly in our wake.
"See you in America!" Carlo shouted at the oar. "But we're going faster than you!"
Soaked with sea water and laden with the weight of a yard six feet wider than the whole deck, the jumbled sail had to be turned and stowed lengthwise along K^'s port side. Triumphant, but as exhausted as if we had lasted twenty rounds in the ring, the five of us sat on top of the soggy mess of canvas, trying to restrain this re-
bellious burgundy-red flying dragon which was still jerking convulsively as its folds were inflated by the wild gusts of wind. Finally the brute was securely bound.
It was suddenly strangely quiet on board. There was only a rhythmic, peaceful creaking, which made us feel that mother sea had adopted the reed boat Ra as a marine cradle full of unruly fellows who now had to be rocked to sleep before they hurt themselves by overturning the whole cradle. Ra, stripped to the bare mast, once again set her course as she wished, parallel to land, no longer threatening to run us ashore.
I looked at Carlo. He began to smile. He chuckled. Then he began to laugh without restraint. We all stared at him.
"Now we have neither sail nor rudder-oars. There is nothing left on this craft to obey human orders any more. Nature is in command now. As soon as we stop fighting her, we can just relax and enjoy ourselves."
We began to look about us. Nothing but peace and order everywhere. No yard, no sail, no engine, no worries: here we were, rocking in a communal papyrus hammock, while the mighty ocean current took us where it liked, and that was just where we wanted to go. Abdullah crawled into the cabin and lay down with his tiny pocket radio against his ear. Georges wanted to fish. Yuri ate an orange and went off v^th the sbn to make a glass of liqueur by adding surgical spirit, while Carlo began to poke about in sacks and baskets to find the raw material for a better meal. Santiago lay motionless in the cabin with his little book of inventory and called out the numbers on the jars that contained water, dates, eggs, olives or grain for the chickens. I took the hunting knife to whittle that instrument I had been planning to make, which could give us our latitude. Then Norman could not restrain himself any longer.
"This is all very fine, fellows," he groaned. "But not for the people at home. We promised to go on the air yesterday. They have to know that everything is OK, otherwise they viall think we have gone down."
Yuri agreed and helped the feverish Norman to roll the mattress away so that they could open the locked case under his legs and pull out the little emergency transmitter with the built-in, hand-operated generator. A little later Safi radio replied clearly to Norman's call and
DOWN THE AFRICAN COAST TO CAPE JUBY lyy
was told that we had broken both rudders, but were continuing across the Atlantic Ocean with no p
roblems. He also warned them that there would be no regular contact in the future, because the oar carrying the grounding plate was broken and lying on the deck. If we dropped it overboard in the seething waves the dancing copper plate would cut through both rope and papyrus. Norman was so weak that he sank back in his sleeping bag while Yuri packed up the radio. Carlo crawled in with a hot drink.
Georges caught no fish but came into the cabin with an idea. Why not hoist the sail reefed? Even a tiny spread of sail in this wind would help us to travel faster. The sail was deliberately sewn in such a way that we could reef and lash either one or two-thirds of it, so that we could hoist only the top strip of sail if the wind was too strong. I thought this a good idea and Norman nodded feebly. The five of us crawled out on deck again, heartened by a mighty Stone Age lunch based on salt sausage and fresh vegetables. After a desperate struggle we managed to turn the yard with the water-filled bundle of sail from the port side so that it lay spread out across the vessel, projecting three feet into the waves on either side. It was difficult to reef the sail in a wind that varied in strength between stiff breeze and light storm, but with our combined efforts all went well. We lay on top of it as we inched it out over the chicken coop and the rest of the cargo, and then rolled it up until only a third of the surface was left unfurled. Great was our triumph when this narrow strip of sail filled with wind at the masthead. With the sea anchor hauled aboard and the small rowing oars bound in place, we skimmed southwestward over the wave crests, rejoicing in this fresh victory over the elements.
The Ra Expeditions Page 21