The Ra Expeditions

by Thor Heyerdahl

  Fifteen minutes passed. It was early afternoon and only our second day at sea. Abruptly a squall struck the sail again. We leaped to the tacks and sheets as one man when we heard the first thud of the heavy, wet roll of sail, which now hung bunched together at the masthead, and hammered the rigid yard against the mast. The next blow sounded like a scream for help from the masthead, and our hearts contracted as we heard the blow extend into a terrifying crash and a crack that jarred bone and marrow. We looked up and saw the whole, indispensable yard that held the sail outstretched slowly sagging on either side of the central point, while the sail shrank inward

  Captions for the following four pages

  62. Lunch round the chicken coop. When Norman and Thor took too long, Safi the monkey and Sinbad the duck came to book seats for the next sitting. (Above)

  63. The author's "nosometer," notched with a knife, measured the angle of the Pole Star and thus showed Ra's precise latitude. (Below)

  64. LI2B calling. Norman operating the little transmitter that kept in touch with radio hams, while the author reads a report. Yuri sits outside the cabin door with the monkey. (Above)

  65. Change of watch every two hours through the night. Georges struggles to wake up when Santiago and Yuri go off duty. (Below)

  66. Basket cabin interior. Norman calculating the day's position, which is logged by the author. (Above)

  67. The weeks pass and hair and beards grow. Georges trims Santiago. (Below)

  68. The steering oar breaks again and the blade is salvaged by Yuri, Thor and Abdullah. (Above)

  69. The logs snapped and the steering oars were in constant need of repair, while the papyrus rolls bent like rubber. (Below)

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  Captions for the preceding four pages

  70. At the masthead. Norman was the expedition's only professional sailor. (Above)

  71. "No more beard, after a year on the South Pole icecap," said Yuri, rigging a shaving mirror on the broken rudder-oar. (Below)

  72 and 73. Atlantic pollution. Ra lay so low in the water that the expedition could see asphalt-like clumps of oil in countless numbers all over the ocean. The photo below was taken by Georges, swimming on a life line.

  74. Papyrus life belt. Egyptian Georges reviving the art of his ancestors (see photo 12). (Above)

  75. Leisure pursuits. Georges teaching Abdullah to write in Arabic. (Below)

  like a bat folding its wings. Sharp splinters of broken wood stuck out of the yard like angry claws. We had to lower the whole mess to prevent the canvas from being ripped to shreds by the broken wood. And we were only two days out of port. Two days.

  No sooner was the wreckage of the broken yard and sail lying in a heap on deck than Ra became as docile as before and our magic reed rolls continued to undulate in the desired direction like a tame sea serpent with us on its back.

  ''There you are, you see/' said Carlo, and crawled into bed, gratified.

  Abdullah scurried aft and washed himself up to the knees and elbows for his next prayer to Allah. Yuri sat down chuckling with his pipe and diary in the door opening and I sat down beside him with my whittling.

  "Everything under control?" asked Santiago, cautiously sticking his nose out of his sleeping bag.

  "Everything," we chorused. "Everything. Now we have broken everything that can be broken. Now there is only the papyrus left."

  The rest of the afternoon passed peacefully inside the cabin while the storm howled outside. We had not seen a ship, but shared the night watch between us, because we were lying right on the coastal shipping lane round Africa. We were constantly climbing up to the masthead on the lookout for a light from land. Collisions with ships and the perilous cliffs on shore were the only things we feared.

  Half an hour after midnight I was shaken awake by Carlo, who was leaning over me, holding a kerosene lantern. With wide, anxious eyes he whispered that there were lights all along the horizon on the port bow. We were being driven sidelong by a strong northwester, straight toward them. I had gone to bed fully dressed and had only to tie on my life line before crawling out on deck. A bitingly cold wind of moderate strengtii, and an overcast sky. Through the pitch-black night I saw all the lights spread out along the horizon. As Carlo said, they lay ahead of us in our line of drift. Four were very large and another faint. It had to be the Moroccan coast. Carlo was up at the swaying masthead. We seemed to be approaching fast. The other three fit men were turned out. Now we would have to try to row our reed bundles to save ourselves from a tragic fate on the rocks.

  DOWN THE AFRICAN COAST TO CAPE JUBY

  1«1

  Then both Carlo and I thought we ghmpsed a green hght. Another, and a red one too. It was not land! A scattered fleet of big fishing smacks was sailing straight toward us! Blue with cold, the crew crawled back to bed. Soon afterward three big, rolling vessels rumbled close past our bows. A fourth lay broadside to us after stopping its engine so that Ra was heading straight for the pitching ship's side. I shone my flashlight on cabin wall and papyrus rolls and blinked "Ra OK, Ra OK." The big sea-fishing boat started up again and glided away, so slowly that we barely avoided a collision. It sent some incomprehensible flashes from the masthead and gradually disappeared in the darkness. Georges stood watch, wrapped like an Egyptian mummy in vdnd jacket and blankets, and I crawled into bed. Even hoarse shrieks from a hundred thousand tethered papyrus reeds were not enough to drown the uninhibited, rapturous humming of the son of the Nile, which the stern wind blew in through the thin wickerwork wall, all that separated our cozy den from the ferocious universe outside.

  It was still cloudy when day dawned, our third day on board. The wind was less fierce, but the seas were more agitated than ever. We observed with satisfaction that the waves leaping madly round us simply lifted us into the air. The sea carried us forward gingerly like a ball and not even the most treacherous breakers managed to pour water on deck. The whole cargo was dry. With neither sail nor rudder, with neither sextant nor position, with no land in sight, the third day was a day of peace, during which we managed to finish splicing one rudder-oar and reinforced the middle section of a long reserve spar that was to replace the broken yard.

  Abdullah was busy washing his smooth-shaven head for prayer when he stopped and uttered a hoarse cry of protest. The sea certainly was not pure! Someone had done his business out there and he had smeared it on his head. In the bottom of Abdullah's canvas bucket large and small black lumps were circulating. We looked overboard. Hundreds of similar clots were floating past us on both sides. Soft, asphalt-like lumps. An hour later they were still floating just as thickly round us. It must be the waste from a tanker. From the masthead, we looked for the culprit, but there was no ship in sight, and the sea continued to be covered with black lumps all day.

  Toward afternoon we drifted past a big moonfish that lay idly on the surface, and later we were visited by nearly a hundred porpoises which suddenly surged up round us, leaped vertically out of the waves in a cheerful reel, and gave Abdullah indescribable pleasure before disappearing as suddenly as they had arrived.

  The fourth day was noticeably warmer and calmer and the sun appeared through rifts in the clouds. For a long time we could clearly see the distant blue silhouette of the mainland rising in a couple of hump-shaped mountains. Santiago was really sick but Norman was much better, with no fever, and Yuri allowed him to crawl out and take the sun's meridian. But since we had no chronometer on board and the emergency radio could no longer pick up Safi radio, we lacked the to-the-second time accuracy required to fix a reliable position. This worried the two men in the cabin, because Norman thought that since we could still see the mainland we would not be able to pass outside the Canary Islands. We were drifting into t
he dangerous passage between the island Fuerte Ventura and Cape Juby on the African mainland. Santiago, who had lived in the Canary Islands as a boy, could confirm what Norman's reference books showed, that Cape Juby was the terror of all sailors because from the rocks a treacherously low sandbank juts out like a tongue into the most dangerous ocean current, just where the African coast turns south.

  We were sitting forward on the heap of sail having a meal when we heard an eager yell from the ever-observant Abdullah, who had already finished eating.

  "Horses! Horses!" He corrected himself: "Hippos!"

  We looked where he was pointing and in a moment they came surging up again, two great whales that squinted at us v^th small indolent eyes and puffed through their blowholes, spouting up a mixture of air and spray. Abdullah had never seen such big hippos in Chad and it made his day. That a mammal could have a fish's tail seemed to him utterly preposterous, and yet one of the whales raised its tail politely to wave good-by and Abdullah was dumfounded at the inventiveness of Allah.

  On the fifth day we awoke to a biting north wind and a violently restless sea. We put on all the clothing we owned. Abdullah's teeth chattered. For five days breaking seas had been flinging themselves

  constantly against Rd's starboard beam just as we had calculated, because the whole of our journey would lie in the belt of the northeast trade winds. For this reason we had built the cabin's door opening on the opposite, that is the left or port side, which would be in the lee. We had also displaced the entire cabin and the heavier part of the cargo toward the starboard side so that the wind that filled the big sail from that side would not succeed in capsizing the whole boat. Both we and our advisers were well aware that sailing boats must be loaded with the main weight on the windward side in order not to capsize. By the fifth day bitter experience was beginning to show us that in this respect a papyrus boat turns counter to every other boat in the world. It is the only sailing boat that must be loaded more heavily on the lee side. The reason is that on the windward side the papyrus absorbs many tons of sea water above the water line, because waves and spray are always washing up over the whole side of the boat, whereas everything above the water line on the lee side remains dry and light. The weight of water on the exposed v^ndward side gradually becomes so enormous that the vessel heels over against the wind instead of with it in the normal way.

  It was too late to move the cabin amidships. It was lashed fast with stout rope running crosswise right through the bottom of the papyrus boat. We moved all loose cargo from starboard to port but that did not seem to be enough. The papyrus above the water line on the starboard side must have absorbed several tons of sea water, which now accompanied us on our voyage as an invisible cargo, weighing more than the few hundred pounds of food and drinking water that we had managed to transfer to the other side. We were actually sailing in a vessel that listed chronically to v^ndward,

  Norman was at last completely restored and while the rest of us restowed the cargo he tried to secure the unruly copper plate under the water so that he could make radio contact and thus get an accurate time. He had good reason to suspect that we were nearer the coast than he had estimated without chronometer time yesterday, and that we were actually drifting straight toward land at Cape Juby.

  During the night a full gale blew up. The v^dnd howled through all the mast stays and Ra seemed to grow more and more dislocated. The stormy seas flung themselves on us more savagely than before.

  We kept double watch all night in order not to be caught unaware by the sandbanks of Cape Juby, and we kept a close eye on all our ropes. Not a line had snapped. Not a papyrus reed had worked loose. But the timber of the bridge ground so violently against the wicker corner of the cabin that everything within that corner was covered with an even powdering of fine sawdust. Santiago was suffering from insomnia, for at night it was almost impossible to get a wink of sleep unless one was dead tired, as the cases heaved about beneath us, while cabin, bridge and masts swayed out of step, making a racket like a thousand cats with their tails stuck between the ropes. The whole cabin was also leaning so severely to starboard that no one could lie on his side without rolling over. The others lay four in a row, but we, lying feet-to-feet with them, were only three because the radio and navigation corner were on our side. Abdullah was always rolling down on Georges who rolled down on Santiago, until Yuri, who was at the bottom of the slope, received the others with knees and arms because the wall would not allow him to roll farther. I had bundled all my extra clothing under the starboard edge of the mattress and Carlo had done the same, so that we would not roll down onto Norman and the radio corner.

  The storm continued to rage all night, with waves twelve to fifteen feet high. The gusts sent a fine salt spray over the boat. During the morning of the seventh day Ra seemed, oddly enough, to become a little less disjointed; the ropes seemed to be tauter. The crest of an enormous, towering sea, which quite inexplicably broke over us aft and buried Norman to the waist, had difficulty in running out through the papyrus. The sea spray on the deck and the moisture from below had apparently made the papyrus reeds swell until they filled all the ropes and all the interstices. So the vessel seemed more rigid and robust than before; it was just unfortunate that she listed so badly to starboard.

  We were all filled with admiration at the splendid way in which Ra rode out the storm; then Norman informed us that we were heading for the rocks. We had a choice between trying to hoist the sail in the powerful north wind or drifting straight toward land. We agreed unanimously to try to hoist the sail, two-thirds spread, on the newly reinforced yard. Even Santiago came staggering out, and with the whole crew in action we got the sail up and the one spliced rudder-

  oar out into the water astern. We skimmed like a flying fish over the crests, away from land. Soon afterward we heard another crack, the thick shaft of the spliced rudder-oar snapped like a matchstick and we could haul only the blade on board again. But the landlubbers had been gradually turning into a team of seamen. In one tiger-spring Abdullah was there, grasping the port side corner of the flapping sail, and Santiago crawled out and hooked himself fast beside him. Carlo and Yuri vanished without a word behind the cabin on the starboard side and slackened the sheets. Georges, clad only in his underpants, grasped one oar and rowed the stern up into the wind while Norman and I adjusted the small vertical oars until Ra, with no helmsman, pitched again over the wave crests like a weighty fish. So we held our course for the rest of the day, without a single reed being damaged by the storm. It was the thick wooden structures, not the thin reeds of the hull, which presented us with problems.

  Next night the storm died down, but not the seas, which were running up to eighteen or twenty feet high. The cabin, no longer symmetrical, was leaning to windward like a tipped hat. I crawled out on deck in the darkness before my own night watch to survey the vessel. When I crawled under the sail to get a clear view ahead, my heart almost stopped beating. On the starboard bow was a tall broad lighthouse, illuminated with colored lamps and surrounded with a multitude of other lights. We were headed to the left of the whole immobile complex and accordingly bound straight for land. This lighthouse, which lay so far out, could only be Cape Juby.

  With feverish haste we began turning the sail to alter course as best we could without rudder-oars. This was not enough; we just began to lose leeway and simply continued to approach land to the left of all the lights. With hearts beating we quickly realized that we could not pass outside, that we were racing blindly toward the invisible rocks. It struck us in the last minute that the lights were rocking slightly as if tower and houses were built on a floating pier rather than on sandbanks. Then we rushed past on the inside: the complex was detached from land. It proved to be a huge oil-drilling platform anchored off the African coast, lighted to the top with colored lamps to prevent collision with ships and aircraft. We just stood and stared. Then I yelled brusquely to Georges, who stood shivering, holding the little oar. Why the devil did he not pull
on some clothes

  or get back into his sleeping bag before we had another man sick in bed!

  On the seventh day we still had two-thirds of the reefed mainsail hoisted and seemed to be sailing in competition with high, surging swells traveling the same way as ourselves. Heavy banks of cloud were rolling up from both sides of Rd, but straight ahead there was a rift of blue sky between the two fronts. It all indicated that the Canary Islands and the African continent each lay hidden beneath one of the dense cloudbanks, and the blue strip of sky arched above the open stretch of sea between them. Ra willingly allowed herself to be steered toward the blue. Yuri's medical skill had got both Norman and Santiago on their feet again, but Georges was temporarily sent to bed with severe back pains after straining himself with the oar, half naked in the ice-cold night wind.