The most insidious danger on any expedition where men have
to rub elbows for weeks is a mental sickness that might be called "expedition fever"—a psychological condition that makes even the most peaceful person irritable, angry, furious, absolutely desperate, because his perceptive capacity gradually shrinks until he sees only his companions' faults while their good qualities are no longer recorded by his gray matter. The first duty of an expedition leader at any time is to be on guard against this lurking menace. In the days before departure this had been thoroughly impressed on the whole crew.
I was therefore not a little alarmed when on our third day out I had already heard the peaceable Carlo roaring in Italian at Georges that he might be a judo champion but he was so disorderly and messy that he needed a nanny. Georges hit back, but after a quick and heated verbal duel both of them shut up and only the papyrus could be heard creaking and whining as usual. The next day there was another explosion between the same two. Carlo was tightening a mast stay when Georges angrily threw dovra his fishing rod and ostentatiously went to bed. On the bridge Carlo confided to me that playboy Georges was beginning to get on his nerves. Carlo himself had gone to work, carrying heavy rice sacks, when he was twelve years old. He had made his own way with his bare hands without benefit of schooling. This lazy rich man's son from Cairo was a spoiled brat who simply dropped everything and expected the rest of us to tidy up for him. I promised to speak to Georges, and agreed with Carlo that Georges did not yet quite understand the spirit of expedition teamwork; to him this was all a new sort of game, a contest of endurance and muscle power. But Carlo must also try to understand that up to now Georges had only lived in a home where he simply threw everything down without a thought and yet always found it in its right place, because the house servants or his wife or his mother picked it up and kept everything tidy. Carlo had learned in the school of life, Georges had not. We would have to teach him.
Soon afterward I found a moment alone on the bridge vidth Georges. He was unhappy because he had answered Carlo rudely, but he had done so because Carlo was always interfering in Georges' own affairs. It was easy to explain to the attentive Georges that there was no room for one's "own affairs" on board, except inside
each man's private box. No one was obliged to clear up after anyone else and no one was entitled to strew the deck, inside or out, with hand-harpoons, flippers, reading matter, wet towels, soap or toothbrushes. Everyone on board was equal and no one had to clean up after anyone but himself.
A moment later Georges' fishing tackle, tape-recorder and dirty clothes had been picked off the deck and cabin roof and Carlo and Georges were suddenly hauling together on the same rope.
The next serious threat to peace did not come until we had everything so well organized on board that we introduced galley duty. Carlo had voluntarily offered himself as permanent cook, a generous gesture that assured him great prestige and popularity. Now the rest of us were to take turns in being orderlies and cleaning up the galley boxes, pots and pans for one day at a time. The orderly list was chalked on a blackboard on the bridge and no one had remembered that Abdullah could not read. He did not realize that two of the others had taken this turn before him, and when Santiago showed him the dirty pots and the scrubber Abdullah got a headache and flung himself on his bed growling:
"I get it. You are white, Santiago, and I am black. That's why you want me to be a servant to the rest of you."
Santiago was an apostle of peace but this hurt him worse than a dagger wound. He flared up.
"And you say that to me, Abdullah!" he snarled in pure rage, "when I have spent six years fighting for Negro equality. Tlie most important thing about this whole voyage for me is the very fact that-"
Abdullah heard no more. He pulled his sleeping bag over his head. When he looked out next time he happened to catch a glimpse of me staggering aft with the dirty stack of pots. His eyes v^ddened.
"You and I have simply traded days," I explained.
Next day Abdullah was standing happily in the stern humming and singing his rhythmic African songs while he scoured the pans.
The next day brought a shock for all of us. Georges came and asked me quietly if he alone could be responsible for order in the galley for the remainder of the voyage. It was such a tedious business rotating the job and there were others who had more important duties to perform.
So it was Georges—yes, Georges—who became permanent orderly, and after that the kitchen on the Ra was spick and span and no one else had to think about washing the pots.
Then there was a time when Norman and Carlo began to react ominously against Yuri and Georges, who did nothing without express orders, while they themselves were always on the lookout for work from morning till night, quite apart from their own duties. They could accept the fact that Abdullah took no personal initiative, but the other two, who both had university backgrounds, should not simply wait for orders. At the same time Yuri, Georges and Abdullah were beginning to be irritated by Norman and Carlo. They were too military, they gave orders instead of speaking pleasantly, as one does among friends, and they did not know how to relax and enjoy the mere fact of being alive. Moreover Santiago was an artful dodger. If there was something heavy to be moved he would stoop down himself and take hold, then call the others to help, and the next moment he would be standing smiling and pointing while the musclemen, Georges, Yuri and Abdullah, did the lifting and carrying. And then there were those who felt hurt because I as leader would not chase a man out of his sleeping bag if he was taking a nap while others worked on their own initiative. The other group thought I ought to have more control over those who barked military orders instead of calling in a friendly way. This was neither a naval vessel nor a company of Alpine troops: we were seven companions on an equal footing.
But the miracle happened. Instead of all these small frictions growing into expedition fever, each man tried to understand why the others behaved as they did, and here Santiago's philosophy and research on peace versus aggression benefited all of us. Yuri and Georges began to admire Norman and Carlo because their initiative and energetic efforts improved conditions for all of us, and Norman and Carlo changed their view of Yuri and Georges, for no one on board tackled stiffer tasks or was more willing to help as soon as he was asked, or realized that help was needed. Santiago was the diplomat and psychologist who helped Dr. Yuri to bandage invisible wounds. Yuri, our doctor, was hard-working, responsible and tireless. Abdullah was admired by everyone for his lightning intelligence and eagerness to learn, and for his ability to adapt to cultural modes completely dif-
ferent from his own. Abdullah himself liked everyone, because he could see that he was one of the family although the rest of us were white. He would coax Yuri to produce a medicine that would give him, too, a beard like all the rest of us, and simply could not understand why the well-groomed Yuri would sit in the pool aft shaving every morning, when all the rest of us were beginning to grow red or black mustaches and beards. Unable to grow hair on his face, Abdullah started growing hair on his head. He stopped shaving his black scalp, which until now had shone like patent leather. Soon he had crinkly hair growing so thick that he carried his big carpenter's pencil stuck in it like a red hairpin.
Georges had a few peculiarities. During the day he slept easily. But at night he could not sleep unless he had pillow on his chest and music by his ear. For this purpose he had brought a tape-recorder with a limited number of his favorite pop tunes. The noise from the papyrus and ropes drowned the music for those of us who lay farthest away, but that same noise meant that Yuri had to give sleeping pills both to Georges himself and to Santiago. Georges' tape-recorder played Georges' tunes day and night. One day the tape-recorder disappeared. I had seen it half a minute before. At that time it was lying on the bridge and playing alone at Abdullah's feet as I passed, while Abdullah stood with his back to it, steering. Norman was hanging half overboard, making an oar fast. Carlo, Santiago and I were passing to an
d fro in the stern, moving the cargo, while Yuri and Georges worked on the other side of the cabin. Suddenly the music stopped. A minute or two passed before Georges clambered back over the cargo to start it up again. The tape-recorder was gone. Georges searched everywhere. In the stern, in the bows, under the mattress, on the cabin roof. Gone. Gone forever. Who was the culprit? The African judo champion swelled like an angry gorilla. Who, who had thrown his tape-recorder into the sea? Now the voyage was finished for him, done for: without his tunes he could not fall asleep. Who—who—who had done it? The air vibrated. No more sleep! Little Safi clambered as far up the mast as the rope reached; she did not intend to take the blame.
Abdullah could have kicked the tape-recorder overboard, but he was much too fond of music to do that. Norman could not reach it, and Georges had Yuri in sight the whole time. It could only have
been one of us three who had been passing to and fro in the stern. Carlo was the only one who went on moving jars imperturbably, as if nothing had happened. Carlo! There was no doubt in my mind. He must still be mad at Georges, so he had done it. Crazy. Unlike Carlo. Now we were all sitting on a powder keg while the fuse burned.
"Georges/' I said. "You really have turned into an orderly man, but how could you have managed to leave your tape-recorder so far out that it fell into the sea?"
"It may have been near the edge," said Georges, "but at worst it would have fallen on deck, not overboard."
Inwardly I agreed, but I had to save Carlo.
"It was right out on the starboard corner," I said firmly. "If anyone brushed against it while we were heeling sharply to starboard it would have fallen into the sea."
Georges continued to search in the most absurd places, then dropped off into his sleeping bag. He slept like a log instantly, and we did not waken him until next morning, when Carlo whistled his cheerful mealtime signal and served us a delicious breakfast of fried ham and eggs. With meals like this, who could be angry with Carlo? The tape-recorder was never referred to again on the voyage. Not until we had landed on the other side did Santiago lay his hand on Georges' broad shoulder one day and say calmly:
"Georges, how much do I owe you for the tape-recorder?"
We were all equally astounded. Georges turned slowly, terribly slowly, until he was broadside to the smiling little Mexican.
Then he himself beamed from ear to ear and said:
"What tape-recorder?"
That was the end of the discussion.
"How could you take such a risk?" we asked Santiago later. He admitted that he had been very doubtful whether he was doing right or wrong when he flipped the recorder into the sea, but he was quite convinced that if it had been allowed to go on playing the same tunes much longer one of us would have gone insane and hit the owner over the head with it.
While the weeks passed with the seven of us in the cramped cabin crowded together as if we were at a non-stop party, Ra rolled on in the center of an unchanging horizon that accompanied us like
IN THE CLUTCHES OF THE SEA
209
a magic circle. From June 4 to 9 the sea ran in high but gentle swells, the wind was light, and some of the men felt the urge to sleep at all hours of the day. The papyrus had stopped whining and growling and had begun to purr like a cat enjoying the sunshine. Norman disclosed that he was worried. We were drifting slowly south-westward and unless the wind returned there was a risk of our being caught in the eddying currents off the coast of Mauritania and Senegal. We had come into one of the trans-Atlantic shipping lanes, constantly sighting passenger steamers and cargo vessels far and near, and on the night of June 6 a big, lighted ocean liner headed straight for us. It was steering so directly toward us that the officers on the bridge could not possibly have spotted the glow from our little kerosene lantern at the masthead, so we gesticulated violently with our flashlights. The light wind gave us very little chance of escaping with the help of the rudder-oars. The monster rumbled along, lights blazing, and was beginning to loom threateningly over us when it abruptly turned toward our starboard beam and silenced its mechanical thunder. Some angry reprimand was flashed at us from the bridge, so fast that we could only catch the word "please" before the giant glided silently past under its own impetus, a few hundred feet from the papyrus bundles. Then its propellers were churning the water again and the steel giant rumbled on its brightly lit way to Europe.
Next day we were sailing in slack winds through an ocean where the clear water on the surface was full of drifting black lumps of asphalt, seemingly never-ending. Three days later we awoke to find the sea about us so filthy that we could not put our toothbrushes in it and Abdullah had to have an extra ration of fresh water for his ritual washing. The Atlantic was no longer blue but gray-green and opaque, covered with clots of oil ranging from pin-head size to the dimensions of the average sandwich. Plastic bottles floated among the waste. We might have been in a squalid city port. I had seen nothing like this when I spent 101 days with my nose at water level on board the Kon-Tiki. It became clear to all of us that mankind really was in the process of polluting his most vital wellspring, our planet's indispensable filtration plant, the ocean. The danger to ourselves and to future generations was revealed to us in all its horror. Shipowners, industrial leaders, authorities, they would have seen the sea gliding past at a fair speed from an ordinary ship's deck and would never
have dipped their toothbrushes and noses in it week after week, as we had. We must make an outcry about this to everyone who would hsten. What was the good of East and West fighting over social reforms on land, as long as every nation allowed our common artery, the ocean, to become a sewer for oil slush and chemical waste? Did we still cling to the medieval idea that the sea was infinite?
The strange thing is that when you are bobbing over the wave crests on a few papyrus bundles, aware at the same time that whole continents are gliding past, you realize that the sea is not so limitless after all; the water that rounds the African coast in May passes along the American coast some weeks later with all the floating muck that will neither sink nor be eaten by the inhabitants of the sea.
On June lo the mnd strengthened. That same day Abdullah slaughtered our last chicken and then there was only a duck left in the poultry coop. The heavy coop was thrown into the sea, where it would gradually absorb water and sink. But no one had the heart to slaughter the duck. It was spared and christened Sinbad, and after that it waddled about the deck, to the real indignation of Safi. With a line tied to its foot and a basket as its one-room residence, it became master of the foredeck, while Safi kept to the cabin area. If one of the two wandered by an oversight into the other's tenitory it ended either with Safi screaming v^th fury because she had been nipped on her tailless behind by Sinbad, or wdth Safi leaping triumphantly home vwth a duck's feather in her hand.
During the night the seas piled up and became really fierce. Often it was quite uncanny to stand on the creaking, swaying steering bridge and see nothing in the world but a lighted patch of sail and the lamp at the masthead, which swung like an unruly moon among the stars when one glimpsed their light between racing storm clouds. Now and then a venomous snake seemed to be hissing right at one's back and a foaming wave crest would come rushing along at the height of one's head, invisible in its blackness apart from the white foam on top that seemed to be sailing alone through the air, whispering to itself. The pursuing creature reached us and lifted us in the air with its huge watery muscles, only to let us go again and drop us so deep that the next white phantom following behind hovered over us
at a still greater height. We were worn out, dead tired, after two hours' intensive night watch at the two rudder-oars, even though we were generally using only one of them, allowing the other to work in a fixed position.
The Ra Expeditions Page 25