The Ra Expeditions

by Thor Heyerdahl

  By sundown we had created an orchestra from Carlo's kitchen tools. Ra was creaking so softly that we drowned the mewing of the papyrus with our chosen instruments. Carlo could not get at the galley box, so he simply served Russian dried bread and honey. The bread tasted better to us than the finest cake, but it was handed out in big black lumps as hard as coal. I had eaten a good many pieces when there was a snap and my only crowned tooth flew off across the papyrus and I sat there feeling foolish and exploring the revolting little hole with the tip of my tongue.

  "Lousy communist bread!" remarked Norman with a sidelong glance specially aimed at our Russian ship's doctor.

  Yuri bent and picked up the little chip, which he examined closely.

  "Lousy capitalist dentist!" he parried.

  With shouts of laughter, song and music the party went on until the sun-god Ra sank into the sea, right in front of the nose of his marine namesake. The shining celestial sphere seemed to be enticing our own swan-necked Ra westward, ever westward. Such eternal movements westward must have offered immense enticement to genuine sun-worshipers. Resplendent lancets which no royal crown could match radiated like a diadem from the sea's edge into the sky. A tropical sea's attempt to emulate the northern lights: first in dazzling gold, then red as blood, orange, green and violet, turning gradually to black, while the twinkling stars emerged equally slowly from their invisibility as the sun-king disappeared. His majesty had gone. His little people of the sky flocked out to join the procession to the west.

  We lay on our backs on full or empty goatskins, philosophizing. Outside the cabin there was no limit to our view, nothing to hinder or confuse our thoughts. It had been a fine day, we were full, we had feasted and laughed, now we simply wanted to look at the stars and let our thoughts linger or wander where they would.

  "You're a good guy, Yuri," said Norman. "Are there any more like you over there in Russia?"

  "Two more," said Yuri. "The rest are better on the whole. But are there any decent capitalists left in your country, now that you have come with us?"

  "Thanks for the compliment," said Norman. "If you think I'm decent, you'll have something to look forward to on the other side."

  There was a peaceful discussion on communism and capitalism, on anti-communism and anti-capitalism, on autocracy and dictatorship of the masses, on whether to prefer food or freedom, on why the people's representatives hate each other when common citizens everywhere get along so well as soon as they are able to meet. Whether the hippie movement in East and West was created by youth or by its parents, whether it would die out or increase with the advance of civilization, whether it could be thought of as a sort of warning barometer, showing that the civilization that we and our fathers had believed in and feverishly built up night and

  day was not going to be accepted by future generations. Egyptians and Sumerians, Mayans and Incas built pyramids, embalmed mummies and thought they were on the right track. They defended their ideas with slings and bows and arrows. We think they were wTong about the purpose of life. So we build nuclear missiles and go to the moon. We defend our policies with atom bombs and antimissile missiles. Now our children are beginning to sit down in protest. They hang Indian ornaments round their necks, let their hair grow and play guitars on the floor. They retreat by artificial means into themselves, a longer journey than to sun or moon.

  One grows philosophical when stars and plankton are twinkling in a world that is as it was before human beings saw it, before they got going on it with their thousands of millions of busy fingers. It is easier to be tolerant of each other's views when you are sitting together in the starlight and know that you will sink or swim together, than when you sit on opposite sides of national frontiers with your nose in a newspaper or the TV screen. There was never any heated verbal duel of a political or religious nature on board the Rd. To each his own opinion. We were supposed to represent the most extreme contrasts, and so we did, but we found that the lowest common denominator was not so low after all. It was easy to find. Perhaps it was because we seven on board saw ourselves as a unit in relation to our only common neighbors, who happened to breathe through gills and had quite different interests and ambitions from our own. In spite of ever-thing, human beings were confoundedly similar, even if some had beaky noses and others flat.

  There was a splash in the darkness, a heavy fish flailed against papyrus deck and wicker wall. A jubilant shout from Georges announced that he had speared a two-foot-long dolphin. By the light of the fishing lamp we saw squid keeping pace with us by swimming backward in jerks with all their arms stretched over their heads. They filled themselves with water and forced it out in powerful squirts that shot them backward through the water. The jet system. They had acquired it as a means of escape from their pursuers. They acquired it before we did. The cachalot whale that had visited us could dive to a depth of three thousand feet, where the tremendous pressure was a hundred times that of the atmosphere,

  and yet it would not bang its head against the bottom in the absolute darkness, because it had a built-in radar. It had acquired it before we did.

  "Yuri, as an atheist, do you think there may be an intelligent system in all that, twinkling up there among the constellations, when no human beings have been up there to put things in order yet?"

  "I'm not a real atheist, it's just that I don't believe in all that nonsense that goes on in church."

  "In any case, Darwin and the church agree that sun and moon, fish, birds and monkeys were created first. When man got his chance at last, everything was ready and waiting. In fact, now we are simply trying to find out how our own brains and intestines as well as the entire universe is composed and made to function."

  It was pleasant to lie completely relaxed in friendly comradeship vdth a peaceful sea and to gaze up at exactly the same view that seafarers and desert wanderers had gazed up at for thousands of years before us. Modern city dwellers, dazzled by street lights, have lost the starry sky. The astronauts are trying to find it again. I dozed. We decided we would all go to bed except for the watch. We had hard days behind us and did not know what was to come. Another storm would be no joke. The afterdeck was not there to protect us. We had spread canvas over the short back wall and long starboard side of the cabin after torrents of water from the stern had poured down the necks of those of us sleeping with heads against the back wall. I thought with mixed feelings of my chief impressions of the last few days, before we had come out here into calmer seas.

  The first night, after being robbed of both our rudder-oars off the Cape Verde Islands, Yuri and Georges had worked out a temporary method by which two men at a time could steer tolerably well by simply hauling on the sheets of the sail. After all, the important thing was to keep the stern into the wind, so that the sail was filled and did not flap and slap against the mast. All we had to do was to ride with the weather. The first night after the Cape Verde Islands, we had been beset by huge waves that thundered the back wall of the cabin, high up, before pouring overboard on both sides of the boat. This incessant slamming against our bedhead

  had made it difficult enough to fall asleep, and if we did sleep we were soon roused to crawl out into the night and do battle with the vast canvas sail. Breaking waves and slashing canvas. We were tossed around like dolls, thrown headlong across the cargo of jars and tumbled about from cabin wall and ropes to the outermost edge of the boat. Salt water ran off our backs and faces. Back into our sleeping bags. Out again. Fourteen flying fish on deck for breakfast. Seven dolphins caught in a row. Crazy Georges. Abdullah cannot eat them all. Let them swim with us, then we will have them fresh when we need them. Two disappeared in the pool aft, one swam about under the bridge and one hid under the steering spar. There was an underwater battle between fish and man before they were caught in bare hands. The fish was one powerful slippery bundle of muscle. One hand round the narrow tail root and one through the gills prevented the floundering fish from following the water as it poured overboard from the rolli
ng vessel. The crossbeam on which the bridge poles were supported slid away. A crack, and the whole bridge gave way. Rope, rope! Water over our heads. Splendid job. Now it's holding. Enjoying yourself. Carlo? It's just like in the Alps. Don't go to sleep here, Georges. We'll carry you to bed. Damn, how my arms ache! Was I asleep? Not quite. Are we still on the Ra? Yes, the papyrus is creaking. There are stars outside; we are far away from the misty coast.

  It was difiicult to keep the first days after Cape Verde distinct in one's mind. Time flowed together. But in the logbook is a note that June 20 was the hardest day up to then. On June 21 the entry reads that the night was the worst we had seen, and the day no better. But even without sail or rudder-oars, and with sea anchors trailing to slow us down, we were still able to log a day's progress of thirty-one nautical miles toward America. This was the lowest recorded on the voyage. On June 22 the submerged end of the steering spar had such an unsteadying effect on our course that Georges had to dive down in diving mask and saw the thick spar off under water. While three of us hung completely or partly overboard in the twilight a dozen black-and-white spotted porpoises came up from below and played along the papyrus roll we were hanging on, so close that we could touch them. The small whales gamboled up to the reed bundles and rolled about without a splash

  in graceful play, more like soap bubbles than hundreds of pounds of solid muscle. With Georges overboard and Abdullah and me sitting on the submerged edge, the waves rhythmically rising to our chests, we were meeting the whale in the whale's own habitat. These mammals did not disturb us and we let them play in peace in our common bath water. That day we discovered for the first time that the waves which struck the cabin wall were forcing their way further in, over the v^ckerwork cabin floor, between the wooden boxes we slept on. The bottom of the case where Norman kept his radio was soaking wet. The cabin was beginning to tilt so sharply to starboard that several of the men tried to turn their mattresses crosswise.

  On June 25 atmospheric conditions were strange. The temperature vacillated between cold and tropical heat. Once or twice there was a wave of heat carrying a distinct scent of dry sand, just as I had known it in the Sahara. Had I not had confidence in our approximate position, I would have thought that we were navigating just off a desert coast. Only later did I learn that sand from the Sahara regularly rains down on Central America. That night the seas were worse than ever. We had to move everything we could even farther toward the foredeck. All the boxes we had been sleeping on in the cabin were awash, although the pliant Ra was hurling herself over the chaos of waves as never before. She rode like a magic carpet.

  So it was that we eventually emerged into quiet weather, with a fresh breeze, rolling seas and sunshine. The trade v^nd blew steadily from the northeast and the elements behaved more or less as one is entitled to expect in these latitudes. As the weather changed, the first shark came patrolling toward us and suddenly skimmed so close by Georges' legs that he had to draw them in. But it simply glided on and disappeared in our wake.

  June 28 was one of the most splendid days we spent on Ra and everyone busied himself peacefully with his own affairs. Georges sat in the door opening with Abdullah, teaching him to read and write in Arabic. Others sat with laundry, fishing rods or diaries. Then we heard a heart-rending wail—from the equable Norman! For a while he had been overside near the port bow, securing the broken oar blade that, held his grounding plate, but now he was hanging as

  if paralyzed, his face contorted, unable to pull his body on board. Everyone thought the worst: shark. We ran to pull him up. There were no limbs missing, but the culprit was hanging on. The lower part of Norman's body was entwined in the glistening pink filaments of a big Portuguese man-of-war. Norman was in a coma when he was dragged into the cabin and given cardiac stimulants.

  "Ammonia," said Yuri tensely. "We have no ammonia. It's the only thing that helps to neutralize the caustic acid which is permeating his body. Urine is full of ammonia, all of you. This is serious."

  For two hours Yuri sat massaging Norman with a rag dipped in a coconut shell full of urine while the patient writhed in pain and convulsions until he became inert and slept. His legs and the lower part of his body were covered with red sting marks like welts. When Norman awoke and looked from his own leg to all the innocent bubbles of foam that were floating as usual on the shining waves, he shouted like a drunken man, "Look, baby men-of-war! Now the whole sea is full of them." He subsided with a bowl of hot dried-fruit soup. Next day he was still out of sorts and raged at Georges, who had suddenly got under his skin. But by evening the two of them had shaken hands and were sitting together singing cowboy songs.

  On June 30 we drifted once again into a part of the ocean covered with oil clots. We were traveling in the same direction, but with our big sail we moved much faster. Still we seemed unable to get away from them; we passed untold numbers of the black floating lumps from morning till night. Then a splendid full moon rose behind us in our wake. An unforgettable night, with moonlight on yellow papyrus and burgundy-colored sail. The stars were beginning to fade on the eastern horizon. It was no longer May, nor even June; it was the beginning of July and we were still afloat with tons of useful cargo left.

  On July 1 a ship bristling with masts and derricks appeared on the horizon to the northwest and passed us at close range, heading southeast. We were just crossing the shipping route between the U.S.A. and South Africa. We all stood on the bridge, the cabin roof and the steps of the mast to watch almost with nostalgic feelings this pleasant fragment of our own twentieth century until

  the last masthead disappeared over the horizon. Then we were alone again with the sea. More alone than before. Georges stayed up on the bridge, humming in a rather melancholy manner. Then he gave a roar.

  ''They're coming back!"

  It was true. Over the horizon where it had just completely disappeared the same ship hove into view again and now it was heading straight for us. The crew must have been discussing the extraordinary contraption they had passed and now the skipper had decided to come back .and take a closer look. The ship came steaming straight toward the Ra. African Neptune, New York, was the name on the bow. It swung in alongside Ra, with all the decks filled with waving people.

  "Can we do anything for you?" Norman yelled to his countr}'-men, bubbling with exhilaration.

  "No thanks, but perhaps there's something we can do for you," came the shout from the bridge.

  "Fruit!" the crew of the Ra called back in many languages.

  But the Ra herself continued to forge ahead and was just about to run her papyrus nose straight into the iron hull when our frantic shouts and gestures startled the skipper into starting up the propeller and hastily getting out of our way. Having something delivered to such an uncontrollable wanton as Ra was not easy. The sea-god's namesake made a wide detour round the sun-god's little namesake and as she crossed our line of drift a bag attached to an orange life belt was thrown into the sea. It whirled away far out of reach in the boil of the big ship's propeller. Georges had already put on his rubber suit for protection against Portuguese men-of-war and dived out with a long line tied round his body. When we pulled him in he brought an unforgettable catch: thirty-nine oranges, thirty-seven apples, three lemons, four grapefruit and a wet roll of American magazines. We waved and yelled our thanks. The foredeck had suddenly turned into a rainbow banquet. Fresh fruit and fruit salad in a world of salt. Cores for Safi and seeds for Sinbad.

  Here, in mid-Atlantic, we enjoyed some of our best days on board the Ra. Abdullah's papyrus bulwark and Carlo's jungle of

  guy ropes on all sides of the cabin and stern seemed to be holding us up a little more or less by the hair. Seen from the rolling ocean vessel we must have looked quite presentable. We on board the reed boat were all equally impressed by the incredible strength and loading capacity of the papyrus. Paper boat? Perhaps. But it was only the wooden parts that broke. Papyrus had proved to be a first-class building material. Its strength in sea water h
ad been completely misjudged by the theorists, whether anthropologists or papyrus experts. It was equally wrong to believe, as we ourselves had believed, that the ancient papyrus boats, as painted on the walls in Egypt, were primitive vessels. The only thing an Egyptian papyrus ship had in common with a raft was that both floated equally well even if their bottoms were holed. Both the Ra and the Kon-Tiki were raft-ships, because they had no hull. But otherwise, to compare the reed boat Ra with the log raft Kon-Tiki was like comparing an automobile with a cart. Even a horse can make a cart go, but to drive a car you need instruction and a license. We had neither. We had set off on a sophisticated Egyptian vehicle, never dreaming that it was so specialized and unlike a simple raft in that one had to know the ingenious controls to make it work. It was made of first-class materials, but, like a car, if one was not instructed in the purpose and use of all the parts one could easily ruin something important before discovering by experiment how to make it all function. We were learning constantly, both from our failures and from our successes.