The Ra Expeditions

by Thor Heyerdahl

  On July 4 Georges shook me awake. I could see he had an anxious expression. He thought he could see water spouts in several places on the horizon. Black ribbons between sea and sky looked menacing as the sun rose, but they were simply scattered showers. Soon rain was pouring down on reed deck and wicker roof. The unaccustomed rumble of thunder woke the crew and everyone came out into the dawn to wash the salt off his hair and body. We had so much water in the jars that we did not need to collect rain. Scattered showers continued all that day, and the next, and the next. The waves flattened out as the rain subdued them, but the reed boat became completely drenched. After three days of showers it was heavy and sodden. The trade wind turned fitful and shifted here

  and there, playing idly with draperies of rain squalls. The Ra seemed to be stealing along on tiptoe, with barely a creak. Was it the calm before the storm?

  There was plenty of opportunity to swim and enjoy a fish's-eye view of the swollen strength and toughness of the papyrus bundles. One fly in the ointment was that once again, for two days running, we sailed through hundreds of thousands of small black clots traveling, as we were, to America. Out in the middle of Columbus' ocean we floated among them, and our hands turned black when we fingered them. Some were covered with small shells.

  Hundreds of long-necked barnacles and a terrified little crab had made themselves at home on Ra's belly. Now and then we saw big shoals of flying fish swimming ahead of us like herring. They were timid, but our little pilot fish and pampano, the first striped, the second spotted, became so bold that they took nips at us and bit holes in the sacks of dried fish when Carlo hung them overboard to soak.

  On July 5, Egyptian Georges saw a rainbow for the first time in his life. The sunset on the same day was at least equally vivid. Enough paint for a hundred rainbows was smeared by invisible paintbrushes across the arch of sky toward which we were sailing. Norman sat doubled up in the cabin, working with chart and ruler on a board hung on the wickerwork wall. The rest of us lay on dry straw mattresses, waiting for the calculations to be done. Through the chinks in the front wall we could see the riot of color fading while Carlo lighted the kerosene lantern, which then disappeared with him up the steps of the mast.

  ''We have now sailed 2150 nautical miles," said Norman at last. "That means we are now much more than halfway. The distance from here to the West Indies is 1300 miles, that is much less than the distance back to Safi."

  ''The tail is holding us back, otherwise we would have sailed even faster," said Yuri. "Yesterday we were down to about forty miles."

  "The tail slows us down, but the worst thing is that it makes us yaw too," Norman said. "Today we oscillated between 30° north and 30° south of the main course the whole time, although we all took turns at the rudder-oars. Sixty degrees of error, that's a lot of extra miles. I am simply measuring the shortest distance between each

  midday position. If the tail had not sent us on such a zigzag course we would have been there by now."

  "The people who knew all the tricks of the papyrus boat could have been across long ago without problems/' said Georges.

  The papyrus creaked peacefully and there was a gentle splashing behind our bedhead, as if someone were using a bathtub behind a screen.

  "I thought the sea got worse the farther out one came but it's the other way round/' murmured Santiago. "Among anthropologists we often speak about how primitive sailors might have traveled to this or that place, as long as they could keep close inshore, but that's the worst place of all!"

  "Along coasts and round islands the seas and currents are squeezed into all sorts of extraordinary eddies and backwashes," I confirmed. "In fact, close to land the sea runs amok much more easily than in the open, where swells have more room and do not bunch up into steep waves and breakers as readily. Even a storm is more dangerous on the coast."

  "The mistake," said Santiago, "is the anthropologists and other scientists are always arguing about whether reed boats and rafts can cross an ocean or not, and they never reach any agreement. But if anyone tries to find out in practice he provokes wrathful indignation, because the answer comes in an unacademic way."

  This was a problem with which both Santiago and I were intimately acquainted. I was independent and could laugh it off, but Santiago had had a hard time getting permission from his university to join in anything as "unscientific" as a voyage by reed boat. Papyrus could be tested in a bathtub. Scientists work in libraries, museums, laboratories—they do not play savage on the Atlantic.

  The only thing was that here we were, at sea, with our beards and sunburned noses, getting an answer quite different from the answers in the textbooks. A result quite different from that of the specialist who had put his papyrus stalk in a water container. If you test a bit of balsa wood in the laboratory it sinks in a week or two. But if you do as the Indians did, fell standing timber and leave it in the sea with the sap in, the unexpected happens and you can stay afloat on balsa wood for 101 days and land in Polynesia. Now, the papyrus experts had put bits of papyrus stalks in a tank of still water, and besides

  quickly losing buoyancy, the plant tissue began to develop bubbles and decay. Two weeks, maximum, the textbooks said. Seven weeks had now passed. We and tons of cargo were being carried by exactly the same type of reed that sank in the laboratory. Why? Because the specialist experimented with loose reeds in a bathtub, while we sailed a completed reed boat on the salt sea. Experience had shovm reed boatbuilders from Egypt to Peru that reed absorbs water through the shom-off, porous end, not through the tight fibrous sheath that covers the stalk. So they used special techniques to build their reed boats, compressing the ends of the reeds so that they let in almost no water. Papyrus and papyrus boats proved to be two quite different things. Just as iron and iron ships.

  "As long as the ropes hold," Abdullah said daily, "we shall float. If the ropes get slack the papyrus will absorb water. If the ropes break, we shall fall through."

  Before two months had passed we had become so familiar with our environment that we often really felt as if we were contemporary with the men who had created the papyrus boat and loaded it as we had with jars and baskets, skin containers and coils of rope, salted and dried food, nuts and honey. Ancient and medieval seamen must have experienced our many moods before us. Nothing we were doing was new, nothing we were doing seemed strange. We felt a strong kinship Vidth our ancient predecessors. Common problems, common joys, the same yellow reed craft floating between sky and sea. On our reed bundles we were outside time; none of us was a scientist now, we were all statistics in a scientific experiment that had been started up and ran by itself. Gradually time had begun to lose its dimensions. As our ancestors seemed to crowd in on us, past centuries shrank, the image of time became distorted. The Vikings were just over the horizon up there in the North Atlantic, Columbus was bobbing along in our wake. Soon the pyramid-builders had become Georges' grandparents, or at least he was beginning to feel prouder and prouder of his Egyptian forebears, whom he had previously regarded as something unreal and irrelevant in a tedious school curriculum.

  "If the stern holds I would gladly go on through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific," Georges would daydream. "If we don't make it this time I shall build a new one and sail across again. It's

  obvious that my ancestors were the first to cross the Atlantic, at least in one direction."

  "It's not so obvious/' Santiago and I would argue, to Georges' bewilderment. "What is obvious is that if they had tried, they would have made it. The reed boat is much more suitable for sea travel than anyone thought. But it was not only the Egyptians who had reed boats; they were used in ancient times from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, from Mesopotamia to the Atlantic coast of Morocco."

  "Then why did we copy Egyptian tomb paintings if we did not want to copy the Egyptian sailors?"

  "Because only Egypt has contemporary illustrations that show all the construction details. It is thanks to the Pharaoh's religion and the preser
vative desert climate that we know so much about everyday life in Egypt four or five thousand years ago."

  One of the sixteen wooden boxes we used to lie on in the cabin was full of books about the world's earliest civilizations. In a work on ancient Mesopotamia there was a picture of a stone slab from Nineveh, showing a splendid relief of reed boats at sea in war and peace. The ruins of Nineveh lie far inland, nearly five hundred miles from the mouth of the Tigris and over one hundred miles closer to the Phoenician port of Byblos on the Mediterranean. Meso-potamian stonemasons, soldiers and merchants had contacts with both the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf. The stone slab from Nineveh, which is now preserved in the British Museum, shows that their sailors used two types of reed boat. Seven of the boats on the slab are depicted as reed bundles lashed together in the Egyptian manner, with both bow and stern curving upward. They are full of men, and the waves round them represent the ocean itself, since a most realistic giant crab dominates the center of the picture, surrounded by swimming fish. Double ranks of armed warriors have boarded some of the larger reed boats and are busy driving their crews into the sea. Some crewmen are diving overboard, others are swimming, and several reed boats are fleeing from the naval battle, their bearded sailors humbly praying to the sun. A straight coast and two small islands covered with tall reeds encircle the seascape, and three more reed boats are hidden among the reeds. On board the boat by the farthest island, archers kneel side by side ready for battle.

  but by the mainland and the nearest island the scene is peacefully idyllic: groups and rows of men and women sit in reed boats, chatting and gesturing amicably.

  This relief told us a great deal. For instance, we noticed the difference between the boats on the open sea and those among the reeds by the shore. In the former both bow and stern were peaked and curved up as in the ancient ships of Egypt and Peru, while the sterns of the coastal boats in the reed marshes were sheered off broad and straight. They offered no protection against waves from behind but were ideally suited to being beached and up-ended for their daily drying, as small reed boats were, and still are, in both the Old and New Worlds.

  Thanks to this realistic temple relief from ancient Nineveh, and the funerary art of ancient Egypt and Peru, we know that fully measured manned reed boats of the same design, as well as small tusk-shaped ones, were once important cultural factors common to the earliest civilizations in Asia Minor, North Africa and South America. After the collapse of the mighty civilizations of old, reed boats disappeared entirely from the Nile Valley, yet small versions of the two types depicted in the Nineveh relief have survived to the present century: in Mesopotamia, Ethiopia, the Sahara region, the islands of Corfu and Sardinia, and Morocco on one side of the Atlantic and in Mexico and Peru—with Easter Island as an off-shoot —on the other. Two clearly defined geographical areas: the one dominated by ancient Mediterranean civilization and the other by ancient American civilization. And now, here we sat, the seven of us plus a monkey and a duck, far over on the American side, on reeds grown and lashed together in Africa. We were beginning to ask ourselves where the Old World left off and the New began. Where could the dividing line between the two reed boat areas be drawn? Land vehicles are kept apart by oceans; watercraft are united. Dividing lines can be drawn on the stationary sea bed, but not on the mobile surface where boats belong. Because, in a matter of weeks African waters become American waters, just as surely as, in a matter of hours, the African sun becomes the American sun.

  In the thousands of years since man developed navigation, were we the first to lose steering control on a primitive craft caught by the eternal current south of Gibraltar?

  The Egyptian Georges, who had previously been interested only in judo and frogman techniques, had suddenly developed a passionate interest in the amazing world of antiquity. Was there no written evidence to show that the ancient Egyptians had established colonies beyond Gibraltar?

  No, there was not. But the Phoenicians, who for thousands of years were their nearest neighbors in the eastern Mediterranean, had plied regularly beyond Gibraltar and down the whole open coast of Morocco, far beyond Safi and Cape Juby. Potsherds with Phoenician inscriptions and other relics from organized Phoenician colonization are now constantly appearing along the west coast of Africa, farther south than we ourselves had followed it. Only a few years ago science had no idea that these earliest known seafarers from the easternmost corner of the Mediterranean had had an important trading colony on the flat island off Mogador, south of Safi. Phoenician relics, including factories for the production of dye from the purple mollusk, are now being dug up both there and down on the Rio de Oro coast, south of Morocco. Modern archaeologists have discovered that the Phoenicians had a solid foothold among the Guanches out on the Canary Islands and that they used these oceanic islands as a staging post in order to pass Cape Juby and Cape Bajador in safety. Because of their advanced trading posts they had to sail beyond these dangerous points, which we ourselves now had barely managed to clear in our reed boat.

  There is a written record by the historian Herodotus, after his visit to Egypt, stating that in the time of Pharaoh Necho, who ruled about 600 b.c, the Egyptians had dispatched a Phoenician fleet to sail around Africa. Being responsible for the expedition, some of the Pharaoh's own men obviously participated, although it is expressly recorded that ships and sailors were Phoenician. They sailed down the Red Sea and returned through Gibraltar three years later, having twice encamped to grow crops. They could report that the sun had moved to the north as they sailed around Africa. More than a century later one of the greatest Phoenician voyages put on record was led by Hanno, with the aim of establishing colonies for trade outside Gibraltar. Sixty galleys, each equipped with sails as well as fifty oars and packed with a total of thirty thousand prospective settlers of all trades, navigated into the unsheltered Atlantic. The

  vast fleet passed the ancient colony of Lixus, the Eternal City of the Sun, and anchored six times along the Moroccan coast to disembark colonists. They followed the dangerous shores farther than us, rounded Cape Juby and passed the Cape Verde Islands off Senegal, to reach as far down as the jungle rivers of tropical West Africa.

  It is known that the Phoenicians even had overland trade relations with jungle tribes of West Africa. They made use of Numid-ian caravans that crossed the continent to bring back ivory and gold as well as lions and other wild animals wanted for the many ancient circuses entertaining spectators in all important cities westward from Syria and Egypt to the Mediterranean islands and the Atlantic coast of Morocco, Centuries before Christ, all of North Africa was thus entangled in a cobweb of explorations and trade routes. The intrepid Phoenicians were deeply involved. Again, who were these Phoenicians about whom we know so very little; from whom did they descend and who taught them to sail? Thanks to the Romans we have simply inherited the word "Phoenician" as a convenient sack into which we put anything sailing from the inner Mediterranean before Roman times.

  On a desolate beach just south of our starting place in Safi, an angled breakwater made of tens of thousands of megalithic stone blocks still projects toward the reefs and provides a magnificent harbor. Fantastic quantities of gigantic quarried stones have been dragged out into the sea by experienced marine architects, who built such a lasting bulwark that the Atlantic waves have not succeeded in washing it away after thousands of years. Who needed such a big harbor on that desolate sandy point before the Arabs and Portuguese had yet to sail down the Atiantic coast of Africa?

  On a rounded hill surrounded by sandbars through which the broad Lucus River meanders into the Atlantic, on the northwest coast of Morocco, stand the gigantic ruins of one of the mightiest towns of antiquity. Its past vanishes into the darkness preceding written history. Huge blocks weighing many tons were transported up the slopes and lifted on top of one another in giant walls that can be seen from the sea. The megalithic blocks are cut and polished, the joints accurate to a millimeter, with the specialized technique characteristi
c of megalithic walls in Egypt, Sardinia, Mexico, Peru, Easter Island—the very areas where reed boats were in use. And it is also

  here, near the sea at the foot of the ancient ruins, and only here, that Moroccan reed boats, madia, have survived to our own times. The oldest known name of the megalithic town is Maquom Semes, "City of the Sun." The hill now surrounded by sandbars was an island in the Lucus estuary when the Romans found it. They wrote that fantastic legends were associated with its earliest history. They called the town Lixus, the Eternal City, and built their own temples on top of the ancient ruins. Their buildings and colonnades seem pitifully small compared with the colossal blocks in the walls on which they rest. Roman historians placed the grave of the hero Hercules himself on this island in the river. With the open Atlantic for background Roman artists made a giant mosaic portrait of the ocean-god Neptune, with crab's claws bristling from his hair and beard. Then the Romans disappeared, and the Arabs who followed and merged with the original population on the surrounding plain call the ruined town Shimish, "Sun." In their stories the last queen who ruled there was called Shimisa, "Little Sun."

  The extremely few archaeologists who have embarked on small test digs there have found that the Phoenicians used "Sun City" long before the Romans. But who founded it? Perhaps the Phoenicians. If so, Phoenician megalithic stone masonry was equal to the best on both sides of the Atlantic. The Phoenicians' home was in the distant eastern Mediterranean, present Lebanon. Yet, "Sun City" was no Mediterranean port, but a true Atlantic harbor established where the powerful current swings westward through the Canary Islands to end in Mexico. How old are the walls? No one knows. They are covered to a depth of fifteen feet by the detritus of at least Phoenicians, Romans, Berbers and Arabs. The Romans believed in Hercules and Neptune, but not in the sun-god, and the Roman ruins lying uppermost are therefore not solar-oriented. But recent test digs down to the very bottom have shown that the lowest and largest of the giant blocks, those which were already covered with detritus when the Romans came, and which the Romans therefore failed to demolish or rebuild into their temples, provide the foundations for extensive buildings carefully oriented to the sun. The Phoenicians, like their Egyptian neighbors, and in most of the earliest Mediterranean civilizations, were sun-worshipers.