The Ra Expeditions

by Thor Heyerdahl

  Sun City, the Eternal City, Hercules' last resting place, older.

  according to the Romans, than Carthage. . . . Why all this tribute to a remote megalithic Atlantic port? Wliy should it lie beyond Gibraltar? The founders of this Eternal City lived as many sea miles from the Phoenicians in Asia Minor as from the Indians in America. To keep in touch with Asia Minor they must have been real masters in navigation, maneuvering off the dangerous coast of North Africa, v^here no regular current and wind could help them there or back. It would have been infinitely easier for the residents of this Atlantic port to cross the ocean and take their stonemasonry techniques to the Indians of America. They would only have had to pull in their oars and let themselves drift like us. If Phoenicians founded Sun City, their sailors must have taken priests, architects and other representatives of the nation's elite with them on their voyages of colonization outside the Mediterranean. In fact, the maritime Phoenicians are known first and foremost as traders and intermediaries of civilization in the ancient world. If it was the Phoenicians who lived in this Atlantic city, they knew all about the ancient pyramids of the Old World. They knew both the stepped and the smooth-sided types. We know Phoenician expeditions sailed on Egyptian request. There was Phoenician timber in the ships buried round the Egyptian pyramids, Egyptian papyrus in the books of Phoenicia, and Pharaoh Rameses II had his own portrait, with inscriptions, carved in three places on the Phoenician coastal cliffs. In peace and war there were intimate contacts between the two countries. In fact, since modern scholars did not believe in the seaworthiness of Egyptian papyrus ships, it has been assumed that Egyptians used Phoenician ships-even to collect their own tribute from the Mediterranean islands and the Syrian coast. They knew both those built of stone blocks and those built of sun-dried adobe bricks. Those perhaps best known to them were the terraced adobe pyramids of Asia Minor, which differed from the Egyptian in having a narrow staircase or ramp leading up the middle of one or more of the pyramid's terraced sides to a little temple on top, just as in the earliest pyramids built on the American side of the Atlantic. Yet their contact viith Egypt was also intensive.

  "But we Egyptians sailed the sea too," Georges would argue, and as a good Christian Copt he quoted the Bible, where Isaiah (18:2) reports that his homeland was visited by Egyptian messengers

  who came across the sea in boats made of reeds. In the new edition of the King James Bible it was even specified that these reed boats were of papyrus. Georges also reminded us that Moses himself (Exodus 2:3) was set adrift on the Nile by his mother in a papyrus ark daubed with pitch and bitumen. In Egypt, Georges had shown me the walls of Queen Hatshepsut's temple at Luxor in the Nile Valley, covered with paintings showing that she had sent an expedition of several large wooden ships right down the Red Sea to Punt in Somali-land, to return with all sorts of merchandise, including whole exotic trees for replanting in the queen's garden.

  What Georges did not know was that modest merchants with ordinary papyrus boats had sailed even farther than the queen's famous fleet of wooden luxury ships. Eratosthenes, chief librarian of the huge Egyptian papyrus library in Alexandria on the Nile estuary before the tens of thousands of irreplaceable papyrus manuscripts went up in flames, reported that "papyrus ships, with the same sails and rigging as on the Nile" sailed as far as Ceylon and the mouth of the Ganges in distant India. The Roman historian Pliny (Historia Nat-uralis. Book VI, XXII, 82) later quoted that learned librarian in his geographical description of Ceylon, saying that while the papyrus ships took a full twenty days to sail from the Ganges to the island of Ceylon, the "modern" Roman ships made the journey in seven days. This casual but most important v^nritten reference enables us to work out that the ancient papyrus ships made the same speed through the ocean as Ra did before we allowed the stern to sink and become a brake. In fact, measuring the distance between the Ganges River and Ceylon, we can calculate from the information preserved through Eratosthenes that the papyrus ship, with Egyptian rigging like ours, must have averaged about seventy-five nautical miles in twenty-four hours, which is slightly more than three knots.

  But the Indian Ocean was not the Atlantic. Perhaps the Egyptians had also sailed out through Gibraltar, but no evidence has been preserved to prove it. The Phoenicians, however, knew the rocks and beaches along the coast where we had begun our voyage. They had gradually learned the secrets of local currents.

  The mystery surrounding the earliest traffic on the very ocean that washed up over our afterdeck, sent flying fish on board and drove us ceaselessly forward, became still more challenging when we lay with

  our beards stuck in learned books, feeling like ancient seafarers reading about ourselves and our own times. Looking up I saw the Mexican tapping water from a goatskin bag into an amphora; the Egyptian swayed past with a papyrus life belt over his shoulders; while the monkey poked its funny little face in and stole my "nosometer," which I used to determine the angle of the Pole Star.

  "Bearded men drifting westward across the Atlantic/' I wrote in a message to the head of the Archaeological Institute of Mexico, with a joking reference to ourselves and the bearded Olmecs who founded the earliest Mexican civilization. It was only when Norman took our little radio set out of the case beneath his sleeping bag that antiquity disappeared in a flash and for some minutes we were living in our own, modern world. Dick Ehrhorn, a ham radio operator in Florida, had built the little set, and soon after we lost contact with Morocco we suddenly heard a voice over the microphone saying, "LI2B LI2B, this is LA5KG Chris Bockehe in Oslo." After that, Chris traveled v^th us in the magic box right across the ocean. Beside him there was room for his compatriot, Just, LA7RF in Alesund, Frank IiKFB in Genoa, Herb WB2BEE in New York, Alex UAiKBW in Leningrad, the builder of the set himself, Dick W4ETO in Florida, and other voices that for the men of antiquity, would have been genies from Aladdin's lamp flying invisibly across the sea and landing in our little box among the goatskin bags and jars. Through the radio amateurs our families knew we were alive. Like us they had the chart of the Atlantic on the wall and marked our position at intervals. Halfway across we exchanged greetings with U Thant and the heads of state of our seven countries of origin. The Presidents of the two super powers in East and West sent us friendly greetings that arrived on the same day. When Norman closed his "Pandora's box" again we went straight back to antiquity, just as we had been wrenched into the present when he opened it and filled the cabin with a chorus of cackling metallic voices: radio hams in every conceivable country trying to help us with contacts. When they had gone the water gurgled and splashed and the ropes moaned desolately as before. In our world there were only sea and flying fish, and then a green back gliding past the bottomless depths.

  Bearded men: that turned out to be one of our last humorous reports. Fate hdd us in the hollow of its hand. Our tail was under

  water, helping the waves to surge freely up to the back wall of the cabin, like breakers on a beach. Little fish were living on board on the afterdeck. If we escaped a storm we would drift ashore in America this way in a week or two, with cabin and foredeck chock full of food and other cargo. But if we met one more storm we would come out of it a wreck. Since leaving Morocco, only African Neptune had photographed Ra at sea under full sail. To see the whole Ra in perspective we had to swim out on a life line. For us, who for weeks had seen only each other with some hmited section of the vessel as background, it was really thrilling to grasp all in one view. Georges swam out with an underwater camera, stretched up from the crest of a wave, and snapped Ra struggling along as others would have seen us.

  On July 7 the papyrus ship was still looking beautiful, with its golden bow high and the burgundy-red sail tauter than ever, because we now had the east wind at our backs. But if a storm came the Ra would never emerge looking as she looked now, and the film of the expedition would have no long shots of the papyrus ship sailing on the open sea. All the film Carlo had already taken might be damaged too. So in the next radio contact with Italy I gave my
wife, Yvonne, the job of finding a motion-picture photographer who could meet us with a small vessel at sea off the West Indies. Even if I did not hint at it by so much as a word to my own friends on board, I felt at the bottom of my heart that this might also be a safety measure. If lives were at stake the responsibility ultimately devolved on me.

  What was the photographer to bring with him? Everyone wanted a little fruit, Santiago a box of chocolates. Nothing else. We had more water and provisions than we could use. Salted meat, ham and sausages, jars and baskets full of honey, eggs, butter, dried fruit, nuts and Egyptian bread biscuits. The deck forward and to port of the cabin was stiU so covered with food that it was hopeless tr}dng to find room to put a foot down.

  Bearded men. Only Yuri stood up to his knees in the bath water aft and shaved. Red beards and black beards. Abdullah now had hair on the top of his head. Black hands and white pulled on the same ropes. It had been so in ancient times as well. Nothing new. The wall paintings of ancient Egypt show men with yellow hair and men with black hair building the same papyrus boat. Under the sand where we had built Ra, at the foot of his own pyramid, the Pharaoh Chephren,

  Captions for the following four pages

  91. Central African Abdullah did not fear the sea because he had three leather pouches of magic amulets tied to his back. (Above)

  92. Two Africans bind reeds as a bulwark against the sea, Georges under the water and Abdullah above. (Below)

  93. "The sea is salt'." exclaimed Abdullah, and asked for extra rations of fresh water to wash himself before saying his prayers to Allah.

  94. New bunk sites had to be found every time the sea smashed the boxes we were sleeping on in the basket cabin. Norman chose to sleep on the food baskets. (Above)

  95. Sharks began to gather round the raft-ship as we approached the West Indies. (Below)

  96. The last storm carried the galley overboard and smashed all the boxes, but the padded jars were still full of drinking water. ( Above)

  97. Radio hams on both sides of the Atlantic were following the Ra experiment through reports on the amateur wave length. Norman and the author with the expedition's transceiver. (Below)

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  Captions for the preceding four pages

  98. A small American yacht came out from the West Indies to film the last leg of the expedition. (Above)

  99. Rd was devastated after the last storm, but the little yacht found the crew of seven men, one monkey and one duck alive and the cargo safe. From the left, Norman, Georges, Yuri, Abdullah, Tlior, Carlo and Santiago. (Below)

  100. The mast is cut away by Santiago and Norman. With the ropes chafed through on the windward side, so much papyrus was lost that the heavy bipod mast could no longer support the sail.

  101. Everything of value is transferred to the yacht. Georges swims with the mast, the author passes equipment to Santiago in the yacht's rubber dinghy.

  son of Cheops, buried his queen and had her portrayed for all time with yellow hair and blue eyes. In a glass case in Cairo Museum, among the mummies of his kinsmen with their straight, black hair, lies Rameses II himself, with soft, yellow, silky hair topping his hook-nosed mummy skull. The north has no monopoly on blond, fair-skinned peoples. This racial type was present in Mediterranean areas, including Asia Minor and North Africa, long before the progenitors of the Vikings existed in Scandanavia. If there is any physical connection, it must have been from south to north, because the Viking period began three thousand years after the Pharaoh Cheph-ren buried his blue-eyed, blond wife besides his father's mighty cedar ship in Egypt.

  Blond men with beards. They were as common among the original population of the Atlas Mountains as among the Berbers on the plains round the City of the Sun on the Atlantic coast, where their descendants can still be seen. They had sailed from the African coast with their women and sheep into the Atlantic and settled as Guanches on the Canary Islands.

  Blond men with beards, who were not Vikings, because they built pyramids and worshiped the sun, ran through all the legends associated with the ancient American cultures, from Mexico to Peru. Throughout tropical America, wherever pyramids and carved stone colossi lie—as abandoned ruins from bygone days—the Spaniards learned that they were not the first bearded white men to come sailing across the Atlantic. The legends told in detail of teachers, similar in appearance to the Spaniards, who had once mingled with the aboriginal Indians and taught them how to build adobe houses and live in towns, erect pyramids and write on paper and stone. In other words, white, bearded travelers were credited everywhere with having merged with the original local inhabitants and laid together with them the first foundations of local cultures. The Indians themselves had no beards. The Spaniards exploited the legends in order to conquer both Mexico and Peru, but the legends were not created by the Spaniards. A thousand years before the Spaniards came, American artists from Mexico to Peru were making ceramic figures and stone statues of bearded men. Before the Vikings began to sail the Atlantic the Mayas had painted white men with long golden hair in a legendary sea battle taking place somewhere on the Atlantic coast

  of Mexico. Some decades ago, when American archaeologists opened a brightly painted pillared chamber inside one of the largest pyramids at Chichen Itza, they found splendid mural paintings, which they copied in minute detail before the humid tropical air and countless tourists got in and removed everything. The paintings illustrated a dramatic attack on naked white men, navigating yellow boats with upturned bow and stern. As in the relief from ancient Nineveh, there is a large crab in the waves and various marine species of fish and shells, showing that the sailors are either coming from the ocean or trying to get away to sea. The white-skinned sailors are met on land by dark-skinned warriors with feathers in their hair, who tie their hands behind their backs, scalp their blond locks, and lay one of them on the sacrificial slab. Others dive naked overboard from their capsized vessel, with long yellow locks floating on the waves among rays and other salt water fish. Whereas some of the white-skinned men are dragged helplessly away by their yellow hair, others have packed up all their possessions and are walking calmly away along the beach with large packs on their backs.

  What legend or historical episode were the Mayas trying to perpetuate in this way, in a sacred chamber inside one of their most important pyramids, centuries before the Spaniards landed? No one knows. The three American archaeologists who copied the wall-paintings wrote soberly that the temple portraits of light-skinned men with yellow hair "give rise to much interesting speculation as to their identity."

  We must have speculated more than most, on board the Ra, where the elements were daily carrying us, as if on a conveyer belt, toward the Gulf of Mexico, without our having to push or row. We did not delude ourselves that we could compete in seamanship with the professional navigators of old. Norman was our only seaman, but he had never seen a papyrus boat before. Abdullah had, but he had never seen the ocean. We would never have managed, like people of old, to navigate a papyrus boat with Egyptian rigging in the capricious water round Ceylon. Nor could we have sailed Phoenician vessels between Asia Minor and their colonies at Rio de Oro, a trip far longer than the distance from Africa to South America. But we could surely imitate men of old who had been caught by a storm off the African coast and lost their steering power.

  Rain clouds hung about us the length of the horizon and at regular intervals showers came and washed us and the deck so that the papyrus became even more wet and soggy, and the water level on the afterdeck crept slowly but perceptibly farther forward up the narrow strip of deck on the windward side of the cabin, from which we had long since moved the cargo. Sea water now stood in the depression in the papyrus f
loor caused by the weight of the starboard mast foot, showing how low we were on the windward side, where all the papyrus was now soaking wet. On the lee side, on the other hand, we still had to hang over the edge on our stomachs to reach down to the passing wave caps.

  We were now so close to the mainland coast of South America that we were visited by the first sea birds from the other side. Beautiful tropic birds with long, trailing tail feathers flew over the mast. A shark overtook us from the rear and made a savage attack on the life belt we had in tow. Those of the men who had never seen a shark had a startling experience when Carlo shouted that something was fighting the life belt, and soon afterward a two-yard-long dark monster came swimming majestically up with its dorsal fin above the surface. It rose and sank with the waves. When it was level with the But it turned savage again, rolled its whitish belly upward and thrashed its tail, attacking the underside of the papyrus rolls with gaping jaws. Was it gobbling down some of the long, tasty barnacles? Whatever it was gobbling, the danger to the ropes was serious. With my experience of the low-lying Kon-Tiki raft I leaned over the railing and grabbed for the shark's rough tail which I knew was like sandpaper to the touch. Then I saw an open wound on its back and two big pilot fish keeping station close above it. Twice I almost had it, but the lee side was still so high that I would have been dragged overboard unless I could get a better hold. Then big Georges drove his harpoon into the body of the shark. The brute fought for a moment with its steely muscles, until the water foamed about its tail. Georges was left standing with his tough harpoon line, which the brute had snapped in two. It disappeared into the ocean depths with Georges' last harpoon.