These same Indians who suddenly began to carve in stone, mold adobe, mine metal, manufacture paper, discover the innermost secrets of the calendar year, and write down the traditions of their kin— these same Indians in Mexico and Peru succeeded in crossing two useless types of cotton to produce a cultivated strain with lint so long that it could be spun. This done, these Indians started extensive cotton plantations, carding and spinning the harvest just as people in the Old World did. When the skeins of yarn were
long enough and had been dyed in all sorts of durable colors, they set up precisely the same two types of horizontal and upright looms as were used in the Meditenanean in ancient times. On these they wove tapestries, which in many cases outstripped in fineness of mesh and exquisite quality the best the rest of the world has ever seen.
Before pottery was invented in the Old World the early civilizations of North Africa had begun to cultivate bottle gourds, which they hollowed out, dr}ing the rinds over a fire to make water containers. This plant became so important and popular that it is used for the same purpose to this very day by the reed boatbuilders from Ethiopia to Chad. By some means or other, this useful African plant fell into the hands of the early cultures of Mexico and Peru, where it was used in exactly the same way and was one of the most important cultivated plants when the Spaniards came. Sharks and other marauding organisms of the sea would have finished a gourd off if it started to drift across the Atlantic alone, or it would have rotted before the Indians found it on the opposite shore and realized how it could be used. Thus, in all likelihood it was brought by boat
The acquisition of excellent containers from bottle gourds obtained from Africa was not enough for the cotton growers in America; they also managed to duplicate the ceramic art of tlie ancient Mediterranean. With professional skill they located potters' clay, which they mixed with the correct amount of sand, molded to shape, colored, and fired for containers. They made jars and jugs with all kinds of handles, dishes, vases with and without feet, pots with spouts, spinning wheels, flutes, and ceramic figurines of the same general appearance and often with the same peculiar details as the ancient potters had used in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Even such unique products as thin-walled jars shaped like animals with a spout on the back, produced by the artist first making a two-part negative mold, were made by potters on both sides. So were both flat and cylindrical ceramic seals engraved for stamping and decorating articles by pressing and by rolling respectively. Perhaps the most extraordinary recent discover)^ is that small ceramic dogs, running on real wheels like modern toys, are found in Olmec graves from the first millennium, B.C., and also in ancient Mesopotamian tombs. This is particularly noteworthy, not least because one of the main arguments
of the isolationists had been that the Old World wheel was unknown in America before Columbus. Now, however, we know that it was indeed known, if not by others, at least by those who founded the earliest Mexican civilization. We would not know that pre-Columbian Indians even had wheeled toys had these not been made of enduring ceramic. Paved roads of pre-Columbian origin have been found in the jungles of Mexico, where wheeled transport could have been used. Since iron was unknown and ceramic unsuitable, full-scale Olmec wheels could only have been made of wood. No such perishable material from the Olmec period has survived. Why the wheel was subsequently lost in America- is another matter; it was there at the beginning of local civilization, and perhaps the Mexican jungle, almost impenetrable with its dense timber and muddy soil, together with the absence of horses and donkeys, gradually discouraged wheeled transport.
Horses, of course, could scarcely be brought to America on reed boats. Dogs could. The dog was man's earliest companion in the Mediterranean world and followed him on most of his journeys. The Olmecs had dogs, as exemplified in their wheeled models. The Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas continued to keep dogs, as udtnessed by their art and by the records of the early Spaniards. Dogs were mummified in pre-Inca Peru, and left with their masters in their desert graves. At least two breeds were kept, neither of them descendant from any wild American progenitor, and both of them quite different from the Eskimo-type dog brought from Siberia by other Indians. Both breeds are strikingly similar to the dogs of ancient Egypt, where the craft and custom of mummifying dogs and birds were as much a part of the culture as in ancient Peru.
No mummies of men or beasts will last in a jungle climate, but we know that important persons were embalmed to attain eternal life by the sun-worshipers of ancient America, because hundreds of carefully embalmed mummies are preserved in desert tombs in Peru. Their grave-goods proclaim their high rank. While some Peruvian mummies have coarse, straight black hair like modern Indians, others have reddish and even blond, wavy and soft hair, and their great body height is in striking contrast to the Indians living in Peru today, who are among the shortest races in the world. Relieved of their internal organs, filled with cotton, massaged with special
preparations, sewn up and wrapped in mummy cloths, and finally provided with a mask over their faces, the pre-Inca mummies follow a traditional pattern which in all essential particulars is familiar from Egypt. The tall sun priest, lying full-length among his ornaments under the five-ton lid of the stone sarcophagus inside the Palenque pyramid, also had a mask over his face, and his long body had once been wrapped in a red cloth, of which fragments remain on the bones. But no embalmer's art could save his mortal remains in the climate of the Mexican rain forests.
It was natural that a Mexican priest-king should be wrapped in red cloth and that his sarcophagus should also be painted red inside. Red was the sacred and favorite color in both Mexico and Peru, just as among the Phoenicians. In Peru special expeditions were sent north up the coast on large balsa rafts and reed boats simply to collect and bring home special red shells, just as the Phoenicians sent expeditions—and even founded colonies along the Atlantic coast of Africa mainly to satisfy their fanatical desire for red dye made from the purple mollusk.
In Mexico and Peru the Indians took up many customs that did not occur to the other Indians, and some of them were as strange as they were striking. They began to circumcise boy babies, as was the religious custom among the Jews and others in the eastern Mediterranean. They decided that sun priests of high rank, lacking real beards, must wear artificial ones, a typical custom of high priests in Egypt. Of the myriads of stars available to choose from, they selected the first annual appearance of the constellation of the Pleiades to signal the start of their agricultural year—just as was the custom among some peoples of the inner Mediterranean. And the surgeons in Mexico, and still more expressly in Peru, practiced trepanning of the skull partly as a magical operation and partly to heal fractures. When the Spaniards reached America, the extremely difficult art of trepanning had a most limited distribution elsewhere in the world. It existed exclusively along the narrow Mediterranean belt from Mesopotamia to Morocco, and, strangely enough, among the Guanches on the Canary Islands.
The small details of daily life were not so staggeringly different, either, despite the distance from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Mexico. Family life and community organization, from priest-king to
slave and eunuch, followed roughly the same pattern in these hierachic dictatorships; and domestic articles varied mostly in detail. Farmers in Mexico and Peru had begun terrace farming, with aqueducts, artificial irrigation and manuring with animal dung, just as they did in the Mediterranean area; and the isolationists themselves have pointed out remarkable coincidences of detail in types of pick, basket, sickle and ax. Fishermen in both places made the same sort of nets v^th sinkers and floats, the same sort of traps, and fishhooks with bait and line on the same principles. Their reed boats were the same. The musicians in both areas had drums with skin stretched over the end; horns in a variety of forms; trumpets v^th mouthpieces; many kinds of flute, including Panpipes; clarinets; and all sorts of bells. The isolationists themselves have pointed out similarities in the structure and organization of the armies, the use of mil
itary cloth tents in the field, the custom of giving the soldiers shields with painted designs to indicate their units, and the fact that the sling, unknown to the Indians who came across the Bering Strait, but characteristic of the warriors of the inner Mediterranean, reappeared as one of the most important weapons in the pre-Inca cultural area. Both diffusionists and isolationists have stressed that there are striking similarities in loincloths and men's cloaks, women's garments with belted waists and shoulder pins, and sandals of hide or coiled rope with very specific resemblances in design and manufacture. Personal ornaments, metal minors, tweezers, combs, and instruments for tattooing. Fans, parasols and litters with seats for important personages. Wooden headrests. The same sort of beam scales and the same sort of Pan scales. Board games and dice. Stilts and spinning tops; and an unending series of parallels in patterns and designs. All in all, there is not such a fundamental difference between what the people of Asia Minor and Egypt had already created while Europe was still living in barbarism, and what the Spaniards found when they arrived in America a couple of thousand of years later. They came, under the sign of the Cross, to bring a new religion from Asia Minor to the sun-worshiping Indians at the other end of the ocean current.
All this we contemplated and discussed, as that perpetual Atlantic current drove our own reed boat steadily closer to tropical America. Perhaps, after all, the boat we were sitting in constituted
one of the most remarkable parallels. The stern was sinking lower and lower. That was our Achilles' heel. Our boatbuilders from central Africa had at first been unwilling to give us any raised stern at all. Unlike the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians they were not used to making one; they had never learned how. The Indians in Peru were used to it, however. The art had been passed down unchanged from father to son since the earliest Peruvian potters made models of their own crescent-shaped reed boats. Lake Titicaca in South America was now the only place in the world where reed boats still carried sails, and oddly enough throughout that part of South America the sail is carried on just the same sort of strange, two-legged, straddled mast as in ancient Egypt. Lake Titicaca is also the only place where really compact reed boats are still being built today, peaked and raised at both ends and with rope lashings running from the deck right round the bottom of the boat, all in one piece, just as ancient artists have painted the lashings on tomb walls in Egypt. Our friends from Chad had bound many narrow bundles of reed together in several layers, using numerous short ropes linked in the form of a chain; and although we had finally persuaded them to add an elevated stern it was still only the outward shape that coincided completely with the Egyptian paintings. Apart from the caravan routes, the great ancient civilizations had never penetrated across the continent to Chad in the same way as they had spread by boats bringing organized colonists along the Mediterranean coast to Morocco. Now, for the first time, I began to wonder if I might perhaps have allowed myself to be misled by the map. I had brought my reed boatbuilders from Chad because there were no better to be found in the Old World. But what if the cultures on both sides of the Atlantic had a common heritage? In that case the Indians who lived on Lake Titicaca, the most important and oldest pre-Inca cultural center, could have inherited their boatbuilding craft from the Mediterranean more directly than the remote Buduma tribesmen in the African interior. I remember the isolationists' claim that there was an insuperable distance between the inner Mediterranean and Peru. Had I also allowed myself to be fooled by this dogmatic claim? Had we all forgotten that the Spaniard Francisco Pizarro, who had neither airplanes, roads, nor railway lines to help him across ocean or jungle, had traveled straight from the Mediterranean to Peru with his perfectly ordinary men,
just about as fast as Hernan Cortes made his way to the Mexican uplands? The Spaniards colonized the whole area from Mexico to Peru in one generation; there is no reason why earlier voyagers could not have crossed the Isthmus of Panama and reached Peru v^th the same ease. It is a sound isolationist lesson that history repeats itself. The Spaniards first discovered tlie islands lying in front of the Mexican Gulf, yet they delayed the establishment of their main settlements until they had pushed on to Mexico and Peru. We seven men from seven nations were there on board a reed boat to prove how alike human beings are, whatever their homeland. And yet we found it so difficult to understand that the same likeness pursues us through time as well, from the days when the ancient Egyptians were writing their love songs, the Assyrians were improving their fighting chariots, and the Phoenicians were laying the foundations of our own v^Titing or struggling with sails and rigging to explore the riches of West Africa.
When the first week of July was past I began, deep down, to feel uneasy. I hoped the photographer's boat would be dispatched in time, before the constant showers that had kept us company for several days coalesced into a real gale. The hurricane season was beginning in the area we had now entered. The men took it all with devastating calm.
On July 8 the wind began to rise and the waves piled up as if a real storm had taken place beyond the horizon. Giant seas flung themselves on our miserable stern, and for the first time washed right over the steering bridge, which stood on long legs behind the cabin. We had a rough night of it. The wind howled in pitch-black darkness, the water rumbled, gurgled, splashed, roared and thundered everywhere. The cases we lay on began to rumble and float up and down in the cabin, with us on top. Those who lay farthest back on the starboard side had to empty the cases under them of all their possessions: they were half full of water. They moved all their things into the other sleeping cases, where the water was only trickling in, rising and falling a few inches where the gaps in the cases were leaking most. Every few seconds waves smashed against the back wall of the cabin, which was now covered vdth sailcloth. The wicker walls shook and salt water trickled in on all sides—if we were lucky enough not to get a whole deluge straight on our heads. Most of us
got used to the ceaseless rhythmic crashes over our heads, though Santiago needed sleeping pills; but now and then there was a sharper, more vicious thunder that had us all shooting out of our sleeping bags—the struggling sail had lashed back against the mast and once again we were joined in battle with the giant which we could scarcely see above us in the lamplight. We stubbed our toes and stumbled over Santiago's jars and Carlo's almost impenetrable network of stays. At about six o'clock the next morning, I was standing on the bridge taking the strong wind on the starboard quarter with the help of a lashed rudder-oar and another under constant handling, when the sea quite unexpectedly rose about me and engulfed everything. A shining stretch of water moved slowly up to my waist and without any appreciable noise the cabin roof in front of my chest was submerged. Some seconds later Ra began to quake violently, while the vessel lay hard over into the wind, so hard that I had to hang on to the tiller of the rudder-oar in order not to skid down the slope and overboard with the water. At every moment I expected the heavy bipod mast to tear the papyrus bundles under it to shreds and topple into the sea. But R<2, shivering, simply rolled on to her beam ends to empty out the water, then righted herself, though never again as fully as before. The starboard mast foot had been pressed deep into the supporting bundle, and the cabin also had become oblique toward starboard. In the days to come the helmsman had to stand with his left knee bent to keep upright on the slanting steering bridge.
With the stern sloping away like a beach, we now had to tie ourselves on securely in order not to be washed out to sea when bathing on board. The waves soared on forward on both sides of the cabin, and on the lee side, aft of the cabin door, we built a screen of empty baskets and ropes, covered with Ra's spare sail for which we had had no use until then. Dead flying fish lay everywhere. Although the stern section acted as a powerful brake, and although we were constantly zigzagging along with no real steering power, the strong wind drove us 63 sea miles closer to America that day. This was only 10 to 20 miles less than the average daily distance for the papyrus ships of old as given by Eratosthenes the l
ibrarian. Once again we were visited by white-tailed tropic birds from Brazil or Guiana, which now lay to the south and southwest. All the crew were in the best of spirits. Norman had made radio contact with
Chris in Oslo who confirmed that he was trying to help Yvonne find a cameraman in New York. As soon as the cameraman was ready to leave home they hoped he would be able to come out on some boat or other from the West Indies.
On July 9 we had just discovered that the sea that had gone over the cabin roof had also forced its way through the lid of a cask containing almost two hundred pounds of salted meat, which soon rotted. It was during this morning inspection that an agitated Georges came to report something much worse. All the main ropes that secured the outermost papyrus roll on the windward side to the rest of the Ra had been chafed.through as the floor of the cabin shifted to and fro under the onslaught of the waves. Georges was pale and almost speechless. In one leap I was on the other side of the cabin with Abdullah. We were met by a sight I shall never forget. The boat was split in two lengthwise. The big starboard bundle, supporting one mast, was moving slowly in and out from the rest of the boat down its entire length. The roll was attached to Ra only at bow and stern. Every time the waves lifted the big papyrus roll away from the rest of the boat we stared straight down into the clear blue depths. Never had I seen the Atlantic so clear and so deep as through that cleft in our own little papyrus world. If Abdullah could have turned pale, he would have done so. With stoic calm, and without a tremor in his voice, he said coolly that this was the end. The ropes had worn away. The chain was broken. The rope links would unravel themselves one by one, and in an hour or two the papyrus reeds would be drifting away from each other in all directions.
The Ra Expeditions Page 32