Long before sunrise on July 16 we regained radio contact with
Shenandoah. We cranked and cranked and listened and listened until we heard the metallic voice of the radio ham on board. The captain asked us to send up signal rockets while it was still dark. The wind had dropped. The gale had rushed farther west and had now reached the islands. Apart from Sinbad the duck, with his broken leg, we were all unscathed. Norman got out the signal rockets we had retained when we cut up the life raft. They were so waterlogged we could not even light their fuses with a match. On a scrap of loose label we read: "Keep in a dry place." We asked Shenandoah to send up her own rockets. Shortly afterward, the captain replied that they could not light theirs either. Neither of us had a completely accurate position after the storm, but as far as we could judge we were traveling in precisely opposite directions on the same latitude.
The radio voice asked us to keep our hand generator going constantly, transmitting out call signal the whole time, so that they could try to home in on it. For although the wind had died down and the torrential rain had flattened the waves, neither of our vessels was large enough to be visible at long distances. We learned that the motor yacht was an eighty-tonner, seventy-four feet in length. As we sat cranking we noticed that the sea was once again covered with asphalt-like lumps, and we had seen the same thing the day before. They were left stranded on the papyrus while the water filtered through. I collected a few samples to be sent with a brief report to the Norwegian delegation to the United Nations. We had now sailed through this filth on both sides of the Atlantic, and the middle as well.
While Norman worked with knobs and earphones and the rest of us took turns cranking, Carlo served the most delicious cold dishes. He regretted that the galley was not operating as well as before, partly because all the saucepans had floated off and partly because he could not get the Primus stove lit since it was lying at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. But if we would like smoked ham and Eg}^p-tian fish roe, he still had a knife left. And there was no rationing of "mummy bread," which tasted better than ever, whether we spread it with Berber butter and honey or ate it with peppered sheep's cheese in oil. The storm had dealt kindly with the provision jars, packed down as they were on the soft papyrus reed. It was the wooden
cases that had taken the beating. Papyrus and rope, jars and skins, wicker and bamboo went well together. Everywhere, it was the rigid timber that had lost battles with the seas.
Late on the afternoon of July 16 the weather was fine again and we kept a lookout in all directions from cabin roof and masthead. Yuri was cranking and Norman was ceaselessly intoning our call signal into the microphone, when suddenly something inexplicable happened. Norman, who was sitting immovably in the cabin doorway, turning knobs v^dth both hands, suddenly stared strangely straight ahead without looking at any of us and said in a voice full of emotion.
"I see you, I see you; can't you see us?"
A dramatic moment passed for the rest of us, sitting speechlessly round him, before we realized that he was talking to the radio operator on the Shenandoah. Shenandoah! We all turned sharply, Georges on the cabin roof, keeping a lookout in the wrong direction and Carlo swinging to and fro on the crazy masthead with his camera on his stomach.
And there she was! She came into view at short intervals, like a white grain of sand on top of the distant crests. As she came closer we saw that she was rolling wildly. What was left of Ra took the seas with far more stoic calm. How we found each other is still a miracle to us, but here we were, leaping in turn, up and down, at sea off the West Indies. A big black bird circled above us. Shark fins appeared, cutting the water around the Ra. They must have followed the yacht out from the islands. Both sides filmed and photographed, but it was one day too late. The Ra's mainsail had been lowered forever the previous day: the mast would support no more than a shred of sail without being driven straight through the flimsy foothold left to it on the starboard side.
A tiny rubber dinghy was lowered from the yacht and Abdullah cheered delightedly when he saw a man with skin the color of his own come rowing over to meet us. He shouted a greeting, first in Chad Arabic and then in French, and gaped speechlessly when the black man replied in English. Africa met Abdullah in America. An Africa that had become American through and through.
The first thing to be loaded onto the dancing dinghy was all the expedition film. We rowed over in several installments to meet the
men on board the yacht—cheerful, straightforward men. With its high superstructure and narrow beam, the pretty vessel rolled so badly that we who had spent eight weeks on Rd had difficulty in finding our sea legs on the immaculately scoured deck. She rolled so violently that Carlo and Jim, each trying to film the other from his own vessel agreed that it was much easier to film the yacht from the reed boat than the other way round.
The captain and crew were all young men, most of them hired for the occasion, and all eager for us to come aboard so that they could start for home at once. This was not in accordance with the charter contract, and we continued to keep the Ra manned. Shenandoah had brought us four oranges each and a box of chocolates for Santiago. But the improvised crew had set off without discovering that the provisions on board consisted mainly of numerous bottles of beer and mineral water. So the captain was insistent on returning before they ran out of food. And before there was another gale. We borrowed Shenandoah's dinghy and returned from Rd with several whole hams, cured mutton, sausages and jars of other food. On Rd, we had enough food and water for all of us to eat and drink for at least another month.
So Shendndodh waited. Rd floated with her port side intact, but the starboard side had lost so much papyrus that it was no longer capable of supporting the thirty-foot-high and extremely heavy bipod mast. We decided to cut it down. As our proud mast toppled in the sea Norman erected a light straddled mast from two fifteen-foot rowing oars tied together at the top and provided with a little improvised mainsail. Rd sailed on. On July 17 and 18 we ferried all unnecessary cargo over to Shendndodh and worked at sewing the bundles together as securely as possible. While Carlo swam over with the straddled mast, Georges worked underneath the Rd, Yuri danced alone in the dinghy in a perilous shuttle service between the two boats, and the rest of us waded about on the papyrus bundles with ropes and soaking wet possessions. Visitors crowded in on us from down below. We began to see more and more shark fins slicing through the surface of the water all round us, like sails on toy yachts. If we put our faces under water we could see big fishy forms sailing slowly about, far down in the clear blue depths. The crew of Shendndodh began to fish for shark. A white-finned shark six feet long, and
another, slightly smaller, were pulled on board and we had Ra's boiled rice served with tasty shark's liver. A blue shark, twelve feet long, was too crafty to be enticed onto the hook, and patrolled about restlessly.
Despite all orders to observe the utmost caution Georges suddenly terrified us all by flinging himself onto the submerged starboard edge of Ra with a huge shark in pursuit close to his legs. Georges had an old shark bite on one leg. I forbade him to swim any more as long as we were surrounded by these man-eaters, and he said that in that case we would have to wait a long time, because he had counted between twenty-five and thirty sharks circling in the blue depths. It was pointless to risk human lives and we quit any further sewing up of the papyrus bundles. Better to let individual papyrus stalks and even entire sheaves of reed afloat away in our wake. We could afford to lose all the starboard side as long as the midships and port side were intact and showed no sign of breaking up.
The weather reports on Shenandoah were ominous, and the captain had good reason to urge our return to harbor. The entire crew of the Ra agreed that if a new gale broke we would be safer on board our own wreck. True, our papyrus boat was no longer navigable, with rudder-oars broken and a steering bridge on which we could scarcely keep our feet, but the remaining bundles were afloat and would continue to drift westward like a giant life buoy until t
hey were washed ashore. Shenandoah was navigable, even though both its pumps and one of its two diesel engines had been put out of operation by the gale. But both her captain and crew were fully aware that in a hurricane, however small, she would spring a leak or capsize, and then the whole metal craft would go straight to the bottom.
I summoned all the men of the Ra to the first really serious "powwow" since we had sawed up the rubber raft off the African coast. I explained that it seemed to me right to end the experiment now. We had lived on board the papyrus rolls for two months, they were still afloat, and without taking our zigzag course into account, we had sailed almost exactly five thousand kilometers—over three thousand statute miles—the distance across the North Atlantic from Africa to Canada. This proved that a pap}Tus boat was seaworthy. We had the answer. There was no reason to risk human lives point-lessly.
All the men, bearded and weather-beaten, with palms callused from pulling cords and tillers, sat listening gravely. I asked each of them to say what he thought.
"I think we should go on in the Ra" said Norman. "We have enough food and water. We can make a platform of wicker baskets and broken cases to sleep on. It will be tough, but in about a week we shall be at the islands, even with the little scrap of sail we have set now."
"I agree with Norman," said Santiago. "If we give up now no one will believe that papyrus boat sailors could have reached America. Even many anthropologists will say that it's not the long voyage behind us that counts, but the little bit left ahead. If there were only one day to go, that would be the one that counted. We must get all the way from coast to coast."
"Santiago," I said, "the few anthropologists who do not realize that the people who had used papyrus boats for generations could handle them better than we won't be convinced, even if we sail right up the Amazon."
"We must go on," said Georges. "Even if the rest of you give up, Abdullah and I will go on. Right, Abdullah?"
Abdullah nodded mutely.
"This is an Egyptian boat. I represent Egypt. I must go on as long as there is a papyrus bundle left to keep my head above water," Georges concluded dramatically.
Carlo gave me an inquiring look.
"If you think we should go on, I'll go on too," said Carlo, stroking his beard. "It's for you to size up the situation."
Yuri had been sitting, staring in front of him, for some time.
"We are seven friends who have shared everything," he said at last. "Either we should all go on, or we should all stop. I am dead against our splitting up."
It was a painful decision for me to make. All the others were willing to go on. It might be all right, but a severe storm could wash one or the other of us overboard. It was not worth it. I had set this experiment in motion because I was looking for an answer. We had the answer. A papyrus boat, with defective stern, wrongly loaded, and badly handled by a group of uninitiated landlubbers, in a time when no one living could give lessons or advice, had ridden off a
major storm with men and animals surviving and all essential cargo intact, after zigzagging the open ocean for eight weeks. If we drew a circle centered on the ancient Phoenician port of Safi, where we had started, taking the distance we had sailed as its radius, the circle would encompass both Moscow and the northernmost tip of Norway. It would cut through the middle of Greenland, cross Newfoundland, Quebec and Nova Scotia in North America and touch the tip of Brazil in South America. If we had not set out from Safi but from Senegal, down on the west coast of Africa, the distance we had sailed would have been enough, as the crow flies, to take us right across the Atlantic and up the Amazon almost to its source. For the Atlantic is barely one thousand nine hundred miles wide at its narrowest point, whereas we had covered three thousand. It was better to stop while the going was good. Here were two boats, each with its particular weaknesses, sailing west together in an ocean region known as the birthplace of hurricanes. Unknown to us, the first hurricane of the year, Anna, had just been born in the sea behind us, where we had recently passed, and was traveling with rising momentum toward the northernmost of the West Indian Islands ahead. Our own course was set for Barbados, in the far south of the same chain. Equally unknown to us was the fact that research planes from the American BOMEX project (Barbados Oceanographic and Meteorological Experiment), which discovered the hurricane at its birth, had found that the highest layer of air over Barbados was mixed with fine sand from the Sahara. Sand from the Sahara was raining over the jungles of Central America. And ahead of us and behind us, clots of oil were drifting from the coast of Africa toward the beaches of Central America. It was to become Ra's fate to travel alone with the elements to the tropical land ahead. I was alone in making the decision.
I
Chapter Eleven
M 11. BY PAPYRUS BOAT FROM AFRICA TO AMERICA
Otrange apprehension. Uncertainty. I awoke disturbed. Clutched at my support. Rolling. Rolling and pitching and the rush of water. Night. Was I dreaming? Was the voyage in the Ra not over? Could it have been just a bad dream that the stern section sank and we cut down the mast? Or was it now that I was having nightmares and dreaming that we had not yet left the precarious wreck? For a moment I was confused, trying to separate dream from reality. The voyage of the Ra was over. I had sworn to myself that I would never attempt such a thing again. And here I was. The same wickerwork cabin around me. The same low, wide opening out into the wind and the naked world, where savage waves, streaked black and white, reared up against the night sky. Ahead the same big Egyptian sail stood unchanged, set taut on the straddled mast, which we had cut down, and astern the slender tail of the papyrus boat soared above us in an elegant curve, though we had seen it sinking sluggishly into the foaming seas. I was dead tired, my arms were aching. I sat up when Norman came crawling in, large as life, and shone the flashlight first on me and then on a bushy head with a red beard, sticking out of the sleeping bag close beside me.
"Thor and Carlo, change of watch, your shift."
I picked up my own flashlight and shone it around me. There lay all the others, tightly packed as before, more tightly in fact, so that when Norman tried to dig himself out a modest sleeping space in the opposite corner, they all turned over in unison: Carlo, Santiago, Yuri, Georges. But squeezed between them was a strange head with Asiatic features and stiff raven-black hair. That was Kei. Kei Ohara from Japan. Now, how had he come on board the Ra? Of course. I flopped down on my back and began to pull on my trousers. Much too low under the basket roof to stand: we could barely sit up. Lower than on Ra I. Of course. It was all clear now. This was Ra IL I had started everything all over again. We were right back off Africa once more. We had not even passed Cape Juby. It was not Abdullah waiting to be relieved on the steering bridge out there in the darkness. It was another African whom I scarcely knew yet, a dark-skinned, full-blooded Berber called Madani Ait Ouhanni.
"Get up, Carlo, you have been lying on half my mattress and now you are sitting on my shirt sleeve."
On the bridge it was damnably cold, but peaceful. Madani pulled down his Berber hood and showed me how far it was safe to turn the rudder-oar away from land without risk of the onshore wind twisting the giant sail. Carlo took over the job of look-out for lights from both land and shipping. We felt threatened from all sides now, until we had once again cleared the perilous rocky coast of the Sahara and the constant traffic of the shipping lanes round Africa.
But we had done all that before. This was nothing but a risky repetition. We had already cleared Cape Juby alive, and here we were, sailing into the onshore wind again, in obvious danger of ruining everything we had achieved. Why had we not at least started below Cape Juby this time? Why a second Ra? Why was I beginning a thick expedition diary from page one again? Could I answer?
"We've got to make it this time," muttered Carlo from the cabin roof. "We've got to make those last few sea miles to Barbados."
Was it he and the others who had persuaded me to set all the wheels in motion again? Because we were short a few
miles to satisfy the skeptics? Or was it continued curiosity? The desire to find out if we could cross the ocean in a better built papyrus boat, now that we had practical experience of a single fumbling attempt to build and navigate a ship whose design we knew only from tomb paintings
thousands of years old? Both, perhaps. Such an unbelievable amount had happened in barely ten months, between the landing of Ra I and the launching of Ra 11. I had seen still more reed boats. They survived just where deep traces remained of ancient civilization on its way out from the inner Mediterranean into the Atlantic Ocean.
In the large lagoon of the Oristano marshes on the southwest coast of Sardinia, Carlo Mauri and I had embarked with the fishermen in their traditional reed boats, fassoni, and speared fish on tridents, while the impressive and ancient Nuraghi towers were silhouetted on the low hills around us. What an atmosphere of bygone times! The archaeologists attributed the oldest of these magnificent stone ruins to inspiration from the inmost Meditenanean basin almost three thousand years before Christ. But the same type of building was continued on Sardinia long after that. The fishermen had taken us into the best preserved of these giant cylindrical stone cairns, whose moss-grown megalithic walls were intact after millennia of wars and earthquakes. No sooner had we fumbled our way through the little opening into the enormous boulder structure and switched on our flashlights than I seemed to recognize the place. I had seen once before this whole complex caracole system of narrow but lofty tunnels, one running in a ring inside the other, while the big boulder walls seemed to press in on us as they leaned over to meet in a pointed false arch high above our heads. And here, just as before, I followed a low passage that crossed these ring-shaped corridors and led to a narrow tunnel opening farther in, where it was possible to scramble up a spiral staircase that wound up through the compact boulder core to an observation point on the roof.
The Ra Expeditions Page 34