The Ra Expeditions

by Thor Heyerdahl

  How strange! An extraordinary composition, but on the very same plan as the one used by the Mayas when they built their astronomical observatory, the famous "caracole" of Chichen Itza on the Yucatan peninsula, before the Spaniards arrived. This was the tower that stood beside the Maya pyramid that contained the painting of blond mariners fighting black men on the beach. Was there a missing link? Had the unknown masters of the Mayan architects, the earlier Olmecs, also built ceremonial observation towers like the towers of Sardinia?

  From the lookout roof of this ceremonial cairn I could see what must have met the eyes of its Sardinian architects thousands of

  years ago: the distant surf sending white cascades into the lagoon where rows of golden tusk-shaped reed boats were set up on end to dry in the Mediterranean sun. The Mediterranean: the home of man's earliest ventures at sea, the home of deep-sea navigation, with the Straits of Hercules as an ever-open gateway to the world beyond. This water had helped culture to spread. We know that it had spread by sea from the corner where Asia Minor and Egypt meet to the island of Crete. From Crete to Greece. From Greece to Italy. From the original homes of Phoenician sailors to Lixus and other Moroccan colonies outside Gibraltar, at least a thousand years before the birth of Christ.

  Reed boats were man's earliest kind of watercraft in the Mediterranean corner where culture was born. Reed boats built like those depicted in ancient Nineveh survived among Greek fishermen on the island of Corfu until the present generation. They were not made of papyrus, but of the stalks of a giant fennel. Their local name is still papyrella, although the plant and the term papyrus are unknown on modern Corfu, And we had found them still in use, though made of another kind of reed, among Italian fishermen on Sardinia. We saw them from the roofs of towers built by unknown architects who had come from somewhere in the inner comer of this historic ocean, this breeding pool of culture crisscrossed since the morning of time by unknovm navigators. Lost civilizations. Lost ships. No wonder the prophet Isaiah could speak of messengers visiting the Holy Land on boats of reeds that sailed across the sea.

  Egypt, Mesopotamia, Corfu, Sardinia, Morocco, yes, even Morocco. No sooner had I found the ancient Sardinian reed boats still in use, than those that had once existed in Morocco began once more to haunt my thoughts. They don't exist; all our boats are built from planks and plastic, was the categorical reply I had got from a telephone call to the district administrator of the Lucus region, where reed boats were reported shortly before the First World War. Returning to Morocco to build Ka U, I regretted that I had accepted his "no" for a valid answer. Our good friend, the Pasha of Safi, now lent me his car and an interpreter guide, and on good roads we reached the Atlantic port of Larache near the mouth of the Lucus River. In this modern town, nobody had heard of any reed boats other than a huge one that passed along the highway to Safi on a

  trailer the previous year. We wasted no more time among the cit/ dwellers, but headed for the fishermen's wharf where some old seamen were sitting on cobblestones mending nets.

  Reed boats? Did we mean madia? Sure!

  With one old Berber as guide we were soon on the trail. For two days we tried to find wheel tracks through the sparse cork forest hiding a tiny Jolot village somewhere near the sea. We found our way at length on foot. Stone Age dwellings, hidden from the sight of nearby modern Africa by the lack of asphalt roads and landing strips. Picturesque huts with walls of mud-covered branches thatched with the boatbuilders' reeds. The bushy reed gables with big storks' nests were scarcely visible behind a labyrinth of impenetrable hedges of giant cactus. Goats, dogs, children, chickens and old people. Whole families were blond with blue eyes. Others were completely Negroid. The Arab migration into Morocco had left no traces here. This was a striking sample of Morocco's mixed indigenous population. They should have been labeled "unidentified." Yet black and blond were for mere convenience mixed together and put in one bag marked "Berber." A black giant chased away the dogs and guided us through the cactus fences that barred the little sunbaked kingdom from view of sea, river or the sparse pastureland with its gnarled cork trees.

  Madia? Of course. All the old people, bent graybeards and toothless crones alike, had known both shafat and madia, the two types of reed boat that had been in use in the Lucus River estuary until only a few decades ago. Two old men hastened to make models: a shafat with its flat, sliced off stern, for floating cargoes across the river, and a madia with bow and stern curving upward. A madia could be used out in the surf, it could be made as large as you liked, because khab, the thin flat reed they used, floated for many months. The old men built a bed-size sample with upturned bow and cut end, the five persons jumped into it paddling about just to show us its incredible bearing capacity.

  Here at the mouth of the Lucus River, as in Sardinia, colossal ruins of megalithic structures overlook the waters where reed boats survived: the mighty ruins of Lixus. In fact, but for my search for reed boats I would never have stumbled upon Lixus. The ruined city was as unfamiliar to my archaeologist colleagues as to the common citizen of Morocco. An expert on Egypt or Sumer, not to men-

  tion a specialist on ancient Mexico, knows little about the Atlantic coast of Africa and nothing about the sites on the Lucus River. Only a couple of archaeologists specializing in Morocco have had time and means to open a few small test trenches and disclose the colossal stones forming Lixus' oldest buried walls. I stumbled on these ruins merely because they towered above the modern road from Larache to the cork forest where I was to search for the village of the reed boatbuilders. It was only a few miles from the mighty ruin to the modest surviving village. The difference in magnitude, in proportions and in cultural level opened wide perspectives with regards to the dimensions of the watercraft formerly built in this area. It was on the outlet of the wide Lucus River, just where it wound past the hill where these colossal ruins stood, that reed boats had been in common use into the present century. Warehouses from Roman times emerge from the silt at the foot of the hill, witnessing to times when Lixus was the main Atlantic port for sailors from the Mediterranean world.

  Reed boats had lured me to Lixus. Few sights have surprised me more. The Atlantic Ocean in front of us, the unbroken mainland of Africa at our backs, stretching all the way to Egypt, with Phoenicia and Mesopotamia close behind. They had come here, from the innermost corner of the Mediterranean, past Gibraltar and dovm the west coast of Africa, with women and children, with astronomers and architects, with potters and weavers, those travelers from distant Asia Minor who, when the Romans later came out past Gibraltar, had been living here since the morning of time. This was truly historic ground. Out here on the Atlantic coast lay this ancient town, so old that the Romans called it the Eternal City, connecting it with the giant Hercules, son of their supreme deities Hera (or Hra) and Zeus, and hero of the earliest Greek and Roman mythology.

  The oldest walls, now completely or partly covered by the compact detritus of Phoenicians, Romans, Berbers, and Arabs, were sufficiently impressive to stir anyone's imagination. Gigantic blocks had been quarried and transported to the top of this hill in enormous numbers. They were carved in different shapes and sizes but always with vertical and horizontal sides and angles that fitted neatly together like pieces in a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, even when right-angled indentations in some blocks made their facade ten or twelve-sided instead of rectangular. This special technique, unknown and almost

  inimitable, appeared as a sort of signature carved in stone wherever reed boats had once been in use, from Easter Island back to Peru and Mexico, and from there back to the great civilizations of Africa and the inner Meditenanean. Olmecs and pre-Incas had mastered this technique to perfection, just as the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians had, but Vikings or Chinese, Negroes or prairie Indians would all be as perplexed as a bunch of modern scholars if they were shown a mountainside and asked to carve blocks and fit a wall together on these principles, even if they were given steel tools and a pattern to copy.

  As I wand
ered among the tumbled and half-buried blocks of the Eternal Sun City and recognized that sophisticated special technique, I felt as if America and the eastern Mediterranean were drawing closer to each other. Lixus seemed to link them and divide the distance in half. This far the eastern Mediterranean civilization had spread its branches—many centuries before Christ. Here well-equipped and well-prepared colonists and traders had been sailing to and fro at a safe distance from the menacing cliffs of Africa here and further down, past the perilous Cape Juby, during just those centuries when bearded Olmecs appeared on the opposite shores of the Atlantic and set about clearing glades in the jungle. Just when Mediterranean stonemasons poured out through the Strait of Gibraltar, the unknown Olmecs began introducing stonemasonry and civilization to the Indian families that had roamed the wilderness for many thousands of years. Here at the river mouth, the classical reed boat had survived, although all sorts of timber were available on the shore. Here it survived, with the same ocean cunent surging off the coast, that very current that now had us in its grasp for the second time in a year.

  I gave the heavy rudder-oar an extra shove outward, to give us the greatest possible chance of steering clear of the rocks round Cape Juby. How many vessels in the early days of Lixus had struggled, like us, to round the dangerous reefs where Africa swung southward to the furthest Phoenician colonies below Cape Bajador.

  "This time the rudder-oars will surely hold up," I said laughingly to Carlo and patted the thick log I was steering with on the port side. The other, on the starboard side, was set in a fixed position

  with Stout rope. Tliose thin shafts we had used last time had broken on their first encounter with the ocean waves and reduced the whole voyage on Rd I to a drift voyage.

  The papyrus hull itself was also infinitely stronger this time. The papyrus had once again been collected at the source of the Nile, because the sparse papyrus growing in Morocco, where we built Ra n, did not cover our requirements. Neither Abdullah nor I could reach Bol on Lake Chad to fetch Mussa and Omar; the rebels had struck again in the desert and French parachute troops had cordoned off the entire area. Nor had the Central African technique proved strong enough in the long run at sea. After two months we had lost the reed on one side because the makeshift tail tacked on behind had gradually subsided and allowed the waves to use the wicker cabin as a saw, until the rope chains raveled like knitting. I had decided to try reed boatbuilders who were still regularly building robust vessels in the ancient Mediterranean style, with a pointed stern soaring as high into the air as the bow. That was how the South American Indians still built their reed boats in Bolivia and Peru. They also followed the illustrations of ancient Nineveh and Egypt in another remarkable detail: their ropes ran continuously from the deck right round the bottom of the reed boat, so that from the side, the vessel consisted of a single compact bundle, while the boats on Lake Chad, apart from having a flat stern, consisted of many small papyrus rolls, held together on top of and beside one another by short, linked loops of rope.

  Strange that the Indians in South America should use a method far closer to the ancient Mediterranean technique than the one that had survived in Central Africa. Perhaps the explanation was that the Buduma on Lake Chad had never had any close personal contact with the civilizations of antiquity. But the Quechua and Aymara Indians on Lake Titicaca had. It was the Aymaras' own forefathers who had helped to build the Akapana pyramid and the rest of the megalithic structures in Tiahuanaco, once South America's most important cultural center, which stood in pre-Inca days on the shores of Lake Titicaca. It was they who had transported the colossal building blocks by reed boat across the lake. It was they who told the Spaniards that white men with beards had appeared among their forefathers to direct this stone work, and that when they came they

  had first appeared in reed boats of this type. The Aymara Indians themselves had never learned to work stone. But they had succeeded, to perfection, in copying reed boats for fishing on the lake, right up to the present day.

  All the crew of Rd I had declared their willingness to join in a further experiment. Once again, Santiago left his post at Mexico University, this time to look for reed boatbuilders on Lake Titicaca. In Addis Ababa, my local contact, Mario Buschi, was discreetly asked to send his Ethiopian assistants out on Lake Tana to harvest another twelve tons of papyrus. Reed from Ethiopia and boatbuilders from Bolivia were to be transported covertly to Morocco, where the building had to proceed in all secrecy if I were to be left in peace to write the chapters on Ra I, a piece of work which was an absolute necessity to help me bear the additional expenses of this continuous experiment. Twelve tons of Ethiopian papyrus, shipped around Africa under the cover name of "bamboo," were unloaded in Safi harbor and vanished. Four full-blooded Aymara Indians and their Bolivian interpreter landed at the airfield in Casablanca with Santiago and vanished. Sailcloth from Egypt, a v^dckerwork cabin woven in Italy, timber for masts and oars, quantities of rope, all arrived unnoticed in Morocco from various directions, and vanished. Nobody but the Pasha of Safi and my closest circle of collaborators knew that a second Ra was being built in Morocco.

  On May 6, a section of the high wall around the city nursery garden in Safi collapsed and out from the flowers and palm trees roared a mighty bulldozer, followed by a little frail ship of flower stems, which seemed to have grown naturally from the greenery.

  Ra 11 was born.

  She moved slowly through the crumbled masonry like a big paper bird emerging from its egg. With majestic dignity she rolled slowly on wheels down narrow alleyways, where Arabs and Berbers in hooded tunics and veils stood packed together to watch. Police paraded and barefoot children danced along in the procession. Excited gardeners and electricians hung from the trees and posts and on top of a red mobile ladder, to prevent branches and wires from tearing or setting fire to the dry papyrus tips rising fore and aft of the golden showboat. The authorities breathed a sigh of relief when the strange construction had jounced across the railway lines and stopped be-

  tween rows of newly painted fishing boats waiting to be launched for the first sardine fishing of the spring.

  "I name you Ra II" said Aicha, wife of Pasha Taieb Amara, as for the second time in the little under a year she splashed goat's milk over a bone-dry papyrus boat before it slid out on the water.

  "Hurrah," yelled the sea of people surging over the quay, applauding while the strange vessel lay bobbing around on the very surface of the water exactly like a toy paper boat. Many of the spectators had felt sure it would capsize or at least lie out of trim, for it had all been made by hand and eye. We who were to use the thing felt a tremendous relief in seeing how perfectly she floated on top of the water. The crew of the waiting tugboat just stood staring, without moving a muscle.

  Hurrah!

  But what now? Stop! Help! Ay-ay-ay! A despairing shriek from the crowd. Panic on the tugboat. A powerful squall came chasing unexpectedly over the mountain, twirled the paper boat round and whisked it off alone away from the tugboat, at terrifying speed, straight toward a twelve-foot-high jetty of solid stone. Howls and cries of distress, orders yelled in French and Arabic, faces buried in hands, photographers plunging into shallow water with their cameras. And there was the newly baptized infant, spinning round and high-tailing it at top speed, straight for the wall. Bang! Tlie elegantly curved new papyrus tail took the whole shock and bent like a feather. It was heartrending. The stern! The very part which must be invulnerable and perfect this time. The hull turned and danced recklessly on the wave-tops right up onto the stones. No one could stop the boat in the gusts of wind. The experiment with Ra II seemed to be over before it had begun. But no. The harp-shaped tail gave like a spring, and the reed boat bounced off the wall like a rubber ball. Once. Twice. A wooden boat would have splintered and gone to the bottom. Ra was unscathed. Just a scuffed gray patch on the outer sheath of some of the golden straws. Then the tugboat captured the rope. Nothing to repair. Ra II followed cheerfully on her tow rope, ove
r to the quay where the bipod mast was to be put on board. Dancing to right and left in the gusts of wind, she behaved like a paper kite trying to get air-borne.

  I shuddered at the rudder-oar as I thought back to the launching.

  But at the same time I thought that if we were now to be cast up on reefs and rocks in the mist over there, we would have a good chance of saving our hves before this ball of hay went to the bottom. It was so compact and solid that it did not bend an inch on the seas. Ra I had undulated like a sea serpent. Ra II was as rigid as a baseball. Everyone on board was equally impressed with the Indians' brilliant design. Those perfect lines and the incredibly ingenious way in which the difficult construction problems had been solved were quite inconsistent with the style and quality of the Aymara Indians' other earthly possessions. This was inheritance. Even if the real secret of their ancient technique seemed to have gone unnoticed by laymen and scholars alike, our own research and experiments had proved that this Lake Titicaca method is the only one that can produce a vessel with shape and lashings concurring with the details on ancient Mediterranean reliefs. All other methods of binding the papyrus together in the form of a crescent-shaped boat led inevitably to sagging and jerking, with catastrophic results to the ropes. It is easy to construct a makeshift raft of reeds, but not a crescent-shaped reed boat capable of resisting ocean waves. The system employed by our Indians was so simple and yet so ingenious that I know of no living tribe or individual who would be able to duplicate it without instruction and much practice.