The Ra Expeditions

by Thor Heyerdahl

  of further sailing down Africa. Stocked with provisions to last for two months beyond Lixus, Hanno turned back only when his bina-tional exploring fleet reached well down the jungle and river coast of Equatorial West Africa. The king's inscribed stele, as recorded by later Greeks, refers to the population of Lixus as foreigners among whom the explorers sojourned long enough to obtain friendship and advice. These ancient voyagers were masters of the art of obtaining fruitful relations even with hostile, primitive people. According to their own record, they always landed a tempting gift on the beach to be picked up by local tribes as a friendship token before they dared to leave the ships. This method was used on the jungle coasts of West Africa, and it would have functioned among unorganized jungle tribes anywhere else.

  The obvious benefit of international collaboration on voyages to foreign lands was fully understood by man of antiquity. Not least by the Egyptians and Phoenicians. This is why it was quite normal that Egyptians and Phoenicians directly joined hands in the first historically recorded circumnavigation of Africa, nearly two centuries before Hanno's skillfully prepared fleet of emigrants sailed down along the already known west coast. In fact, Pharaoh Necho's circum-African expedition about 600 b.c. was a proper Egyptian enterprise utilizing Phoenician ships and crew. No King or Pharaoh went along on the three-year venture, thus no Egyptian tomb or stele tells the story. It just happened that Herodotus recorded the event before it was forgotten, traveling as he did between the Phoenician coast, Mesopotamia, and Egypt in the fifth century B.C. while preparing his famous world history.

  What kind of culture would have begun to flourish among formerly primitive jungle hunters on the other side of the Atlantic if such a mixed expedition of colonists or explorers had been driven there? What kind of pyramids would they have built?

  That stupid map with the dead blue that places Mexico centuries or millennia away from Morocco, instead of a few weeks. A few snatches of sleep for a monkey, a duck, or a sailor—even if he did not know the sea was salt. Mere seconds, counted within the frame of history. True, the people of America had not seen ribbed plank ships before Columbus. But the people of Morocco, the entire Meditenanean, and Mesopotamia had seen reed ships.

  Like those surviving in America. I had only made a fumbhng experiment in building two, with the aid of a scant handful of lake people, and sailed some six thousand nautical miles in four months, the second time landing in America. By building a hundred Ras, we, too, like Hanno, might have learned to sail safely up and down off the dreaded Cape Juby. But in the meantime, how often would we have run the risk of breaking the rudder-oar and landing in America? And heaven knows what kind of culture pattern we from Ra would have agreed upon.

  I closed the window. I grabbed my pencil and wrote: I still don't know. I have no theory but that a reed boat is seaworthy and the Atlantic is a conveyer. But I would hereafter consider it barely short of a miracle if the multitude of active maritime expeditions during the millennia of antiquity never happened to break their rudder-oars off Lixus, or be swept off course while struggling to avoid shipwreck in the dreaded currents around Cape Juby. Did we drift to America because of unprecedented stupidity in handling wooden steering oars, or because of unprecedented skill in sitting on reeds?

  Here I do have a theory: Perhaps we got across because we sailed on the ocean and not on a map.