From Raft to Raft

by Bengt Danielsson

  As there was nothing for us to do but wait for a turn of fortune, at the beginning of July Francis and I accepted an invitation to see the shipyard at Constitucion, a small provincial town of about 4000 inhabitants, which lies 125 miles south of Santiago at the point where the river Maule runs out into the Pacific. To our surprise the owners of the eight shipyards not only showed us in detail how a type of cutter, which was their speciality, was built, but invited us to a big dinner at which many speeches were made and toasts were drunk in splendid wine from a neighbouring vineyard. Our Spanish was still very poor and the wine was very strong, so it was a long time before we grasped the main point of all the speeches—that our kind hosts wanted to make us a present of a cutter. We also discovered by degrees that their generosity was to some extent dictated by a hope that orders for similar cutters would stream in from the South Sea islands as soon as we had made their excellent qualities known there—but this did not make their offer any less attractive to us. Elated by the Chilean wine and the pleasant prospect of becoming shipowners, we returned to Santiago to await the next offer of this kind. But when we told Eric what had happened he was not best pleased and said at once impatiently:

  Almost hidden by all the sweet-scented flower wreaths which his friends and admirers had hung about him in Tahitian fashion, Eric de Bisschop bade a specially warm farewell to Bengt Danielsson when sailing from Tahiti on November 8, 1956.

  It was evident that Alain Brun was tormented by unpleasant memories, and it was a long time before he could bring himself to tell the true story of what had happened on the two tragic expeditions.

  With her Chinese rig and her Peruvian center-boards, the bamboo raft Tahiti Nui I, which Eric de Bisschop and his comrades used for the voyage from Tahiti to Chile, was one of the most peculiar crafts ever built.

  The bamboo raft Tahiti Nui I, gaily decorated from bow to stern, was towed out of Papeete harbor on November 8, 1956, and left to her fate about ten miles south of Tahiti.

  Down in a latitude of 3 5 ° South, fishing was bad, and only on rare occasions could the cook offer such a delicacy as fillets of dolphin or tunny. To the left, Eric de Bisschop and Alain Brun.

  Tahiti Nui I had lost quantities of worm-eaten bamboos and had a heavy list when the Chilean warship at last arrived and after several unsuccessful attempts finally took her in tow.

  Like her predecessor, Tahiti Nui II had a raised deck, but she was built of cypress logs instead of bamboos. Contrary to all predictions, she floated well when she was launched.

  Eric de Bisschop, surrounded by his companions, on board the raft immediately before sailing from Constitution on February 15, 1958.

  Tahiti Nui II was towed out to sea by a string of rowing boats, after which the crew had to set sail quickly so that the raft should not drift back into the surf on the shore.

  After forty-one days of pleasant sailing along the west coast of South America, Tahiti Nui II arrived according to program at Callao, where a tug immediately took her in tow.

  Unmoved by all that went on round about him, Eric de Bisschop, as long as he was in good health, worked vigorously at the scientific thesis which he hoped would prove his revolutionary theories to be correct.

  Alain Brun was the only man on board who was a seaman by profession, so that he had greater responsibility and more work than the other members of the crew.

  Eric de Bisschop’s companions. In front (left to right): Alain Brun (French) and Juanito Bugueno (Chilean). Behind : Hans Fischer (German-Chilean) and Jean Pelissier (French).

  ‘But what do you want a boat for? Why didn’t you ask for a raft instead?’

  Although we felt very sad at having to give up our fine ship-owning plans so soon, we could not help admitting that Eric was right. After all, our stay in Chile was only an accidental break in our long raft voyage, and the most important thing at the moment was to get on as quickly as possible. We owed it to Eric that we had made this raft voyage to Chile and had been invited to Constitucion. So it was our definite duty to think first of Eric and the expedition. We wrote to the shipbuilders and explained the situation, and they sent Eric by return of post an invitation to come and see them.

  Eric went off to Constitucion fitter, more self-confident and full of charm than he had been for a long time, while Francis and I remained in the capital and celebrated the coming victory in advance, for we knew that Eric was irresistible when he was in this humour. Indeed, he returned several days later and triumphantly declared that he had not had the least difficulty in persuading the shipbuilders to build a raft for us. Of course the building of the raft would not cost us one peso, and to judge from Eric’s enthusiastic accounts it seemed that the whole population of the town had promised to come out and help us with our preparations quite free of charge. It was by no means as unlikely as it sounded, for by this time we knew both Eric and the Chileans very well.

  The future looked bright again. But just as we were about to return to Constitucion to start building the raft Francis had a letter from Tahiti containing bad news. His wife was ill and must have an operation, and all his relations entreated him to come home. Francis decided with a heavy heart to fly back to Tahiti at once with our unwearying expedition secretary Carlos, who, having straightened things out for us in Chile, was now again hurrying on ahead to make preparations for our return. I saw the last of my raft-mates disappear with grief and a real sense of loss, and I felt depressed for the first time since we arrived in Chile. But fortunately Eric’s energy and confidence were not affected in the slightest degree.

  ‘So there’s only you and me left,’ he said in a matter of fact way. ‘Let’s divide the work between us. I’ve my book to think of, so you’ll have to build the raft. That is to say, it’ll really be enough for you to supervise the construction, for the builders are providing both labour and material. If it was possible I wouldn’t mind exchanging with you, for the job is so infinitely easier and more interesting than mine.’

  I was far from convinced that the simplest job had fallen to me, but I accepted this division of work as being the only possible one. Besides, I had always Eric to fall back upon for instructions and advice. Our first problem was to decide what kind of wood we should use for building the raft. Our friends the shipbuilders had given Eric a collection of samples of wood, which we now produced. To make our raft of balsa, as the Kon-Tiki men did, was out of the question, for no balsa trees grew in Chile and we had neither time nor money to send to Ecuador for the quite considerable quantity of timber that would be needed.

  After we had shown our samples to innumerable timber merchants and shipbuilders we began, as the majority of them did, to incline to the view that cypress wood would be the most suitable. Several people objected that cypress wood was only used for coffins, and we should therefore do best to avoid it. But, as we soon discovered, this assertion was wrong, for many boats were made of this kind of wood. The fact that it was also used for coffins naturally made no difference one way or the other, unless one had an unusually grisly imagination. To be on the safe side we decided to postpone our final choice till we had heard what the builders at Constitucion thought. So, as soon as we arrived there—on September 8, 1957—we laid our problem before them. One of them immediately lifted up his voice and said:

  ‘Muy estimados senores. The only raft we have built here was an oak raft, which the Government ordered a few years ago to carry cars to and fro across the Maule a little higher up, where there is no bridge. She was a fine large raft, senores, and several ministers, provincial governors, mayors and a lot of other fine people had been invited to the launching. A band of fifty played military music and a lot of speeches were made. Finally came the solemn moment when the raft was to be committed to her right element. She glided down the slip at a good pace, plunged into the water—and began to sink fast! A few minutes later only a few light ripples on the surface showed where the handsome, expensive raft rested on the river bottom. She was too heavy to be raised, and possibly she is st
ill lying where she sank. That is all the experience we have of rafts, senores. As for cypress wood, it is just the kind of wood we use for building the cutters which have made Constitucion famous, and no better cutters are built anywhere in the world, I’m convinced of that.’

  This decided the matter. Cypress was quite certainly the right kind of wood for us too. Another advantage was that there were large cypress forests quite close to the town. Eric and I went for a walk in the woods with Don Enrique Munoz, in whose yard our raft was to be built, and chose some fifty trunks about eighteen inches thick. As soon as Don Enrique had marked them, he set a gang at work felling them at once.

  ‘I’m glad the building is in such good hands,’ Eric said with satisfaction on our return to the hotel and began to collect his few belongings. ‘As I can’t do anything more here I’m going to Lontue, where some Chilean friends have promised to put me up. It’s a pretty hacienda high up in the mountains, and is certainly an ideal place to finish my book in peace and quiet. So good luck—’

  ‘But wait a bit, Eric,’ I interrupted him. ‘You haven’t given me any sketch for the raft.’

  Eric looked perfectly astonished.

  ‘What do you want a sketch for? You ought to know quite well by this time what a raft looks like. Make as faithful a copy as you can of Tahiti Nui I. The most important thing is that she shall have the same measurements. Well, good luck. I must be off now.’

  In the next moment he had disappeared.

  I remembered quite well how we had set about the building of our bamboo raft in the naval yard at Papeete, but unfortunately this dearly bought experience was of little use to me, for this time the problems were different because the material we were using was different. For example, it was impossible to lash the thick cypress trunks together by the same simple and quick method which we had employed for our first raft. After puzzling my head over this for a long time I decided not to use any ropes at all, fearing that they would be chafed to pieces by the hard, rough trunks, and adopted instead the ancient system of wooden pegs. Each layer of trunks—there were three in all—was kept together by wooden pegs of harder timber, which were driven in from the side slantwise right through all the trunks. The three layers were then joined together in the same way with similar pegs inserted vertically. In constructing the raised deck, cabin and masts it was easier to copy the prototype, and I made only one alteration—a small but very fortunate one, as was seen later: I gave the cabin a flat roof instead of a sloping one. As a mascot, and a reminder that despite all changes our goal was still the same, I fixed the Polynesian image, which we had so luckily saved at the last moment from Tahiti Nui I, immediately behind the centreboard in the stem of the new raft.

  Now and then Eric came down from his mountain retreat, nodded approvingly, said a few friendly words and disappeared as quickly as he had come. On another occasion a young Frenchman whose acquaintance we had made in Santiago turned up and declared that Eric had just taken him on as a member of our expedition. Jean Pelissier, as my new comrade was called, was unusually well qualified for a voyage of the kind we meant to undertake, for he was an oceanographer by profession. He had taken part in several Arctic expeditions while a student at the Geophysical Institute at Bergen in Norway: he had then obtained a post at the marine biological station in Chile and had done research work both in the Antarctic and in the waters round Easter Island. I was therefore convinced that he was a man of the right type, with plenty of hardiness and endurance, which on a long sea voyage is at least as important as the possession of theoretical knowledge, however valuable.

  Jean mentioned that he had a Chilean friend, a mining engineer with the un-Chilean name of Hans Fischer, who seemed to have a good chance of also being taken on by Eric. Unfortunately neither Jean nor Hans could come and help me with the building of the raft till the meters end of the year at the earliest, because they had first to complete some important scientific research work.

  Plan of timber raft TAHITI NUI II built for the voyage from Chile to Polynesia

  I was rather annoyed at seeing Jean disappear so quickly, for I really needed all the help I could get if I was to have the raft ready in time for us to complete our voyage before the cyclone season began in the South Sea islands. Immediately afterwards, however, I received the support I needed from another quite unexpected quarter when Juanito arrived with a cheerful grin on his face and immediately began to make himself useful in his usual considerate way. I was by no means sure that the authorities in Tahiti would be any more tender-hearted this time, but I dared not destroy his beautiful dreams. It made a great difference to have a comrade who was a Chilean by birth and not only spoke Spanish fluently but also knew how to handle his countrymen, and from that moment the tempo of the work increased considerably.

  But the work would certainly have gone still more quickly if we had not been so popular. From the first moment the good people of Constitucion had shown an extraordinary interest in our raft-building, and as strictly speaking they were all our hosts, and many of them had helped us in different ways, it would have been both rude and foolish to turn them away. So although we sometimes felt like queer animals in a zoological garden, we reconciled ourselves to being continually stared at. But as time passed our crowd of spectators increased in numbers and at the same time became more demanding and difficult to manage. As I soon found out, this unwelcome change was due mainly to the fact that it was gradually getting warmer. Constitucion was a very popular watering-place, visited every summer by thousands of holiday-makers from Santiago and Valparaiso, and in that particular summer they seemed to be unusually numerous and frolicsome.

  As long as they contented themselves with a good joke we did not mind, but many of them regarded our enterprise simply as a bad joke, a very bad joke indeed. After I had answered, several hundred times a day over a long period, such silly questions as whether we really thought the raft would float, whether we were going to Tahiti or Haiti, and why we did not build a boat instead, I almost wanted to put up a notice such as Eric had nailed to a tree when he was building his remarkable double canoe Kaimiloa in Honolulu in 1936. It read simply: ‘WE KNOW WE ARE CRAZY, SO PLEASE DON’T TRY TO PROVE IT TO US!’ But I had not Eric’s gift of ruthless irony, and many of our well-meaning benefactors would certainly have been quite unnecessarily hurt.

  A visitor whom we always greeted with pleasure was the stationmaster of Constitucion, Horacio Blanco. Blanco was a most unusual combination of a dynamic man of action and an unselfish idealist. We gradually learnt that it was originally he who had persuaded the owners of the shipyards to take an interest in our expedition and make us their generous offer. Blanco’s sole motive was his strong patriotism, or perhaps I ought to say local patriotism: he wanted to restore to Constitucion the greatness and importance it had possessed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when ships from its harbour made regular long voyages to Panama and Europe. It was, by the way, the town’s greatest son, Juan Fernandez, who on one of his many adventurous voyages discovered the islands that now bear his name.

  Horacio Blanco was firmly convinced that the building of the raft would not only be the opening of a new and glorious epoch in the town’s history, but would also stimulate its flagging business life. As he only had four trains a day to deal with he was able to devote most of his time to helping us, and he seemed to possess a kind of sixth sense when it was a question of guessing our wishes and needs and finding out the best way of satisfying them. If by any chance on some rare occasion he had not time to come himself, he sent us instead some of his eleven children, all of whom seemed to have inherited their father’s energy and inventiveness.

  Indeed, as time passed I became so accustomed to the idea that Blanco could arrange anything and everything that I took it as the most natural thing in the world that he should initiate me into the mysteries of the Morse code—Eric having on one of his occasional visits appointed me, to my astonishment, not only second in command but also wireless operator t
o the expedition. After that I began my working day an hour earlier with lessons in Morse at Constitucion station, which fortunately was only a few hundred yards from the slip.

  Blanco also undertook—without, as far as I can remember, anyone asking him to do so—to obtain provisions, medical stores, sails, anchors and all the rest of the equipment which we needed for our voyage of at least five months. How he managed it I have no idea, but anyhow towards Christmas large cases began to arrive in a steady stream from different shops and factories, and the only thing we had to do was to say thank you and receive them. I think I can say in all seriousness that without Blanco’s selfless assistance the building of the raft and preparations for our return voyage would have taken twice as long and cost a great deal of money.

  At the beginning of January 1958, Eric arrived—as usual, without warning—and told me with a grin of satisfaction that he had almost finished his book. He assured me with delight that it was a very malicious book, which would certainly annoy a lot of people.1 I told him, not without some pride, that Juanito and I too had nearly finished our task. The raft had been ready for launching for a long time, and the work which remained to be done was mainly on cabin fittings. We promised to finish them in good time if he would only let us know when we were to sail.