The Tigris Expedition

by Heyerdahl, Thor

  The bandits were not willing to yield a penny and even insisted on keeping Rashad as a hostage until the ransom was paid when we reached the edge of the shallows. Without the sHghtest sign of fear, Rashad agreed.

  The wind had somewhat abated and yet the dhow had difficulties getting us moving in the right direction when they threw a tow

  to the Russians, who in turn had us at the end of their line. Slowly the procession of three small vessels began to work to windward without any sign of Slavsk.

  The night fell over us again, as black as the last. Except for our own kerosene lamps and modest flashlights, there was nothing to be seen in any direction. No Hghts on the island. No hghthouse. No Slavsk. Whether the other two dhows were going away or coming was anybody's guess.

  Captain Igor was still with us on the reed ship and could report that Slavsk was about seven miles away when the towing began. We seemed to be going through an extremely shallow area, for the pitching and roUing was formidable. Oiu: flashhghts sometimes showed seaweed dancing in the waves of an almost milk-colored sea. The rascals ahead of us in the pitch dark did a good job. It proved to be a long passage. Then, at last, Norris shouted from the mast ladder that he saw the hghts of a ship on the starboard side forward. The hghts grew bigger. It was Slavsk.

  The sea ran reaUy wild, with taU swells at the edge of the submerged reef when the pulling ceased. The dhow suddenly appeared close to our side, now with a kerosene lamp ht, like on Tigris. This time we feared that they might come too close, for as one boat rose up on a wave crest the other sank down in opposing rhythm. Their wooden gunwales might rip the reed rolls of Tigris to shreds. It was a truly violent dance, but we had to venture close to pay the ransom and get Rashad back. I stepped onto the side roll of Tigris with a grip in a stay and stretched out over the water as far as I could with a thick stack of dinars in my free hand. A dark-faced Arab sailor on the dhow stretched out as far as he dared to meet me, while the rest of our men worked with bamboo rods to push the two wild vessels apart if they should get entangled in the dark. The man grabbed the cash, and now we clung to the side of the dhow as the pack of paper money was brought to the chief on the pillows. He took his time coimting the wad of notes one by one while someone held the lamp over his turban-covered head. Then he nodded and in a leap Rashad was with us. Slavsk, fully ht, was now coming to our side. The men on the dhow blew out their lamp and hke Aladdin's genii they vanished into the darkness. There was no further sign of them.

  We were dancing along with the men in the orange lifeboat and had to take great care not to be smashed against the steel hull of the big rolling ship that approached us. Slavsk was alternately

  pitch-black and blood-red as we were tossed up and down past its waterline. Both the hfeboat and Tigris were in danger, first from the suction of the big revolving propeller, next from the bottom platform of the staircase lowered from the lofty deck of the big ship. It rose and fell like a giant piston, one moment high above our heads and the next disappearing with a splash deep into the turbulent waves. It was diflBcult enough for the crew of the lifeboat to get onto the platform before it escaped over their heads or sank into the black sea. It was worse still for the four men who had to repeat this wild performance from Tigris to Slavsk by way of the riotous hfeboat. We all held our breath when Captain Igor and his mate jumped. Igor almost tumbled into the sea as the hfeboat shot skyward just when he jumped down. Yuri and Carlo followed in a fraction of a second. The four men were then lost in the darkness until we saw them all enter a hght beam as they hurried up the long stairways at the side of the Slavsk.

  Yuri had whispered to me before they jumped that Carlo had a serious leg infection. He wanted to take this opportunity to clean and treat Carlo's leg carefully.

  We pushed oflF with our long bamboos to avoid getting sucked in and cut to pieces by the propellers. Soon we hung on a long rope behind the empty lifeboat, now in the tow of its Russian owners. We felt violent jerks from the bow each time the ship, the lifeboat and Tigris rose and sank out of time. Igor had refused to let us loose before we were safely out of the reach of the jackals. He had promised to go as slow as his pistons could churn the propellers, for I had made it clear that nothing was harder on a reed ship than to be towed in open sea. The risk was far greater that the short reeds would be pulled apart by a jerky tow than if they danced free in a hurricane. Norman and I, the only old-timers now left on board, had our hands on our knives several times, ready to cut the towrope if we felt the bow might be ripped apart. But nothing seemed to happen, and we fell asleep, dividing the watches on the rudder oars among the nine of us left.

  How crazy it was to feel the breaking seas hammering against a reed ship straight from the bow, from the bow.

  Chapter 5

  TO DILMUN, THE LAND OF NOAH

  A

  .DAM and Noah have one thing in common: they are the only two men we all descend from, according to the beliefs brought by the Hebrew patriarchs from Ur. From Adam's Garden of Eden we had come on Tigris to the waters where the story of Noah's ark began. A thousand years before Abraham heard it in Ur, the Su-merians had told it to their children in the same city-port. In these waters, they said, a big ship had once been built by the progenitor of aU peoples as he comphed with the orders of a merciful god who wanted to save mankind from complete obUteration in a terrible flood.

  While fields and homes were submerged the big ship resisted the fury of the raging elements by floating upon the waves. In the Hebrew version the builder of the ship afterward thanked his God, who set the rainbow in the sky as sign of his covenant with the sm:-vivors. In the Sumerian version he prostrated himself to the reappearing sun in gratitude.

  The sea was moderately rough as the same Sumerian sun rose above the former Sumerian waters and filtered the first rays of the day through the cracks of the woven-cane wall upon my closed

  Captions for the following four pages

  ly. The archaeologist Geoffrey Bibhy shows the author a survival from Bahrain's antiquity; the boat is made from palm stalks and Torn uses the same material to repair the how of Tigris.

  18. Prehistoric burial mounds on Bahrain are estimated to number one hundred thousand; a few are as big as pyramids and lined with dressed stones as shown by Geoffrey Bibby.

  IQ. Under the sands of Bahrain Danish archaeologists have discov-ered a long-lost port city with walled harbor basin dating back to Sumerian times.

  20. The quarried and beautifully fitted stones of a mini-ziggurat and associated sacred well on Bahrain were of a kind of rock unknown on this island and hence brought by prehistoric mariners in Sumerian times.

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  21. Prehistoric quarries on the prison island of Jidda, from where the ancient masons of Bahrain had rafted their big blocks.

  22. Oil platforms and supertankers added to our problems of reed-ship navigation in the gulf.

  23. Mountain climber Carlo preparing extra ropes for the bow as the flexible reed ship sails along the dangerous cliffs of Oman, aiming for the narrow exit from the gulf.

  24. Turning into shelter outside the traffic-fiUed Hormuz Strait, we are waiting for Rashad, then turn to sail southward along the Arabian peninsula.

  eyes. With mixed feelings I awoke and gazed through the open doorway at the flowing disc that slowly rose with majestic dignity from its bath in the sea. Beautiful. Magnificent. Clean, virgin light was being lit for a new day. I welcomed the beautiful sight wholeheartedly, for I felt as if the sun had lit another hope in my somber spirit. After all, we were safe and free, free to start all over again with a ship that was still in good shape.

  It had been a restless, unpleasant night, with violent jerks from the towrope. When the snatches at the bow had been too bru
tal I had suffered in my sleep, as if it were I who was pulled by the hair and not Tigris. I had been out on deck to check that the bow was still with us. Each time it was with strangely mixed feelings of security, fear and disappointment that I observed the steady lights from a big ship right ahead. But of course it was the friendly Slavsk, with Captain Igor, Yuri and Carlo probably sound asleep aboard, not feeling, on their big steel ship, the nerve-racking snatches from the rope that held us together.

  The strain on our ship was sometimes scary. Terrible shrieks, cracking and gnawing noises came from ropes, lashed wood, bamboo and berdi. The huge shafts of the rudder oars banged and hammered from side to side in their wooden forks so hard that they ht-erally shook the ship and could be felt as veritable shocks through the wooden cases on which we slept. Detlef and I were out once and worked in the dark to lash the shafts into a tight position. This stopped the terrible hammering.

  During the night Norman and I had also been out together to toss bright bits of berdi from the bow, which we followed with flashhght in the black water and timed as they passed the thirty-foot mark on the side bundle. Thus we checked that the engineer of Slavsk lived up to Captain Igor's promise not to go faster than two knots, the speed we had been saihng toward Failaka. The Hghts of Slavsk ahead of us gave me continuously mixed feelings of relief and disappointment. Relief from the burden of responsibihty I had felt for all the men some hours ago in the shallows of Failaka. Now the rascals and the reefs disappeared ever farther behind us in the dark. But we were being towed away. We had failed to escape under our own sail. But for the human vultures somewhere out there in the night it would probably have been safer for our sickle-shaped reed stack to have run its bow into the mudflats; it would have been safer than being dragged to windward, violently bumping every five seconds into the rising wall of a contrary wave.

  Now the sun shone freely above the horizon. Someone whistled a merry tune in the open galley nook. I could discern the movements of the whistler through the thousand cracks in the cane wall and catch the pleasant odor of something reminiscent of pancakes. It must be HP. His sleeping bag was empty. The others, except the watch on the bridge, were still asleep, probably relaxed and happy to be towed along. Perhaps not Norman, for he was dead set on solving the sailing problem.

  The purpose of our reed-ship experiment this time was not merely to float and drift, but to navigate. Therefore the beginning of the voyage had been a glamorous failure which we could only laugh at as we gathered at the breakfast table. The southerly wind was still dead against us, 15rst of moderate strength, then increasing again in force. We even had to put on wind jackets to enjoy oiu: meals at the unsheltered table.

  *Are you sure the ancient people could have done better than us?'* HP queried. "Maybe they just hung on wherever they were until the wind blew more in their direction."

  "After all, we too could at least pick our course to span half the horizon," Asbjom added. We all agreed that we could steer successfully 90° to either side of a following wind.

  Suddenly we observed that the violent hugging and lugging came at much shorter intervals. Water cascaded in front of the bow. We were going faster. We hurried up to the cabin roof and waved desperately for Slavsk to slow down. This was crazy going. But nobody on the ship ahead saw us or understood our signals. The lifeboat midway on the towline was empty, it bounced on the water worse than we did, being pulled in two directions with ropes fore and aft. Before I could make up my mind whether to cut ourselves free with a knife or try to contact Slavsk by radio, the towline broke in a last violent jerk. Our speed slowed down as suddenly as it had picked up. Slavsk went on alone with its empty lifeboat.

  Asbjom climbed over the bow and reported that the one-inch towhne had broken close beside Tigris, but what was a real shock to aU of us was that he had foimd a huge hole torn in our bow. Fragments of loose reeds were in fact floating behind us. In front of the hole the spiral ropes hung loose across a cavity as large as a dog kennel. This was a frightening discovery. We forced our fingers under the lashings on deck up front, and pulled to feel the tautness where they passed the cavity. The spiral rope was still as tight as if

  glued to the reeds. The reed bundles had fortunately swollen so much that they squeezed the lashings fast between them. With a large hole in the bow we thus apparently faced no immediate catastrophe. But we had to find a way of filling the hole before it grew too big. The reeds around it would now loosen one by one and gradually cause the whole bundle boat to fall apart.

  Slavsk came back in a great circle and Captain Igor appeared with a megaphone. He refused to let us remain loose. He had contacted his shipping company in Odessa and they had approved his actions. He had even sent a message to the Ministry of the Merchant Marine in Moscow, and Minister Gujenko had personally authorized Slavsk to tow the reed boat Tigris "to an area of safety."

  "There is no such area short of Bahrain," assured Captain Igor. And his men began to throw us a new towline from their tall ship. No matter how they threw it, even with a life ring on the end, it was sucked in by the colossal propeller, and so were we. The propeller had to chum around, otherwise the roUing ship would be as much out of control as we were without a sail. Even with the engine of Slavsk running, its tall iron wall was swaying over our dancing reed ship while both vessels were tossed to and from each other. Our waving bipod mast and our elevated reed ends were close to being crushed from above whenever we tried to fish the rope end out of the whirls of the propeller. It was two hours before we managed to toss our own thin line up to the men on the rolling ship and pull it back with the thick towrope tied to it. Captain Igor shouted that the ship's engineer had unfortunately been tempted to raise the speed because going dead slow in these seas was harmful to the propeller shaft. But they would never again exceed two knots. We also made clear that we wanted to hoist our sail and continue on our own the moment the wind turned to normal and permitted us to set course for Bahrain.

  We on Tigris were all curious to see our position in relation to Failaka and Bahrain, and Norman rolled out a very illustrative map sent us by the National Geographic Society. It was a sort of historical map entitled Lands of the Bible Today, with archaeological annotations such as Abraham's route from Ur and other pertinent data taken from the Bible as well as from archaeological finds. The "Persian Gulf* showed up beautifully in blue with yellow islands. Nor-

  man put his finger at our approximate position. He then read aloud the text that happened to be printed beside his finger: "Earhest Sumerian records refer to shipwrights and seafaring people. Some of man s earliest ventures on the sea occurred in the Persian Gulf." This fired the curiosity of everyone. What were these records about? Had I read them? Certainly not all. But probably all that dealt with seafaring provided that they had been translated from cuneiform script into European languages. Perhaps I had imderes-timated the interest of my companions in the actual background of our adventure. We could hardly expect a better opportunity for a quiet get-together than now as Slavsk towed us at sailing speed past ships and oil platforms. I crawled into the cabin and came back with a bag full of pocket notebooks replete with scribbhngs from my own researches. Notes from museum exhibits and storerooms and quotations from scientific books and learned journals, like those I had studied in the Baghdad Museum Library. I opened them one by one and looked for handwritten extracts underlined in red.

  Sumerian daily life in gulf ports

  There was a quotation from an essay entitled *The Seafaring Merchants of Ur" published in a scientific journal^ by a noted authority on Sumerian culture, A. L. Oppenheim. He was of the opinion that the most interesting information contained in some of the inscribed tablets from Ur

  has to do with the role of the town of Ur as the "port of entry* for copper into Mesopotamia at the time of the Dynasty of Larsa. The copper was imported by boat from Telmun [i.e. Dil-mim], today the island of Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf. This 'Telmun-trade" was in the hands of a group of seafaring merchants—called
ahk Telmun—who worked hand in hand with enterprising capitahsts in Ur to take garments to the island in order to buy large quantities of copper there. Since the island hardly yielded any ore—not to speak of the fuel needed for smelting—we are faced here with a situation which is typical for international trade on a primitive level: Telmun served as "market place," a neutral territory, in which the parties coming from various regions of the coastal area of the gulf exchange or sell the products of their coimtries. . . .

  Since Telmun was only a market place, two possibilities have to be envisaged: the ivory obtained there by the traders of Ur could have come either from Egypt—through some unknown commercial channel—or from India brought across the Indian Ocean on boats saihng with the monsoon. In favor of the second alternative speak the well-estabUshed hnks between southern Mesopotamia—especially Ur itself—and the civih-zation of the Indus Valley. The discovery of Indian seals . . . and of specially treated camelian beads ... in Mesopotamian excavations has proven beyond any doubt the existence of such trade relations. We now may very well add ivory to the Hst as an item based exclusively in Mesopotamian sources on philological evidence, while we have from Mohenjo-Daro actual ivory combs. . . .

  Thanks to the deciphering of the inscribed tablets, scholars Hke Oppenheim can give us a good idea of what life had been hke in the gulf ports of Mesopotamia in Sumerian times. Shipbuilding, navigation and maritime commerce was the second largest occupation in ancient Ur, surpassed only by agriculture. Maritime activities were extremely well organized and formed the basis on which Ur founded its economy. From Ur riverboats carried the gulf trade up the two rivers to other peoples as far north as present-day Turkey, Syria and Lebanon. The harbors as well as the network of inland canals were dredged and well maintained under the supervision of high officials directly responsible to the king. The harbor authorities imposed taxes on importing ships, and the captains carried sealed documents concerning vessel and cargo. Oppenheim quoted part of a legal document in the form of a clay tablet from Ur, in which the captain's responsibility is spelled out in cuneiform characters: **. . . the well-preserved ship and its fittings he will return to its owner in the harbor of Ur intact. . . ."