The Tigris Expedition

by Heyerdahl, Thor

  At first nothing seemed to happen. Then slowly we began to move. Very slowly. Scarcely one knot, but enough to give me steerage. The Tigris, sail down, crawled out from our dock and wormed its way out through the labyrinth of concrete piers and steel hulls. Filthy flotsam began to circle and drift behind us in the harbor. Three blasts of the siren resoimded from each ship in turn as we reached and passed it—salutes from modem ocean craft to a repHca of their earliest ancestor as it struggled to reach the sea. Two hehcopters circled overhead as if to check that we really left. His Majesty the sultan ia his escorted car chased along the dock road to Port Qaboos, where he turned around and dashed back to his Muscat castle.

  All this was a stimulus to the toiling oarsmen, and the sudden silence was almost oppressive as we left the last ship behind and the long way lay open to the outer breakwater. It was eight in the morning when we were ready to cast loose, and by nine we began to realize the dimensions of this huge modem harbor, for we stiU had to clear the outer breakwater with a faint sea breeze now impeding oiu: advance.

  By this time the men, untrained in rowing, began to feel really exhausted. Tigris was indeed grossly undermanned. The ancient rock carvings rarely showed fewer than twenty oars in the water on a reed ship of fair size, sometimes twice that many, and we had only eight. With twenty we would have flown through the harbor with three times the speed and little effort.

  Before we reached the gap through the final breakwater the breeze had become a problem. We hardly seemed to move at aU

  and the wall ahead seemed to remain at the same distance. Not only did the feeble wind reduce the speed, but as it struck us sUghtly to one side of the high bow it forced us sideways to port, making it diflBcult eventually to clear the jetty. The rudders and two boards we lowered fore and aft were not enough to counteract this leeway, and I had to give the four starboard men a rest while the others rowed doubly hard, then we let the rowers change sides.

  The eight men were exhausting their reserves and all I could do from the tiller was to keep the rudder tiuned and yell even louder, hke a real slavedriver, but shouting cheers of optimism too. The jetty came nearer. Another hundred yards and we would be level with the long wall and clear its tip, where the sea broke and we would be free, free to hoist our square sail. The minutes were endless. A couple of the men at times splashed their oars hke drunkards, ending up with backward strokes.

  After an hour and a half we reached the gap where the ocean swells rolled against the star-shaped concrete blocks of the jetty that stretched toward us from the portside. The moment we came abreast of the breakwater the wind became too strong for our effort. We barely managed to get outside, for the four oarsmen on the port-side hardly had space for full strokes; and once outside we lost the battle with wind and waves and were slowly forced backward, stem and rudder blades first, toward the dentated polygonal blocks. We were seconds from disaster.

  "Hoist the sail!" I cried. It was too early, but we had no choice, for the men could do no more. It was a desperate situation, with people suddenly screaming with fear on our behalf from the top of the jetty and from half a dozen small boats that had come to see our departure. We were right up against the finger-shaped projections of the breakwater blocks. The stem was so close that from the railing of the steering bridge I could look dovm at htde crabs scrambhng away in all directions as the mdder blades swept past with only inches to spare. An ugly performance. A close shave. A motorboat threw us a rope as the exhausted men led by Norman mshed to hoist the sail. It was up and trimmed at record speed. It filled. In a few moments the concrete claws of the breakwater blocks shpped behind us. We were out in the open sea.

  We could only envy the early Sumerian seamen. How easy it would bave been if we, as they had done, could have gone iv ppd anchored in front of the Sohar beach. With a few oars we could

  have turned Tigris stem to wind at the anchorage and sailed straight ojff from the sandy shore.

  ITie faint wind blew from SSE, and there was no sign of the strong NE winter monsoon we could have expected in the middle of January. Our sailing speed was so slow that we found ourselves unable to tack with our small sail, and we had to take the feeble wind in from starboard and sail north again in a direction that barely cleared a lofty black cape jutting into the sea north of Port Qaboos. Jokingly I suggested to the crew that we had been to Makan, and that we ought now to sail back north again to visit the Indus Valley we had missed. In reality we had planned to sail in the opposite direction, southward to Africa, hoping to get the winter monsoon at our backs.

  We had the tall mountains and rock islands of Oman within sight until dusk. Then we could see only a few bright hghts which soon sank into the sea, and as night fell only the faint ^ow in the sky told us the direction of Muscat and Matrah. But long before dark we began to see a famihar sight: the masts and bridge houses of distant ships forming an iminterrupted line along the eastern horizon. What had looked hke white houses soon rose from the horizon and became parts of large ships, one behind the other. We were once more in the very midst of the shipping lane, trying to cross it. The horrible, brutal and unrhythmic side-roUing in the deep, shortly spaced wakes of the superships began again, and so did the ferocious hammering and unmelodic cat orchestra special to an irritated reed ship. On my midnight watch with Detlef we barely escaped collision as a small cargo ship came straight for us and we were both able to turn aside only at the very last moment.

  The next day, before sunrise, the wind changed from SSE to NNW and we turned to steer 130° with sail filled and at good speed. In the afternoon we adjusted our course to steer just clear of Ras al Hadd, the easternmost cape of Oman, where the Arabian peninsula forms a right-angle comer and falls o£F in the direction of the Gulf of Aden.

  Only now did we begin to realize that a serious problem was brewing on board. Norris, usually happy and cheerful, had suddenly become sullen and quite beside himself. We all knew why. On our last day ashore, travehng in Paolo Costa's Land Cruiser through the prehistoric copper-mine area, we had lost our way in the network of wadis and canyons, and the bumping over rocks and

  gravel banks had been so rough that something in Norris's specially constructed sound camera was shaken to bits. He had been fiddhng with aU his spare parts almost without food and sleep until it became clear that nothing could be done except in a laboratory. Before we sailed from Oman he sent an emergency cable to the consortium. We comforted him with the prospect of borrowing a film camera from Torn or Gherman, who each had one, although theirs could admittedly not record sound. But this underestimate of Norris's professional needs made him even more depressed. The whole reason for his presence on board was that the National Geographical Society and WQED had sent him to shoot an expedition documentary with synchronized speech and sound, and a common 16-millimeter camera could not fulfill this requirement.

  With his camera unusable, Norris had struggled as one of the eight rowers when we left Muscat, but despite this struggle, when we were safe out at sea and he stiU had been unable to repair his camera, he wanted to get back to shore and airfreight his equipment for repair. For a moment I was almost glad there was no sound recorder working as most of us had begun to raise our voices. Norris insisted on being put ashore. The rest of us could not care a damn about the film at that ijioment; with the wind so good all we wanted was to get into the open sea and away from cliffs and moles. So we sailed with latent problems stowed away on board. Now Norman was angry as Norris gave him endless emergency messages to transmit via Bahrain Radio, urging spare parts or new equipment to be shipped by air from England or the United States to Muscat and then by surface vessel to some rendezvous in the Gulf of Oman. I agreed with Norman; it would take hours to get the messages through and we had to get away from the Arabian peninsula. It would be madness to jeopardize the whole expedition for a camera.

  The result was that the tall, good-humored Norris seemed to shrink into himself; he gazed in the direction where land had been as if planning to swim as
hore, now that his special services with us had come to an abrupt end. It gradually dawned upon me that this was serious: Norris was growing more frustrated with every passing moment. Norman managed to transmit his desperate messages via Bahrain. The Bahrain operator, Frank de Souza, seemed by now to be part of our group; he was the only person in the outside world who managed to hear our confounded consortium transmitter and come back with a reply. I began to hope for a rendezvous with a

  new camera for Norris while we were still within reach of Oman, before we sailed past the final cape. Norris felt sure that Dale Bell, in charge of land operations for WQED in Pittsburgh, would do anything to airmail replacements to Oman. We had better stay close inshore.

  We had successfully wriggled our way through the shipping lane and were beyond it, but we entered it again as we steered closer to land in the direction of Ras al Hadd. By night we felt as if we were travehng across prairies with light from scattered homes here and there in the darkness. But the illusion lasted only so long as the hghts were at a distance. While Yuri and Gherman shared the night watch a tanker passed so fast and so near that Yuri jmnped from the toilet seat while Gherman waved frantically with the stem lamp.

  On the third day after leaving Muscat, the good northerly wind died and came back as feeble gusts from E and SE, slowing down our progress toward the cape and giving Norris a faint new hope. The sea had been moderately polluted since we left port, but now we sailed into a serious oil shck with scattered lumps. We tried to escape the traffic by getting on the shoreward side of the shipping lane, but did not know that Bahrain Radio had warned all ships in the area of our presence in the Gulf of Oman. Before we could avoid it, a large luxury liner seemed as if about to run us down when it unexpectedly changed course as if to give the passengers a closer look at a rare form of watercraft. Next a small freighter suddenly stopped its engine and lay drifting, as if trying to trap us, crosswise to our course, then started again as if in despair when it became apparent that we could not stop like them. Shortly afterward, yet another ship turned off its course and came chasing straight for us as if intending to ram us, but it turned out to be a small Norwegian freighter. Brunette, which circled us twice, then resumed its course and disappeared with three blasts of its siren. A big Russian ship, Akademik Stechkin, came for us next and repeated the same maneuvers, as if dancing around a Christmas tree, while a loudspeaker shouted "Yuri Alexandrovitch* and asked if we needed anything. We did not, and we sailed closer inshore as fast as possible, to avoid the beaten path.

  Fishing with rod and spoon, HP caught a big fish, he said, so big that it broke his fine and disappeared with his favorite spoon before any of us could testify to the three-foot length indicated by

  the fisherman. A few hours later Asbjom dived overboard on a hne and came up with a really large fish on his hand harpoon. It was a big dolphin, also known as dorado or gold mackerel. Moreover, it had HP's precious spoon in its mouth, with a piece of broken line trailing behind. HP had not exaggerated. Soon afterward, a six-foot shark came circling and headed for the big red buoy we always towed behind for security. The buoy was bumped left and right for a moment, then the shark took oflF.

  On the fourth day we sighted wild mountains above a misty coasthne on the inside, while all the ships were now on the outside. For a moment we had escaped the traflBc lane. But the wind was turning increasingly east and to Norris's dehght forced us ever closer to the mountain coast. That evening the unbeHevable news came from Frank in Bahrain that a^new camera had been prepared for Norris and would be flown to Muscat, if we could wait. What else could we do when we saw the joy on Norris's imshaven face— and the wind all on his side. We turned Tigris about and steered back north, parallel to the coast. The uninhabitable rock walls which emerged from the mist seemed a more compact threat than the widely spaced steel hulls of the shipping lane, and when the mountain coast grew higher, wilder and nearer as night approached, we forced the reed bow as far to starboard as we could take the east wind on our return voyage up the Oman coast.

  The nights and days that followed were among those which none of us on Tigris are ever hkely to forget. We tried a rendezvous with a fishing vessel chartered by our agent to meet us twelve miles from shore, outside the isolated fishing town of Sur, hidden between the coastal mountains west of Ras al Hadd. But the fishing smack never found us, and at this position, under the lofty rocks and mountain ranges, Norman's radio failed to get contact with either ships or shore. Not even Frank at Bahrain, on the other side of all the mountain ranges, could hear us now. We decided to beat northward to Muscat, where modem vessels would have less difficulty in finding us. But we had no means to communicate this decision to anybody, leaving the fishing vessel to search for us in vain.

  A name can do injustice to a place, and such was the case with Ras al Daud, which in good old Norse meant "Landslide of Death" to me, but according to Rashad meant "Cape David" in Arabic. We

  sighted this desolate cape at night, vaguely lit by a stellar heaven and draped in a ghostly mist from the sea, and as we sailed close I began to feel that nothing I had seen did more deserve the name of Death than this lifeless, sinister cape, standing in the midnight haze hke a giant gravestone, with a deep and empty valley, gaping Hke a tomb, at its left and vanishing into complete darkness under a veil of pale clouds. No life. Nothing moved but mist. There was probably a small invisible beach at the outlet from this narrow valley, and I had been tempted to try a landing in the starhght between the steep rocks, but at close range the place looked so frightening that the navigators agreed with me that we had better stand off from the walls before it was too late.

  The cape was already unpleasantly near and we tried to throw out the canvas sea anchor to reduce our speed. But our wind drift was already too slow for the sea anchor to take a hold, hanging straight down like an empty sack. Norman had by now devised a topsail to be hoisted on a bamboo boom, and it was a great success. It gave us better steerage. We could resist the east wind that threatened to send us against the rocks. Much against what would have been our own wishes, if we had had a better choice, we began to steer out toward the busy ocean highway we had tried to avoid. As we began to see the ships around us again and tried to cross the traffic sector, the wind died down and returned only as feeble gusts from varying directions, preventing us from conducting any sensible navigation. We lay in the midst of dense traffic, fighting with sail and steering oars to get out of the way of fast ocean liners and tankers as they thundered by and left us rocking so violently that the steering platform under our feet seemed ready to tear loose from the reeds and capsize with cabins and masts into the sea. Carlo and Yuri were everywhere trying to secure ropes while the rest of us struggled to get Tigris out of this crazy marine highway where an old-fashioned reed ship did not belong.

  By night we felt worse. We could detect at once a speck of light wherever a ship appeared, but not seeing the vessel itself we could never teU if it came on a collision course or would pass at a safe distance. Lights appeared on the horizon everywhere and grew and grew until either a little green or a little red lamp could be distinguished in the general glare of illumination on board. If both the green (starboard) and the red (port) lamps were visible at the same time, then the ship was comiag straight for us. We had red and green lights on Tigris too, but in the wind the glass sooted up terri-

  bly and the flames often blew out. Anyway, big ships rarely had lookouts to see such modest kerosene lamps, and the biggest tankers could neither stop nor turn by the time something was within vision of their bridge. It was up to us to do the sighting and patiently watch every speck of hght around us until big enough and near enough for us to distinguish the various lamps. We could then tell, by the ahgnment of the two colored lamps, combined with one tall white lamp aft and a low one in front, whether we lay right in the course of the vessel or whether it would pass to our left or right. But by then we could often see the outlines of the black hull against the night sky, with little time left
to scramble out of the way if the wind failed. We therefore organized a double night watch to keep a sharp lookout for hghts from the moment they appeared, to know whether we had to escape to port or to starboard. It became a routine, but the night was long and we awaited sunrise impatiently, tired of staring into the dark, tired of the incessant battle with rope and canvas, and arms stiff from gripping the oar shafts and legs weary from tumbling about as Tigris jumped the angry wakes like a porpoise.

  When morning came the Hghts disappeared but the ships were still there; now we saw them from the moment they rose humming like mosquitoes on the horizon, buzzing like wasps as they came nearer, until they passed us like drumming elephants.

  Toward sunset on the fifth day the weather changed. Heavy clouds rolled up over the horizon and we heard distant thunder. To the west we could stiU see the outhnes of coastal moimtains briefly each time they stood out against the hghtning. The night had barely started when a strange combination of lamps that made us think of a Christmas tree floated very slowly past in front of us, crosswise to our course. We marveled and discussed what they might be, when we noted some other unusual hghts from a low and equally slow craft following at a distance behind the first, also intending to cross our course. Both vessels moved so very slowly that there would be time to pass between them. And that is what Gherman and I tried to do when Detlef came up on the bridge and I showed him the Christmas tree. The next second Detlef reahzed what it was. We threw both tillers hard over to starboard and barely managed to sldm around the low stem of the second vessel, which proved to be a heavily loaded, unmanned barge. As a captain of merchant ships Detlef had read from the many superimposed mast hghts on the