other was somewhat larger, fatter, and of a greenish-brown color. Except for two long protuberances on the head, reminding one of a hare's long ears, these boneless gastropods are far too clumsy, slow and ugly to merit their name. To us they were rather mini-hippopotami. The dull motion, the clumsy snout, the warty skin of the broad unshapely body were those of a pocket-size hippopotamus as they crawled up to and over the waterline, and slowly wavered their heads, trying to determine where to move next. When scared they would lose all shape and identity, crawling into their own skin, first resembling a cat moving in a sack and then becoming a lifeless fig.
Except for the crabs, none of our submarine passengers ventured above the wet part of the reeds. Perhaps it was the flying fish that lured the httle crabs up on deck as time passed. We did not always find every flying fish that sailed on board during the night, but the crabs located them between bundles and cargo. The little two-armed, eight-legged rascals posed themselves merrily on top of the titanic helping of seafood, scaled clear a convenient portion and began serving themselves greedily with both hands.
Our little kitchen garden did not serve the eye alone. It was Detlef who discovered that by harvesting a potful of the biggest goose barnacles and boiling them with garlic, Iraqi spices and some dried vegetables, he had invented the best variety of fish soup we had ever tasted, particularly when some bits of flying fish were thrown in.
Flying fish are a blessing to any raft-ship voyager in warm waters. As a dehcacy they are second only to breakfast herring, and as bait they are superior to the most expensive artificial tackle. The variety we encountered in the Indian Ocean was not the largest I have seen, being only about seven inches long, and when only two or three landed on deck they did not suffice as breakfast for eleven men. But a single one put on a hook would straightway catch a dolphin three feet long, which sufficed as dinner for everyone. And when the old secret of how to liure flying fish on board was shown to the keenest among the fishermen, Asbjom, master of our ship lanterns, ht all our kerosene lamps and placed them outside the cabin walls at night. Flying fish began raining on board like projectiles. Day by day, as we traveled southward, our morning harvest increased. When we had a late dinner by lamplight flying fish sometimes shot across the table, hitting us left and right, tumbhng into pots and pans, while fish scales that marked collision points had to
be brushed oflF canvas and cabin walls. Several times we were awakened by a cold fish landing in the bed, strugghng with long breast fins that could not give them takeoflF speed for flying away, which in the water is done by the tail. More than once I was awakened by a wet creature wriggling down my neck as I lay naked in my sleeping bag right inside the door, and one night Carlo, my neighbor, sat up greatly amused when I could not find the visitor that had danced all over my bed. Next morning he found it dead in his own sleeping bag. There were days when the morning cook was able to serve each of us with three fried flying fish for breakfast. The morning harvest had mounted to forty by the time we stopped counting and accepted whatever flew on board as part of a normal routine in what our German companion Detlef, versed in the stories of Miinchhausen, termed the Schlaraffen-See (the Sea of Luxury).
Dolphins
The first fish to rush for a hook baited with fresh flying fish was the dolphin, the surface hunter and raft companion of all warm seas. Again, the multicolored fish dolphin, Coryphaena hippuras, also known as dorado, gold mackerel and mahimahi, must not be confused with the Httle whale of the mammahan family Delphini-dae. Fish dolphins had followed us before, notably in the Pacific. We had only two or three with us as we left Pakistan; they never went for any hook, and only Asbjorn and Detlef had success with spears. But from the day we had the first flying fish to put on the hook we had dolphin dinner whenever we wanted, and, no matter what we pulled up from the sea, next day the munber of dolphins swimming aroxmd us had increased.
On February 16 I made a note that I had never seen so many fish at sea. On the eighteenth Gherman and Torn swam under Tigris to film the variety of fish species that had joined us by then, and among them were twenty dolphins, in spite of all our fishing. Next night their numbers had passed thirty. With our flashhghts they were easily distinguishable from other fish in our company. We kept on fishing, and at intervals I kept adding a note to my diary that never had so many fish swum with us in any sea as now.
At midnight on the twenty-sixth I crawled drowsily out of the cabin to take over my steering watch, and got a veritable start as I faced a completely spooky sea. Torn was out before me, playing
with his torch over the surface, and his beam did not reveal the usual black night ocean. Just below the surface ghostlike, lifeless bodies stood side by side everywhere, keeping exactly our speed and course, yet motionless as if they were mere reflections of something on board. Dolphins. But never had we seen them in such mmibers, and they did not circle about in lively fashion as we were used to seeing, but just stood there hke an army of white ski troopers, escorting us motionless and eflFortlessly as if ghding downhill on black snow. Normally we swam with the friendly dolphins, but this silent, uninvited entourage was packed so close and in such impressive numbers that I should have hated faUing into the water.
As morning came the dolphins spread out over the surrounding sea. But as soon as the sun set they came back to us. Two nights later their number had passed three hundred. Colorful in daylight, they became palHd ghosts again by night. Broad in profile but slender across the back, they stood evenly spaced, with freedom enough only for their outstretched breast fins, always on portside, always with our bow a short distance ahead of their own front hne, as if to be sure that we led the way. No matter what speed we made, theirs was the same. By day they were hvely, swift, and even seemed playful. In rough seas they would amuse themselves wagging their tails at full speed to rush right up to the highest peak of a wave top, then calmly surf-riding down the steep side.
As the month ended a note in the diary says:
We are so much part of the marine environment now that I regard the dolphin school as domesticated; they always change speed and direction to go with us whenever we make a change. And at portside gunwale they swim so close that the tailfin often cuts the surface beside us, and with a flashlight in their faces we can see every detail. In daytime they often swim with their white hps open as if to collect plankton; we can then see their pink tongues. In daytime also, the breast fins, spread out hke on a butterfly, are shining so intensely in hght blue that they seem to be illuminated and can normally be seen before the fish itself becomes visible. While pale silver at night and when dead, this parrot-colored chameleon of the sea is otherwise ahnost brown on its back, with grass-green head and yellow-green tailfin, the rest of the body in various tones of green that alters and moves with the direction of sun and
shade. A beauty to look at that none can help admiring or tire of, even though we see it all the time. They even leave us with an impression of being a friendly and faithful marine herd, by following us as dogs and sheep follow a shepherd ashore.
We sometimes sailed into an area with a side current rich in plankton. At night the sea was phosphorescent with microscopic organisms that gave a faint glow to anything touching them, fish or reeds, while some less numerous, bigger plankton twinkled as individual sparks. Sea and sky could sometimes be confused. The dolphins then showed up without flashhght as pale, elongated clouds drifting over a pitch-black firmament, and the phosphorescent mi-croplankton made each fish send out a faint hght even in its wake, giving them a long extra tail as if they were giant luminescent tadpoles. When we used a fine-meshed net to catch the starlike sparks that danced about independently, they proved to be copepods: tiny jimiping shrimps with big black eyes.
The wind strengthened and we sailed faster. The only sign that the dolphins also increased their speed was at night, when their luminescent wakes were drawn out in length, making them look less like tadpoles and more Hke electric eels. It was an unforgettable spectacle that som
etimes kept us seated on the portside bench gazing at the nocturnal show long after our steering watches ended. It was a fire dance each time some fishes decided to change places in the procession, their long undulating comet tails crossing and interlacing in beautiful patterns.
At the first sign of daylight, when the procession broke up, the few that remained would circle around and under us as if awake after a night's sleep. We saw the others at a distance, usually in pairs or three at a time, jumping sideways out of the water in pursuit of ghttering flying fish. For days on end we had the company also of a few long-flying boobies, and it was a common sight to see these seabirds fly low in front of a hunting dolphin, ready to dive and snatch the escaping flying fish as soon as it took to the air, leaving the bewildered dolphin to scuttle about below looking in vain for the fish that never came back from the sky.
We wondered much why the dispersed hunters came back to us at night to take up their sleepwalker procession. Carlo theorized that they had discovered the rain of flying fish close to Tigris at night. They swam so closely packed on portside that with mouths
open one of them would always get whatever failed to land on deck. But why always assemble on portside? The moon rose on portside and ht up the golden ship on that side in the early evening before the whole procession fell asleep. There were many guesses, but certainly the dolphins herded together like sheep as if for safety during the night, probably finding Tigris a large and friendly protector, each hoping that another of the flock might become the prey and sound alarm in case of surprise attack during their sleepwalking. They had enemies in the Schlaraffen-See that could swallow them whole, the way they themselves could swallow half a dozen flying fish in one gulp.
Saihng along one night with our host of luminescent ghosts, I was half dormant myself, leaning against the bridge railing with the tiller in my hand. Brought to my senses by a sudden uproar in the sea beside me, I saw the phosphorescent dolphins rushing about in chaos as if a torpedo had landed among them. And there came the luminous torpedo. The terrific speed of the escaping fish prolonged their phosphorescent wakes until they all looked like undulating sea serpents, but the torpedo grew to outstrip them all in width and length as it shot into their midst and provoked havoc in the pattern of light. When the sea was black again, and the dim fights tinrned off with the dolphins gone, a ten-foot hammerhead shark swam away, fins above water, restless as if not yet satisfied with whatever he had swallowed.
A minute after the giant predator was gone, the dolphins were back with us to resume the procession. If possible, they seemed for a while packed even closer together, with barely room for their outstretched fins.
Sharks
The hammerhead sharks were terrific hunters. They commonly came at night when the dolphins could be caught by surprise, but were active by day too. We once saw half a dozen escaping dolphins leaping through the air as if in imitation of flying fish. The last in the row was thrown vertically into the air by the broad transversal snout of a hammerhead shark, and fell down, out of control, right into the terrific jaws of the waiting monster.
The hammerheads seemed the least trustworthy of all the sharks we encountered. In contrast to most other sharks the ham-
merheads never really kept us company. They appeared suddenly, patrolled our surroundings and rushed away. One fine morning I was sitting peacefully on the airy outboard seat on the portside stem, with the reed screen discreetly drawn around me, when someone on the bridge shouted, "Big shark asteml" I happened to look straight down between my feet and saw the ugliest sight probably ever seen in any toilet. The broad, squahd head of a monstrous hammerhead sHd slowly into view right below my bottom. Never have I seen the grim expression of that graceless species better. No other creatures can have a more grotesque position of the eyes. The flaring, hammer- or T-shaped head was incredibly wide right in front, like comical cheeks or fleshy mustaches except for the small eyes at either extremity, with big nostrils at their sides. The huge mouth, far behind and underneath, leisurely swallowed up my paper as the displaced eyes seemed to gaze up at me ready for the main course. The prospective man-eater was apparently either nearsighted or as disgusted at what it saw as I was, for it moved on. I did not even dare to lift my feet for fear of calling attention to my near presence. The ten feet or more of gray-skinned muscle slid slowly, very slowly, under my seat, and with my feet I could have touched both dorsal and tailfin as they in turn passed under my outboard enclosure, but until the tall tailfin sailed out of the toilet I did not even dare to rise to gather up my trousers.
When next I saw the beast it was behind us playing with the big rubber hfebuoy, and the men were preparing a huge hook with a short chain tied to the strong towrope. Carlo had put a small shark on as bait, and he caught the big hammerhead to everybody's excitement. A long battle followed with our end of the rope finally tied to the stem log, whereupon the fish pulled us 20° out of course. The captured shark churned the water, then went deep in all directions, and as it came up under us the rope was caught up in the guara aft, which started to waggle above deck. We pulled the guara up. For a while the giant was hammering at our bottom and our wake began to fill with tiny reed fragments. Finally everything grew calm below, but we could not pull in the rope with all our combined strength. HP had made us a small diver's basket of bamboo and rope, following the design we had invented on Kon-Tiki. Feeling braver now with my swimming trunks on, I crawled in when the basket was hoisted overboard. To everybody's disappointment but my own relief I foimd the big hook empty, stuck
deep into the reed bottom of our ship. Swimming around me were only our familiar escort, including smaller sharks of a white-finned type we no longer feared. The hammerheaded monster was gone; it looked as if it had made a joke of its own name by hammering the hook so deep into the bottom of Tigris that we hardly got it out. It had swallowed the big bait as payment for the eflFort.
Since the time when we led a daily hfe with sharks around and upon the Kon^Tiki raft, it has been abundantly clear to me that sharks can be just as friendly and just as ferocious as men in and out of uniform. Even one individual shark can change in temperament from one moment to the next. The entourage of Tigris consisted of almost charming sharks. That is, though belonging to a detested and carnivorous species, they contrasted vdth the hammerhead shark both in conduct and appearance and left us with a feehng of sympathy.
Sharks came and left throughout the voyage, but only after we sailed from Karachi did we really make close contact. Their number varied from day to day, but increased as we sailed, and seventeen were counted in our company the day we fought the hammerhead. Their sizes varied from three feet to the length of a man, sometimes more, and at the beginning it was we who were the predators and they the victims. It was too easy to catch them and no sport fighting them; they hardly put up the battle of a dolphin. And they were far less popular as food, even when soaked to reduce the ammonia. Soon even the keenest fisherman was apologetic to the rest of us if by mistake he took a little shark on the hook. We fed them instead like dogs, with leftovers, fishheads and bones.
One day we had foul wind and our speed permitted bathing. We found Gherman in the water alone before us, floating calmly on his back with no fewer than ten friendly sharks keeping him company with no sign of evil intent. From then on most of the men lost their awe for the daily shark company; in fact the complete disrespect was too flagrant at times, especially among the youngest on board, who were left with the impression that only blue sharks, hammerhead and tiger sharks would force them to climb out of the sea.
One day I let myself trail behind Tigris in the dinghy, lying with my head under the water to look at two long pikehke barracudas, scarcely trustworthy prospective man-eaters that swam with us for a few days, grinning with jutting lower jaws full of fierce teeth.
They always swam side by side and deep below us. I removed the goggles that did not quite fit my expedition beard, had just filled my lungs and was head down to relocate the patrolli
ng barracudas, when something was right up against my hair. I looked up and right into a face that had an expression as surprised as mine. I had seen the broad, flat head of a shark before, but not nose to nose, and had never before discovered that a fish could have an expression. Yet this shark definitely had one, as much as I did, radiating friendly curiosity and mild surprise. Being used to dogs, I was perhaps a bit misled by the tail slowly wagging at the other end of the body, and by the comers of the closed mouth that were drawn down as if in bewilderment at what it saw. I saw a shark, but the shark saw the bottom of the dinghy as a big round turtle with a bearded human head at one end. From that moment I have promoted fish to the reasoning species, not so far removed from the warm-blooded beasts as I had always assumed.
The Tigris Expedition Page 37
