The Tigris Expedition

by Heyerdahl, Thor

  Our friendly coexistence with domesticated sharks led to a couple of near-disasters. Carlo was sitting well outside the stem, balancing on the narrow oar blade, washing his old wound with one hand and hanging on to a bit of rope with the other. He had convinced himself, but not Yuri, that this daily saltwater cure was good for the wound. Before this Gherman had been hanging on the other oar after a good soap wash and was standing aft drying himself when he suddenly shouted a warning to Carlo: "Sharkl" Carlo had long been sitting with one of the friendly httle sharks swinging from side to side beneath his feet, and answered, "I know."

  "Shark! Shark! Get out!" Gherman shouted again, for he had discovered a ten-foot man-eater coming, fin above water at high speed, straight for Carlo, who calmly continued to wash his leg. Then, fortunately, the brute began to behave strangely, wagging its tail and whipping the surface as if in challenge before attack. Carlo looked up and saw the big predator approaching fast and directly toward his leg. With the remarkable strength of a lifelong mountain chmber Carlo hoisted himself up with one arm and grabbed the side bundle with the other as he swung himself up from the rudder blade. The men aft estimated that another shark-length, equahng another second, saved Carlo from losing his foot.

  We had almost reached Africa when Gherman without my knowledge took an unforgivable risk. While all but the helmsmen were dozing in the shade of the cabins after a good dolphin lunch,

  he donned his rubber suit and let himself out from the stern on a long rope to film the mixed company that swam in our wake. As he hung there with his goggles on, white-fin sharks and other fish approached him and paraded on either side of his camera. Some species were by now so tame that Torn used to swim out with a bag of chopped seafood and feed them with his hand. Hanging alone, far behind, Gherman noted one of the really big man-eaters deep down below. It had already seen him and came in slow circles up from the depths. Gherman had filmed sharks in his own Caribbean Sea and most other shark-infested waters on our planet, so he knew when one of them was approaching with evil intentions. As calmly as possible he started to pull himself in.

  While the rest of us were out of sight and most of us dozing, HP and Rashad were joking and laughing between themselves on the steering bridge, and had no notion of what was going on in the ocean behind them. Circle by circle the shark came higher as Gherman, grip by grip, pulled himself closer to Tigris. Nobody was there to pull him aboard. An uncontrolled grip or a provocative sound or movement, and the shark would have rushed to attack. It was there, right below him, as he grabbed the starboard rudder oar and pulled himself up on the bundles. He was pale, speechless, confused, angry at himself and at war with everybody for a couple of days after his unjustifiable adventure.

  Rainbow runners, triggerfish, and pilot fish

  Among the inhabitants of the open aquarium under Tigris were rainbow runners and triggerfish, two species not known to us from previous raft voyages in other seas. The rainbow runner, Elagatis hipinntdatis, was a beauty in lines and color, shm and speedy as a projectile. It derives its name from the two blue and two yellow stripes that run lengthwise on either side, separating the silvery belly from the dark-blue back, and it has a tail of pure gold. Usually about a foot and a half long, this fish has a delicious flavor, Hke a mixture of bonito and mackerel, and at times the rainbow runners followed us in such numbers that Asbjorn once was told to stop when he had caught a dozen in a few minutes. More than once we saw the rainbow runners in the closest company with the sharks; in fact it happened that a man-size shark would swim along the side of Tigris with one rainbow runner escorting him on either side, and

  they stuck so close to his side that it looked as if all three fishes were fastened together.

  The triggerfish, in contrast, was the comedian of the sea. It was clumsy in shape and looked silly swinmning, as if more at home in a glass bowl. This species is in fact supposed by marine biologists to be a shallow-water fish hving in reefs. But they surely did not Hve up to their reputation, for here they came to join us in the open sea and swam along with us ten thousand feet above the ocean floor. The first one we saw was hke a strange bubble moving aimlessly on the surface, which proved to be the round white mouth of a stocky, speckled httle fish. Short and tall it swam in a comical way, with curtainlike fins on back and belly waving left and right but always at the same time and toward the same sides, like wings out of place. This funny creature had difficulty in keeping up with our speed in good wind and sometimes fell over sideways like a drunkard in its eagerness not to lose us.

  There are some thirty kinds of triggerfish and some of them are poisonous, so we never tasted the two types that kept us company. Thus their representatives had risen to incredible numbers by the time we reached Africa. They flippered along deep and high and competed with the sea hares in grazing on our lawn. When Tigris rolled in high seas they sometimes had the grass in their mouth and, reluctant to let it go, were pulled out of the water, fell on their backs, but waved themselves right side up again to come back for another bite. The largest we measured was twelve and a half inches long, but most were the size of an open hand. When caught they could control their own colors, showing round blue spots all over that otherwise were hardly discernible. But their specialty was to manipulate the trigger that gave them their name. Leather-skinned all over, they have a soft fin on the back and in front of it are two, sometimes three, long spines. The foremost of these is the longest and can be raised and locked in a vertical position, so that the fish may hold itself firmly in protective crevices. With all the force of our fingers we could not bend or unlock this long spine. But if we touched the trigger, the smaller spine just behind the long one, the mechanism would inmiediately imlock and the long spine fold back. This ingenious mechanism the fish could manipulate from the inside. The triggerfish mingled freely with the sharks, who would hate to get one of them in its throat.

  A few zebra-striped pilot fish swam before the bow or beneath

  us, but few as compared with those we had seen in the Pacific, probably because we rarely brought on board the bigger sharks they usually accompanied. One five-foot shark had six pilots swimming in front of its nose, but once we pulled it up on deck we saw to our surprise about twenty of them strugghng around its tail trying to come along with the master. Carlo left the dead shark hanging with its tail in the water, and we were amazed to see two pilot fish remaining beside the tailfin, performing the most beautiful and remarkable dance. The two performers, of equal size but one greenish-yellow with light-brown stripes and the other Hght blue with dark-brown stripes, never stayed more than an inch apart, and swam and swayed with identical rhythm as if one were the shadow of the other.

  Whales

  It was something diflFerent, however, to be awakened by the sound of someone blowing his nose so loudly that it aroused even those of us able to sleep through the most exclusive snoring. Sitting up to look at the water beside the open doorway, we then saw the moon shine on something colossal, ghstening like a poHshed shoe at our side, but with a big panting blowhole that left no doubt that we had a living whale at our bedside. No matter how often we might have seen whales in some Marineland, it is quite diflFerent to wake up in intimate contact within the whale's own free environment. Unhke the police boats which ran into our door and shook the ship and rigging, the whale with all its tremendous body strength never touched the reeds, never bumped into us even in the dark. Yet we often had them rolling up suddenly at arm's length or swimming right under our bundles from one side to the other. Most of the visiting whales were porpoises, roUing up with rounded back and dorsal fin, but many were much larger, with straighter backs.

  By day, too, whales would venture up to examine us quickly, while we would stand on deck and look straight down into their blowholes as half a dozen of these huge mammals slid beneath us. We saw some of them blowing hke marine fire brigades, and among those that leaped vertically from the water, body and tail, we recognized the killer whale with its beautiful black-and-white de
cor and tall dorsal fin. We even saw killer whales and porpoises chasing together in an area ghttering with small silvery fish, and among them

  the water was cut by fins so tall and sharp that they could only belong to hunting swordfish.

  One birthday after the other was celebrated on board. Never have I seen a raft-ship with so many eminent and inventive cooks. Never would I have suspected that raw fish could be served in so many and tasty ways as Tom managed, Japanese style, admitting that he himself was the owner of a small fish restaurant. Detlef s fish soup, Norman s pancakes, Carlo*s rice specialties, Yuri's sun-dried rainbow runners and Gherman's chili-peppered dried meat were unforgettable, and no one could have guessed that two young Scandinavian students could have produced so many fabulous cakes and puddings out of Arab beans, peas, flour and eggs kept fresh with a coat of oil. Yet the prize went to Rashad, the inventor of pickled flying fish k la Tigris. I stole into the galley one morning and wrote down the recipe: Take two flying fish, clean and cut them into cubes, % large cup vinegar, V4 cup seawater, a dash of ohve oil, 1 clove of garlic, plenty of chopped onion, 1% spoons of sugar, 2 teaspoons salt, % teaspoon pepper, and a dash of whatever Arab spices he had brought with him.

  Yuri's birthday dinner started with this superb appetizer, continued with dolphin, fried, boiled or served raw in half a dozen ways, then came HFs and Asbjom's special spaghetti pudding. The two rascals had secretly drilled a hole in our wooden table and placed the rubber hose used for inflating the dinghy inside the pudding. As we were all ready to dig in for the first helping, HP solemnly announced that Yuri's very special birthday pudding needed some drops of vodka to swell, as we had no yeast. He poured while Asbjom secretly pumped with his foot, and to everybody's amazement the pudding started to swell. None of the miracles of the sea perplexed us more than when the growing pudding began to swell in all directions, until something rose like someone's finger out of the middle of the pudding, and grew and grew to emerge as a long balloon with pudding pouring from its sides. We had barely recovered from oiu: surprise, roared with laughter and begun singing "Happy Birthday," when there were unexpected visitors: black whales surfaced and came rolhng straight toward us. We saw only three side by side, but there were probably more, as for a while the huge mammals came up at intervals everywhere. For the first time for weeks the httle mouse came running up into view, as if it had a peephole down below and for a moment preferred the company of singing men and grasshoppers.

  Remoras, sea turtles, and the unexpected

  Our intimate association with these large marine mammals would probably account for our inheritance of the largest rem-ora fish we had ever known. Black, floppy and ugly, with an oval suction disc at the top of the head, the remoras are too smart to bother to swim with their own tails more than necessary to change transport. They hitchhike on hard-skinned, scaleless travelers, hke sharks, whales and turtles. They hang on with the fine device at the top of the head, keeping their mouths free to enjoy spilhngs from their host. Most of the remoras hitchhiking on our bundles were finger size, but a couple must have come to us from a whale, for those that clung to our bottom were as long as an outstretched arm.

  Once, to our surprise, Asbjom lifted a sea turtle out of the ocean with his bare hands. It seemed intent to come and visit us anyhow. We kept it on deck for a while and dreamed of turtle soup and simulated roast veal, but by unanimous vote we preferred to watch him swim happily away. For ancient voyagers in this ocean sea turtles must have provided a welcome change from the fish and dried-food diet. Today they have been almost exterminated, although we saw the periscope-like heads of a few. Three days after Asbjorn's success, Rashad on a calm day swam into the sea and somehow managed to grab the big carapace of another turtle. Turtle and boy proved to be equally good swimmers, and it was unclear to the spectators whether the turtle pulled or Rashad pushed as they approached Tigris more below than above the surface. But when the young Arab triumphantly managed to hft the struggling reptile with front flippers above water, victory was his. Both our turtles had a couple of remoras firmly attached, and tiny green crabs crawled about on their carapaces as on Tigris. This second captive was so angry at its defeat that it tore reeds and bamboo to shreds with its parrot beak, and we quickly let it back where it belonged. No sooner did the turtle surface some hundred yards from us when Yuri yelled from the cabin roof: "A big shark took himl" True enough, we saw the water churning with fins and flippers rotating in the waves. Then we saw no more on the surface, and someone mumbled that we might as well have had it ourselves.

  Next time Asbjom attempted to catch something with his bare hands it was something we had never seen before, and he was less

  fortunate. The sea was calmly undulating and something strange was rippling the surface in one spot, resembhng the emerging fingers of a human hand. Asbjorn rowed in pursuit with the dinghy and was soon there, not knowing that what we saw was Neptune, or rather Neptunus. "I've got him!" he shouted triumphantly as he reached over and nearly fell out of the boat when he saw what he had caught. "Aaiiil" he yelled in pain as he hfted his own hand in the air and tried to shake oflF something red and sprawhng. A big crab! We looked around, and reddish-brown crabs as big as fists scurried about everywhere, running across the surface as if it were a mirror, then diving down and disappearing. We had never seen it before, this swimming crab of the Indian Ocean known among marine biologists as Neptunus. The crab pinched Asbjom's finger so hard that it bled and he came back to borrow Carlo's spaghetti sieve. With this ingenious implement he and Detlef caught a dozen crabs that were so furious that they chpped the claws and legs off each other when left in the same pot. Soon the men in the dinghy found competitors. The dolphins that swam with us also went for the big crabs, snatching them on the surface right in front of the dinghy and leaping high out of the water in doing so. We also saw a five-foot shark rush after a crab that paddled at fuU speed to escape; the shark caught it and then jumped in a terrific twist clear of the water. Never before had we seen a shark jump.

  The httle rascals with the name of the ocean god sat quietly on the surface eating plankton with both claws until disturbed. These miniature robots with himian characters were perhaps the strangest creatures we met at sea. When their pivoting black eyes sighted the approaching enemy with the spaghetti sieve, they immediately took up a wrestler's defense position, arms flexed and pincers open. But seeing the size of the sieve they soon found it wiser to paddle away fast. This Neptunus did sideways, incredibly swiftly, and by a bril-hant coordination of five pairs of legs. The forelimbs with the big claws were both turned to the left, right arm flexed at the elbow to reduce friction and left arm fully outstretched behind to serve as a regular steering oar. The hindmost pair had the two outer joints flattened like oar blades for fast paddling, with a complex system of hinges that ensured maximum effectiveness, and the other three pairs of shm limbs just scurried along. The way all the compHcated segments of the hard-shelled robot pivoted and functioned, from its antennae to its propulsion and steering mechanism, was a master-

  Captions for the following four pages

  ^j. Into forbidden waters off Socotra without adequate steering speed; within shooting range at the entrance to the capital port of Hadibu.

  $8. A birthday photo by self-exposure as the uHnd fills the sails again. On the cabin roof the four reed-ship veterans Norman, Thor, Yuri and Carlo, the man of the day; up the mast ladder, Norris, Toru, Detlef, Gherman, Rashad, Asbjorn and HP.

  Sg. Into the African war zone; military airplanes, helicopters and battleships off the coast of Djibouti.

  60. Into the final port, Djibouti. With all flags up and the captain at the helm, Asbjorn rushes to help lower the sails as we are welcomed by French warships.

 

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  Captions for the preceding four pages

  61. Abandoning ship in Africa, Rashad, youngest crew member, walks ashore in Djibouti, as we are rwt permitted to land in any other area due to wars or for security reasons. With the African hills at the entrance to the Red Sea beside us we prepare Tigris for a proud end.

  62-63. PareweU Tigris, you proved a good ship and we would not leave you here to rot. You ended as a flaming torch, with an appeal to all industriaUzed nations to stop unrestricted armament delivery to the part of the world that first gave us our civilization,

  64. The end of Tigris, but we had the answers. You were stiU fhat-ing high after five months, and you had carried eleven men and all their necessities 4,200 miles, or 6,800 kilometers, from Mesopotamia (Iraq) by way of the Dilmun (Bahrain), Makan (Oman) and Meluhha (Indus Valley) of the Sumerians, across the Indian Ocean and past the Punt (Somalia) of the Egyptians, to Djibouti at the erir-trance to the Red Sea.

  piece of engineering. Yet this is a trifle in an ocean where whales have always dived with sounding instruments operating like modem radar, and where regular jet propulsion is built into the body of squids so that they can shoot through the water with rocketlike speed behind their own smoke screen, or glide over the waves and land aboard. In a city man may feel second to none. But alone in the inmiensity of the universe, among all the creatures that preceded man and built up the himian species, even a most fervent atheist will wonder if Darwin found the visible road but not the invisible mechanism.

  For two days we sailed among the reddish Neptunus in a calm sea; then the wind strengthened, we picked up speed, and sailed with our marine herd into another area dominated by the most beautiful sky-blue snail shells. Living snails were in them and floated upside down, hidden from above by plasticUke, segmented bubbles that helped them to sail about, but not fast enough to avoid recognition by the triggerfish, whose turn it was to wriggle forth as fast as they could, to swallow the blue pearllike flotsam, shell and sail.