The Tigris Expedition

by Heyerdahl, Thor

  Yuri was sure there would be no problem if we landed, but if Norman felt we might clear the west cape if the present wind lasted, then he, too, would vote for an attempt.

  Norris was silent, but we heard the famihar hiccups of his baby as he filmed and registered aU that was said. Without interference he let the multinational crew give their ballot on the most important decision of the whole expedition. Then he, too, voted against landing, as this could not possibly be an interesting place, otherwise Thor would have planned to go there from the beginning. One by one the votes ran contrary to my proposal: United States, Russia, Italy, Germany, Iraq, Japan, Mexico, Denmark. No support. Only my countryman HP agreed that we would never find a more interesting place to visit, so we ought to take a chance of going ashore.

  I was amazed. Defeated. Perhaps I had been spoiled by my men always accepting my proposals, except when I wanted to interrupt the voyage of the first Ra and they all wanted to go on. That time I took the decision alone. There was no reason to take needless risks in a scientific experiment, and by then we had the answers anyhow. And we could build a second test raft. This time I had at least the necessary support of one vote. And I saw no point in setting a long-distance record. Besides, the risk of running on the reefs and wild rocks before we managed to clear the west cape of Socotra was perhaps fifty-fifty. A brief description of Socotra in the Indian Ocean sailing directory spoke of the west cape as treacherous, with fierce currents, rough sea and violent gusts of wind. Experience of the last four days had shown us that the wind might turn or die at any time, and then we would be lost. There was no other beach far-

  ther west or a bay where a reed ship could sail in and find security, only wild cliffs and a couple of impossible anchorages blocked by coral reefs. It was a desperate situation. To me it was totally meaningless to risk our hves in an onshore wind against these extensive cliffs when we could stand straight into this fascinating bay, anchor and meet human beings to whom we could explain om: case. But without support of my men and with all the warnings from the outside world I decided on a compromise.

  The onshore wind increased sufficiently to whip up a few early whitecaps. I told the men that I was willing to sail on a two-hour trial run with exact bearing on the west cape controlled from the bridge. If after two hours the bearing showed that we were able to maintain a com-se clear of the cape without leeway, then we should continue. If not, then there would still be time for us to take the wind in from the opposite tack and sail back into Hadibu port.

  Everybody was happy, but at heart I was not at all pleased. This, to my mind, was hazardous.

  Two hom-s passed as we sailed westward along black inhospitable sea cliffs where the surf had begun to show up white against the rock as the steady onshore wind continued to blow. We were indeed taking a risk. After two hours Norman came crawUng out of the cabin with two fresh radio messages, just as Detlef jumped down from the bridge with his bearing report. With Gherman on the tiller astern the rest of us gathered anxiously aroimd the table as Norman read aloud: "South Yemen Embassy at United Nations in touch with government to explain Tigris situation. Stop. Hope permission will follow. Stop." The second message read: "Norwegian Embassy in London advises South Yemen agrees OK for you to land Socotra."

  Some of the men shouted hurrah, and it was suggested that we should turn around at once and try to sail back to Hadibu Bay. I asked for Detlefs report. He said we made two knots over the bottom against a contrary current, and with leeway subtracted we were maintaining a course of 278°, which was 18° clear of the still very distant west cape.

  Detlef was the first who wanted to run back to the bridge and reverse the course for Hadibu. "Now we know we won't be shot at," he cheered. But now I was firm. "No," I said. "We decided unanimously to make a two-hoiu* trial to see if we could clear the cape. We now have the result. It is affirmative. So now we sail on, otherwise this risky test run has been pointless."

  Norman agreed. We ought to go ahead, as no Sumerians or Egyptians would have called at this island, knowing from earlier visits that there was neither gold nor other valuable products to pick up. But most of the others began to regret deeply the adventures we had missed by not sailing into Hadibu Bay and getting the answers to the still unsolved mysteries of Socotra. They gazed at the passing valleys and in our minds we all chmbed the highlands and explored the mountain valleys up there between the wild peaks.

  Carlo and Gherman dug up some bottles of red wine reserved for special occasions, and as the sun set in some fantastic cloud formations that we aU for a while thought were more islands, we kept oiu" bow to the right of the cape that was outhned against the golden sunset. The wild cliflFs of Socotra were there at our side all the time, but the last cape was still very far ahead. We noticed a few primitive stone-house settlements on some level groimd above the clifFs, but soon we saw nothing except our own bearded faces around the kerosene lamp. The grasshoppers were still singing in the reeds and httle crabs crawled around our bare feet. After all, the eleven of us were still having a great time together on this Smnerian ma-gur. I began to forgive the men for their lack of support at the morning powwow. After all, the purpose of our voyage was to test our vessel, and they could not have given it a better certificate. This kind of prehistoric watercraft, deemed insecure outside Mesopotamia's river system, had carried us through the gulf from Bahrain to Oman, from Oman to Pakistan, from Pakistan to this African island, and it was stiU so seaworthy that the crew preferred to go on nonstop when they knew we next had to force ourselves another thousand miles and run the gauntlet of two long forbidden gulf coasts before we had a chance of another landing.

  Chapter 11

  FIVE MONTHS FOR US, FIVE MILLENNIA

  FOR MANKIND

  A

  NEW moon seemed to mark a new phase of our journey as we sailed away from Socotra, the first African island. We found rough seas and varying winds during the night, and both Norman and I at one time beheved we sighted the black contours of the high west cape as we sHd past in the sparse hght of a slender sHver of moon. Farewell Socotra! For some time we all saw powerful searchlights far away in the direction we had come from. By sunrise we could see the whole of the tall west coast of the island behind us, and by late morning we were once again alone with the sea, surrounded by most of our former companions of the water.

  Two days later we passed at good speed close to the uninhabited bird island Kal Farun, tall and shaped like a shark's tooth, glittering with guano. We noted that the drawing of Kal Farun and the one of Jazirat Subuniya had been interchanged through an error in the pilot book,^ and assumed that few ships ventured here since the same book referred to strong tidal currents changing in opposite directions between these rock islands. But at that very moment, as the sun and sky turned red for sunset, we were overtaken by two ships that came on a converging course behind us, one of them

  clearly from the directioii of Socotra. Both ships changed course to come straight for us side by side, and as they seemed to run up one on either side, we hoisted the United Nations flag. The two ships immediately responded by hoisting the Soviet colors, and we could now read their names: Anapsky and Atchuievsky. They were Russian trawlers that bore every sign of having been long at sea and in need of paint. Yuri cHmbed up on the cabin roof and rejoiced as he danced and waved his cap. Flocks of seabirds circled around us and dived for fish all the time. At first there was little reaction from the thirty men on each ship, although they were all lined up at the rails to gaze at us from the two trawlers which were now brilliantly lit, since darkness feU as soon as the sun was gone.

  The two Russian ships slowed down and escorted us closely on either side astern, the one blowing its siren. Asbjom hurriedly inflated the dinghy and he and Yuri jumped into it in the dancing black sea and rowed over to Atchuievsky, where Yuri climbed on board. Half an hour later he was back with a colossal deep-frozen red grouper, a twenty-poimd bag of beheaded, neatly packed and deep-frozen prawns, a sack of potatoes, and a roll
of old Russian maps of the gulf into which we were heading. For two days we ate dehcious prawns in greater quantity than we would otherwise have dared, but we feared that they might turn bad in the heat. The two trawlers left with course for Aden.

  Again we were alone, and for the last time we were free to lie on the roof and rehve the days when man spread free commerce and dawning civilization across these waters. The historian Phny the Elder, in the first century after Christ, recorded^ the truly impressive volume of trade carried on in his days by ships between Egypt and Ceylon, with further communication between Ceylon and "the country of the Chinese." He made it abundantly clear that the early Romans had learned local sailing directions from the ancient Egyptians, who knew exactly where to steer and when to hoist sail in the right seasons. Thanks to Phny and his informant, the leading Egyptian hbrarian and geographer Eratosthenes, we knew that Tigris was not the first reed ship to have accomplished this easy voyage. He recorded that in earher times the Egyptians, "with vessels constructed of reeds and with the rigging used on the Nile," not only visited Ceylon, but also sailed on to mainland India, trading with the Prasii on the river Ganges. He gives the exact saihng route learned by Eratosthenes from the Egyptian merchant mariners, and

  states that the voyage from the Red Sea ports begins in midsummer at the time the dogstar rises. Then, 'Travellers set sail from India on the return voyage at the beginning of the Egyptian month Tybis, which is our December, or at all events before the sixth day of the Egyptian Mechir, which works out at before 13 January in our calendar. . . ."*

  With Tigris we had not left the Indus Valley until February 7; we knew it was too late and paid for it with a broken topmast. But we had reached African waters even so. Our problem, however, was not so much being late in the season as being late in historic time. We had made the crossing some centuries too late and were not allowed to land in Punt. We were now moving ahead dangerously near to that forbidden coast, and we must maneuver with utmost caution not to get within sight of Cape Guardafui, the projecting tip of the Horn of Africa, where the east coast turns abruptly west-southwest into the Gulf of Aden.

  "I think we should stay south of center of the Gulf of Aden," said Norman, "and one thing we'U have to do is be very accurate. We have only a fifteen-mile gap between the continents of Asia and Africa, and we've got to hit that slot."

  The first pohtical breakthrough came. Djibouti, a tiny new African republic in the innermost comer of the Gulf of Aden, just at the entrance to the Red Sea, had given permission for our landing. That httle nation, not much more than a good port surrounded by a small piece of desert, was neutral.

  We sailed past the cape of Punt far out of sight. In there, behind the horizon, the most developed nations of our civilization were unloading the latest inventions for butchering people. Queen Hatshepsut's Egyptian fleet had come here three and a half thousand years ago to fetch hving myrrh trees for planting at Thebes.

  On a reed ship sailing between the continents there is plenty of time to meditate. Except for human character, much has changed on all continents during the last five thousand years. Today the environmental changes accelerate around us. The road ahead is as unknown as is most of the road behind us, and the more we under-

  * This information on weather conditions and seasonal sailings from India to the Red Sea, which the ancient Romans admit to having inherited from the early Egyptian papyrus-ship navigators, concurs with the advice we got from modem Pakistani harbor authorities millennia later: "The worst period for storms and treacherous weather in these waters is the last part of January and first half of February."

  stand of the past the better we can predict the future. With a pedigree recently pushed back to over two million years we have much to learn from future excavations. The greatest discovery of recent years is how incredibly httle we yet know of man's past, of the beginning. In the first decades after Darwin and the discovery of the unknown Sumerian civilization, we thought we had all the answers: the jungle gave birth to man, and two large and fertile river valleys gave birth to twin civilizations. Egypt and Mesopotamia. That made sense.

  That two amazing civilizations suddenly arose side by side in the Middle East about 3000 b.c. was not surprising. The Garden of Eden was there, and Adam and Eve were bom only a few millennia earlier. Then came the discoveries in the Indus Valley. First the well-preserved twin cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. But then field archaeologists found the ruins of the first civilized city builders here too, which dated roughly from 3000 B.C. as well. These three great civilizations siurounding the Arabian peninsula appeared as ready-developed, organized dynasties at the same astonishingly high level and all three remarkably alike. The definite impression is that related priest-ldngs at that time came from elsewhere with their respective entourages, and imposed their dynasties on areas formerly occupied by more primitive or at least culturally far less advanced tribes.

  Why this impressive, seemingly overnight blossoming in three places simultaneously unless there was some link between them? If this question was pertinent before, it certainly becomes more so now, with the discovery that 3000 b.c. does not mark some sort of halfway point in human spread and evolution: the Mesopotamians, Egyptians and all other representatives of mankind had all had at least two million years in which to move independently from Palaeolithic barbarian to Bronze Age civilization. Knowing this, how can we assume that three reed-boat-building people began to travel in search of tin and copper at the same time, the two metals they needed to mix for shaping bronze in their wax-filled molds? Nor is there any natural tie between bronze molding and, say, the invention of script or the use of wheeled carts; yet these three civilizations suddenly shared aU of man's major inventions and behefs, as if they had inspired each other or suddenly had drawn from a common pool.

  We are on firm historic ground when we admit that it was from

  the vast grain fields of Egypt and Sumer that all the arts of civilization spread in antiquity, first throughout the Middle East, then to Crete, Greece, Rome and finally the rest of Europe. The Indus civi-hzation, with elaborate ports on the coast, is known to have left its influence on distant parts of India. Since Phny shows that Ceylon traded with China in prehistoric times, there would have been nothing to prevent the civihzed Harappans from doing the same thing and spreading impulses important for the coming growth of the great Chinese civiUzation which blossomed soon afterward. In Or-mara village we had seen the tiny, primitive dhows that regularly came to fetch shark cargo for Ceylon. The sea was their natural road, not the jungle of India. With Ceylon as a geographical intermediary in the east and Bahrain in the west, the Indus civiUzation was not necessarily ignorant of any major nation along coastal Asia in the epoch when their ships began to plow the seas.

  Chronologically, all the great civilizations of antiquity known to us today appeared one by one in the centuries immediately after 3000 B.C. They all followed the breakthrough in the three circum-Arabian river valleys. But however important, that breakthrough still does not mark the zero hour for civilized man, the real beginning. Estabhshed views collapsed again when a revision and adjustment of carbon datings disclosed that civilized man had been active on some of the most unlikely islands before he got around to founding the first dynasties in the three great river valleys. Important stone structures were built on islands around Great Britain, on Malta and Bahrain before they were built elsewhere. The long-accepted teachings as to the beginning of civiUzation are today found untenable.

  Science itself is bewildered. There has been no time to revise the textbooks and they are now all heretical. Nor can the old texts be replaced until the majority of scholars agree on their replacement. At present some assert that civiUzation must simply have started independently on various islands a millennium or more before it started in the continental river valleys; the stimulus for progress was perhaps peace and security through isolation rather than inspiration through contact, mass organization and rich grain harvests. Others insist that
such a theory conflicts with fundamental knowledge of social anthropology. SmaU islands, poor in soil and re-som-ces, offer none of the basic needs to produce civiUzation. Besides, civiUzation is not bom overnight; if present on islands around

  Britain by 4000 b.c, then civilized people must have reached there at that time, or barbarians must have arrived there much earher, with time to become civiMzed.

  Whatever might be the answer, we are back with boats marking the beginnings. Whole families, civihzed or primitive, were trav-ehng together by sea. This confirms what we knew from the wall paintings in the Sahara and the rock carvings near the Red Sea: shipbuilding was old when pyramid building started. Rivers and oceans were open when jungles were closed.

  There is a glaring lack of knowledge about our own past in the two miUion years between the oldest hominid bones found under the silt in Africa and the evidence of seafaring inside and outside the Straits of Gibraltar only six or seven thousand years ago. Then another short gap until the sudden appearance of powerful, deified longs with whole entourages of skilled craftsmen, metalworkers, architects, astronomers and scribes at the mouth of the Mesopotamian rivers and on the banks of the Nile and the Indus around 3000 b.c. These dates are milestones, nothing else. Most of the human past is totally lost. Buried or eflfaced. In the course of two miUion years of human activity, ice has come and gone. Land has emerged and submerged. Forest humus, desert sand, river silt and volcanic eruptions have hidden from our view large portions of the former surface of the earth. The sea level has altered, 70 per cent of our planet is below water and underwater archaeology has barely begun in coastal areas.

  We are accustomed to finding sunken ships with old amphora and other cargo beneath the sea, but speculation as to the discovery of other human vestiges on the bottom of the ocean remains a subject for science fiction writers. Or almost; for flint arrowheads have been found on the bottom of the North Sea by trawlers, a reminder that Stone Age man hunted animals on foot in an area which changing water levels have hidden from easy access by an archaeologist. Until very recent years everyone derided Alfred L. Wegener's theory of continental drift; yet Wegener is today proved right and his theory generally accepted by geologists just when palaeontologists have discovered that at least another zero should be added to the hitherto accepted age of man.