|
1: Easter Island
2: Moai 263
1: Testing the reed boat hypothesis
2: The Ra
Expedition
3: The Ra II
Expedition
1: Completing Heyerdahl’s Easter Island
experiment: Phil Buck
2: The Viracocha
Expedition
The vessel carved upon Moai No. 263 on Easter Island
(from Heyerdahl, et al., 1961)
Sketch upon which Heyerdahl based his construction of the reed ship Ra (after Heyerdahl, 1971)
A view of the stern of the Ra II, on display at the Kon-Tiki
Museet in Oslo, Norway (photo by P.J. Capelotti, 2004).
Route of Ra and Ra II across the Atlantic (after
Johanssen, 1999)
View of the port side of Ra II, Kon-Tiki Museet, Oslo,
Norway (photo by P.J. Capelotti, 2004).
The reed boat Viracocha (photo
courtesy of Phil Buck, from the cover of Sea
Drift: Rafting Adventures in the Wake on Kon-Tiki, Rutgers University
Press, 2001)
|
Section 1: Easter Island
and Moai 263
1: Easter
Island and the 1955-56 Norwegian Archaeological Expedition
Known
as Rapa Nui, or Big Rapa, to its inhabitants, Easter Island has fascinated the western imagination
since the moment Jakob Roggeveen’s fleet sighted the place on Easter Sunday,
1722. Its famous moai statuary makes it one of anthropology’s most enduring
cultural enigmas. The easternmost
inhabited island of Polynesia, it lies 2,400 nautical miles west of South
America and some 1,400 miles east of Pitcairn Island, its nearest inhabited
Polynesian neighbor. In its extreme
isolation, it has been populated solely by organisms able to travel thousands
of miles by sea or air.
Thor
Heyerdahl linked several cultivated plants from America with islands of Polynesia, including Easter Island.
The most important was the South American sweet-potato (Ipomœa batatas) or, in the local name,
kumara, a plant name, as one
scholar noted, “that has stirred the imagination of scientists working in the
Pacific like no other.” The sweet
potato is well-established throughout Polynesia.
As both a cultivated plant and a name, it spread throughout the
Pacific islands by human contact.
That
contact is conclusively aboriginal, the cultigen having been observed in New Zealand by Cook on his first voyage and on Easter Island by Roggeveen in 1722, and having
been described by traditional history as being located in Hawai’i as early as 1250 C.E. Even
proponents of European introduction found it unlikely that the plant could
have spread so far in the few decades separating the voyages of Cook and
Roggeveen with those of the 1560s of the Spaniards Mendaña and Quirós (Buck
1938, 313). In any case the kinds of
long inter-island voyages necessary for the settlement of the expanse of
Polynesia—and the introduction of kumara
to the islands—had stopped sometime after the close of the fourteenth century
(Hornell 1946, cited in Heyerdahl 1952, 431).
Current
linguistic evidence points to the Cuna language spoken in northern Columbia as the origin of the word kumara, which in its various
transliterations followed the sweet potato across the Pacific.
The combination of balsa rafts, sweet potatoes, and
megalithic industries, all found along the coast of Peru and Chile prior to the first human movements
into Polynesia, was intriguing. When a similar combination was found to
have existed on Easter
Island in
the first centuries C.E., interest turned to a search for a method of
cultural transmission. For Heyerdahl,
the natural way to introduce kumara
to the Marquesas, or Easter
Island, was
alive, in a pot, on board a balsa
log raft.
2: Moai 263
After his archaeological research
on Easter
Island in
1955-56, however, Heyerdahl had been confronted by a dilemma. Norwegian archaeologist Arne Skjølsvold,
one of the five archaeologists on the Easter Island dig, had excavated a unique moai statue, which was known locally
as No. 263. It was special because a
strange ship had been carved into its chest.
And even though Skjølsvold came to believe that the carving probably
represented a European sailing vessel—one cut into the stone after the statue
was erected—one can also interpret it as a prehistoric reed vessel. So the
distinct possibility existed that the Kon-Tiki
experiment might have been conducted with the wrong type of prehistoric raft.
The
carving appears to be propelled like a three-masted, square-rigged European
ship, yet the hull has the distinctive upswept bow and stern of a Lake Titicaca reed ship. There is also a strange line trailing from
the bow of the vessel, which some believe might be a turtle caught by one of
the many sailors apparently standing on deck, and which others interpret as a
kind of stone anchor.
Beyond
the carving on the chest of No. 263, Heyerdahl's expedition also uncovered
locally produced volcanic stone carvings that unmistakably represent reed
boats. Taken together, Heyerdahl saw
this as evidence that reed ships had arrived on Easter Island at some point in prehistory, perhaps
bringing the stone cutters who produced the giant moai or the finely hewn stone platforms on which they
rested. If one accepted that a boat
made essentially of grass could traverse large sectors of the Pacific, could
one cross other oceans as well?
Heyerdahl
began to research boats constructed of reeds all over the world, travelling
from museum to marsh to study watercraft made from totora, papyrus, and other
natural fibre materials. When he saw
boats and barges apparently constructed of papyrus depicted in the burial
chambers of Egypt, his experimental instincts took
over. If a reed boat had carried the
legendary Kon-Tiki across the Pacific 1,500 years ago, could a vessel built
of papyrus have carried a crew of Egyptians across the Atlantic 5,000 years
ago? It was not a question Thor
Heyerdahl could formulate without attempting to provide an answer.
Section 2: Testing the Reed Boat
hypothesis: The Ra Expeditions
1. Testing the reed
boat hypothesis.
Heyerdahl had his doubts that papyrus possessed the same
watertight capacity of the totora reed of South America. Papyrus experts brought in the advise the
Egyptian government on Heyerdahl’s request to use a plot of land near the
Great Pyramids of Giza for the construction of a papyrus boat were uniformly
hostile. None thought papyrus could
remain afloat for much more than two weeks, and that only in still, fresh
water. No one thought such a vessel
could survive three thousand miles of a rough transatlantic crossing. When one of the experts announced that
laboratory tests had shown that pieces of papyrus sank after a few days,
Heyerdahl thought to himself that this was like throwing a piece of iron into
the sea and deciding that any ship built of iron would automatically sink as
well.
Egyptian authorities finally gave the go-ahead for a papyrus ship
to be built at Giza, and Heyerdahl selected Buduma tribesmen
from Chad, who still lived on
floating islands of reed, to build his transatlantic ship. With a sketch by the Swedish scholar Björn
Landström of what an ancient Egyptian papyrus vessel should look like,
Heyerdahl then required 300,000 papyrus stems to be harvested from Lake Tana
in Ethiopia, and transported to Egypt across the Red Sea and through a war
raging around the Suez Canal. He had
to assemble a crew and build a vessel no one had built in 5,000 years, then
transport both vessel and crew to Morocco and be ready to sail in
six months.
As construction of the replica progressed, Heyerdahl divided his
time between the work site at Giza and trips to the tombs to
study frescoes showing representations of ancient Egyptian watercraft. A peculiar cable running from the stern of
a reed ship to its afterdeck caused particular consternation, as no one could
provide a satisfactory explanation for its presence. Did it simply hold the shape of the
inwardly-curved reed stern, or did it have some more significant maritime
function. Heyerdahl’s boat-builders
from Chad eventually did away with
the cable once they had curved the papyrus stern into shape, dismissing it as
unnecessary.
Heyerdahl had his raft ready to be delivered to the African coast
on April 28, 1969, the twenty-second
anniversary of the start of the Kon-Tiki
expedition. He named her Ra after the Egyptian sun god. A month later, the papyrus boat sat
absorbing seawater in the Moroccan port of Safi. For eight days, as the raft underwent
last-minute rigging and provisioning, it continually lost precious hours of
its brief projected life span. Finally,
on May 25, Heyerdahl ordered the paper boat towed to sea.
2. The Ra Expedition, 1969.
Just as on the Kon-Tiki,
the crew marveled at how waves washed through rather than swamped the
hull. Navigator Norman Baker found
himself incapacitated by influenza and a temperature of 102°. As the raft fought to make its way offshore
on the very first day at sea, Heyerdahl was suddenly called aft to see a
disaster in the making. Not one but both of the steering oars had snapped
completely away. The crew was
despondent, feeling that the experiment was over before it had even
begun.
Heyerdahl studied the raft closely. Without the two oars, the raft suddenly
turned on its own and headed out to sea.
Heyerdahl was concerned but not despondent. For a man who had spent his life trying to
demonstrate that ocean currents were conveyors of culture instead of
impassable barriers to human migration, Ra
had suddenly turned into an even more daring experiment. It was one of Heyerdahl’s favorite
scenarios: ancient mariners on a crippled vessel, its crew in a battle
against wind and current, intent on carrying their culture to a foreign
shore. Ra would now imitate the navigation of Incan rafts with their guara leeboards.
Hearing Heyerdahl yelling, Norman Baker crawled from the
wickerwork cabin to learn the good news.
He was stunned to learn that the vessel of which he was navigator was
now adrift, without rudders, and almost completely unmanageable. The raft broached and waves slammed its
sides. At a stroke, the crew had not
extacly been transformed from sailors into supercargo, but Heyerdahl’s
Atlantic laboratory had subjected his raft experiment to its first variable.
The next challenge for the raft was to pass the lowlands at Cape
Juby on the African coast, and begin to arc to the west, across the
Atlantic. To everyone’s surprise, the
raft began to list slowly toward the wind, not against it, as on a regular
sailboat. Heyerdahl discovered that
waves breaking on the windward side deposited water more heavily into the
reeds on that side of the raft, while the lee side remained high and
dry. Much shifting of cargo failed to
alleviate the problem, which was yet another lesson relearned after five
millennia in obscurity. On May 31st,
Ra passed Cape Juby and put Africa
astern. The reed boat had been afloat
two weeks, without showing any signs of the imminent disintegration predicted
for it. But the greatest challenge
still lay ahead.
The crew improvised a new steering oar from a spare mast, as the
raft moved westwards at approximately sixty miles per day, half again as fast
as Tim Severin’s bamboo raft Hsu Fu
would snake across the North Pacific nearly a quarter century later. But where Severin’s wash-through bamboo
raft subjected its crew to constant drenching, Heyerdahl’s paper boat, at
least for the time being, kept his men high and dry.
The performance of the special rigging, copied so carefully from
Egyptian tomb paintings, now seemed in practice to both Heyerdahl and Baker
to have been designed to handle ocean swells and waves. It seemed clear enough that the papyrus
boats of antiquity had done more than float calmly on the Nile. However, the absence of the strange cable
linking the upturned stern with the aft deck—the cable that the boat-builders
from Chad had told Heyerdahl was unnecessary—now came back to haunt the
raft. Halfway through June, the stern
of the raft was awash, even as the bow continued to sail on as dry as the day
the reed boat was launched.
By the first days of July, the Ra had sailed over 2,000 miles, and less than 1,500 remained
between the raft and the Caribbean island of Barbados. Heyerdahl was learning that, unlike the
pre-Incan log raft Kon-Tiki, this
Egyptian reed ship required true sailing ability. Anybody could hang onto a raft. The stern continued to drag further into
the sea, the starboard side continued to fill with water. The oars had been rebuilt only to snap
again.
On Ra, Heyerdahl felt
as if he was driving a car without a license.
It was the fate of anyone who tried to recreate prehistoric
technology. A simple and many would
claim unbridgeable flaw was always present in the experiment. The replica might be correct; the ocean
route might be the right one. But no
scientist could replicate the prehistoric mind, nor venture with certainty
into a prehistoric worldview. As the
Caribbean loomed just beyond the horizon, the Ra slipped inexorably into the sea.
On July 18th, 1969, with
sharks and Portuguese Man-o-war encircling the reed boat, Heyerdahl ordered
the crew to abandon ship. The apparent
failure of this greatest of primitive reed ship experiments was wholly
overshadowed in the days that followed by the first landing of humans on the
surface of the moon. The juxtaposition
of the sinking trajectory of the ancient raft with the successful soft
landing of the ultramodern lunar module could not have been more
striking. Between the failure of Ra and the triumph of Apollo 11, it seemed as if modern
humans had put the ancient world behind them once and for all. All modern humans, that is, except Thor
Heyerdahl.
3. The Ra II Expedition, 1970.
In the spring of 1970, under a
thick blanket of secrecy, Thor Heyerdahl was back in Morocco, building
another ship of papyrus. This time,
Heyerdahl had gone back to his roots, bringing Aymara Indians from Lake
Titicaca to Africa to oversee the construction of perhaps the most beautiful
recreation of a prehistoric vessel ever undertaken. With the many lessons learned from what was
now called Ra I, along with another
year of research amongst traditional reed boat builders, Heyerdahl left
nothing to chance this second time around.
Even so, he was plagued by worries that a second failure would prove
disastrous, and be seen as “nothing but a risky repetition” (Heyerdahl 1971,
286).
After setting sail for Morocco on May 17, 1970, the Ra II proved less stable that her
predecessor, but more seaworthy. The
new reed ship was thirty-nine feet long—almost twenty feet shorter than Ra I—sixteen feet wide amidships, and
six feet deep. In fact, the raft
proved seaworthy enough to transport a multinational crew of eight completely
across the Atlantic. But the voyage
nearly ended less than a month after it started.
Norman Baker had returned as well, as both navigator and
second-in-command. As Baker set a
course away from Africa as fast as possible, none save Heyerdahl were very
optimistic about their chances for success.
Leaving port, the reed deck of Ra
II was only three feet above the surface of the sea. Within two weeks, the raft had sunk two
whole feet. After three, the decks
were awash. Seeing this, Baker thought
they had little choice but to run for the Cape Verde Islands, 1,200 miles
from Safi in Morocco. There the expedition
could slink into obscurity, rather than cause a scene by calling for an
inevitable rescue in mid-Atlantic.
Desperate, the crew threw over the sides
everything they could, even to the point of potentially sacrificing
themselves by throwing their papyrus life raft overboard. As the Cape Verde Islands drew closer, so
did the crew’s last apparent hope of abandoning ship before it sank. They had all decided that they would sail
into port and go home. But as Baker
took the raft’s position throughout that day, Heyerdahl kept a steady course
westward. In the morning, the Cape
Verdes were a few points off the port bow; by noon, they were directly abeam,
about eight miles away; by early evening, the islands were on the port
quarter, about sixteen miles away. The
raft had passed the point of no return.
No one said anything. The
raft had less than a foot of freeboard remaining. There was no way to turn the reed boat
around and return the Cape Verdes. The
crew knew that they were now committed to 2,000 miles of open ocean. To solidify their dismay, the crew decided
to conduct a secret ballot on the only question that mattered: would Ra II make it across the Atlantic
Ocean? As Baker recalled, seven of the
crew voted “no”; only one responded “yes.”
“No one ever asked who the cockeyed optimist was,” Baker remembered,
although in the end it was the lone dissenter who proved to be correct. “Though I’ve never asked, in my heart I
know who it was—our Captain, Thor Heyerdahl” (Baker 1997).
On July 12, 1970, the crew sighted land. They had sailed 3,270 miles from
Africa. As the reeds began to lose
their buoyancy once and for all, Ra II
sailed hard into the harbor at Bridgetown, Barbados. Heyerdahl had staked everything on a second
reed boat, and it had delivered him to the New World. Soon after, Ra II was returned to the Old World, and took up a permanent
place in a great hall in Oslo, Norway, directly adjacent to that occupied by Kon-Tiki.
Section 3: Completing Heyerdahl’s Easter
Island Experiment: Phil Buck and the Viracocha
Expedition
1. Completing
Heyerdahl’s experimental voyage to Easter Island
By the spring of 1997,
half a century after the original Kon-Tiki
expedition, no primitive experimental raft had made the connection between
South America and that continent’s closest Polynesian island, Easter Island,
although Eric de Bisschop had come close in Tahiti-Nui I in 1957, and Kitin Muñoz had drifted on Uru from Peru to the Marquesas in
1988. Heyerdahl’s massive ethnological
tome American Indians in the Pacific
had compiled a much greater case for prehistoric reed boat—as opposed to
balsa raft—voyages to Easter Island, yet despite the Ra expeditions no one could say from actual experience whether
such an expedition was possible.
Such an experimental raft
expeditions would connect the reed boat builders of the pre-Inca highlands of
Peru with the Pacific ports that could have made use of large versions of
lake reed boats. It would connect a potential
prehistoric South American port with the most likely Polynesian island to
have received cultural impulses from pre-Incan Peru. It would offer a plausible escape route for
the legendary prehistoric figure Viracocha, as he fled from the shores of the
great highland lake at Titicaca to his exile somewhere toward the setting
sun. And it would offer some
comparative strength to Heyerdahl’s hypothesis that pre-Incan Moche mariners
forced to sea during cultural catastophes triggered by El Niño events would
be pushed southwest toward Easter Island.
In 1998, such an
experiment was created. Phil Buck, a
highly-accomplished mountaineer, announced that he would circumnavigate the
globe in a series of five reed boats.
The reed ships would all be named for the bearded sun-god
Viracocha. The first leg of this
enormous undertaking would take the Viracocha
I from Arica, a Chilean port near the border with Peru, to Easter
Island.
In the late 1998, Buck
journeyed to Huatajata, Bolivia, on the shores of Lake Titicaca. There, both the Catari and Limarchi
families—many of whom had helped Heyerdahl construct the reed ships Ra II and Tigris—collaborated with Buck to build the hull of Viracocha I. The hull was completed in March of 1999,
then stored under a tin roof until it was trucked to the coast in
December. During the storage period
Buck had the boat builders haul on the hull’s ropes each month. Eventually, he considered that this simple
step might have been critical to the success of his voyage. Reeds shrink as they dry, and having a
solid reed boat is imperative to lower water absorption and lessen the
overall flexing of the boat at sea.
The hull was trucked to
Arica, Chile, in December 1999, where it was fitted out with masts and sails,
rudder oars, and a bamboo cabin. Like
Heyerdahl, Buck selected a multi-national crew, in this case three Chileans,
a Bolivian, a Britisher, a Frenchman, and one other American. Buck envisioned a six-week expedition to
Easter Island, one that would start around January 15 in the new millennium,
and reach Easter Island in early March.
There the explorers would tramp the island, look in on the totora
reeds of the island’s crater lakes, and seek permissions for the second leg
in the global circumnavigation, from Easter Island to Australia. In the end, Buck’s timetable evolved with
almost clock-like precision.
2. The Viracocha Expedition, 1999
Viracocha I left Arica on February 25, 2000,
after having been placed in the water fifteen days earlier. Norman Baker had suggested to Buck that the
raft should be put into the ocean three days prior to departure, to allow the
reeds to absorb seawater as ballast, but problems with inspections and
computer software delayed the departure.
Three days after leaving
the Chilean coast, the reed boat was 150 miles to sea, sailing 150 degrees
off the wind and about two knots an hour, on a southwest course toward Easter
Island. Over the course of the next
forty-four days, the reed boat continued to average about two knots an hour,
or about fifty miles a day. On only
two or three days did the boat’s performance increase or decrease
dramatically. On March 9, contrary
winds stalled the boat’s progress to nothing, while on March 23rd
and 26th, the boat skimmed along with the wind at speeds of five
and six knots.
By April 1st,
2000, the Viracocha I had sailed
more than 2,000 miles from the coast of Chile, and was only 300 miles from
Easter Island. As he neared the island of Sala Y Gomez, an uninhabited island
240 miles from Easter Island, the raft began to experience major wind shifts
and velocity drops. The winds began to
move in a counter-clockwise direction and at time would completely drop
off. It was in stark contract to what
Buck had experienced during the first month at sea, when he had steady trade
winds from the South and South-East.
The raft drifted on calm seas six miles from Sala y Gomez. Buck was now within a long stone’s throw of
an island Heyerdahl landed on in 1956.
He was well aware of the significance of his achievement:
“I thought that passing
near Sala Y Gomez was important to Thor Heyerdahl’s theories because passing
an uninhabited, rocky bird island was one of things that the Spanish
Chronicler Sarmiento had heard that Inca and Pre-Incan voyages would pass one
week before reaching the island Thor Heyerdahl believes to be Easter Island”
(ibid.).
Buck hoped to zero in on
the harbor at Anakena, the port on the northeast corner of Easter Island
where legends place the arrival of Hotu Matua, the prehistoric maritime explorer
and founder of Easter Island culture.
As the island emerged out of the Pacific a week later, Buck steered
the reed boat around the southern side of the island, to a landing at Hango
Piko.
For perhaps the first time
ever—or possibly the first time in over a thousand years, depending on your
view of the evidence—a reed boat sailed through the gap separating the
ancient ceremonial center of Orongo, and the small offshore island of Moto
Nui. It was across this gap that the
famous annual birdman competition was held, where young men on small reed
floats swam and climbed to reach the first sooty tern egg of each
spring.
At 3:00 in the
afternoon of Sunday, April 9th, 2000, Viracocha I anchored at Hanga Piko, where the arrival of a reed
boat from Chile was greeted with decidedly mixed feelings. The memory of nineteenth century raids by
Peruvian slavers is still warm on this Polynesian island, and any reminders
of ancient ties with the mainland stir complex emotions. Buck himself wanted to preserve Viracocha I, which had survived the
voyage in almost perfect condition.
Local merchants likewise saw an interesting tourist attraction. But when others recalled the biting
mosquitos they felt had arrived with the reeds of Kitin Muñoz’ Mata Rangi I, Buck had no choice but
to agree to burn the ship. Less than
two weeks later, stripped of all useable equipment, Viracocha I went up in flames at Hanga Roa, an event which in
itself may reflect the fate of earlier voyagers to this strangest of all the
world’s islands.
|