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1: Transpacific contact, from Asia
to America
2: The bamboo raft-builders of Vietnam
1: The Hsu-Fu Expedition:
From Hong Kong to Taiwan
2: Into the Japan Current
1: Across the North Pacific—almost
2: A 6,500-mile archaeological experiment
Cover of Tim Severin’s account of his expedition
on board the bamboo raft Hsu-Fu.
A Taiwanese bamboo raft (after Shun-Sheng,
1956).
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Section 1: Transpacific contact, from Asia
to America
1: Contact between Asia and America
In the early 1990s, Irish explorer
Tim Severin revived an old hypothesis that Chinese
mariners might have reached the Americas two thousand years ago. In the early 1970s, Kuno
Knöbl had been profoundly influenced by his
readings of and meetings with Heine-Geldern, one of
the main theorists of prehistoric contact between Asia and America.
These contacts had ultimately led to the Tai Ki expedition. Tim Severin was equally impressed when he met with the Cambridge University scholar Joseph Needham. Needham’s multi-volume work on Chinese
civilization had included strong hints of contact between China and the Americas.
One
of the main artifacts cited by the proponents of transpacific contact is the
centerboard. The same guara that
stabilizes the balsa rafts of Ecuador acts as a sliding leeboard for the
rafts of Asia.
Either the invention was made independently of both sides of the
Pacific or, as Heyerdahl and many other have
speculated, prehistoric mariners carried the idea for the guara from Asia to Ecuador, or in the opposite direction. Severin concluded
that the most likely method of contact between the two areas was the Chinese
bamboo raft. In 1993, he set out to
build a large bamboo raft and test his idea.
Severin traveled to Taiwan to see if the bamboo rafts mentioned
by Needham still existed in the place of their
birth. As he observed Taiwanese rafts,
it is interesting to speculate whether Severin knew
of Ling Shun-Sheng’s article on “[The] Formosan
Sea-going Raft and its Origin in Ancient China,” published in 1956. Shun-Sheng’s
article describes in detail the construction of the centerboard-equipped
sea-going Taiwanese bamboo raft, and makes a case for the mention of bamboo
rafts in the Chinese historical record as far back as 1174 C.E., and legendary
notes about rafts in Chinese literature as far back as 3,300 B.C.E. To Severin’s
surprise, he found the Taiwanese raft as common as they apparently were in
prehistory, with two jarring exceptions.
The bamboo of Shun-Sheng’s rafts had been
replaced by PVC plumber’s pipe as the construction material of choice; and
the outboard motor had replaced the sail as the method of propulsion.
2: The bamboo raft-builders of Vietnam
Forsaking
the plastic rafts of Taiwan, Severin
discovered that traditional bamboo rafts were still built in the communist
nation of Vietnam, where a twenty-year economic
blockade by the U.S. had left the fishermen utterly
unable to afford luxuries like outboard motors or plastic plumber’s
pipe. In the coastal village of San
Son, Severin collected enough information for the
British naval architect Colin Mudie—the same man
who had designed Santiago Genovés transatlantic Acali raft
twenty years earlier—to sketch out a plausible bamboo raft for an attempt to
cross the Pacific.
Of
the hundreds of species of bamboo, Severin located
the thirty-foot-long, six-inch wide bamboo stalks for his main hull in the
interior of the country, along the Laosian
border. Rightly terrified of
predictions that any bamboo raft attempting a transoceanic crossing would be
eaten by the marine invertebrate teredo navalis—the same organism that had literally eaten
the Tai Ki
to the bottom of the Pacific—Severin took immense
pains to try to protect his raft. The
bamboo was harvested when the sap in them was the least, to protect against a
possible infestation by insects that eat the sap and then disgorge eggs into
the wood. His workers coated the
hollow logs with layers of laquer, which produced
the result of both protecting the raft and inflicting an allergic reaction to
the lacquer on the raft-builders. All
but two of the forty raft-builders were affected with swollen eyes and limbs,
especially the ones who sought to gain supernatural protection against the
lacquer by bravely licking it from their fingers.
The
bamboo was lashed together with ropes made from rattan, then heated at
selected points to give the raft a characteristic upsweep near the bow and
stern. When finished, the
sixty-foot-long raft was delivered to a harbor near Hanoi.
The most curious aspect of the bamboo raft was that, like a balsa
raft, waves did not travel over the hull but through it. This accounted for the raft’s almost
uncanny stability. But being much more
flexible that rigid balsa logs, the effect on a bamboo raft was something like
standing on board a twisting sieve in mid-ocean as waves swept through the
decks, soaking everything in their path.
It made for some interesting speculation as to how transoceanic
mariners might have managed to keep themselves dry on voyages of 6,500 miles
from Hong
Kong to the
Americas.
Severin attempted to solve the problem by
adopting the idea of the waterproof Vietnamese basket boat and adapting it in
the form of two bamboo shelters on the decks of the raft.
In
Hanoi, the raft was fitted with three chesnut masts supporting hand-stitched cotton and silk
fan-shaped Chinese junk sails. Like
the bamboo logs, the sails were treated with a natural substance—in this case
one made of the boiled roots of an inedible yam—to ward off rot. A windmill charged a battery that powered a
satellite radio. Severin
would be able to transmit his position via fax each day. If the raft ran into trouble, rescuers
would know with pinpoint accuracy where to search for the stranded crew. Severin named his
raft Hsu Fu, after a lengendary Chinese mariner
sent off on an expedition into the eastern oceans around the year 219 B.C.E.
by China’s first emperor Qin
Shihuang.
With the possible exception of Heyerdahl’s Ra II, Hsu Fu was the most beautiful recreated prehistoric raft ever
attempted.
Section 2: The Hsu-Fu
Expedition
1: From Hong
Kong to Taiwan
On
May 17th, 1993, with a crew of northern Europeans
complimented by a single Vietnamese raftsman, Hsu Fu rather staggered out of Hong Kong and toward Taiwan, 120 miles away. A sign of trouble appeared almost
immediately. After all the care in
treating the bamboo against teredo navalis, an almost unforgiveable
lapse had occurred when bamboo used for the cabins had been selected
carelessly. Once at sea, Severin discovered his cabins in the process of being
eaten by beetles, and prayed the infection would not spread to the bamboo
logs of the main hull.
A
week into the voyage, with the raft crawling along at little more than one
knot an hour, the bamboo mainsail spar snapped and was replaced by one of the
spare lengths of bamboo carried on board the raft. When the winds increased too much, the
Chinese sails had to be folded down lest the masts snap. The constant twisting of the bamboo hull
meant that one had to very careful not to let an arm or a leg slip between a
temporary opening in the deck, lest one risk amputation. Other than these weaknesses, Severin was astounded at how the raft responded in a
gale. Where another ship would be
rolling and pitching, Hsu Fu remained completely flat and stable
in high winds and waves, allowing big rollers to wash right through the
decks.
2: Into the Japan
Current
As
May turned to June, and the progress of the raft was slow, Severin maneuvered Hsu
Fu around the southern coast of Taiwan in an attempt to pick up the Japan
Current. This twenty-mile wide river
of fast-moving water was the main “cultural current” of so many Asia to America contact theories. And Severin found
himself in the middle of one of theorist’s favorite scenarios. The Japan Current was carrying the raft
away from Taiwan and, with rapidly diminishing
supplies on board, pushing the vessel toward Japan itself. A helpless crew, drifting on an
out-of-control raft. It was one of the
very possibilities Heyerdahl and others had
advanced for half a century.
Avoiding
pirates and meeting up with a friendly yacht, which took off one crewmember
and replaced him with an another, snapping the foremast in a high wind, Hsu Fu managed to sail into a harbor
in the Japanese Ryukyus islands on June 12th. In a layover of nine days, two damaged
masts were replaced and a new crewmember taken on board. As the raft made its way along the Japanese
coast amid the worst and wettest weather in forty years, Severin
noted that the bamboo deck seemed to be losing its buoyancy. Moreover, the continual twisting and
turning of the entire deck structure served as a constant strain on the
rattan lashings.
In
the middle of July, the raft called at the Japanese port of Shingu, where the Hsu Fu of history was
said to have landed, and where a shrine had been built in his honor. Upon leaving, the raft ran into a typhoon,
and Severin was bedeviled in his attempts to
convince any of the fishermen of a nearby port to help tow the raft or even
offer it shelter from the storm. At Shimoda, the Hsu Fu
was stocked with provisions for the transpacific attempt. The raft had come 2,000 miles from Hong Kong, and 4,500 miles now separated it
from America.
Section 3: Across the Pacific—almost
1: Across the North
Pacific
With
a crew of five, Hsu Fu drifted away
from Japan and out into the North Pacific on August
5, 1993. Loaded with provisions, the raft rode so
low in the water that waves washed right through the cabins. Valves that Severin
had built in Vietnam to allow seawater to drain from the
watertight cabins had rotted, allowing the sea to slosh directly into the
sleeping areas with each rise and fall of the raft. Nothing on the decks remained dry. It seemed like an inauspicious way to begin
a voyage across an entire ocean. Most
raft voyages did not have their decks awash until vast stretches of open
ocean had been crossed. By choosing to
sail from Hong
Kong, Severin had already subjected his raft to as much soaking
and punishment as Ra I had endured
when it sank out from under Heyerdahl in 1969. And Severin still
had nearly 5,000 miles in front of him.
The
raft was tested almost immediately, when Hsu
Fu skirted along the outer path of a typhoon toward the end of
August. Two weeks later, a third of
the way across the Pacific, Severin himself was
knocked down by a swaying mainsail boom and broke two ribs. As his ribs mended, Severin
calculated the raft’s movement eastwards.
Originally, he had thought the raft could make the crossing to America in roughly ninety days, with an
average daily run of fifty miles. But Hsu Fu was crawling along at forty
miles a day, a pace that would add another month to the voyage, and add a
month to the strain on the bamboo. The
rattan rope was rapidly being used up, and Severin
doubted whether enough remained to finish the crossing. In late September, halfway across the
Pacific, he confided his doubts to his private journal:
“Now I am aware that this present voyage is far longer,
across more open water, in high and stormy latitudes, aboard a vessel
half-sunk before it begins, and subjected day and night to flexing, twisting,
and battering of thin-walled bamboo tubes—a grass not even a timber—ropes
made of flimsy fibres, masts held up by jungle
vines” (Severin 1995, 222).
2: A 6,500-mile
archaeological experiment
As
the raft drifted to within 2,000 miles of the west coast of North America, it became clear to Severin that there was little real danger of the bamboo
raft sinking. The true threat lay in the
raft’s constant motion, which was slowly working the intricate rope lashings
into dust. The rattan that tied the
bamboo raft together was not up to the constant strain of nearly six months
at sea. Severin
told his crew that if he decided that the raft was no longer safe, he would
call for rescue and abandon the experiment.
Yet
the raft itself was beginning to deteriorate before their eyes. Large main bamboos began to work loose from
the hull and trail lazily astern. One
thousand miles from the American coast, and nearly 4,000 miles from Japan, the crew watched as several bamboo
logs dislodged and drifted away. The
raft was breaking up underneath them.
After more than 100 days at sea, the crew now noticed that teredos were
finally making their appearance as well, eating their way through the
bamboo.
With
the crew’s spirits flagging and his raft breaking up, Severin
in early November gave the order to bring the experiment to a halt. As he wrote in his journal: “If Chinese
mariners made this voyage in ancient times, they came ashore in pre-Columbian
America so exhausted they would have been on
their knees” (ibid, 277). On November
12th, a passing container ship picked up the crew, but not before
they set all sails, and prepared the raft to drift on unmanned. Severin tied a
note to the raft asking anyone who found it to report its position to the
Mariners’ Museum in Virginia.
But Hsu Fu was never seen
again.
More
than even the voyage itself, Severin demonstrated
through the voyage of the Hsu Fu an
acute awareness of dozens of seemingly minute yet intensely interesting
details attending transoceanic raft expeditions. Details involved in construction, in
sailing, in endurance, in crew reactions and the receptions afforded, or not
afforded, to the vessel en route, all of these points of analysis were kept
constantly in mind throughout the Severin’s
narrative. What prehistoric treatments
might have afforded various woods protection from teredos? How would a weakened crew have brought a
crippled vessel ashore with no help from completely exotic strangers on
shore? Almost nothing is known about
these aspects of prehistoric voyaging in any kind of experimental
setting. With his voyage of 6,500
miles on a bamboo raft, Tim Severin had set a new
standard for all future archaeological experiments.
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