What did the Ra expeditions prove?

Thor Heyerdahl has long been interested in the history of early seafaring and has advocated that the oceans, far from being obstacles, could and can be safely crossed on relatively simple watercraft by following the natural conveyances of the winds and currents. He and his wife studied the possibility that the Pacific Islanders could have migrated from South America many centuries before. However, World War II interrupted his work. He served with the free Norwegian Air Force as an officer in the special parachute unit operating in the Arctic Norway. After the war he continued his research. He led archaeological expeditions to the Galapagos and Easter Islands under the Kon-Tiki expedition from Peru to a South Sea atoll because he wanted to prove that the population of Polynesia was not only from Asia but was also populated by indigenous people from South America. He built the Kon-Tiki raft in Peru and then left Callao on the 28th of April 1947 and sailed it for 6,900 Km across the Pacific to Tuamotu Islands arriving on the 7th of August 1947. This proved that the Incas had the ships capable of navigating the vast distances of the Pacific.

In 1969 and 1970 Heyerdahl built other boats and sailed from Morocco. Heyerdahl contested the Kon-Tiki expedition with a boat made of balsa wood, named after an Inca god. He undertook the Ra expedition in a boat made of papyrus reeds, which he named after the Egyptian sun god Ra, chosen to symbolize the solar worship predominate in many ancient civilizations. There is plenty of evidence, especially from the Near East, that reed boats were widely used in ancient times. Reed boats and reed boats illustrations have been found throughout the Mediterranean from Mesopotamia, Egypt, the coasts of present-day Syria, Lebanon and Israel, Cyprus, Crete, Corfu, Malta, Italy, Sardinia, Libya, Algeria, and out through the straits of Gibraltar to the Atlantic coast of Morocco and Spain. This is not to suggest that all in the world who used the reed boat were in contact; but the existence and practical use of such vehicles provides a tool for travel, and therefore the means for possible interactions with others. Given this ancient use of the reed boat, Heyerdahl designed a practical experiment to test the ocean seaworthiness of this sort of vessel. In planning this vessel, Heyerdahl examined representations of reed boats as found depicted in Egyptian predynastic rock and ceramic art, and from pharaonic tomb art and models. As a result, features such as an upturned prow and stern and a bipod mast were incorporated in the design. A cabin and steering oars were also added. The boat was constructed in Egypt by a small crew from Central Africa who had experience building smaller vessels of papyrus for use on their native Lake Chad. When completed, the boat was then transported to the Moroccan port of Safi. However, the ship was not optimally designed and loaded incorrectly. The seven-man team and a monkey were in mortal danger several times and had to give up. The first Ra expedition failed after 5,000 kilometers just before the finish. But Heyerdahl was not a person who gave up easily. Throughout his life, the researcher fought against established views in anthropology and yet was never fully recognized. Undaunted by this setback he returned to Morocco and built Ra II. This time he employed four Quechua and Aumara Indians and a translator from Lake Titicaca on the border of Peru and Bolivia. They built boats almost exactly as depicted in the carvings of the Pyramids that bore similarities to reed boats from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. Ra II was 40 feet long, 16 feet wide and 6 feet deep. It had a 12 x 9-foot cabin. It was made from Papyrus reeds source from Chad, Africa. Almost a year after his failed first Ra expedition, Heyerdahl and his crew set sail from Safi in Morocco on 17th May 1970.

During the Ra expedition, Heyerdahl was concerned with another migration story. This time, the zoologist and geographer, who dropped out of his studies and has a passion for anthropology, wanted to prove that there was already a lively cultural exchange between ancient Egypt and Central and South America before Christopher Columbus accidentally discovered the continent. With his daring self-experiments in historically built boats, Heyerdahl laid the foundation for experimental archaeology.

Expedition Ra II followed the same route as the first Ra expedition and was to sail from Safi in Morocco to America and the Caribbean state of Barbados. And this time the experiment worked. Heyerdahl reached Barbados with his international crew and the monkey Safi, who was named after the port city of Safi, after 6,100 kilometers and 8.1 weeks on July 12, 1970. This confirmed Heyerdahl’s thesis that cultural contact between the African and American continents could have existed even before Columbus.

Another discovery surprised and shocked even experienced sailors like Heyerdahl and his crew: black lumps of oil were floating in the Atlantic. The team had never seen anything like this and radioed the information to the United Nations (UNO) while traveling. The then UN Secretary General commissioned Heyerdahl to monitor water pollution on a daily basis. The crew of the Ra II spotted oil slicks in the Atlantic on 43 of the 57 days of the voyage. Heyerdahl wrote reports on pollution at sea and presented them on various occasions, including at the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea. In 1972, the international community then passed a ban on disposing of waste oil on the open sea.

The Ra Expeditions demonstrate that boats of this sort, with a wide ancient international distribution, were certainly capable and seaworthy, thus putting a damper on the notion that ancient people did not have the means to cross the oceans. One could argue that in terms of survivability, the reed boat is equal, if not better, to most any boat used by Europeans during the early centuries of exploration. The expedition’s success also diminished the notion of the oceans as great barriers. The oceans are, in fact, often quite friendly to even the simplest of craft, as has been demonstrated over and over again. Accidentally or intentionally, the winds and currents can carry a vessel readily across. In short, although the Ra Expeditions in several ways reflected Egyptian themes, the project was not specifically Egyptological in nature, but relied on a great deal of ancient Egyptian inspiration to construct and explore the parameters of a model of a kind of ship which sailed the seas in the past. As such, the Ra Expeditions, like the Kon-Tiki before it, served as classic examples of experimental archaeology. The Ra expeditions have added fuel for thought about certain aspects of ancient world history that we know little or nothing about. Heyerdahl wrote books and made documentaries film about his voyages. The film about the Ra and Ra II expeditions was nominated for an Oscar in 1972.