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Déjà
Vu-25 Years Later
Heyerdahl Burns
"Tigris" Reed Ship
to Protest War
By
Betty
Blair
ai@artnet.net
Thor
Heyerdah with his international crew of 11 members
had just completed a 5 month journey of 4,200 miles
that began in the Tigris Valley. Here he sets his reed
boat "Tigris" at Djibouti, Africa ablaze in protest of
the numerous wars going on in the region which were
fueled by Western and Soviet sales of military arms.
Photo: April 3, 1978
© The Kon-Tiki Museum, Oslo, Norway. Used with
Permission.
April 2, 2003
Twenty-five years ago, on April 3, 1978, Thor
Heyerdahl (1914-2002) was just completing a 4,200-mile
voyage on a 60-foot reed ship known as the Tigris. His
journey had started at the place many consider to be the
birth of civilization - the verdant valley between the
Euphrates and Tigris rivers in Iraq. Setting sail from
the banks of the Tigris, Thor and his crew navigated down
the Persian Gulf to Oman and eastward to the Indus Delta
of Pakistan. Then they reversed direction and headed back
across the Indian Ocean in the direction of the Horn of
Africa. It was the last of Thor's four trans-oceanic
voyages, the first being the well-known 1949 Kon-Tiki
voyage made on a balsawood raft from the coast of Peru to
the Polynesian Islands.
The Tigris' crew comprised 11 multinational members:
Thor Heyerdahl (Norway), navigator Norman Baker (USA),
art student and interpreter Rashad Nazi Salim (Iraq),
underwater cameraman Toru Suzuki (Japan), professional
photographer Norris Brock (USA), young navy captain
Detlef Zoltzek (Germany), physician Yuri Senkevitch
(USSR), mountain climber and expert with ropes Carlo
Mauri (Italy), amateur archeologist Ghermán
Carrasco (Mexico) and students Hans Petter Bohn (Norway)
and Asbjørn Damhus (Denmark).
After surviving the treacherous five-month journey at
sea, Thor had wanted to end his voyage in the port of
Mitsiwa (now Massawa) on the western (African) side of
the Red Sea. It was through this port that Thor had
originally brought the reeds from Lake Tana in Ethiopia
for the building of two earlier experimental ships, Ra I
and Ra II.
No Place to
Land
But Ethiopia was involved with a breakaway war with
the Eritreans. Nearby Somalia was at war, too. On the
opposite side of the Gulf of Aden, civil war had erupted
in Yemen. Thor and his crew decided to try to steer in
the middle of the Gulf between Yemen and Somalia.
However, when the winds died down, navigating the
primitive reed craft became extremely difficult and they
began drifting towards the island of Socotra, which
belonged to South Yemen and on which the Soviets were
installing military hardware at that time. Eventually,
they had no choice but to land in the newly established
African nation of Djibouti, a small neutral country
squeezed in between Somalia and Ethiopia.
Heyerdahl's experiment again proved that early man
could have successfully navigated immense distances
across seas and oceans thousands of years ago. The
Tigris, constructed of buoyant river reeds, had been a
fine sea-worthy vessel.
They had survived on sea, only to be denied a place to
land because the entire region was engulfed in war. In
the end, Heyerdahl decided to torch the Tigris, setting
it ablaze as a bonfire for peace, protesting the wars
that were raging, fueled by arms sales by the major
Western powers, including the Soviet Union. The crew
members stood on the coral reef in silent awe at the
ironic fate of the Tigris, watching the hoisted sails
flare up like a torch as the red sunset disappeared
behind the dark African mountains.
Burning the Tigris was a difficult decision for Thor,
but it was also his way of not letting the ship rot
amidst the warships and man-made pollution found in the
harbor off Djibouti. Also it meant that no one would be
able to exploit the ship for their own commercial
benefit. Saddam Hussein, too, had been eager to use the
reed ship for his own public relations purposes, as it
had originally been assembled in Iraq. Heyerdahl's
earlier vessels, the Kon Tiki (made of balsa logs) and Ra
II (made of reed), are both on exhibition at the Kon Tiki
Museum in Norway.
On April 3, 1978, Heyerdahl wrote the following Open
Letter to Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim of the United
Nations to explain why he had burned his ship as a
desperate plea for world cooperation. His call for sanity
is as relevant today as it was 25 years ago.
Open Letter to UN
Heyerdahl sent the following Open Letter to Secretary
General Waldheim from the Republic of Djibouti, Africa on
April 3, 1978.
As the multinational crew of the experimental
reed-ship Tigris brings the test voyage to its
conclusion today, we are grateful to the
Secretary-General for the permission to have sailed
under United Nations' flag, and we are proud to report
that the double objectives of the expedition [of
succeeding on a transoceanic voyage with a primitive
craft manned by an international crew] have been
achieved to our complete satisfaction.
Ours has been a voyage into the past to study the
qualities of a prehistoric type of vessel built upon
ancient Sumerian principles. But it has also been a
voyage into the future to demonstrate that no space is
too restricted for peaceful coexistence of men who
work for common survival. We are 11 men from countries
governed by different political systems. We have
sailed together on a small raft-ship of tender reeds
and rope a distance of over 6,000km [4,200
miles] from the Republic of Iraq by way of the
Emirates of Bahrain, the Sultanate of Oman and the
Republic of Pakistan to the newly-born African nation
of Djibouti.
We are able to report that in spite of different
political views, we have lived and struggled together
in perfect understanding and friendship, shoulder to
shoulder in cramped quarters through calm and storms,
always according to the ideals of the United Nations:
cooperation for joint survival. When we embarked last
November on our reed-ship Tigris, we knew we would
sink or survive together, and this knowledge united us
in friendship. When we now, in April, disperse to our
respective homelands, we sincerely respect and feel
sympathy for each other's nations.
Our joint message is not directed to any one
country but to modern man everywhere. We have shown
that the ancient people in Mesopotamia, the Indus
Valley and Egypt could have built man's earliest
civilizations through the benefit of mutual contact
with the primitive vessels at their disposal 5,000
years ago. Culture arose through intelligent and
profitable exchange of thoughts and products.
Today we burn our proud ship, though the sails and
rigging are still up and the vessel is in perfect
shape, to protest against inhuman elements in the
world of 1978 to which we have come back as we reach
land after sailing the open seas. Now we are forced to
stop at the entrance to the Red Sea. Surrounded by
military airplanes and warships from the world's most
civilized and developed nations, we have been denied
permission by friendly governments, for reasons of
security, to land anywhere, but in the tiny, and still
neutral, republic of Djibouti. Elsewhere around us,
brothers and neighbors are engaged in homicide with
means made available to them by those who lead
humanity on our joint road into the third
millennium.
To the innocent masses in all industrialized
countries, we direct our appeal. We must wake up to
the insane reality of our time, which to all of us has
been reduced to mere unpleasant headlines in the news.
We are all irresponsible, unless we demand from the
responsible decision makers that modern armaments must
no longer be made available to people whose former
battle axes and swords our ancestors condemned.
Our planet is bigger than the reed bundles that
have carried us across the seas, and yet small enough
to run the same risks unless those of us still alive
open our eyes and minds to the desperate need of
intelligent collaboration to save ourselves and our
common civilization from what we are about to convert
into a sinking ship.
_______
Please feel free to post and share this article about
Thor Heyerdahl's protest of war.
Further inquiries:
Betty Blair ai@artnet.net
Bjornar Storfjell, Director of Thor Heyerdahl Centre
in English: jbs@thorheyerdahl.org
©
TFF and the
author
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