Wine-Dark Sails

By Melvin Maddocks

Wine-Dark Sails THE RA EXPEDITIONS by Thor Heyerdahl. 341 pages. Doubleday. $10.

On April 28, 1947, an unknown Norwegian ethnologist named Thor Heyerdahl set off across the Pacific on a 45-ft. balsa raft he called Kon-Tiki, the Incan name for sun-god. Young Heyerdahl entertained a theory that Incan raftsmen might thus have freighted their civiliza tion to Polynesia. He failed to convince most fellow scholars that Peruvian-Polynesian cultural coincidences were more than just that. But by Aug. 7, when he cracked up on a coral reef 4,300 miles from Peru (and 250 miles east of Tahiti), Heyerdahl had proved indubitably that a balsa raft could cross the Pacific. He had also become a celebrity-- one of those adventurers who stir the thin blood of the technological age with intimations of what the word hero once meant.

Heyerdahl's account of the voyage was translated into more than 60 languages, sold more than 20 million cop ies. In 1955 he made an expedition to Easter Island, 2,350 miles west of Chile, and another bestseller, Aku-Aku, resulted. But then he bought a 13th century terra cotta chateau above the Ital ian Riviera and settled down to a comfortable life of sun-kissed scholarship. Had Thor Heyerdahl become adventurer emeritus? Not quite.

Grander Suspicion. On May 25, 1969, Heyerdahl-- 54 years old, lean, and tan-- again put out to sea, nagged by an even grander suspicion. Reviewing 60 cultural parallels between ancient Peru and ancient Egypt (including pyramids and reed boats), Heyerdahl asked himself: It Peruvians could sail by bal sa raft to the Polynesian islands, might not the Egyptians have sailed by reed boat to Peru? Or at least from Mo rocco to Mexico?

Following the design of old Egyptian murals, Heyerdahl built a papyrus-reed boat, or kaday, 50 ft. long, 15 ft. wide, and named it Ra, for the sun-god--cultural coincidence!--of Egypt, Easter Island and Polynesia. The Ra was loaded with over a ton of fresh water in authentic Egyptian jars and almost twice that weight in food. Menu samples: sheep cheese in olive oil and sello (ground almonds, honey, butter, flour and dates). Coops enclosed live chickens and a duck named Sinbad. There was also a pet monkey named Safi. With Heyerdahl sailed an oddly assorted crew of six: a Russian doctor, an Italian mountain climber, a Mexican anthropologist, an Egyptian judo champion, and Abdullah, a desert dweller from Chad who did not even know the sea was salt. The only real sailor on board was a New York building contractor named Norman Baker, an old Navyman.

Total Recall. Heyerdahl takes an awfully long time putting out to sea. But once he gets launched, his account of the Ra voyage is persuasively faithful to the cresting good cheer and alternately sinking heart of all travelers in the tradition of Odysseus. On one page he can call his ship a golden paper swan, and on another, a floating haystack. Steering oars snapped with annoying regularity, and two days out a squall cracked the yard, carrying the 26-ft.-high wine-colored sail with a rust-red sun painted on it: the symbol of Ra. When the whole structure of papyrus and ropes expanded and contracted, it sounded, Heyerdahl confessed, like 100,000 copies of the Sunday New York Times being torn to shreds.

Lost in total recall--and occasionally in travelogue prose--Heyerdahl may not always do justice to his own toughness, but the facts do. After two months, over 3,000 miles, and batterings by waves up to 35 ft., the Ra had to be abandoned. Next spring Heyerdahl was back on course with Ra II. The repeat voyage he compresses into a single chapter. This time, after 57 days and 3,270 nautical miles, Barbados was sighted.

Heyerdahl does not expect the Ra voy age to alter anthropologic theories any more than the Kon-Tiki voyage did.

What did he prove? Really nothing, ex cept that an Egyptian seagoing basket could have crossed the Atlantic, and that there are men willing to risk their lives to prove it.

Melvin Maddocks

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