Page 331 - The Tigris Expedition

From Asia to Africa; from Meluhha to Punt
followed i in Kon-Tiki's wake had
Australia. i succeeded, and even reached
had always tried to make the point that, though certain primi­
tive craft were seaworthy, not even a reed-ship could succeed in
doing what the early Spanish caravels found impossible: force an
old-fashioned sailing craft eastwards along the equator to tropical
America. The Pacific Ocean fills half the surface of our planet, and
in this unsheltered hemisphere ocean currents and trade-winds are
rigorously propelled by the rotation of the earth. In the entire
tropical belt, sea and air, set in non-stop movement from Peru and
Mexico to Indonesia and the China Sea, are too strong to permit
aboriginal mariners to reach America across the Pacific, except in
sub-A retie latitudes, or to enter the mid-Pacific, except from the
American side. For eastbound voyagers from the Indus Valley,
China would be the end of the line. Any effort by us to sail our
primitive reed craft from Asia through the mid-Pacific island area
would have failed, just as it would have failed Chinese junks and as
it did fail all Spanish and Portuguese caravels and later replicas of
prehistoric junks that have tried in modern times to sail due east

while the false reports about our intended itinerary infuri­
ated everyone on board as we struggled to sail south with an
:
unstea wind. It was noc ,he fc« dj..
had fabricated reports about our voyage,
that the London-based television consortium with exclusive rights
to our stories had scant success in distributing the reports we tried
to send them with their transceiver, and yet had stopped Norman
from telling anything to the hams who heard him. When we had
happily waded ashore in Ormara bay, the news media reported our
shipwreck. German papers had carried the horrible news that t e
Japanese member ot Tigris crew had been eaten by a shar an t at
the expedition leader had therefore been forced to end the exper-

us a peace messenger. The amiable e c , to Karachi to
could blame for the confusion, flew ro seen he had barely
straighten out the misunderstandings, wft d through the
had time to

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