Page 206 - The Tigris Expedition

We Gain Control of Tigris
We were fighting our way up the coast, taking the weather in
athwart, but we were also getting ever closer to the cliffs we wan e
to avoid on the starboard side. A more forbidding land I had never
seen: sky-piercing in every sense, and yet not even scrub or a green
tuft of grass to brighten up the sterile ascents. A petrified desert
tilted on end. The stormy weather struck these walls head on, and
assaulting seas were violently rebuffed and rebounded with full
force for many miles, stirring up a chaotic turmoil of tossing and
leaping waves of a treacherous kind never encountered in the free
ocean spaces. How utterly illusory it was for armchair anthropol-
ogists to believe and teach that pre-European voyages were possible
only so long as the navigator could hug a mainland coast, and that
ocean crossings were impossible before the days of the Spanish
caravels. Nowhere is the sea worse and the problems more acute
than where rocks arc or where waves and currents encounter shores
and shallows. To hug a coast can be the most demanding task for
any primitive voyager. Ancient seafarers must have felt like us in
similar situations, unless they were far better prepared. Never have
I or my companions been tormented by more problems when
travelling on primitive craft at sea than when we have struggled to
clear the last mainland capes to get into the open ocean, or when
upon an ocean crossing we have approached land on the other side.
To hug this Arabian peninsula gave us not the slightest feeling of
security. On the contrary, it was quite a nightmare, from which we
would have wished to wake and find ourselves safe in the middle of
the Indian Ocean.
The modest leeway we made confirmed the sinister prediction of
our navigators from the moment we saw land: we would confront
the cliff walls before we were able to clear them all the way back up
to the latitude of the Hormuz Strait. The wind was too northerly
again. In the agitated backwash from the cliffs we were repeatedly
lifted up and turned around 40°—50° on a conical surge before sliding
down into the next trough, completely off course, with all hands on
deck and roofs in another desperate battle with canvas and ropes.
There is nothing like common danger to weld men of all ages and
ways of life together for common survival. Confronting perils
together one rarely thinks of nationality or differences of upbring­
ing* None of us believed he could benefit at the cost of the rest or
impress others with reckless bravery; it is successful team-work
that counts in achieving a victorious outcome of a struggle. Anyone
acting otherwise becomes like a drummer trying to play a sym­
phony without the conductor and the rest of the orchestra.

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