Page 381 - The Tigris Expedition

Five Months for Us, Five Millennia for Mankind
rails to gaze at us from the two trawlers which were now brilliantly
lit, as darkness fell as soon as the sun was gone.
The two Russian ships slowed down and escorted us closely on
either side astern, the one blowing its siren. Asbjorn hurriedly
inflated the dinghy and he and Yuri jumped into it in the dancing
black sea and rowed over to Atchuievsky, where Yuri climbed on
board. Half an hour later he was back with a colossal deep-frozen
red grouper, a twenty-pound bag of beheaded, neatly packed and
deep-frozen prawns, a sack of potatoes, and a roll of old Russian
maps of the gulf into which we were heading. For two days we ate
delicious prawns in greater quantity than we would otherwise have
dared, but we feared that they might turn bad in the heat. The two
trawlers left with course for Aden.
Again we were alone, and for the last time we were free to lie on
the roof and relive the days when man spread free commerce and
dawning civilisation across these waters. The historian Pliny the
Elder, in the first century after Christ, recorded2 the truly impres­
sive volume of trade carried on in his days by ships between Egypt
and Ceylon, with further communication between Ceylon and ‘the
country of the Chinese’. He made it abundantly clear that the early
Romans had learnt local sailing directions from the ancient Egyp­
tians, who knew exactly where to steer and when to hoist sail in the
right seasons. Thanks to Pliny and his informant, the leading
Egyptian librarian and geographer Eratosthenes, we knew that
Tigris was not the first reed-ship to have accomplished this easy
voyage. He recorded that in earlier times the Egyptians, ‘with
vessels constructed of reeds and with the rigging used on the Nile’,
visited not only Ceylon, but also sailed on to mainland India,
trading with the Prasii on the river Ganges. He gives the exact
sailing route learnt by Eratosthenes from the Egyptian merchant
mariners, and states that the voyage from the Red Sea ports begins
in midsummer at the time the dogstar rises. Then, ‘Travellers set
sail from India on the return voyage at the beginning of the
Egyptian month Tybis, which is our December, or at all events
before the sixth day of the Egyptian Mechir, which works out at
before 13 January in our calendar. . . .’
With Tigris we had not left the Indus Valley until 7 February; we
knew it was too late and paid for it with a broken topmast. But we
had reached African waters even so. Our problem, however, was
not so much being late in the season as being late in historic time.
We had made the crossing some centuries too late and were not
allowed to land in Punt. We were now moving ahead dangerously

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