From Eden to India

A risky new voyage for an old adventurer

Thor Heyerdahl, 63, the Norwegian anthropologist, explorer and adventurer, believes in dramatizing his theories. To show that the Polynesian islands could have been settled by ancient mariners from South America, he crossed the Pacific on a balsa raft. To demonstrate that Egyptians might have reached the New World centuries before Columbus, he conquered the Atlantic in a boat made of papyrus. Now Heyerdahl is about to take a reed boat down the Tigris River from the purported site of the biblical Garden of Eden, eventually reach the open sea and either sail to India or East Africa, or sink--whichever comes first. His goal: to prove that the Sumerians--who established the earliest known civilization in what is today Iraq--could have used the route for trade and to spread their civilization as far away as India.

The newly launched vehicle for Heyerdahl's latest voyage is the Tigris, an 18-meter-long (59 ft.) craft constructed from 30 metric tons (33 tons) of reeds gathered from the swamps of southern Iraq; its design is based on drawings found on ancient Sumerian clay tablets. Iraqi workmen first tied the reeds together into two long, tapering rolls. Then the rolls were joined to form the craft's hull. Though on earlier voyages Heyerdahl and his crew drifted across oceans at the whim of winds and currents, the Tigris will be more versatile. It has been fitted with a large squarish sail and twelve wooden oars, each of them 6 meters (20 ft.) long.

Heyerdahl, who is at least as good a fund raiser as he is an anthropologist, has sold all rights to the story of the Tigris to the British Broadcasting Corp., which has assigned a cameraman to film the voyage from beginning to end. He has engaged a nine-man crew that includes an American, a Russian, an Italian, a Mexican, a Japanese, a German, two Scandinavians and an Iraqi (three Indian dhow skippers, hired to help navigate through some difficult waters on the route, withdrew from the expedition when they got a look at the craft).

This international assemblage, which will sail under the United Nations flag, will have its hands full. The crew will have to be alert as the Tigris is towed down the Shatt al Arab, the narrow river that flows from the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Then they will sail into the Persian Gulf and through the tricky Strait of Hormuz before they try crossing the Arabian Sea to the shores of Africa or India. These waters, surrounded by oil-rich nations, are crisscrossed daily by huge supertankers that could miss the reed boat's small kerosene running lights and run over the Tigris at night without their crews' even knowing it. Because Heyerdahl's latest craft is made of reeds, it does not show up on radar screens.

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