As I left Norman Baker's Long Island City civil engineering office, he handed me a brochure of his former sailing ship, the Anne Kristine. That ship had been lost at sea a few months before our interview in Hurricane Grace (October 1991). It was a 95' Gaff Topsail Schooner, built in 1868. I was immediately struck by the photographs in the brochure -- photographs of him, a muscular, energetic middle-aged man obviously loving his ship and his life on the oceans. In this interview he talks about his forty years of sailing the world's oceans, including three expeditions in reed boats as Thor Heyerdahl's navigator and second-in-command, and about the loss of the Anne Kristine.  

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Rod MacIver (RWM):  Norman, how did you get started sailing?

Norman Baker (NB):  I'd always wanted to go to sea. When I was a child, as a matter of fact, it wasn't even a wanting, it was a knowing. I just knew I was going to sea. It was just a matter of growing up and letting it all come true. I used to go down to the harbor to watch ships leaving. I always knew I was going to be on them someday, and sail so far beyond the horizon that I could look three hundred and sixty degrees around from the deck and not see land. The U.S. Navy took care of that. I got into the Navy during the Korean war and spent the next two and a half years trying to do away with people who were trying their best to do away with us. That was certainly exciting, but not deeply satisfying. So after the Navy, I left steel ships powered by steam and traded them in on wood ships powered by wind. That was satisfying.

After Korea, I signed on for the Trans-Pacific yacht race as deck hand on the 75-foot cutter Cerces. After many adventures, I wound up sailing the ship for the owner, Ray Cooke, who was seventy-two years old and whose ship had never left port without him on board. We were sailing from Honolulu back to Seattle, and we ran into a storm at night. A rudder cable broke and, in order to steer the ship at all, we had to rig an emergency tiller. The tiller was huge and was buried under tons of stuff down in the lowest part of the bilge. We took it out and finally got it rigged at 5 in the morning. Ray was absolutely exhausted. 

I was first mate and after we rigged the emergency tiller I steered. We were sitting there steering in the first gray light of dawn and Ray Cooke came up from below and went to the rail looking very ashen. He put his hand into his mouth and leaned over the side. I called to him:  "Ray, is there anything wrong?" "Ray, is there anything I can do for you?"  "Ray, can I help you?"  He never looked up, never answered. He was trying to make himself throw-up, which I didn't realize at the time. After trying for a while, he simply turned and went down below again.

About half an hour later he sent another young fellow on our crew to get me from the tiller down to his cabin. So I went down there. He was lying on his bunk. His first words to me were, "Norm, Cerce is yours."  I couldn't believe I had heard what I heard and stared at him dumbly and said something like "Huh" or "What?"  He said "I'm giving you the ship, the ship is yours."  I asked him what he was talking about. He said he wasn't going to be with us when we got to Seattle. He explained that he had come down below after helping set up the emergency tiller, had had a raging thirst, passed the galley, saw a cup with clear liquid in the galley sink. He was so thirsty he took the cup and tossed it back. He swallowed it before he realized that it was not water but priming fluid for the stove. The priming fluid can had upset in the cabinet over the galley sink during the storm.

Priming fluid, of course, is poison -- some sort of kerosene. He came up and tried to put his fingers down his throat to vomit. Actually, the first aid manuals tell you that if you swallow kerosene or something of that sort you should not throw up because you will aspirate the fumes from the liquid into your lungs. Lungs have no way to get rid of any poison fumes -- death is certain.

We were eight days out on a twenty-two-day trip to Seattle. We had rigged for racing and sailed to Honolulu in five days. Ultimately, he did survive but when he got out of the hospital he was so absolutely debilitated that that he could not even contemplate sailing back to Seattle with us. So he gave me the ship to sail back to Seattle -- my first command. I was twenty-six.

On the way we ran into a gale. I had been steering for twelve hours. We had a small and inexperienced crew. All night long we had been riding the waves -- rising to them, sliding down the faces, and backing down the crests. About five thirty in the morning an augmented wave fell on the ship and simply buried it. I had made a mistake. I had not closed the main weatherboards or the main hatch. The ship was just simply buried. I was beaten to my knees by the wave. When I stood up, the Pacific Ocean was to my waist. All I could see was the mast sticking above the water. The ship was filling through the open main hatch weatherboard. I stood there with the absolute certainly that I was looking at the last seconds of my life, and was just appreciating the scene.

It was astonishing to me then, and less astonishing to me now, that of all the emotions that I experienced, fear wasn't one of them. There was an intense fascination with the last scenes I was ever going to see. Being shocked and fascinated and sorry -- sorry but not afraid. Sorry that it was going to end, a little bit curious--but not terrified, not panic-stricken. Not horrified by it. But I didn't want it to end--there was and is so much more I want to do. It was very...rewarding somehow to discover that about myself -- that I wasn't afraid. But very gratifying.

I was just appreciating the scene...looking with intense fascination at the scene around me...just waiting for the next wave that would finish everything. The next wave never came. We had twice the period between waves because of the power of the augmented wave. In that period of time, the ship surfaced like a submarine. She was really full of water, but she lifted. I realized that we still had the ability to ride the waves. Of course, then we battened everything down and started to pump. It took us until two thirty in the afternoon to finish the pumping. The pumps had clogged from all of the debris floating around the ship. We finished the job with buckets.

So, I didn't lose the ship. If it had gone down, we all would have been lost. In those days we were not as conscious of safety devices. We had no life raft -- we had a dingy. The dingy filled. It was on deck and just as full as the rest of the ship -- buried under the sea.

Shortly after the loss of the Anne Christine, Bill Guperson(?), a famous marine artist and historian, phoned me and said that perhaps God thought I owed him a ship, since he granted me my life and my ship when she was buried. But, he said, obviously God didn't think I owed him any lives. So I lost my ship, but we lost no lives.

Augmented waves is the technical term. The popular connotation is rogue wave. They are two waves that get out of phase and catch up with each other. Their power grows arithmetically.

Rod: Norman, tell me about the Anne Kristine.

Norman:  Anne Kristine was the oldest continuing operating ship in the world. She was built as a fishing boat in 1868 in Norway. She was the sister ship of Roald's Amundsen's Gjoa, now in the Oslo Museum. Gjoa took Amundsen on his expedition through the Northwest Passage in 1903.

We bought the ship in Tortola in 1982 from the Swedish owner. It was a derelict hulk. My family and I restored the ship. It took us four years. We worked six days a week for six months. Seven days a week for the next two and a half years. We put our life savings into the ship. Much of the oak frame hull was original and in good condition. It was about 60% original. She still had many of the original wooden pegs and when the ice plates were removed the protective layer of tarred reindeer felt between the hull and ice plates were in excellent condition.

After refitting, we began to do sail training with her with the Canadian Sea Cadets, off Nova Scotia. Those were great summers. This last year, after trying for four years, we finally arranged charters year-round in the Caribbean.

And for the first time in ten years, I let her leave the dock without me aboard. I had a young captain on board who was twenty-eight, who had sailed with me for three months in Canada. He had never been a captain before, but he had been my first mate. He he ran into Hurricane Grace on the way down to Bermuda. He made a number of tragic errors. I thought he knew more than he did.

He called the Coast Guard and abandoned my ship. He got nine out of nine off of her, for which I will be eternally grateful. The crew that made the rescue is getting the international award for Rescue of the Year. They really risked their lives. In a two-hundred-mile-range helicopter, they went three hundred miles to get them. They would have fallen into the sea if they hadn't found an aircraft carrier out there. They landed on the carrier in a hurricane for the first time ever. At night.

They got nine out of nine but they lost my lovely ship -- a ship that was perfect. They just turned on the priming valves without letting them fill, so they didn't pump a teaspoon of water with my three biggest centrifugal pumps. They put waste oil from the engine in the oil bags, instead of thin, clean oil that would have taken the crests off the waves. The crests were over the deck a foot and a half deep. They had their engine running, the generator running, all the electronics were working perfectly, not one single piece of rigging was carried away. Not a sail ripped. There was nothing wrong with the ship. They had to close two deck vents, which were flooding her. And they never called me on the radio. Three radios. They called the Coast Guard two dozen times. Never once did they call me to ask "What's my opinion?"  "What do I think?"  Never. They just abandoned my ship three hundred miles off Cape Hatteras. They lost her. No insurance for hull. I'm still recovering from that -- my whole family is. We are really stricken.

It’s unfair, probably, to sit here in the safety of our stable, well-lighted, dry office and try to second-guess a young fellow with his first command, exhausted and possibly disorientated to some extent by the hurricane, and criticize.

If he had of called me on one of the three radios, I would have told him how to prime the pumps. I would have told him to switch the engine-cooling water pump from sucking from the sea to sucking from the bilge, which we could do by throwing one valve. I would have told him to close the engine room vent and close the galley vent. I would have told him to dump the oil out of the oil bags and fill them with light clean oil to keep down the wave crests. He turned east instead of west. You can't escape a northern hemisphere hurricane by going east--they spin counterclockwise. If it catches you, and you're on the west side, it will spit you out. If you are on the east side it will suck you in. He was on the east side and he kept heading east.

We were planning to sail the ship on a scientific expedition over the same route as the HMS Challenger--the world's first oceanographic expedition. We intended to go to all of their stations, and take air, water and bottom samples.

The Challenger left England in 1872 and sailed 64,000 miles, sampling three hundred and sixty-two ocean stations--the water and the bottom. It took them three and a half years. Going around the world is 30,000 miles by sea. They sailed north and south, and then east and west. We think the voyage will take three years. The charter fee that we would charge the expedition would approximate our cash investment in the Anne Kristine, exclusive of our own labors, which were extraordinary. At the end of the expedition, we would give the Anne Kristine to the Challenger II non-profit corporation in return for the Challenger charter. Now of course I do not have the ship. If we were funded for the Challenger II expedition, we would use the charter fees in the budget and put them towards the building the Anne Kristine II. It wouldn't quite cover the total cost, but it would be significant. It would be owned outright by the Challenger II organization, so that the work could be used by subsequent crews and subsequent captains. I would like to see it continue on long after I am gone.

Bottom samples were taken four miles below the surface, astonishing the world with the sea life they were able to bring up. People at that time thought life only existed in the euphotic zone--the depth to which sunlight can penetrate, or about 600 feet. Then they found marine growth on an underwater telephone line that was damaged and brought back up from the Mediterranean. At depths of at least two thousand feet. They were astonished to find barnacles. Which exploded the theory that life only existed in the euphotic zone. 

It was suggested that I might want to do this again. I couldn't believe that it was necessary, so I went to Woods Hole/Scripps Institute and was astonished that the oceanographers there really wanted that information very, very badly. It was a voyage that has never been done except once in history. With the thousands of ships around, no one seems to want to fund a survey--they all want to skewer a particular problem. As the man at Woods Hole said, clear concepts get funds--in a survey you don't know what you'll find.

Right now we are trying to replicate the Anne Kristine with the funds that would be used to charter her. There would be nothing in it for me monetarily, but I'd love to see her exist again. She obviously touched many, many people's lives. The letters we received after she was lost were really quite astonishing and revealing of how much we influenced people. She was a special ship somehow.

RM:  What events led to your participation in Thor Heyerdahl's ocean-crossing expeditions?

NB:  I met Thor Heyerdahl after that voyage to Seattle. I had met a marine biologist in Hawaii named Jack Randall, Dr. John A. Randall. He had just gotten his doctorate from the University of Hawaii. I signed on for an expedition with him which was funded by Yale University and the Bishop Museum to do an ecological study of a particular species of fish -- the grouper -- that was missing in Hawaii but was present in the South Sea Islands. The northern pacific and the southern pacific is more or less a mirror image of each other. He felt that the ecological conditions were the same in Hawaii as in the Tahitian islands to the south. He proposed to Yale and to the Bishop Museum that he study the groupers that are present for possible transfer to the Hawaiian Islands. I participated as his navigator, first mate and underwater assistant on a scientific expedition organized by John A. Randall in the South Sea Islands. We studied the possibility of transferring a particular species of grouper from the South Sea to Hawaii, and then successfully completed that transfer. It was very, very satisfying. A total success. It proved that the grouper was not harmful, for instance, that it didn't eat tuna fish eggs. Tuna fish are very important to the Hawaiian economy.  

During that research, by coincidence, both Thor's expedition and ours were in Tahiti replenishing. That's where Jack Randall introduced me to Thor. I had avidly read his Kon-Tiki, seen the movie, and I thought what a grand opportunity to meet this man that I had admired for so many years. And he was just as wonderful as I had hoped he would be. Very straightforward, honest, open, not boastful, not filled with any kind of conceit--though he had already done great things. There was no chest-beating, no self-aggrandizement about him. He was very serious about his work. Very serious about finding out. Very serious about learning the truth. If the truth flew in the face of conventional wisdom, so be it. He would not yield. Unlike many archeologists, who are very timid people because there are so many archeologists and so few archeological jobs. Thor doesn't care whose toes he steps on because he was not an employed archeologist. He was on an expedition that he financed himself with borrowed money. Kon-Tiki. The Norwegian government, I believe, funded the Easter Island expedition. He just simply wanted to learn the truth about these matters that so intrigued him. And that is what he was doing -- simply searching for the truth. Whatever he learned he was going to say. Whatever his opinion was as a result of the findings, he was going to say. Of course, that made him very unpopular. A lot of the unpopularity was jealously.

One of the things he said was that he felt it was very wrong to simply publish what you found in books that were going to be read by academia only. If you made your findings only technical, and you publications only technical, then the general public, who deserves to know what has been learned, will never know. So Thor wrote what he called popular science. That's the way you spread knowledge. First you have to establish an interest, and then people will learn. So first he wrote what he called popular science. Then he took years to produce his detailed, footnoted volume that goes to university libraries. I really admired his attitude about what he did.

Well, it was twelve years later before I met him again, this time in New York. Over a five-hour dinner he explained his theory that reed boats had crossed the Atlantic, bringing the culture of the Mediterranean to Central and South America, where the indigenous people were living in a stone age society. And he believes the culture of the Mediterranean was transferred across the Atlantic by people in reed boats. The scientific world at the time ridiculed him. They were never loath to ridicule Thor Heyerdahl. I think there was a large portion of jealousy. And also he was stepping on a lot of academic toes.

For instance, they said the pyramid was an evolution of the mound, on which a leader would stand to address his people -- to look down on them. Eventually, this theory held, the mound became more elaborate and more formalized and evolved into pyramids in Central and South America, just as in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Thor had discovered, though, that the actual stone construction had identical fingerprints, or characteristics. He spent twelve years gathering what amounted to 135 archeological matching points between the Mediterranean civilizations and the American civilizations. One hundred and thirty-five matching archeological points are far beyond coincidence, far beyond the explanation that the development of logic in the human mind is essentially the same whether people are living in the desert or the jungles of Central America. That really defies logic.

Thor could not understand why the scientific community didn't see that the culture could have come across the Atlantic. The conveyor belt is out there--the trade winds, the equatorial current. Once you get on it, you can't even turn back. You either die, or you survive and get to America.

Reed boats were used for about one thousand years--from about five thousand years ago to four thousand years ago. Certainly these sailors, after forty generations of building and sailing reed boats, could have made it across the Atlantic if we could make it alone, on Ra II. The Egyptian trading expeditions never sailed alone. The earliest expedition of which we have any knowledge was the expedition of the Pharoah Snedfu (?) to export papyrus paper from Egypt to Bibyloss(?) -- the book publishing center of the ancient world. They had forty reed boats, each with ten people. They didn't sail with just line pullers and knot tiers. They sailed with the finest cross-section of people they had in their culture -- not to export what they knew, but to bring back what other people knew. They wanted their engineers to examine what structures other people built. They wanted their agronomists to see what other people grew, and how to cultivate it, and bring back root stock. They had astronomers to tell their latitude, cartographers to draw maps, historians to record the journey and priests to see what gods the other people worshipped. It appears such an expedition was sent to the Canary Islands. In fact, Thor is now digging in the Canary Islands in addition to Peru.

RWM:  Did you go through any major storms on Ra II?

NB:  On Ra II our rudder was broken by an augmented wave. At the time I climbed the mast so that I could see the ocean when Ra II was in the trough. We were having seventeen-foot waves at that time -- for four days. The augmented wave had to be thirty four feet. It smashed a rudder that was as big as a telephone pole.

RWM:  In light of the seaworthiness of the Tigris, is it inconceivable that a round trip to America was made?

At one time, Thor believed that people did not came back from America. But in visiting an archeological dig in Lebanon, he saw two ceramic representations of what the local archeologist said must have been pinecones. But the lines etched in the ceramic were vertical and horizonal like Indian maize or corn, rather than diagonal. The ceramics were about two thousand years old. So perhaps people did get around the world by island hopping, but until substantiating evidence is found, this can only be considered a possibility, not a probability.  Easter Island is certainly showing culture from South America -- three thousand miles away.  But they probably didn't get back across the Atlantic.

The Europeans thought Columbus discovered America because it appears he was the first to make a round trip. Columbus had been to England and Ireland and so he knew before he left for America that the northern trade winds went from the west toward the east. He was working off the calculations of Copernicus, whose measurements were off by 27%. When Columbus reached America, Copernicus's measurements may have led him to believe he had reached India. Ironically, Eratosthenes, in 200 B.C., had actually pegged the diameter of the earth to within 2% of the actual.

RWM:  What would lead the Egyptians to the Canary Islands?  They are not visible from Africa.

NB:  Signs of islands would be visible to experienced sailors. If you see cumulus clouds standing in a certain place in the sky, day after day after day, you know those clouds are probably over islands. The islands heat up faster than the water, the air rises over the islands, the vegetation on the islands puts moisture into the air. As the air rises it condenses and forms clouds. In addition, the refraction of waves would indicate islands. So the Egyptians might have known the islands were there and sent an expedition out to them.

The Egyptian experience in the Mediterranean, spanning many centuries, may also have encouraged them to think that an expedition to the Canary Islands and back would not be too difficult. In the Mediterranean the winds are constantly alternating between the sea and the land. As the land cools faster than the water causing the air to descend over the land and rise over the water. The wind flows out from the land toward the water. You put up your square sail, sail out to the Mediterranean and fish. In the late afternoon the winds reverse -- the air over the water is relatively cold so the air rises over the land. You put up your square sail and sail home again.

However, when you get out to the Canary Islands it doesn't work because you are in the Trade Wind belt and the Equatorial current. The current and the wind only flow in one direction. Any expedition leaving the Canary Islands would have been swept southwest. At that point, they may have thought they were two or three days from another shore on the other side. They may have based their thinking on the Mediterranean Sea -- where the land on the other side is three days away. Ultimately, they either died in the ocean or got to America --the only two alternatives. Egyptian culture is so prevalent in Central and South America that some must have made it -- by accident.

RWM:  What happened to Ra I, which didn't make it across the Atlantic?

Baker:  Ra I made it 2,662 miles -- 80% of the objective. The reeds were soaked. The ropes holding the reeds together had broken. The stern had hinged downward. The waves were breaking over the stern of the boat like waves break over a beach. Thirty or thirty-five dorsal fins were slicing the water around us. When we were sailing well, the sharks never hung around. We'd see single shark for a few minutes, then they would swim off. When we were waddling out of control, they sense the disability. They come and they stay like vultures waiting, hunting.

RWM:  Did the Ra I and Ra II carry modern provisions? 

Baker:  No. We had to load with the types of supplies they would have used thousands of years ago to make the experiment valid. We couldn't have had vitamin pills and freeze-dried foods when they had to carry tons of jars. We had 1200 pounds of clay jars on Ra I, which we filled with water and food to load our boat the way they would have. Ra II was similarly loaded.

Fish augmented our diet. We had kerosene lanterns so ships would not run us down at night. Flying fish would jump towards the light, landing on deck. You'd be standing on the deck of Ra II steering the boat and a flying fish would hit you in the neck.

RWM:  What was the thinking behind the subsequent expedition, the Tigris?

NB:  The Tigris came about because Thor stumbled upon the information about how to keep reed boats afloat indefinitely. Ra and Ra II were decks awash and sinking in two months. Thor was walking up the Tigris River with an interpreter to Babylon. Thor doesn't know how to drive a car. Wonderfully capable man but he has never had any reason to learn and he never did. You can't drive a car on tropical islands or take them aboard reed boats so he simply never learned. His favorite modes of transport are on foot or horseback. He feels he learns an awful lot by walking. If you drive through a country, or fly over it, you learn nothing. By walking he learns were he is, and he looks for artifacts where his foot falls.  So he just loves to walk.

On the walk up the Tigris, he saw a very large raft. His first impression was that it was as big as a football field. It was at least five meters thick--about sixteen feet--but not more than one meter was under the water. There was a man on top, sitting in front of a little reed house, cooking what looked like a hibachi pot -- a ceramic pot -- with sand and charcoal in it.

Thor asked his interpreter what the man was doing up there. The man was minding the reeds. Why?  Because the paper plant was too full and couldn't take this much reed right now. The raft was the product of one or more villages upstream, and this was their cash crop. They gathered the reeds, built them into a big raft and floated them down the river and sold the reeds to the paper plant. Thor asked the man how long he had been sitting there. The man said a year and three months. Thor asked why the reeds didn't sink. The man was amazed at Thor's simple-minded question -- he assumed everyone knew that reeds never sink -- as long as you harvest them in August. The reeds for both Ra I and Ra II were harvested in December.

In planning Ra I and Ra II, Thor had asked me what was the best time to cross the Atlantic. I looked at my pilot charts and aimed for the window between the African hurricane season and the American hurricane season. The two-month window, May and June, became our target. So we planned backwards from May and had the reeds harvested in December.

When he found out that the reeds should be harvested in August he visited the marsh Arabs in Iraq. Thor decided to make another reed boat to see how well it behaved. People were always questioning why anyone would build reed boats if they could only float two months. The president of the papyrus institute in Cairo said that reed boats had to be hauled out of the water every night to allow them to dry because they would rot into paper pulp. That's the way they made paper. By soaking the reeds in water for about two weeks. And indeed they did. But they did several things first -- they sliced the reed, beat it with a mallet, put the dry reeds in a tub until they totally filled the tub, they lashed the reeds down, totally weighted them down so they wouldn't float, and then filled water space that was left in the tub with water. Fresh water. The reeds did rot into pulp. But we didn't slice the reeds, beat the reeds with a mallet. We were in salt water, which preserves rather rots. And we changed our water constantly by sailing through it. Any putrefaction that started would tended to get washed away.

The reeds from Ra I were found on the coast of Norway four years later. We know they were the reeds from Ra II because they had desert beetle holes in them. We built the boat in the desert, right outside the pyramids. We worried about the desert beetle penetrations which we did see. They didn't rot -- they were floating -- but they didn't have any excess buoyancy in them to support their load.

Tigris sailed 4,200 miles from the Tigris River to the entrance to the Red Sea. Tigris had oar emplacements, it went in and out of port, it could float indefinitely, it could carry tons of cargo. We carried tons of water to represent the stores of copper that were described on the clay tablets found in Mesopotamia ruins.

RWM:  Have you been on expeditions or difficult trips since then?

NB:  Just on Anne Kristine. We bought Anne Kristine in 1982. We went through gales--we actually went through two hurricanes. Both times we were in port. The first time on Tortola. One hundred and twenty ships in the islands immediately around us were destroyed. We were nearly dragged out of the harbor and smashed. We were saved by dragging over a coral head that was deep enough for us to float, but the anchor dragging up hill on the bottom held, so we were not destroyed. The next time was on Nantucket where Hurricane David came by. Four ships in Nantucket were destroyed but we saved ourselves using our engine and anchors.

RWM:  What are your plans now?

NB:  I would like to build an exact wooden replica of the Anne Kristine -- so that when you came aboard her, you would not really know that you were on Anne Kristine II rather than Anne Kristine.

RWM:  Would you tell us more about Thor Heyerdahl, about his character, and his way of life?

There is a certain exhilaration in the way Thor lives his life. You can boil it down to a life that is simple and direct, hard. The problems are usually very direct. It is not nearly as complicated as the life we normally lead, with strings pulling in multiple directions. There is a deep satisfaction in the kind of enterprise where you have a clear-cut goal. The dangers -- the penalty for failure is so direct. The penalty for failure in business is financial hardship; the penalty for failure at sea is shipwreck --being out there forever. For certain types of people it is extremely exciting.

I have never really been attracted at all to doing something for the hardship of doing it. After the Ra expeditions I was invited by an Australian to go on a raft of fifty-gallon fuel drums from Australia, across the Indian Ocean, to Africa. I asked him why he wanted to do this. He said because it had never been done before. I just simply wished him good luck. I wasn't about to do that.

Miles Smeaton, the man who sailed around the world a couple of times. Mountain climber. He wrote "Because It’s There". He tried to sail around Cape Horn three times, he made it once. He said to me when I met him in Hawaii when we all sheltered from the storm at Kailua. We woke up the next morning -- I was on the expedition with Jack Randall -- there were two other vessels. It was really strange. There were three boats there. The other two boats were both famous sailors --Miles Smeaton and his wife Veril, and John Guzwell with his tiny boat Trekka -- and it was very, very pleasant. We stayed there for about two weeks, I think. I got to know him quite well. He said that when he was a younger man he used to go hunting for wild animals -- lions and tigers – and he said that he really thought it was awful when you were a mature person to go shoot this poor old tiger or shoot this poor old lion. If you haven't proved who you are to yourself by the time you've grown up, than really you are beyond proving it. When you are a young man, okay, maybe you want to see what you are made of. Go out and shoot the poor old lion. But, if after you have done that a few times, if you continue to do it, there is something wrong with you. You see, it isn't a matter of me wanting to prove myself. That happened, that curiosity of what I was made of was satisfied very early. I don't have to find out anymore what I was made of. We certainly don't want to die. But I'm not afraid of dying. Does that distinction make sense?

RWM:  Do you have any conclusions about living life, that come out of your time at sea, the three voyages and your relationship with Thor Heyerdahl?

NB: If I've learned anything, I would say it is to do things before the opportunity to do them is gone. I've had people look upon me with envy, and express regret that they did not have the opportunities that I have had. I counter that the opportunities were always there. If you have time, time encompasses opportunity. The precious thing that we all have in limited amounts is time, and it's what we do with our time that makes the difference. If you regret where you are, if you regret what you’re doing, by golly change it. Do something that will change it. Don't look back at the lack of opportunity, because the opportunity is always there. But you have to put yourself in opportunity's way. And when the opportunity reaches out and touches you, and it only touches briefly, you've got to be ready to accept it.

When I was a child, and I knew I was going to go to sea, knew I was going to travel, I began to prepare. I knew I would be in places where I had to be physically fit and competent ... intellectually ready -- and so I nudged my mind and my body in those directions. I learned how to read a compass and a map. Learned how to live with comfort in uncomfortable situations, or ostensibly uncomfortable situations that I didn't find uncomfortable. I joined the swimming team in high school -- so that when the opportunity came to be Jack Randall's underwater assistant, I was an excellent swimmer. We needed a navigator. I had studied navigation. First, I studied celestial mechanics in high school. I learned how to shoot the stars and the sun. When I got into the navy, and had had celestial mechanics, I was a shoe-in to become the assistant navigator -- the job I really wanted -- over the next guy who couldn't do that. So you have to prepare long before the opportunity presents itself.

Think what you would like to have happen, and be ready for it because when the opportunity comes, it doesn't linger.

RWM:  How does the way Thor Heyerdahl approaches life differ from that of people who lead more prosaic lives? 

NB: Thor has always been willing to take risks. He has always been willing to go against convention. He is an absolutely independent thinker. He does his research, his preparation extraordinarily well. He has never gone off half-cocked on anything. He has never gone off half-cocked on anything. By the time he has shoved off, he's done  years of research.

When we went on Ra I, he had been approached months before by a French couple. They asked him all about what he intended to do. Being generous, as he is, not just with money, but with himself, he told them everything. They somehow got 50,000 francs from the French government and French organizations. They built a reed boat and tried to beat us across the Atlantic Ocean -- to be first. They stole Thor's idea. They lasted two weeks and it was a lucky thing they were found -- their boat came apart. They didn't know what they were doing. You can't just lash together a bunch of reeds and try to cross the Atlantic Ocean. You have to know how it is done -- the way it was done for a thousand years. Find out how they did it and do it exactly the same way. It takes years of research and great care.

We didn't make it either on the first voyage because we made several mistakes. We changed things and we shouldn't have. We learned and on the second voyage we made it. It is the careful, plodding research that Thor does that is not visible to people. Some think he is a slap-dash, swash-buckling adventurer that goes off on reed boats. He isn't like that. When he leaves, he's done his research as meticulously as he could possibly can. He has found out everything available to be found out. Some information eludes him, but at least he has gone after it. This is what makes him successful.

RWM:  How does Thor Heyerdahl differ from highly competent, excellent archeologists?

NB:   Archeologists tend to be specialists. Thor Heyerdahl is an integrator, he assembles knowledge. He makes the broader picture make sense. Egyptologists, traditionally, know nothing about America. Americanists traditionally know nothing about Egypt. For example, I was in Bolivia with the archeologist who was the original excavator of that site. He knew more about the ancient Inca civilization than anyone in the world. We went up to an artifact called the Sun Gate -- a huge stone arch with two pillars. Massive. How they ever got this assembled in the days before cranes is a mystery. Going up one side, across the top and down the other were depictions of the ancient Egyptian Sun God Ra. I commented to the archeologist:  "Look at Ra." He didn't understand at all. I said: "Ra -- all over the arch."  He looked at me as if he had never heard the word before. The bird's head on the body of a man with spread wings and the head turned profile. You find that in ancient Egypt in so many places. That's why we named our boat Ra.

Thor's integration and assimilation of facts -- his interest in and ability to understand the big picture often angers the scientific community. It angers them that Thor says things about an ancient culture that the recognized expert in that area doesn't know or hasn't published. They think Thor is exposing their knowledge as limited and provincial.

He is an absolutely independent thinker. He is seeking the truth about matters that so intrigue him. Whatever his opinion, based on the findings, he is going to say. He is not subject to the whims of others who tell him what he can and can't do, how much time is allowed, and what he must say when he comes back. This kind of independence draws the admiration of people who want to support him, because he is that way.

On the first Ra voyage, a very wealthy American wanted to give him the money for it. He wouldn't take it -- he wanted to borrow so he wouldn't be beholden to anyone. And he didn't. He borrowed the money to do the expedition from a book publisher for a book he hadn't yet written, and from a movie distributor for a movie he hadn't made. But they felt he was going to do it. At the end of the voyage, he paid it back. Then he borrowed twice as much from the same people for the second voyage. They gave it to him because he promised and when he says he is going to do something he tries his very, very best to do it.

RWM:  Does he see a spiritual or self-satisfaction value in hardship or simplicity?

NB: Thor does not seek hardship but does seek simplicity. He seeks and needs intellectual stimulation. It is difficult to discuss his life in any context other than in relation to his work.

He was originally a botanist and, in 1937, he went to Fatu Hiva with his young bride to study how the butterflies got there from a thousand miles away. He became fascinated when the Polynesian people told him their temples and Gods came from the east -- South America. And he saw the sea and the wind coming from South America. Then he began looking into vehicles. In South America he saw the balsa log raft and the reed boat. He assumed that the balsa log raft, big and sturdy, had to be the ocean crossing vehicle. The reed boat, light and fragile, had to be the inshore vehicle. Later, of course, he changed his mind. He found that the reed boat was the faster, longer sailing craft. The log raft was probably the coastal freighter. Being with Thor, in the pursuit of knowledge as to where the people came from and how they travelled, was absolutely fascinating. 

. . .

Norman Baker died at the age of 89 flying a single engine Cessna. There were a number of other chapters of his amazing life described here, in his New York Times obituary.