It is the first long story that I have attempted to write, the first novel, and I picked a story that takes place in a historical setting. So far it has been rewarding but also a slow and challenging project that is difficult to fit within the contours of my life.
One of the characters is a navigator and needs to be able to speak authoritatively on the subject so I had to learn more about navigation. One of the books that I read was “Early Man and the Ocean” by Thor Heyerdahl, a series of essays where Heyerdahl lays out his theories of navigation and ocean-going activities in the ancient world. Heyerdahl was a Norwegian zoologist best known for the Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947, when he and a group of hearty fellow-travelers constructed a balsa raft and drifted with the ocean currents to land in the Tuamotu Islands in Polynesia, a journey of 4,300 miles that took over 100 days.
In the book Heyerdahl makes an argument for early contact between Africa and the Americas, showing that ships woven out of reeds used by the Egyptians and the Phoenicians in the pre-Christian era could possibly sail across the Atlantic. He mentions the Sea-People, a mysterious group of maritime traders described by ancient Egyptian and Greek sources; speculating that they sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar to trade along the West African coast, crossed the Atlantic by following the Westward current that begins off of the Canary Islands, and engaged in commerce with the peoples of the Americas. Heyerdahl expands on his theory of the American origins of ancient Polynesia, mustering the supporting data and theories that he can within the small format of the book. There was something about a central image that he used that I found hugely resonant: the idea of a small group of people, impelled by the boundless human capacity for exploration and adaptation to undertake a perilous voyage across thousands of miles of open ocean, living off of the sea, reading the stars and the ocean currents for signs, with no clear sense of destination or purpose.
