All of the things I said about The Ra Expeditions also apply here. Although this is happening in the late 1970s, so the racism is both a bit less, but also even less comfortable, if that’s possible.

Interestingly, I didn’t find this as historically problematic as Kon-Tiki or Ra. I think that’s mostly because he’s only sailing around places where there is actual archaeological evidence for contact – Mesopotamian stuff found in the Indus Valley, and vice versa – so there clearly was contact, although at how many degrees of separation is unclear from just those remnants. Although I did have to stop and laugh when Heyerdahl earnestly suggests that just because there’s a similarity between how a place name is said today, and how we think a word was said in a language nobody now speaks – well, that’s evidence that they might be the same place!

For real.

ANYWAY. I don’t need quite such an expurgated version of this book as with the other two, because the ideas and the language aren’t quite as offensive. And as with the other two, this is genuinely a fascinating adventure story. Getting the built made – of reeds, in Iraq – is another amazing story of ingenuity and the problems of materials etc in an area that really didn’t have ‘modern’ resources at the time. Was importing South American boatbuilders the most authentic way of doing it? Probably not. Anyway, then you’ve got eleven men on this little boat navigating the Arabian Gulf Persian Gulf Sumerian Gulf (there’s a whole thing about which name is appropriate), which is filled with enormous boats and isn’t all that easily navigable… and they go to Oman, and Bahrain, and Pakistan, and then back west – honestly it’s an amazing journey, with a lot of quite serious problems that they do manage to overcome. Heyerdahl is open about some of the friction experienced between the men – he has to be, given there’s someone with a camera filming them for much of the voyage – as well as their frustrations about what’s going on on land.

Would I recommend this wholeheartedly? No. Would I recommend it with reservations? Sure. Only to an historically literate reader, who’s in a place to deal with fairly stereotypical 1970s attitudes. It’s probably the best of the three in terms of not being problematic.