1974 RV Heraclitus
‘There is a fire burning over the Earth, taking with it ancient cultures, visionary wisdom,
plants, animals, languages, all the best of our human nature. Quelling that flame,
reinventing the poetics of diversity, is the greatest challenge of the next era. The
HERACLITUS is a symbol of that hope. A moving platform of poets, artists, scientists
exemplifying, by their own sincerity and intent, our own human quest, celebrating everything that we are.’
Wade Davis, Explorer In Residence, National Geographic Society, Onboard Heraclitus Amazon
Expedition 1981
After the founding of the Institute of Ecotechnics in 1973, the idea emerged that to accelerate the development of this new discipline harmonizing technologies and ecology, the Institute would conceive of cutting-edge demonstration projects and then consult to them in different biomes around the world. This would increase our understanding since each biome and project would face unique challenges both ecologically and culturally. The Sufis have a saying: “See something that needs doing and isn’t being done, and do it – without hope of the carrot or fear of the stick.” Similarly, ecotechnics would prove itself not by doing the easy ecological and cultural projects which are being done because they’re profitable, but tackling the difficult biomes and cultural environments. Ecological crises are often accompanied by cultural conflicts. A benefit of this approach is that such land tends to be inexpensive since conventional economic and ecological approaches don’t work. To lower costs, managers of the projects would share in profits, contributing their sweat equity. We took as a goal that in ecotechnic-consulted projects, we’d try to make $1 do what $10 did in conventional enterprises. The idea was to make the projects open for volunteers who ranged from willing incompetents ready to learn, to people with experience and knowledge.
Ecotechnics would help conceive and start the projects and continue as long-term consultants on their ecological development. Each would adapt to their location but probably operate as a Synergia, with the lifestyle and weekly routines developed at Synergia Ranch.
IE decided that the next synergetic project should be a ship. IE co-founder, John Allen, suggested that an oceangoing ship was key to an understanding of the planet’s diversity as without an understanding of the world ocean, I.E. would be limited to a strictly terrestrial-based perspective of the world. Arthur C Clarke noted: “How inappropriate to
call this planet Earth, when it is quite clearly Ocean.” Bucky Fuller in “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth” thought only the “Great Pirates” (perhaps his metaphor for the British Empire and Navy) possessed a comprehensive picture of the totality of Earth, which gave them great power since land-based cultures tend to be provincial.
IE’s ecologists, artists and thinkers decided to build our own ship. In Synergia Ranch drafting room, a team that included John Allen, Randall Gibson, Phil Hawes and Bill Dempster read books on sailing and sailing ships and began design work for what would become the R.V. Heraclitus.
Early on we chose ferro-cement because of its low cost; also hull damage could be repaired by sending divers down to apply underwater epoxy. A ferro-cement ship also takes advantage of lots of hands building the ship. Thus began a number of Ranch building projects that were designed to get us familiar with ferro-cement: shower rooms, the small geodesic dome, and roofs. Repair of the yellow dome with its canvas covering provided good training for repairing sails. Bill Dempster started mastering the art of celestial navigation; how to determine where you are aboard ship by precisely noting the time and your readings of angle between the stars and the horizon. He gave demonstrations and led courses to teach others. He illustrated how to do it using a ship sextant (the device for getting precise angles to a star). To demonstrate the problems involved in doing this on a heaving and pitching ship, Bill deployed the sextant while being pushed around the Ranch at night in a wheelbarrow, an unforgettable sight!
In the late spring of 1974 a group of IE members and synergists working at Synergia
took the converted school bus that Theater of All Possibilities used for theater tours to drive out to Oakland to begin ship construction. The ship would be a floating Synergia, a place for a modern type of Sea People, who live on and with the oceans.
To build the ship, they used a number of synergetic strategies. They found a rent-free location for construction in a no man’s land next to a concrete mixing company near the 5th Avenue Marina in Oakland. A dozen or more synergist builders received free housing at the large Berkeley home of Bill Dempster’s mother. Later, they would live in dirt-cheap and rudimentary sheds close to the construction site, called “Fu-Shu’s Cabins” after a slumlord character in Brecht’s play, “Good Person of Szechwan.” Some of the synergist ship builders camped on the sand hills next to the construction site.
To raise money for the ship construction and attract volunteers, the synergists opened a café, “The Junkman’s Palace” on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Every day enroute to the ship, the theater bus would drive down Telegraph Avenue and call out to people on the street to advertise the opportunity to learn how to build a sailing ship. Many got on the bus and worked for a day or two, a week or longer.
To save on costs, Bill Dempster headed the team to salvage materials from buildings slated for demolition. They saved fine old lumber and made a scaffold for the building of the Heraclitus. Everything that the crew could do they did to minimize using expensive hired labor. This included everything from bending rebar to the curves of the ship, putting on the wire, sewing sails and installing engines (a second hand GM car engine), rudder and other equipment.
With intense and long day construction crews, the ship required less than a year to
build, and people even made time to do theater. TAP developed several productions they performed in the Bay Area. They laid the ship’s keel in August 1974 and the ship launched on 24 February 1975. The capital investment for initial construction totaled around $80,000, which Randall Gibson lent and eventually got repaid. The R.V. Heraclitus began its decades long series of expeditions later in 1975 and its crew included some of the key people who’d lived at the Ranch as well as many others who either joined in the construction or signed on afterwards (www.rvheraclitus.org).
Built in around nine months of intense, long day and sometimes night-time work by 15- 20 volunteers, the RV Heraclitus was finally launched in February 1975.
Since 1975, the Research Vessel Heraclitus has been connecting and befriending
remote coastal areas, cultivating citizen science, collecting data in marine ecologies, and collaborating on climate technologies with Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)
for adaptive ecocultural solutions. The Research Vessel Heraclitus (RVH) enables scientific exploration at a fraction of the cost of conventional research vessels. This is due in part because the RVH crew participates in the exploration science activities, learning whatever is necessary to contribute to the scientific work. Other contributing factors to its far lower operating costs are that a portion of the crew are volunteers and the ship uses its sails, rather than engines, whenever possible. Beginning in 1978 before the first Atlantic Ocean crossing by the RVH, the ship signed a cooperative agreement with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) to collect weather, wind, cloud, temperature and rainfall data during its voyages. These data added to the information available through land-based weather stations and were especially valuable in that the RVH often sailed through seldom visited seas and docked at quite remote locations around the world.
Among the most notable of the Heraclitus’ early expeditions was the Amazon
Expedition, 1980-1982, which worked in Peru after sailing some 2000 miles up the Amazon. Prof. Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard University at the I.E. Jungle Conference held in 1979 in Penang, Malaysia urged the R.V. Heraclitus (RVH) to go to the Amazon to continue the exploration of its wealth of plant resources and native knowledge of how to use the plants. Prof. Schultes is considered the father of modern ethnobotany and one of the world’s experts on Amazonia flora. Sailing from Penang, Malaysia in January 1980, the ship re-traced its route back up the Red Sea, across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, reaching the mouth of the Amazon at Belem, Brazil in December. Joined onboard by a Brazilian naval officer, the ship transformed its sails into a sun-cover / rain-catchment and began the long motor journey up-river to Peru, where the expedition had been granted a special convenio (‘license’) permitting the collection of botanical specimens from the Peruvian rainforest.
Drs. Laurent Rivier and Bo Holmstedt assisted in designing a phytochemical laboratory for installation onboard enabling on-site analysis of tropical rainforest plants’ potential medicinal properties and the preservation of specimens gathered in the field for later
study. After travelling 2,200 miles up the Amazon, the ship arrived in Iquitos, Peru for reconnaissance and maintenance at the Peruvian Navy’s floating dry-dock on the Rio Nanay. Then 100 miles downriver to the village of Pevas, site of Dr. Schultes’ earlier work, where a local shaman who had assisted Dr. Schultes in his specimen gathering agreed to share his knowledge with the Heraclitus crew, leading their forays into the rainforest. Wade Davis, Dennis McKenna and Terence McKenna joined the ship for further ethnobotanical research. At the end of the mission the collecting crew was taken on a small boat up the tiny Rio Ampyacuto to the remote village of Brillo Nuevo, to attend an all night seasonal ritual dance festival. Hundreds of plants, including previously unknown new species, were collected and their uses documented. Plant specimens were deposited in the herbaria of the University of Peru in Iquitos and Lima, the Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis, Missouri), the New York Botanical Garden, the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew (U.K.) and the Institute of Ecotechnics herbarium (now donated to the Southern Cross University (Australia .
In the years since, the Heraclitus has sailed some 270,000 nautical miles, through six oceans, further than the distance from Earth to the Moon. The Heraclitus has explored traditions of those who have lived on the sea, with the aim to create an onboard cadre of contemporary sea people. Crew members have participated in numerous projects and thirteen expeditions (rvheraclitus.org).
After nearly 50 years, the RV Heraclitus is being completely rebuilt in Roses. Catalonia, Spain from the keel up to launch into a new era of planetary exploration