The ‘Balsa of Sex’, one of the strangest experiments of all time

In 1973, eleven people left a 101-day transatlantic journey, as part of an experiment on violence, aggression and sexual attraction Fasad/BBC The Spanish-Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genoço was flying to Mexico City, where he lived since he was 15, when he arrived in the country as a refugee of the Spanish civil war. He had embarked in the city of Monterrey after participating in a conference on the history of violence, when suddenly a group took control of the aircraft, demanding the release of some companions. “It was too good to be true … Imagine the irony. Me, a scientist who spent his career all studying violent behavior, ending in a kidnapped plane.” “All my life I tried to know why people fight and understand what really happens in our mind,” wrote later, one of the world’s great references in physical anthropology, a doctor of anthropology from the University of Cambridge, the UK, who taught at the autonomous university of Mexico. The aircraft hijacking inspired the researcher to create a similar situation that would serve as a laboratory to study human behavior. Although RA I did not come to its destination, Heyerdahl demonstrated with RA II that it was possible to travel from the Mediterranean and cross the Atlantic Ocean long before Colombo Gettyimages/BBC and the experience that had had a few years earlier with the renowned Norwegian adventure and ethnologist Thor Heyerdahl gave him the idea to put his plan into practice. Genoço had collaborated with Heyerdahl in the construction of Papyiro Ra I and Ra II boats, in the style of the old Egypt boats, and was part of the multinational crew that crossed the Atlantic to show that Africans could have arrived in America before Christopher Colombo. During these trips, he learned what every sailor knows: there is no better laboratory to study human behavior than a group that floats in the high sea. Participants slept like this in the cabin, as they showed 45 years later, three of the six experiment volunteers gathered by director Marcus Lindeen for the documentary ‘The Fasad/BBC House of Water with the Sea as a perfect insulating means, the anthropologist took care of preparing his experiment, elaborating strategies to provoke conflicts and tools to examine them. “Thanks to laboratory animal tests we know that aggression can be triggered by placing different types of rats in a limited space. I want to find out if it happens to humans.” The anthropologist then built a 12 x 7 meter boat with a small candle. The 4 x 3.7 meter booth, with “space for each other’s body, lying down. You can’t stand,” he wrote in the magazine of Universidad de Mexico in 1974. And both the shower and the toilet were outdoors, in the sight of the crewmates. He called the ferry Acali, which in Nauatle in the tongue means “house in the water.” In it, 10 people would board a trip that would last 101 days, without motor, electricity, nor “boats accompanying it, or possibility of retreating”. ‘Ten unknown brave’ to find volunteers, Genoço has published an announcement in several international newspapers – hundreds of people responded. He chose four men and six women – only four of them single and almost all with children, from different nationalities, religions and social contexts, selected “to create tensions in the group.” Among them was the captain: Swedish Maria Björnstam, single, 30, whom Genozos invited to be “the first woman in the world to be named captain of a vessel.” It was not the only woman he designated a dominant function. Genhoço decided to give important roles to all of them, leaving men to insignificant tasks. “I wonder if giving power to women will lead to less violence. Or if there will be more,” he wrote. On May 13, 1973, the Acali ferry left Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands, being launched on the high seas like an island floating lazily towards its destination: the Mexican island of Cozumel. The 11 participants aboard the ferry, with the captain in the middle Fasad/BBC Sex inside and out along with Acali also settled the imagination of public opinion, instigated by the press. Although not counting on cameras that would show all the details of similar situations in reality shows, the media took the opportunity to create wild stories based on the few minutes of radio contact with the vessel. The newspapers printed headlines like “The Orgas in the Raft of Love” or “The Secret of the Love Berry” – which talked about a supposed secret radio code, in case there was an emergency in the “Berry of Passion”. Even devoted articles were published to the fact that the captain uses a bikini, which made the Genique project begin to be known as “the sex ferry.” And although reality on board was not like the newspapers painted, sex were very present in the anthropologist’s menu of experiments. Among other things, raft narrowing itself made sex logistically difficult … although these difficulties were overcome by several couples, but not as tabloids imagined Fasad/BBC “scientific studies with monkeys showed that there is a connection between violence and sexuality, where most conflicts between males are a consequence of the availability of ovulating females.” “To see if the same happens among humans, I selected sexually attractive participants.” “And since sex is linked to guilt and shame, I put a Catholic priest from them Angola, to see what happens.” In the vessel, although several crew members had sex, this aspect of human behavior did not generate tensions or noteworthy hostilities – unless it took into account the discomfort sense by the participants when they discovered, at the end of the trip, the tabloid’s lewd narrative about the expedition. The observed observer, however, sex was just one of the facets of an experiment whose goals were considered higher – as Genique itself confirmed when questioned by Captain Maria before the group: “I told them that I wanted to find out how to create peace on earth.” To achieve this feat, it was essential to understand the aggressiveness of humans. However, over the days, the only indication of violent behavior that manifested itself in that floating laboratory was before a shark – “to my big surprise, there was no sexual jealousy, nor conflicts between the participants.” ‘I woke up in the middle of the night, the others slept quietly around me. But for some reason I felt completely alone, ‘wrote Genoço Fasad/BBC after 51 days of coexistence, Genoza wrote frustrated: “No one seems to remember that we are here trying to find an answer to the most important question of our time: Can we live without wars?” He took a while until he realized that his methods were effectively having an effect: causing irritation, causing animosity and awakening aggressiveness. But surprisingly, not the way I had imagined. “I realized that the only one who had shown any kind of aggressiveness or ferry violence had been me.” And that’s not all. He was also the only target of the dark feelings of others. ‘Murder’ more than four decades later, some crew members confirmed that they even imagined the hypothesis of “murder.” “We were all thinking the same thing at the same time – are we going to do that?” The American Engineer Fe Seymour said in the documentary The Balsa, Swedish filmmaker Marcus Lindeen. Lindeen gathered the six participants in the Genoço project who are still alive to share their memories, photos and movies in a reconstitution of the experiment. In his eagerness to protect the project, Genoço ended up behaving as “a dictator,” according to Björnstam, to the point that at one point assume the command and declare himself captain. “It was difficult to support their psychological violence,” added Japanese Eisuke Yamaki. Participants imagined several strategies: from playing it “accidentally” overboard to injecting drugs that would cause a cardiac arrest – “with everyone’s hand holding the syringe.” “I was afraid to think that I would get to the point where we would do that. I was scared. As we were in the sea, it’s not like when you’re on land: nothing was normal.” “At that moment, I realized that we had the ability to do something terrible to survive,” Seymourno recalls in the documentary the ferry. On land but nothing serious happened. Problems with Genique were diplomatically resolved, as well as all the other disagreements they had had during the trip – unlike the experiment. When the ferry arrived in Mexico, everyone on board – including Genozo – were kept isolated for one week and undergoing a series of exams with psychiatrists, psychologists and doctors. The anthropologist went through difficult times during the exams and then with the criticisms that were made to the experiment. But he moved on with his prestigious career as a physical anthropologist, his floating adventures (later sailed alone to “know himself”) and his abundant production of articles and books, among many other things. For volunteers, the trip started and ended as an adventure. Although they lived some difficult times, there were no quarrels in the group, quite the opposite. They have created a bond that remains to this day. After thoroughly researching the case, the documentary’s author believes that Genoço could have found part of what he sought in acali – but not exactly with his questionnaires and strategies. “If you had heard people’s explanation of why they were on the ferry -Maria fleeing an abusive husband, the racism she had suffered -he would have learned about the consequences of violence and how sometimes we can overcome her softening our differences,” said Marcus Lindeen in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian. This report was originally published in 2019 Operation of the Brazilian Navy rescues Chinese crew member on the high sea

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