Authors: Simon Winchester
Atlantic (16 page)
Prince Albert followed suit soon after and bought a sleekly elegant yacht of his own, the
Hirondelle.
His subsequent studies of the North Atlantic—especially the Gulf Stream—brought him fame and wide respect: he was evidently not the silk-stockinged dilettante that had been initially supposed.
30
His work on the great current took him three years and involved sailing
Hirondelle
on several voyages between the Azores and the Grand Banks and dropping into various sections of the stream almost 1,700 floating objects—beer barrels, glass bottles, and spheres of copper—and seeing where they ended up. Beachcombers responded to the scrupulously polite notes inside by writing to say they had found rather more than two hundred of them—discoveries that enabled the young prince (he ascended to the Monegasque throne just as this work was coming to its end, in 1889) to draw highly accurate maps of the direction and strength of the Gulf Stream, of the North Atlantic Drift that branched from it, and of the clockwise nature of the North Atlantic gyre generally.
He continued his work for most of his years as ruler. He had a 175-foot schooner built as a research vessel, the
Princess Alice
—the first in a long line of vessels built solely for oceanic investigation. His particular interest was in catching and cataloging the fishes and other animals that lived in the halfway-deep seas between the continents and the abyssal plains. His life of leisure and wealth meant that, unlike most salaried scientists or those subsisting on grants, he and his ships could remain on station for weeks at a time, with battalions of stewards, cooks, and valets on hand, and could unwrap the mysteries of oceanic biology as patiently as necessary.
The prince, who died in 1922, left behind three enduring and ocean-related memorials to his thirty-three years of generally congenial rule. Two of these legacies quite deliberately blended the academic approach to the sea with the growing public interest: he had an oceanographic institute of great size and style built in Paris, and another that was similar (only larger) in Monte Carlo, and which had aquariums and exhibits of ships and exploration equipment. (Both of these were financed in large part by profits from the very fashionable casinos for which Monaco was rightly famous.) The third memorial was the one with which this chapter begins: Prince Albert arranged the financing and housing for an entirely new international body, initially called the International Hydrographic Bureau, which would on one hand seek to regulate and standardize all the world’s charts and navigational aids, and on the other would seek to define the boundaries of all the world’s oceans and seas.
The bureau’s famous Special Publication No. S.23, and its fourth edition,
31
created by what is now called the International Hydrographic
Organization,
is perhaps the most celebrated and controversial of Prince Albert’s bequeathals. Buried within its pages—looking quite prominent in the slender 1928 edition, but rather less obvious when jostled among the enormous collection of brand-new maritime names (the Ceram Sea, etc., as mentioned earlier) in the modern document—was and still is the formal definition of what and where, exactly, the Atlantic Ocean is.
The Atlantic turns out to have grown considerably in the eighty years of its supervision by the admirals of Monaco. To be sure, it has physically widened by about six feet, under the relentless pressure of seafloor spreading, the inch-a-year movement from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. But that is not what the IHO meant: the newly published enlargement is more metaphorical than actual, and is all a matter of where the ocean’s boundaries are deemed appropriate to be drawn. Back in 1928 they were defined in relatively—
relatively
—simple terms.
The 1928 Atlantic was notionally divided into two—North and South—and the boundaries of each sub-ocean were established according to the cardinal point of the compass. The North Atlantic was thus seen to be bordered according to the Monaco-devised formula: on the west it ran to the eastern limits of the Caribbean Sea, the southern limits of the Gulf of Mexico, then from the north coast of Cuba to Key West, and along the American and Canadian coasts up to the southeastern and northeastern limits of the Gulf of St. Lawrence; on the
north
it was limited by the beginning of the Arctic Ocean, then a line from the coast of Labrador to the tip of Greenland, and from there to the Shetland Islands; on the
east
it ended with the northwestern limits of the North Sea, then the northern and western limits of the Scottish Seas, the southern limits of the Irish Sea, the western limits of both the Bristol and the English channels, the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean Sea; and finally on the south the limit was defined by the latitude line of 4˚ 25′N that ran between Cape Palmas in Liberia and Cape Orange in Brazil.
The South Atlantic in 1928 was even less complicated. The
northern
limit was the Liberia-Brazil line, above; the
western
limit was the entire coast of South America, but for the estuary of the River Plate; on the
east
the ocean was formally bounded by the coast of sub-Liberian Africa, except for an enormous tract of sea in the continental armpit, otherwise known as the Gulf of Guinea, which was cut off by a straight line between Liberia and Angola; and on the
south
an arbitrary line was drawn by the IHO draftsmen, connecting Cape Agulhas with Cape Horn.
Matters are a great deal more complicated today, and under the new guidelines the Atlantic occupies a far, far greater proportion of the planetary surface than it ever did before. A single example, delineating a part of the northern boundary of North Atlantic, will offer a general idea of the new complexity:
. . . thence a line joining Kap Edward Holm southeastwards to Bjartangar, the western extremity of Iceland, thence southeastward along the western and southern coasts of Iceland to Stokksnes on the eastern coast of Iceland, southeastward to the northmost extremity of Fuglöy in the Føroyar, thence along a line joining this extremity to Muckle Flugga, the northernmost point in the Shetland Islands . . .
Very basically, the expansion has been prompted by the IHO’s decision to include as subdivisions of the ocean many seas and embayments that once were considered entirely separate from it. The Gulf of Mexico, for instance, is now regarded as entirely Atlantic (so the 2010 oil-pollution catastrophe, occasioned by the explosion and subsequent collapse of a BP drilling platform off New Orleans, is classified as an Atlantic problem); the Caribbean Sea is part of the Atlantic Ocean; and so is the North Sea, and the English Channel, the Bay of Fundy, most of the St. Lawrence Estuary up to the western tip of the immense and sparsely inhabited Anticosti Island,
32
the Celtic Sea, the Skaggerak (but not the Kattegat), and the Bay of Biscay. And the idea of the Gulf of Guinea being separate has long been discarded: now the division between the North and South Atlantics is the equator on the Brazilian side and Cape Lopez in the republic of Gabon.
(There happens to be what seems a rather eccentric small kink in this otherwise die-straight southern boundary line. The border takes a lightly angled turn to pass across a tiny palm-covered islet known as Ilhéu das Rôlas, which lies a few yards off the southern tip of the almost equally obscure island of Sao Tomé. There is a cartographic reason: Rôlas is the only Atlantic island on—or essentially on, but for a few feet—the equator. Using it as a mid-sea marker made sense—though it has to be said that in 1928 the delineators of the ocean did not worry their heads about such things. Today, though for no obviously sensible reason, they apparently do.)
This then is the full de facto extent of the Atlantic Ocean—fully 81,705,396 square kilometers (32 million square miles) of seawater, one quarter of the planet’s total water area, with the deepest water of well over five miles—8,605 meters—found off Puerto Rico, and a total of 307,923,430 cubic kilometers (74 million cubic miles) of water in its entirety.
8. WIDER STILL, AND WIDER
Only when one includes a human dimension to this story does it present a final but enriching complication. It is when one begins to add up the total numbers of the vast aggregation of humankind who live in some kind of communion with this sea, of those who can rightly be considered belonging to an Atlantic community, or who are—if they are in any communal sense ocean-blessed or ocean-styled or ocean-crossed—to be considered in some regard Atlantic people—that this complication appears.
It is a complication offered up by the great rivers that flow into the Atlantic Ocean.
A very great number do. Many more rivers flow into the Atlantic—especially the more widely defined Atlantic of the fourth edition of S.23—than flow into either the Pacific or the Indian oceans. There are the big rivers of Europe: the Seine and the Loire, the Severn and the Shannon and even, since the North Sea is now properly “Atlantic,” the Thames and the Rhine. There is the Niger, the Kunene, the Orange, and the almost impossibly vast network of the Congo flowing in from its headwaters dotted throughout central Africa. There is the Amazon, with its headwaters in Peru, and which brings more water and rain forest mud into the Atlantic Ocean than the next eight largest rivers in the world combined bring into their respective seas. There is the St. Lawrence, originating in the Great Lakes. And there is the Mississippi-Missouri river system, which hauls trillions of gallons of water each day down from the prairies and the Rocky Mountains into that officially sanctioned embayment of the far western Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico.
So to those who wish to cast the Atlantic’s net of influence as far and as wide as is technically possible, consider that it does not stop simply at Cape Race or Heart’s Content, at Montauk or the Outer Banks, or at the Argentine beaches of Bahia Blanca or Isla de los Estados or Cape Horn. Nor does it begin on the cliffs of the Faroes or on the Aran Islands, or on Ushant, on Land’s End, at Cape Bojador or Robben Island or at the rocks of Cape Agulhas or near the sea caves at Pinnacle Point.
Rather it begins and ends, to be pedantic about it, in the lakes of Zambia (where the Congo rises) and in the Swiss Alps (where a glacier drips to form the tributaries of the Rhine). It also begins in a valley near America’s Yellowstone National Park, where a late Victorian explorer named Bruce found the source waters of the Missouri River, and beside which today a Greek farmer, a long way from his old home beside the Mediterranean, lives out his life as an American rancher, raising sheep.
And the ocean also begins and ends beside an eight-thousand-foot mountain in far northern Montana named Triple Divide Peak. This is the hydrologic apex of the North American continent. Rainwaters that fall onto its northern flanks flow into Canada and into the Arctic Ocean. Waters from its western and southwestern sides slip into creeks that eventually take them to Oregon and on the Pacific. Any precipitation that happens to fall on the southeastern slope seeps down eventually into a tiny canyon at the base of which is an even tinier creek—and which makes its way to the north fork of a river that becomes the Marias River. Near the town of Fort Benton, Montana, this Marias stream flows into the Missouri; at St. Louis the Missouri joins the Mississippi; and at New Orleans the Mississippi finally reaches the Gulf of Mexico, from where its waters are connected to the Atlantic Ocean.
With great prescience the explorers of that rugged and icebound corner of Montana where Triple Divide Peak rises gave a name to that tiny creek that spills off the summit. They named the very first river that snakes its way downhill, from below the snow line at seven thousand feet to the grassland at five thousand, and its waters coursing swift and pure through a Rocky Mountain canyon. It was almost as though the river knew what the explorers knew—which was where its waters were going. For they called it quite simply Atlantic Creek. They named it for an ocean with which the state of Montana is now ineluctably connected, but which most of its people will seldom if ever see.
And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.
1. THE PLAY OF THE SEA
Although William Shakespeare wrote often and with an easy familiarity about the ocean—about tides in the affairs of men, about fleets majestical, about a thousand fearful wrecks, about fathers lying full-fathom five, about sea changes and sea nymphs and winds sitting sore upon the sails—there remains no firm evidence that he ever boarded a ship, nor ever went to sea, nor that he ever set eyes upon the Atlantic.
But such was the Atlantic’s importance to all England in his time, that Shakespeare would surely have known of its existence, and he would have heard of its many dramas. It is of little surprise to find that he deftly wove one of the most celebrated of sixteenth-century Atlantic tales into the centerpiece of his final, and perhaps his most boldly imaginative theatrical work,
The Tempest.
Like a few before him, and like so many after, Shakespeare plucked an image from this ocean of innumerable moods and dispositions and transformed it into art.
The play, which he wrote in 1611, happened to be staged with great imperial pomp in 2009 on the island of Bermuda, as part of the four-hundredth-anniversary celebration of Britain’s northernmost Atlantic island colony. It was put on in a theater in the capital, Hamilton, and was staged there for one very overarching reason: most literary scholars like to believe that, unlike any theatrical work created before,
The Tempest
was very much an Atlantic Ocean play, and that it was the original accidental settling of the island of Bermuda, four centuries before, that played a key role in the play’s creation.
It might not seem so at first blush. After all, the island to which Prospero and Miranda are found to have been exiled, and where Caliban was found to live, looks upon close reading of the text most likely to be in the Mediterranean. The city of Milan seems from the writing to be unduly close to the scene of the action; and when at the end of the play, the wrecked sailing ship that had brought Antonio and Alonso to the island is repaired and allowed to go home, it was to undertake a quite unexceptional journey merely back to Italy, which probably lay nearby.
But a closer study of Shakespeare’s motivations uncovers evidence beyond the text itself that supports an otherwise rather radical idea—that his inspiration for writing
The Tempest
came from a real shipwreck that occurred in 1609, and which happened not in the Mediterranean at all, but right in the middle of the western Atlantic.
There is, moreover, a hint within the text: a reference in passing to the “still-vex’d Bermoothes,” which shows that Shakespeare must have known something of the islands and their existence.
The dramatic circumstances of the foundering were well known in the London of Shakespeare’s day. They involved a vessel, the
Sea Venture,
which had been chartered in London to the Virginia Company, and which set off from the Plymouth docks to cross the ocean in June of that year. Its captain was a Dorset privateer and adventurer named Sir George Somers. His mission was to resupply the six hundred or so pioneers who a year before had settled in the infant British colonial settlement of King James’s Town, sited in one of the estuaries south of the Potomac River.
Cruel chance intervened, however. Somers and his sorely insubstantial vessel were caught in a fierce summer season hurricane. The little ship was dashed onto the reefs of a barely known group of islands—wrecked, though without loss of life, and after the crew saw as augury a spectacularly ominous display of St. Elmo’s fire among the masts and spars. The
Sea Venture
was a total loss, left high and dry though perched safely upright, wedged between a pair of rocks at the northeastern end of what is now known as the Bermuda island chain.
News of the shipwreck soon became the talk of the inns of early-seventeenth-century London, and Shakespeare almost certainly heard of it. The story, when told in full, had all the elements of fine drama, and the lurid tales of the strangely dancing illuminations that were seen just prior to the collision must, it is said, have led him to conjure up the notion of Ariel, the island sprite.
The story continued well beyond the wreck itself. There were aristocrats among the survivors, and ladies of some gentility, and all were soon obliged by Somers to work under the direction of his shipwrights to build from Bermuda’s abundant cedar trees a pair of replacement vessels for the
Sea Venture.
In these two ships, the
Patience
and the
Deliverance,
almost a year later the party sailed on—only to find the Jamestown settlement nearly completely decimated, with the sixty remaining colonists reduced to near starvation. The rescuers spent some time getting them back on their feet, whereupon Somers returned to Bermuda, an island he liked very much. But in a cruel irony he was to die there soon after his arrival. His body was returned to Lyme Regis, the Dorset village where he was born—but his heart has stayed to this day in Bermuda, in a tomb in what would become one of Britain’s earliest Atlantic possessions.
The island remains a British colony. Since 2009 marked the four hundredth anniversary of Somers’s unintended but compulsory landing, and since that landing effectively began the island’s long relationship with the British Crown, and since Shakespeare probably used elements of the story as the basis for his final play, what more appropriate way is there to celebrate Bermuda’s birthday than to have a performance of
The Tempest
on the island where it had all begun?
So the play was staged in the Hamilton Town Hall, a boxy limestone structure that was modeled on its much larger namesake in Sweden’s capital, Stockholm. All of the island grandees were there, including in the Royal Box the colonial governor, who arrived in the back of a BMW sedan driven by a uniformed soldier. It would be something of a stretch to say that the performance was memorably great, although Prospero was played by an English actor well-known for his matinee-idol looks, which thus brought out a large contingent of Bermudian middle-aged paying customers, most of them excitable ladies all atwitter.
They had come to see a mystical, magical piece of theater, a play conceived from an Atlantic story by a playwright at the top of his powers who was writing little more than a century after the Atlantic had been crossed by Columbus and then recognized by Amerigo Vespucci as the distinct and separate ocean we all now know it to be.
2. FIRST WORDS
Long, long before the Atlantic was recognized to be an ocean, when it was just an unknowably vast and man-devouring mass of waves and spray and far horizons, the artists were aware, were fully engaged with its awful beauty. The poets were among the earliest to take notice. Classical poets had of course long composed around the sea—but the only sea they truly knew was the Mediterranean, which in terms of its drama is a flat, warm, quite subdued, and almost suburban body of water, rather wanting of an appropriate majesty. The heaving gray waters of the Atlantic were quite another thing, and it was the Irish, when finally they were brave enough or foolhardy enough to launch their curraghs into the boiling surf off their western coasts, who seem first to have employed their literary sensibilities to meditate on their unique maritime environment.
St. Columba’s epic voyage north, from Ireland to the west coast of Scotland, in the sixth century
A.D.
was much written about—and there are stirring images of fleets of curraghs crossing the rough waters between Antrim and Galloway. But the literature surrounding Columba—or Colam Cille, as he is more properly known—is more narrative than contemplative. The poetry associated with the great apostle’s missions is regarded as Europe’s oldest vernacular verse, but its treatment of the ocean is mere bycatch, and it is another two centuries before the first snippets of imaginative appreciation of the sea start to become apparent.
Rumann son of Colmán was an eighth-century Gaelic poet who is said to have enjoyed a standing among the Irish equal to that of Virgil to the Romans or Homer to the Greeks. His best-known short poem, “Storm at Sea,” written around 700
A.D.,
is rightly regarded as one of mankind’s earliest artistic ruminations on the Atlantic. It has eight stanzas and was translated in the 1950s by the great Irish novelist and poet Frank O’Connor:
When the wind is from the west
All the waves that cannot rest
To the east must thunder on
Where the bright tree of the sun
Is rooted in the ocean’s breast.
The Celts clearly had the sea in their veins, and early Anglo-Saxon writers across ancient England were soon similarly caught up by a mighty vision of the sea, the first writings almost coeval with their Irish neighbors. It is perhaps hardly surprising that so maritime a race as the English produced, early on in their history, powerful poetry about their coastal waters. The best-known of the eighth-century Saxon poems about the ocean is to be found today in a secure loft above the Bishop’s House behind Exeter Cathedral, in Devon. Since the year 1072, when the great scholar Leofric died and left his sixty-six-volume manuscript library to the cathedral, one unremarkable-looking volume has stood head and shoulders above the rest in the quality of its contents. It is a codex known simply as the Exeter Book, and it contains unarguably the greatest collection of the poetry of its time in existence.
The precious little volume has had a life as tough as it has been long. The book’s original cover is missing, and of its 131 pages, eight have been lost, one was evidently once used as a wine coaster, others were singed by fire, and still others incised with notches suggesting they were used as cutting boards. Yet to the thanks of all, it is a survivor, and the Exeter Book is now recognized to hold about one-sixth of all the Anglo-Saxon poetry ever known to have been written. A single scribe is believed to have copied out all of the poems sometime in the tenth century, using brown ink on vellum, and wielding his quill with an impeccable, monastically steady hand. There is almost no illumination or ornamentation in the book, and just a few small drawings in a number of the margins. It is a priceless work of art: only one other of the four known Anglo-Saxon codices is more famous, and that is the Nowell Codex, which includes the great epic poem
Beowulf.
The
Exeter Book
, a tenth-century anthology of poetry written in minuscule Roman script, is one of the greatest treasures of English literature. It contains the Anglo-Saxon poem
The Seafarer,
perhaps the earliest English poem about the Atlantic Ocean.
But
Beowulf
is mainly about battles and funerals, and it takes place mostly on the land, in Denmark and southern Scandinavia. In the Exeter Book, on the other hand, there is one much shorter poem called
The Seafarer,
and this ranges a great deal further. The poem is dominated, at least in its first half, by a lengthy and mournful meditation on the trials of the sea. It is in truth an elegy to the Atlantic, in the voice of a man—though no one knows his name—who has suffered hard times winning a living from its waters, but yet who, when he is away from it, yearns for the ocean life more than he could ever imagine.
There are many translations of
The Seafarer
: these lines are from one of the better known, made in 1912 by Ezra Pound. It begins with a lament that all worn sailors will recognize:
. . . Lest man know not
That he on dry land loveliest liveth,
List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,
Weathered the winter, wretched outcast
Deprived of my kinsmen;
Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,
There I heard naught save the harsh sea
And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,
Did for my games the gannet’s clamour,
Sea-fowls’ loudness was for me laughter,
The mews singing all my mead-drink.
Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern
In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed
With spray on his pinion. . . .
But then, in an instant, even though the summer on shore is fast coming, the mariner’s mood changes to one of longing, a mood that all old salts will also know well:
Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries
Fields to fairness, land fares brisker,
All this admonisheth man eager of mood,
The heart turns to travel so he then thinks
On flood-ways to be far departing . . .
So that but now my heart burst from my breastlock
My mood ’mid the mere-flood,
Over the whale’s acre, would wander wide.