Read On a Farther Shore Online
Authors: William Souder
Beginnings are apt to be shadowy, and so it is with the beginnings of that great mother of life, the sea. Many people have debated how and when the earth got its ocean, and it is not surprising that their explanations do not always agree. For the plain and inescapable truth is that no one was there to see, and in the absence of eyewitness accounts there is bound to be a certain amount of disagreement. So if I tell here the story of how the young planet Earth acquired an ocean, it must be a story pieced together from many sources and containing whole chapters the details of which we can only imagine. The story is founded on the testimony of the earth’s most ancient rocks, which were young when the earth was young; on other evidence written on the face of the earth’s satellite, the moon; and on hints contained in the history of the sun and the whole universe of star-filled space. For although no man was there to witness this cosmic birth, the stars and the moon and the rocks were there, and, indeed, had much to do with the fact that there is an ocean.
The earth, Carson wrote, was about 2.5 billion years old and had been, when it first formed, a ball of hot gases that gradually cooled and then liquefied. Somewhere after this condensation but before the earth’s crust completely hardened, the sun’s gravitation pulled at the still-plastic surface of the earth and caused a great, oscillating solar tide that finally rose so high that it became unstable, came loose from the planet, and fell into orbit around the earth as the moon. The earth continued to cool, its surface becoming a hard, barren sheet of rock beneath an atmosphere that filled with water vapor. Carson, acknowledging that there were competing theories, wrote that the continents had been much as they are now since early in the earth’s history.
Eventually it began to rain. The rain washed minerals from the
rocks and collected in the low areas of the earth’s uneven crust, and in time the oceans were formed. And there, in the warm, salty sea, a handful of light elements—including carbon and nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, sulfur and phosphorous—combined into complex molecules of protoplasm that had the ability to reproduce themselves and initiate the continuous thread of life—though, as Carson cautioned, “no one is wise enough to be sure.”
All of this represented the state of knowledge at the time, and it was mostly wrong. The earth is much older, more than 4.5 billion years, and the moon is believed to be a chunk of the earth that was blasted from the planet when it collided with another large body during an early phase of the development of the solar system. The continents are much younger than the earth. As recently as 250 million years ago they were all part of a single supercontinent now called Pangaea. And while the exact sequence of chemical events that gave rise to life remains unproven, the publication of
The Sea Around Us
came on the eve of a series of discoveries through which science would at last look deep inside the “protoplasm” that is the basis of life.
In 1951, just as
The Sea Around Us
came out, Linus Pauling of the California Institute of Technology discovered that proteins are composed of long chain molecules called polypeptides that are made from twenty different amino acids. Two years later, James Watson and Francis Crick, working at Cambridge in England, discovered the structure of DNA and explained that in addition to being self-replicating, DNA was also a template for RNA, which chemical machinery inside the cell uses to assemble polypeptide chains into protein. This one-way flow of genetic information—DNA to RNA to protein—became formally known as the Central Dogma of biology.
And yet the beauty of Carson’s opening chapter was that it did not rely on perfect scientific accuracy but rather on being so graceful in the telling that if one were to correct it with just a handful of discoveries made over the ensuing half century it would still track, and not very differently from the way Carson composed it. While life evolved in the sea—a theory not in dispute then or later on—the earth’s land
masses were barren, and in a few sentences Carson captured the sheer brutality and emptiness of a place without life:
Imagine a whole continent of naked rock, across which no covering mantle of green had been drawn—a continent without soil, for there were no plants to aid in its formation and bind it to the rocks with their roots. Imagine a land of stone, a silent land, except for the sound of the rains and winds that swept across it. For there was no living voice, and nothing moved over its surface except the shadows of the clouds.
There’s an old saying that great writing is simple but not easy, and so it is. The search for that one plain but inobvious word that will do the work of five, the agony of untangling a complex idea that has become a mess of phrases in the writer’s mind, the willingness to keep doing it over and over and over again until it is right—all of that plus some luck yields prose so clear that it seems a child could have written it.
Carson said that the “backbone” of the work she did on
The Sea Around Us
was “just plain hard slogging—searching in the often dry and exceedingly technical papers of scientists for the kernels of fact to weld into my profile of the sea.” Her information came from more than a thousand sources, she said, and she had been helped more than she could say by the many experts who volunteered their thoughts and insights. What she did not talk about were the many hours late at night, when she worked best, that had been devoted to making prose out of fact—though to her readers this was everything. Wind and wave and salt, the life of the darkest deep ocean, the great currents that traverse the globe and set the climate—these are magnificent things that, without care, become lifeless on the printed page. Here was Carson on what happens when humans reach an island and its ecosystem is no longer insulated from the rest of the world:
Most of man’s habitual tampering with nature’s balance by introducing exotic species has been done in ignorance of the fatal
chain of events that would follow. But in modern times, at least, we might profit by history. About the year 1513, the Portuguese introduced goats on the recently discovered island of St. Helena, which had developed a magnificent forest of gumwood, ebony, and brazilwood. By 1560 or thereabouts, the goats had so multiplied that they wandered over the island by the thousand, in flocks a mile long. They trampled the young trees and ate the seedlings. By this time the colonists had begun to cut and burn the forests, so it is hard to say whether men or goats were the more responsible for the destruction. But of the result there was no doubt. By the early 1800s the forests were gone, and the naturalist Alfred Wallace later described this once beautiful, forest-clad volcanic island as a “rocky desert,” in which the remnants of the original flora persisted only in the most inaccessible peaks and crater ridges.
Carson wrote that one of our “blackest records” was the destruction of ecosystems on oceanic islands, which are unusually susceptible to the effects of the invasive species that hitchhike around the world with human travelers. Birds, goats, hogs, cattle, dogs, rats, and cats—these could transform abundance into barrenness, as could saws and axes and guns. She did not mention, though she might have, the human diseases delivered upon islands where some illnesses were unknown and against which the native population had little resistance.
Carson’s interest in exotic species was prescient, as were the changes she reported in the world’s climate. There was, she wrote, a groundswell of evidence that the earth was getting warmer. Carson pointed to rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and shrinking areas of sea ice in the Arctic. Reports from fishermen and ornithologists indicated that fish and birds were extending their ranges northward as the sea in the higher latitudes got warmer. All of this was, Carson wrote, part of the long-term cycling of the earth’s climate, over which shorter-term changes were sometimes superimposed. In other words, a shifting climate was normal and to be expected, and was
most likely the result of complex interactions involving tides, changes in the earth’s orbit, alterations in the great ocean currents, and perhaps varying levels of solar activity.
She did not mention, though she might have, the theory that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by human activity were amplifying the natural greenhouse effect—an idea that had been around for a half century but was still widely doubted. Carson, in fact, noted several near-term beneficial effects of a warming climate—longer growing seasons and better commercial fishing harvests in the northern ocean. Over a longer period, well, nothing is permanent on the face of the earth, and in times past the oceans have risen and fallen, changing the shape of the world:
Where and when the ocean will halt its present advance and begin again its slow retreat into its basin, no one can say. If the rise over the continent of North America should amount to a hundred feet (and there is more than enough water now frozen in the land ice to provide such a rise) most of the Atlantic seaboard, with its cities and towns, would be submerged. The surf would break against the foothills of the Appalachians.
In 1951 the printed page was alive and omnipresent, the dominant feature of the media landscape. There were more than two thousand daily newspapers in America. Every city of any size had several, and each of them had a literary editor. The papers set aside ample spaces committed to reviews, columns, and even excerpts of popular books. And there were the glossies—
Look, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Holiday, Collier’s, Coronet
, and, of course
, The New Yorker
—that also devoted many column-inches to literature. Five decades hence, authors would sell their books in ten-minute interviews on TV, but in the early 1950s you published and then you waited for the reviews.
The Sea Around Us
generated nearly universal critical acclaim. The book was reviewed so thoroughly, so favorably, and so widely
that few people could have been unaware of the phenomenon named Rachel Carson.
Writing in the
New York Herald Tribune
, Francesca La Monte, who was associate curator of fishes at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said Carson had done what no one before had managed: “The story of the sea with its islands and mountains and depths and of mankind’s attempts to solve its mystery and exploit its treasures has been told before and often,” La Monte wrote. “But Rachel Carson has made of it one of the most beautiful books of our time.”
This, it turned out, was the consensus. One review after another heaped praise on
The Sea Around Us
. Everyone noted Carson’s lyrical powers, and use of the word “poetic” by reviewers bordered on unanimous—although Jonathan Norton Leonard took exception to this characterization in the
New York Times Sunday Book Review
.
Leonard wrote that the errors poets make when they write about the sea “annoy scientists,” whereas scientists attempting to write about the subject too often got lost in their own “bleak and technical jargon.” But
The Sea Around Us
would raise objections on neither side, he said. “It is written with a precision more than sufficient for its purpose,” Leonard wrote, “and its style and imagination make it a joy to read.” Leonard, in fact, seemed smitten. “It’s a pity,” he wrote, “that the book’s publishers did not print on its jacket a photograph of Miss Carson. It would be pleasant to know what a woman looks like who can write about an exacting science with such beauty and precision.”
Some reviewers expressed alarm over Carson’s description of a warming climate and rising seas. Nobody took issue with Carson’s emphasis on evolution as a central feature of life on earth—
though the reviewer for the
Indianapolis Times
felt compelled to point out that the sea is “the source of our life, speaking biologically and not theologically.”
The critic at
Newsweek
, in an otherwise glowing review that called
The Sea Around Us
“hypnotic,” cautioned that too much of a good thing sometimes got to be too much, period. “In only one respect does [Carson’s] book fall into the weakness of so much modern nature writing,”
Newsweek
said. “A kind of scientific piety pervades
such prose, mournful references to endless cycles and astronomical distances, which begin by being impressive and end by becoming almost magical incantations.”
Carson landed on the cover of the
Saturday Review of Literature
, which ran another extremely positive review. An accompanying profile reported that she had researched the book, in part, by “diving among the Florida coral reefs,” where—evidently in response to being queried about this—she told the
Review
it was hard to walk over the sea floor, but so exhilarating that one didn’t mind. “We surmise she wouldn’t mind anything to do with her beloved ocean,” the
Review
concluded.
The
Buffalo Evening News
agreed: “Part scientist, part poet, and inevitably, one assumes, part sunbather, Miss Carson has written a superb book, one half-way between the Thoreau of the ‘Journal’ and the Darwin of the ‘Beagle.’ ”
Carson never objected to the exaggerated claims about her supposed helmet diving exploits, nor did she mind being described—as she was in many reviews—as a working scientist with a gift for writing, rather than the other way around.
A week after its review of
The Sea Around Us
, the
New York Times Sunday Book Review
carried a short note about Carson that seemed to have been based, at least in part, on an interview with her. The piece said that Carson had taken up helmet diving at the urging of William Beebe and had made “a number of dives in the reefs” in Florida. The
Times
reported that Carson called these experiences “interesting” but said they didn’t really have much to do with her book. Unwilling to amend her diving “experiences” to the singular and unable to resist a further embellishment, Carson added that she thought “the fish must have been pretty surprised to find a woman looking out at them from the helmet.”
In a publicity piece written for her British publisher, Carson herself pointed to the cruises on the
Albatross III
as having been a major part of her research for
The Sea Around Us
. Candidly she conceded that she was little more than an observer on these collecting trips. She again alluded to having done “a little helmet diving on the coral reefs off the coast of southern Florida.” The image of Carson as a salt-splashed
scientist braving the rolling seas of the North Atlantic or submerging herself among the fish in tropical waters was, meanwhile, at odds with a publicity photo that made the rounds, in which a pretty but docile-looking Carson was captured standing on a dock with a pair of binoculars hung from her neck.