Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories Simon Winchester The epic life story of the Atlantic Ocean from the bestselling author, Simon WinchesterIn a narrative tour de force, Simon Winchester dramatises the life story of the Atlantic Ocean, from its birth in the farther recesses of geological time to its eventual extinction millions of years in the future.At the core of the book is the story of mankind's complex relationship with this immense sea, which stretches for 9,000 miles from pole to pole. The Atlantic has profoundly influenced the lives of those who have lived along its shores, from hardscrabble pioneers in windswept locations such as the Aran Islands and Newfoundland, to the inhabitants of the great port cities of Lisbon, Rio, London and New York.‘Atlantic’ brings to life key episodes in this compelling human drama - the age of exploration and the subsequent colonisation of the Americas; the flourishing of transatlantic commerce and the rise and fall of the slave trade; extraordinary tales of sea-borne emigration during the nineteenth century; and the great naval battles that have left an indelible imprint on Atlantic history.Travelling by small sailing craft, container ship and general cargo vessel, Simon Winchester will journey around the edges and across the vast expanse of the ocean to report from the places that encapsulate its most fascinating stories. It is an enthralling mixture of history, science and reportage from a master of narrative non-fiction, and the definitive account of this magnificent body of water. ATLANTIC A VAST OCEAN OF A MILLION STORIES Simon Winchester Copyright (#ueb714ce5-b669-5010-9cf2-7aaa56cb8599) William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/) First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2010 Copyright © Simon Winchester Maps by Nick Springer © 2010 Springer Cartographics LLC Simon Winchester asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Political, physical, exploration, and commerce maps on pages viii, ix, 113, and 319 were created by Nick Springer / Springer Cartographics, LLC. Pangea and Future Pangea maps on pages 41 and 446 were created by C. R. Scotese, PALEOMAP Project (www.scotese.com (http://www.scotese.com/)) Please note that the pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. Some images were unavailable for the electronic edition All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been inlcuded or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9780007341375 Ebook Edition © MARCH 2011 ISBN: 9780007341382 Version: 2018-08-22 CONTENTS Cover (#u424b2afe-c793-577d-9e22-39d3bc8a58d7) Title Page (#u8b47b242-c4c9-57c1-b8bf-65d8a6653d3d) Copyright Dedication (#u509b8270-98e2-5ec5-a536-cc7e99d7f814) PREFACE THE LEAVING OF LIVERPOOL PROLOGUE THE BEGINNINGS OF ITS GOINGS ON Chapter OneFROM THE PURPLE ISLES OF MOGADOR Chapter TwoALL THE SHOALS AND DEEPS WITHIN Chapter ThreeOH! THE BEAUTY AND THE MIGHT OF IT Chapter FourHERE THE SEA OF PITY LIES Chapter FiveTHEY THAT OCCUPY THEIR BUSINESS ON GREAT WATERS Chapter SixCHANGE AND DECAY ALL AROUND THE SEA Chapter SevenTHE STORM SURGE CARRIES ALL BEFORE … EPILOGUE FALLS THE SHADOW. FADES THE SEA. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS BIBLIOGRAPHY GLOSSARY INDEX Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Also By Simon Winchester About the Publisher THIS BOOK IS FOR Setsuko AND IN MEMORY OF Angus Campbell Macintyre FIRST MATE OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN HARBOUR BOARD TUG THE SIR CHARLES ELLIOTT WHO DIED IN 1942, TRYING TO SAVE LIVES AND WHOSE BODY LIES UNFOUND SOMEWHERE IN THE ATLANTIC OCEAN Men might as well project a voyage to the Moon,as attempt to employ steam navigation against thestormy North Atlantic Ocean. DIONYSIUS LARDNER, IRISH SCIENTIFIC WRITER AND LECTURER, 1838 PREFACE: THE LEAVING OF LIVERPOOL (#ueb714ce5-b669-5010-9cf2-7aaa56cb8599) The ocean romance that lies at the heart of this book was primed for me by an unanticipated but unforgettable small incident. It was a clear cool dawn on Sunday, 5 May 1963, and I was eighteen years old. I was alone, on passage aboard a great ocean liner, the Empress of Britain, and we were unexpectedly stopped in a remote corner of the northern seas to the east of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. We were floating quietly above a small submarine plateau some miles off the first headlands of America, an area known to oceanographers and fishermen as the Flemish Cap. It was there that something rather curious happened. We were five days out from Liverpool. The voyage had begun on the previous Tuesday afternoon, a wild and blustery day that had sudden gusts chasing the River Mersey’s waters with filigrees of spindrift. This was when I first spotted the ship on which I would make this first-ever crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. It was her flanks that were most noticeable, looming massive and blinding white—the Canadian Pacific’s three sister ships were known collectively as the White Empresses — at the end of the lanes running down to the Liverpool waterfront. She was fastened securely to the Pier Head, just beside the old Princes Dock, a dozen hemp ropes as thick as a man’s arm keeping her quite still, aloof to the weather. But from the bustle of last-minute activity around her and the smoke being torn urgently from her single yellow funnel, it was clear she was already straining at the leash: with her twenty-five thousand tons of staunchly riveted Clydeside steel, the Empress was readying herself to sail three thousand miles westward, across the Atlantic Ocean, and I had a ticket to board her. It had taken six months for me to earn enough to buy it. I must have been on slave wages, because passage all the way to Canada had not cost much more than a hundred dollars, provided I was willing to settle for one of four bunks in a windowless cabin on a deck situated so far below the waterline one could almost hear the slopping in the bilges. But though it was to be an economical crossing, one step up from steerage, in the Canadian Pacific offices off Trafalgar Square - more cathedral than bureau, all teak, marble, and hush, and with scale models of famous ocean liners from the old days illuminated in the windows - even this most modest of transactions was handled with dignity and circumstance. Maybe time and schoolboy memory have distorted things a little, but I like to fancy that the clerk who took my savings, in frock coat and pince-nez and wearing a company badge embossed with pine trees, polar bears, and beavers, had written out the ticket in longhand, dipping his pen into an inkwell and blotting it with a roller of pink paper. Liverpool to Montreal, Voyage No. 115, it had read, and I clearly do remember spending many subsequent moments turning this precious talisman over and over, examining the engravings, the intaglio, the watermarks. It came in a scarlet and white cardboard wallet, thick and stiff and with a pocket to hold luggage tags with waxed string ties, NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE stickers, immigration forms and customs guides, and vague suggestions as to the coming maritime routine — “11 A.M.: Bouillon on the Boat Deck” was the one that stuck most firmly in my mind. I think I developed a rather unhealthy attachment to this ticket, freighted as it was with so much symbolism — freedom, the New World, adventure, the Atlantic Ocean — and when I handed it in at the top of the gangplank that spring afternoon and saw how the purser took it with only a studied casualness, I must have looked dismayed, for he smiled and handed it back to me. “First time?” he asked, in a kindly way. “Keep it, then. This is a very grand ocean — and you’re on a White Empress crossing her. Nothing finer! You should keep your first souvenir of going across.” By sailing time a watery sun had appeared and was lowering itself towards the horizon. All ashore who’s going ashore! came the familiar announcement, on cue. The Tannoy speaker carried the call to “ease springs” (sailor-speak for “let go the ropes”); there was shouting from shore, the crackling of radios on the bridgewing and the foredeck — and one by one the heavy iron-bound nooses of the hawsers splashed into the oily gap between hull and pier, the oily gap began to widen, and the dripping ropes were hauled in slowly by capstans that growled at the strain. A pair of well-worn tugs appeared, yelping and snorting, nosing us out into the tidestream, and then turning us, nudging our bows to the northwest. The famous George clock on the Royal Liver Building struck five. I could see my father down on the quayside checking his wristwatch. He and my mother pointed upward in relief — they had found me at last, among the crowds of passengers lining the taffrail — and as they waved there came the three departure blasts from our steam-horn, echoing and re-echoing along the ship-crowded waterfront. Our decks started to vibrate and rumble as the engines engaged and the propellers began to thrash the waters astern. I checked my own watch: it was nine minutes past the hour, the moment when the voyage officially got under way. The tugs let go. The Empress of Britain was at last under her own power, free of her hawsers and bollards and tugs, free of the shore and free of England, beginning to steam firmly and unstoppably away, bound for the deep ocean and the promise of tomorrow. Some of the passengers, emigrants to Canada probably, looked briefly distraught, waving through tears. I was excited, apprehensive, nervous. I watched my parents as they started to walk back to our tiny tan Ford Prefect, their heads bowed. Darkness began to fall swiftly, and soon the lights of Liverpool and Birkenhead became a loom of orange, like a damped-down fire astern. At the famous floating lighthouse known as the Bar Light Vessel, somewhere off Crosby, the pilot boat came alongside, and a middle-aged man in a brown pullover and a stained white cap stepped nimbly down onto its afterdeck: he waved up at us, and if he mouthed something like “Take care! Have a good crossing!” his words were whipped away by the breeze. Within the hour he and his wife, I thought, would be dozing in front of his television set, the cat asleep by the fire. We spooled up the engines once he had cleared our wake, and soon the turbines were pushing us along at a good clip, twenty knots, maybe more, and what little rain was left stung the face like needles. Soon we were positively hissing over the sea, ignoring the waves from a storm that, to judge by that last glimpse of the sunset, was now dying away. I stayed on the foredeck to watch for other vessels: there was a bustle of Fleetwood trawlers scuttling home, an inbound freighter or two, and then the outline of what looked like a warship of some sort, maybe a destroyer heading north with us, but faster and quite silent. Ocean Passages for the World, the long-haul mariners’ route-planning bible, seems frequently eccentric in its suggestions for scheming a voyage. A map will show the obvious: Montreal is some eight degrees of latitude south of Liverpool, and one would think the best way for a ship to travel to the Canadian city from Merseyside would be to turn southward past the coast of Wales, head down through the St. George’s Channel, and, keeping Cork and the light on Fastnet Rock (#litres_trial_promo) well off to starboard, enter the Atlantic on a direct heading for the St. Lawrence estuary. But the blue-backed bible says otherwise: vessels headed from Liverpool to Canadian ports in springtime, as we were, would find it much more navigationally prudent to make a heading not to the south of Ireland but to the north of it, and only after clearing the coast of Donegal near Bloody Foreland make a very much longer southward swoop for Canada. “Although heavy weather is frequently experienced,” Ocean Passages offers in its very detailed advice for sailing vessels, “the winds are generally more favourable and the currents from the Arctic assist in the latter part of the voyage.” We were a large, very modern, steel-hulled, and well-found power vessel, with the strength to ignore such bagatelles as winds and storms and currents from the Arctic. Our schedule called for us to pick up additional passengers and freight from Greenock, on the Clyde - and so that evening we headed not south but north out of the Mersey into the Irish Sea. Around midnight we saw the flash of the light off the Calf of Man, and later still, spotted a flurry of lights on Galloway on our starboard side and the forbidding basalt cliffs of County Antrim to port. As dawn came up - and it was raining and blowing again -we were passing Ailsa Craig, a tiny islet made of a fine-grained granite from which are fashioned the world’s best stones for use in the wintertime sport of curling. We passed to the east of the Isle of Arran — there was still late snow on the summit of Goat Fell — and by eleven, the promised bouillon time (though none was on offer that day), we were moored off Greenock. A flotilla of small craft brought out the scattering of passengers - two were children with measles, and there was some slight quarantine-related delay until our captain, an evidently compassionate man named Thorburn, decided to take them — and by lunchtime we were back on our way, making down the Clyde for the sea. As we emerged back into salt water, we altered our heading to starboard and set a westerly course to steer safely around the notoriously rough waters north of Rathlin Island. Now, and at last, we were making steadily for the open ocean, and as we did so the Atlantic swells began steadily and dramatically to increase. Great rollers began to buffet the bows, big thudding monster waves driven by the springtime westerly gales that blew ceaselessly at the approaches to the British Isles. Dinner, to no one’s surprise given the pitching of the ship, was a thinly attended affair. Those few of us about on that rain-soaked evening could see the tiny island of Inishtrahull through the scudding clouds, three miles off to port, and between it and us the tiny archipelago of the Tor Rocks, Ireland’s northernmost possessions. Inishtrahull — the Island of the Empty Beach - marks one of the beginnings, or one of the ends, of a North Atlantic crossing. Through glasses we could see dimly a scattering of ruined houses and untidy lines of old stone walls, and then the slender pencil of its famous lighthouse, already winking through the gathering gloom, and which has been flashing its welcomes and farewells to thousands of transatlantic vessels for almost two centuries. From here onward the sea yawned open wide and featureless, and soon took on the character that is generally true of all great oceans-being unmarked, unclaimed, largely unknowable, and in very large measure unknown. Our track was designed to bring us in a great, slow curve almost two thousand miles to a waypoint that hinted at the land of the New World ahead - the notorious and shallowly submerged Virgin Rocks, off Newfoundland. I remembered the Virgins from English literature classes: Kipling had written about the fishing there in Captains Courageous - the cod in legions, he wrote, marching over the leathery kelp, and all usually easily visible in the shallows. If all went according to plan, and if we kept to the cruising speed of twenty knots that our engines could supply with ease, we should make the Virgin Rocks by Monday night, should soon thereafter sight the lighthouse on Cape Race on the southern corner of Newfoundland, and after threading our way along the St. Lawrence River be safely landed in Canada on Tuesday in time for dinner ashore. And so it turned out. For the men up on the bridge, Voyage No. 115 was basically just another routine crossing. For me, a rank newcomer to the ocean, the crossing was at first memorable simply for being a crossing of this great ocean. We had what for me were some nail-biting moments of great spectacle and storm; we spent our time almost entirely alone on the sea - encountering just one other vessel en route, despite being on a recognised shipping lane - and that sense of pressing solitude I found more than a little intimidating; and when we passed over the Virgin Rocks we did so in darkness and I never got to see the codfish. But there was nothing desperately unusual - until the single interruption, the one small moment that I remember more vividly than perhaps it deserves, and which took place while we were lying stopped in the shallow Atlantic waters off Flemish Cap. • • • It was just after dawn, and bitterly cold. The season still being early spring, this being Titanic waters and with the Arctic ice fields perilously close by, our crewmen were on alert for icebergs and growlers and other similar hazards. None had yet been seen: the voyage, so far as the navigating officers were concerned, had been entirely plain sailing. Nor were there any of the fogs for which this stretch of ocean is notorious: the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream collide softly and unseen near here, and the sudden blending of tropical and Arctic waters can thicken the air above into grey pea soup for days at a time. Not this day, however, for which many had reason to be thankful. I had risen early and, muffled to the ears, was out before breakfast, strolling the length of the boat deck. All was normal: we were hissing along nicely, dawn behind us, darkness ahead. Suddenly, however, bells started to clang, crewmen started running up and down the companionways and the decks, the ship’s engines unexpectedly stopped churning, the vessel lost way, and then it swiftly fell silent. We drifted steadily to a halt, our smooth westbound progress replaced by a heavy and ungainly rolling. The gale of the previous night had now all but blown itself out, but a stiff westerly breeze was still whistling through the aerials and gantries up above. Before long, I thought, we would be blown backwards. The ocean here, on the very outer edge of the American continental shelf, appeared quite empty, with not a bird or any marine life in sight. It was quite rough, and though the ship herself had become smothered by an overwhelming deadness, the sea was evidently very much alive, the waves and the swell slapping ferociously against the hull. After a few moments, though, there came an unexpected sound, from directly ahead. At first it was just a low-frequency sigh, then a hum — then recognisable as the faint sound of a motor. An aeroplane engine. Up on the bridgewings, I could see the officers of the watch, acting as one, training their binoculars to westward, towards the direction of the sound, and peering anxiously into a still half-dark sky. Soon there came a cry — the aircraft had been spotted. A few minutes later we all saw it: first a single pinprick of light, then two, and finally the outline of a propeller plane, its nose glinting in the weak sun. As it approached us it came in low and fast, a large, two-engined machine that roared and smoked as it turned above us and dipped its wings, the roundels of the Royal Canadian Air Force clearly visible on the fuselage. Events then began to happen fast. From near the stern of the boat deck came a clank of pivots and rusty levers, and then a hard splash as the ship’s motorboat was launched. It sped out onto the ocean and came to a stop a mile or so away from us. Once it was holding position the aircraft swooped and turned, opened its cargo doors, and slowed to pass directly over the tiny craft, as it did so dropping something that floated down onto the sea on a small orange parachute. A sailor from the boat’s crew swept-it up with a billhook and the steersman, giving a thumbs-up, headed the launch back home. The aircraft rose back up into the sky, dipped its wings again in farewell, and headed to its faraway base, becoming a smoke-trailed speck, then vanishing within moments. The motorboat was winched up, the package - which turned out to be emergency medicine for an elderly woman passenger in distress in our liner’s hospital — was duly delivered, and within the hour our engines had throbbed back into life and we were heading back onto our original course once again. A trivial maritime incident, occasioning no more than a negligible delay in our arrival in Montreal two days later. But it was an event that has remained with me ever since. There was something uncanny about the sudden silence, the emptiness, the realisation of the enormous depths below us and the limitless heights above, the universal greyness of the scene, the very evident and potentially terrifying power of the rough seas and the wind, and the fact that despite our puny human powerless-ness and insignificance, invisible radio beams and Morse code signals had summoned readily offered help from somewhere far away. It was an augury of sorts, I have come to think in the years since, that this entire small drama had taken place on the first voyage that I ever took across the seas. The captain’s log for the closing moment of Voyage No. 115 is entirely laconic, almost dismissive: “Pilots exchanged at Three Rivers. Fine weather continued all the way up St. Lawrence. Clock tower passed at 1813hrs. Canted into berth with aid two tugs. All fast No. 8 shed at 1853hrs. Finished With Engines.” We had crossed the ocean in seven days, six hours, and seven minutes, and despite our mid-ocean rendezvous were just fifty-four minutes late. British railway trains of the day seldom did much better. • • • Unknown to all of us aboard that week, and quite by coincidence, forces unseen and unseemly were hard at work. They were the dark forces of economics. As it turned out the Empress of Britain was to make only eight more scheduled crossings of the Atlantic in her life. Just six months later, in October, a peremptory announcement was made that the barely seven-year-old flagship, launched with great fanfare by the Queen in 1955, had been withdrawn from Atlantic service and would be sold. Her new owners, Greeks from Piraeus, would instead steam holidaymakers gently around the Caribbean, in a hurry no more. The economics of large passenger liners suddenly made no sense. BOAC and Pan American had both begun air service between London’s Heathrow and New York’s Idlewild (later JFK) airports five years before, in 1958. The first flights were obliged to make refuelling stops at Gander, in Newfoundland, but then as the planes became more powerful, both airlines began to cross the ocean non-stop, and scores of other carriers soon began to do the same. One by one the great passenger liners vanished from the ocean trade, and such ships as survived began to cruise instead, helping to inaugurate what would become an entirely different maritime industry. (#litres_trial_promo) So it was tellingly symbolic that I came back from America six months later by air, and did so in what turned out to be the very same week that the stunned crew of the Empress was making its final voyage with the much-loved liner. Had I known of the droll coincidence I daresay I might have looked down and seen her ploughing her last white eastbound furrow home. But my flight had its distracting moments anyway: it was aboard a Lockheed Constellation, a four-engine, triple-tailed machine designed first as a long-range bomber and then a troop transport, and operated in this case by a somewhat dubious charter company known as Capitol Airways of Nashville, Tennessee. We took off from New York, landed four hours later at Gander, then (by the skin of our teeth, the pilot later confessed, as the fuel was alarmingly low) made Shannon in the west of Ireland, but proceeded to discover that for some technical and legal reason we had no permission to land in London and were diverted to Brussels instead. Eventually, and testily, I found a flight to Manchester and made the rest of my way home by rail. • • • Almost half a century has passed since I made those two crossings — fifty-odd years during which I must have traversed this particular body of water five hundred times, at least. And though I have ventured out from a variety of other ports in both the North and South Atlantic, to cross in other directions, by rhumb lines or diagonally or along the lines of longitude or in huge looping curves, or to make expeditions out to the various islands that are scattered across the sea, it seems to me that the simple and most familiar route, the track from the major British ports to their major equivalents in eastern Canada or the United States, distils one aspect of what this book is about — humankind’s evolving attitude to and relationship with this enormous body of water. And even in my lifetime, this is a relationship that has changed, and profoundly so. In the early 1960s it was still something of a rarity to travel across the Atlantic by ship, or by any other means, for that matter. A scattering of the broke still went one-way, westbound, as migrants; a rather larger number of the wealthy and leisured travelled out and back on the great steamers with no care for time or cost. A handful of businessmen, not a few politicians, and clubby aggregations of diplomats went too, but most of them in propeller-driven aircraft rather than propeller-driven ships, for their crossings were said to be more urgent. For those who made the journey, it was still an adventure that could be daunting, exciting, memorable, suffused with romance, or cursed by the travails of mal de mer. What it most certainly was not was routine. The same can hardly be said today. Yes, for a while it certainly was an excitement to cross the ocean by air — but for only a very short while. It must have been a considerable thrill, for instance, to take a Pan Am Clipper flying-boat service from the Solent to the Hudson, with stops in the harbours of such strange-sounding and long-forgotten coastal way stations as Foynes, Botwood, and Shediac. It must have seemed the height of style to stretch out in a bed on a double-decker Stratocruiser while the seas unrolled silently below. It was surely memorable — and foolhardy, given the plane’s dismal safety record - to fly aboard one of those first BOAC Comet services, and even in the smoky old Boeing 707s when Pan Am and TWA began to fly them non-stop. I remember well taking some of the early Concorde test flights, and being na?vely astonished at just how fast they were when, only halfway through the Arts section of the New York Times, I was told that we were decelerating over the Bristol Channel and would be in London directly and so would I return my tray table and seat to where they had been when I eased myself aboard just a few moments before. Air travel across the great ocean was for a brief time almost as romantic and memorable as travel by sea. But it all soon changed. For me it was marked by a small semantic shift. It began some time in the 1980s, when the pilots of aircraft crossing between Heathrow and Kennedy would slip almost casually into their welcoming announcement that “our track today will take us over Iceland” — with a slight emphasis on the word today, as if yesterday the flight was much the same except that it had passed over Greenland, or the Faroes. Or else they told the passengers that “the 177” or whatever the flight number might be, and so sounding studiedly casual, would be passing “a little farther north than usual, due to strong headwinds, and we’ll make our landfall over Labrador and then head down over the state of Maine.” It seemed to me a shame - as though the flight deck were telling its charges that there was nothing much to get excited about any more: today’s transit was much like yesterday’s, or last week’s, and the crossing of what had become called “the pond” (#litres_trial_promo) (the terminology demoting the great ocean to a body of water almost without significance) would invariably be much as was generally expected at this time of year. Ho-hum, in other words. And we passengers scarcely noticed. Having made good our nest of books and blankets, having made obligatory noises of good cheer to our stranger-neighbour, having glanced at the menu and wondered idly if it was too early to order a drink, we settled down and barely noticed a take-off that would perhaps have enthralled us twenty years before. The same was true when it came to our landing six or seven hours later. Maybe there was a little more curiosity - since home was close and one wanted to sense and maybe spot a hint of it. Generally speaking, though, whether we could see six miles beneath us the forests of Labrador or those on Anticosti Island, or whether our first solid encounter with North America was Cape Breton Island or the sand spits of Sandy Hook or Cape Cod, it made little difference: all we really cared about was that we got in on time, that the border formalities weren’t too irksome, and that we could get onto dry land and begin at once what we had journeyed to achieve. The grey-green vastness of undifferentiated ocean over which we had perforce to travel was really of no consequence whatever. • • • That for years was very much the case for me - until one recent summer’s afternoon, as I was crossing to New York on a British Airways 777, companionless, conversationless, and bored, pinioned uncomfortably into a starboard window seat. Lunch was long since finished. I had finished the paper and my only book. The entertainment was as much as I could bear. There were three more hours to run, and I was daydreaming. I looked idly out of the plexiglass porthole. It was quite cloudless, and miles below us was the sea, as deep blue as the sky, not smooth but vaguely crinkled, like dull aluminium foil, or pewter, or hammered steel, and seeming to inch its way slowly backwards from beneath the wing. I had been gazing for maybe fifteen minutes at the blue sea emerging from beneath the grey flaps. Blue, blue, blue … and then as I gazed down, I fancied I saw the water surface unexpectedly and subtly change colour, becoming first rather paler, and within what can have been no more than a couple of moments, or miles, transmuting itself into a shade of light aquamarine. Seldom had I seen such a thing from this altitude: I supposed that if it was real, and not imagined, then it must have had something to do with the angle of the sun, which since I had taken a midday flight, was higher in the sky than usual. I glanced at the sky map in the seatback in front. The chart was large-scale and poor, but the position it showed offered the obvious reason for the alteration: we had crossed the edge of the continental shelf. The deep mid-ocean abyss over which we had been passing since crossing the Porcupine Bank, which marks the western end of the European shelf and is usually reached about half an hour off the Irish coast, had now lifted itself up at last to become the faint submarine stirrings of the North American mainland. Except that a few moments later, and even more unusually, the water became dark blue once again, though this time only for a brief interval, before lightening yet again. It was as though the aircraft had passed over a deep river in the ocean, a cleft between two high underwater plains. I squinted as far under the wing as my vision allowed: from where the plain resumed it appeared to stretch away to the west, uninterrupted. And then I remembered, from what I knew of the undersea geography of this part of the North Atlantic: I had long been fascinated by the geography of the Gulf Stream, and as I remembered, it flowed nearby. What I recalled suggested to me that the uninterrupted plain I could now see marked the beginning of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The dark blue underwater channel was known as Flemish Pass. And the first patch of green I had spotted was, I realised, the very place where we had stopped all those years before to rendezvous with the Canadian rescue plane: the well-remembered shallows known as the Flemish Cap. • • • Nearly half a century has gone by since I first saw the Flemish Cap and watched, captivated, as that Canadian Air Force plane swept in. Back then — I was still a youngster, to be sure, and more easily awed than today - I had savoured every detail of what seemed to me a fascinating small moment. And in the hours after our ship had started up and begun to move off westward, I had learned of other historical grace notes to the saga: a friendly deck officer on the Empress had told me that the emergency signals we had tapped out the night before had been picked up on Newfoundland by the American coast guard base in a place called Argentia - and they had taught us at school that it was at Argentia, back in 1941, that Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met aboard the battleship Prince of Wales and declared the Atlantic Charter, which so famously delineated the working of the post-war world. That I had just been hove-to, so far from all mankind, at the mercy of the sea - and yet linked by radio with so significant a piece of history: that made the moment even more special and helped burn the memory of this fragment of waterway ever more firmly into my mind. Today that same piece of marine geography, spotted briefly from an overflying aircraft, had been no more than a faraway patch of mottled and discoloured water serving inconveniently to keep me from the timely arrival at my destination. How sad, I thought, that so vividly remembered a place should have so quickly transmuted itself into something little more than an incommoding parcel of distance. But wait - was that not how the world at large had come to think of the ocean as a whole? Wasn’t the ocean just distance for most people these days? Didn’t we all now take for granted a body of water that, so relatively recently - no more than five hundred years before, at most—was viewed by mariners who had not yet dared attempt to cross it, with a mixture of awe, terror, and amazement? Had not a sea that had once seemed an impassable barrier to somewhere — to Japan? the Indies? the Spice Islands? the East? — transmuted itself with dispatch into a mere bridge of convenience to the wealth and miracles of the New World? Had our regard for this ocean not switched from the intimidation of the unknown and the frightening to the indifference with which we now greet the ordinary? And yet had not this change taken place in some kind of inverse relation to the ocean’s ever-growing importance? For hadn’t the Atlantic become over the centuries much more than a mere bridge? It had surely also become a focal point, an axis, a fulcrum, around which the power and influence of the modern world has long been distributed. One might say that if the Mediterranean had long been the inland sea of the classical civilisation, then the Atlantic Ocean had in time replaced it by becoming the inland sea of Western civilisation. D. W. Meinig, the historical geographer, wrote in 1986 of this new perceived role of the Atlantic: the ocean, he wrote, was unique in having “the old seats of culture on the east, a great frontier for expansion on the west, and a long and integral African shore”. The Atlantic existed in equipoise between the blocs of power and cultural influence that have shaped the modern world. It is an entity that links them, unites them, and in some indescribable way also defines them. It was Walter Lippmann, in 1917, who first advanced the notion of the Atlantic Community. In a famous essay in the New Republic, he wrote of it as the core of “the profound web of interest which joins together the western world.” And though today we recognise what this community is and whom it fully embraces (and even if we do not fully comprehend it), it is clear that despite the coming claims of India and China and Japan, it is a grouping of countries and civilisations that, for now at least, still manages to direct the principal doings of the planet. It is a community of sorts, a kind of pan-Atlantic civilisation, if you will, that at its beginning involved simply the northern countries on the Atlantic shores, with the nations of Western Europe on the one hand and the United States and Canada on the other. More recently both Latin America and the nations of western and central Africa have been incorporated into the mix. Brazil and Botswana, Guyana and Liberia, Uruguay and Mauritania are now every bit as much in and of the Atlantic Community, just as for scores of years have been the peoples of more obviously Atlantic nations such as Iceland and Greenland, Nigeria, Portugal, Ireland, France, and Britain. The community is indeed much larger and more comprehensive than that, as what follows will explain. And yet the body of water that ties these millions of people and myriad cultures and civilisations together - the S-shaped body of water covering 33 million square miles, which in the Western Hemisphere is called the Atlantic Ocean, and which on the eastern side of the world is generally known as the Great West Sea - suffers the fate of the overlooked. It is an ocean that can fairly be described as hidden in plain sight — something that is quite obviously there, but in so many ways is just not obvious at all. It is undeniably very visible. “Even if we hang a satellite station in space,” wrote the American historian Leonard Outhwaite, in 1957, when the first Sputnik was launched, “or if we reach the moon, the Atlantic Ocean will still be the centre of the human world.” • • • Not all bodies of water are so very evidently alive as the Atlantic. Some inland seas that are large, topographically important, navigationally complex, and historically crucial manage somehow to seem strangely still, starved of any readily apparent vitality. The Black Sea, for one, has the feel of a rather moribund, lifeless body of water; the Red Sea also, bathed in its ochre fog of desert sand, seems perpetually half dead; even the Coral Sea and the Sea of Japan, beautiful and placid though they may be, are somehow stripped of any true kind of oceanic liveliness and come off as strangely dulled. But the Atlantic Ocean is surely a living thing - furiously and demonstrably so. It is an ocean that moves, impressively and ceaselessly. It generates all kinds of noise - it is forever roaring, thundering, boiling, crashing, swelling, lapping. It is easy to imagine it trying to draw breath - perhaps not so noticeably out in mid-ocean, but where it encounters land, its waters sifting up and down a gravel beach, it mimics nearly perfectly the steady inspirations and exhalations of a living creature. It crawls with symbiotic existences, too: unimaginable quantities of monsters, minute and massive alike, churn within its depths in a kind of maritime harmony, giving to the waters a feeling of vibration, a kind of sub-oceanic pulse. And it has a psychology. It has moods: sometimes dour and sullen, on rare occasions cunning and playful; always it is pondering and powerful. It also has a quite predictable span of life. Geologists believe that when all is done the Atlantic Ocean will have lived for a grand total of about 370 million years. It first split open and filled with water and started to achieve properly oceanic dimensions about 190 million years ago. Currently it is enjoying a sedate and rather settled middle age, growing just a little wider each year, and with a few volcanoes sputtering away in its mid-region, but generally not having to suffer any particularly trying geological convulsions. But in due course, these will come. Before what geologists like to think is too much longer, the Atlantic will begin to change its aspect and size very dramatically. Eventually, as the continents around it shudder and slide off in different directions, it will start to change shape, its coasts (ac-cording to the currently most favoured scenario) will move inward and become welded together again, and the sea will eventually squeeze itself dry and vanish into itself. Planetary forecasters estimate this will take place in about 180 million years. That is no mean life span. Assume for the sake of argument that the world’s total existence, from the postmolten Hadean to the cool meadows of today’s Holocene, encompasses some 4.6 billion years. Once tallied up, the Atlantic’s 370 million years of existence as a separate body of water within that world will have made up something like 8 per cent of the planet’s total life. Most other oceans that have come and gone have existed for rather shorter periods: so far as other competing claims for longevity are concerned the Atlantic will probably turn out to be one of the world’s longest-lived, a potential old-timer, a highly respectable record breaker. It is both possible and reasonable, then, to tell the Atlantic Ocean’s story as biography. It is a living thing; it has a geological story of birth and expansion and evolution to its present middle-aged shape and size; and then it has a well-predicted end story of contraction, decay, and death. Distilled to its essence it is a rather simple tale to tell, a biography of a living entity with a definable beginning, a self-evident middle and a likely end. But then there is very much more to the tale than that. For we cannot forget the human aspect of the story. Humans have lived around the Atlantic’s peripheries and on its islands, and have crossed and recrossed it, plundered it and fought on it, seized it and surveyed it and despoiled it, and in doing so have made it quite central to our own evolving lives. That is a story, too - a story quite different from, and very much shorter than, that of the making and unmaking of the ocean itself, but one that is yet vastly more important to us as human beings. Humans were not there when the ocean formed. We will not be there when it ceases to be. But for a definable period, poised almost in the midlife of the ocean itself, we humans arrived, we developed, and — or so we like to think — we promptly changed everything. Only by telling this second story, the kernel within the main shell of the first, can we recount in full the life of the Atlantic Ocean. The physical ocean’s history of opening and closing then becomes the context, the frame, for the history of humanity’s intimate involvement with and within it. That human story began when man first settled on the Atlantic’s shores. As it happens, mankind spilled down to the sea most probably in southern Africa, and he did so quite possibly (and most fortunately for this account) very close to Africa’s southern Atlantic shores. What follows from that moment is every bit as complicated and multidimensional as one might imagine: the human story of the ocean swiftly becomes a saga of a m?lange of peoples and parallels, of diverging languages and customs, of mixtures of acts and events, achievements and discoveries, of confusions and contests. It is a tricky tale to tell. Simple chronology might suit very well the story of the making of the physical sea itself - but the details of the human experience are scarcely so amenable. For how would it be possible to knit together the experience of, say, a Liberian fisherman with that of an atomic submariner on patrol off Iceland? Or to link the life of an amethyst miner on the shores of Namibia with that of the American director of Man of Aran; to write of the captain of a British Airways Boeing and of an ice-patrol ship off the coast of South Georgia; or to connect the long-dead sea-painter Winslow Homer with a wide-eyed Guantanamo detainee from western China, swimming for the first time in the Atlantic Ocean off Bermuda? How best create a sensible structure from all this strange and multicoloured variety? For a long time that remained a puzzle. I wanted so much to write the story of the ocean. But what and where was the structure? I was, as they say, all at sea. Except that one day, gazing down at the rolling waters, I thought: if the ocean had a life, might not mankind’s relationship with it have some kind of a life about it also? After all, fossils and finds from digs show that this relationship had a particular moment of birth. It will have a likely moment of death, as well - even the most determined optimist will have to admit that an end to human existence is in sight, that in a few thousand, or maybe a few tens of thousands of years, humanity will be finished, and this aspect of the story will be over, too. So yes, to corral the life of this human relationship with the sea, and place it within the context of the much more straightforward life of the ocean itself - this might indeed be possible as biography, too. But then there were the details, churning and daunting and devilish. The tide of human history was so filled with facts and incidents and characters and tones of subtle shading, that it might be near impossible to swim against it. But in the end, and out of the blue, I was tossed a quite unexpected lifebelt - and by that most non-maritime of rescuers, William Shakespeare. • • • For many years I had carried with me on tedious plane journeys (and indeed had with me as we passed above the waters of Flem ish Cap that recent time) a well-thumbed copy of Seven Ages, an anthology of poetry that was assembled in the early 1990s by a former British foreign secretary, David Owen. He had arranged his chosen poems in seven discrete sections, to illustrate each of the seven stages of man’s life that are listed so famously in the “All the world’s a stage …” speech in As You Like It. And I was reading Owen’s book one day when I realised that this very same structure also happened to offer me just what I needed for this human aspect of the Atlantic story: a proper framework for the book I planned to write, a stage setting that would transmute all the themes of ocean life into players, progressing from infancy to senescence, so that all could be permitted to play their parts in turn. The Ages are those we remember, if scantily, from childhood, and are listed in Jacques’s all too famously gloomy monologue: At first the infant,Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel,And shining morning face, creeping like snailUnwillingly to school. And then the lover,Sighing like furnace, with a woeful balladMade to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,Seeking the bubble reputationEven in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,Full of wise saws and modern instances;And so he plays his part. The sixth age shiftsInto the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wideFor his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,Turning again toward childish treble, pipesAnd whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,That ends this strange eventful history,Is second childishness and mere oblivion;Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. Infant; School-boy; Lover; Soldier; Justice; Slipper’d Pantaloon; and Second Childishness. It seemed, all of a sudden, just about the ideal. Pinioned within these seven categories, the stages of our relationship with the ocean could be made quite manageable. I could examine in the First Age, for example, the stirrings of humankind’s initial childlike interest in the sea. In the Second, I could examine how that initial curiosity evolved into the scholarly disciplines, of exploration, education, and learning - and in this as in all the other Ages I could explore the history of that learning, so that each Age would become a chronology in and of itself. I could then become captivated in the Third Age — that of the lover- by the story of humankind’s love affairs, by way of the art, poetry, architecture, or prose that this sea has inspired over the centuries. In the Fourth Age - that of the soldier -1 could tell of the arguments and conflicts that have so often roiled the ocean, of how the force of arms over the years has compelled migration or fostered seaborne crime, of how national navies have reacted, how individual battles have been fought, and how Atlantic heroes have been born. In the Fifth Age - that of the well-fed Justice -I could describe how the sea eventually became a sea of laws and commerce, and how tramp steamers and liners and submarine cables and jet aircraft then crossed and recrossed it in an infinite patchwork designed for the attainment of profit and comfort. In the Sixth Age, that dominated by the fatigue and tedium of the pantaloon, I could reflect upon the ways that man has recently wearied of the great sea, has come to take it for granted, to become careless of its special needs and to deal with it improvidently. And in the Seventh and final Age — the Age that ends with Shakespeare’s immemorial sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything — I could imagine the ways by which this much-overlooked and perhaps vengeful ocean might one day strike back, reverting to type, reverting to the primal nature of what it always was. Alluring as this all might seem, however, there was something else. First I had to make the frame, to construct the proscenium arch, to attempt to place the long human drama within the very much longer physical context. Only when that had been achieved, and by leave of the enormous natural forces that had made the ocean in the first place, could I try to begin to unveil and recount the human stories. Only then could I attempt to tell something of the ocean’s hundreds of millions of years of life, and of the scores of thousands of its middle years during which the men and women who made up its community would eventually go out onstage, and by their own lights, each perform their unique, and uniquely Atlantic, roles. First — just how was the ocean made? How did it all begin? PROLOGUE: THE BEGINNINGS OF ITS GOINGS ON (#ueb714ce5-b669-5010-9cf2-7aaa56cb8599) All the world’s a stageAnd all the men and women merely players:They have their exits and their entrances;And one man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages. A big ocean - and the Atlantic is a very big ocean indeed - has the appearance of a settled permanence. Stand anywhere beside it, and stare across its swells towards the distant horizon, and you are swiftly lulled into the belief that it has been there forever. All who like the sea - and surely there can be precious few who do not - have a favoured place in which to stand and stare: for me it has long been the Faroe Islands, up in the far north Atlantic, where all is cold and wet and bleak. In its own challenging way, it is entirely beautiful. Eighteen islands, each one a sliver of black basalt frosted with gale-blown salt grass and tilted up alarmingly from east to west, make up this Atlantic outpost of the Kingdom of Denmark. Fifty-odd thousand Faroese fishermen and sheep farmers cling there in ancient and determined remoteness, like the Vikings from whom they descend and whose vestiges of language they still speak. Rain, wind and fog mark out these islanders’ days — although from time to time, and on almost every afternoon in high summer, the mists suddenly swirl away and are replaced by a sky of a clarity and blue brilliance that seems only to be known in the world’s high latitudes. It was on just a day like this that I chose to sail, across a lumpy and capricious sea, to the westernmost member of the archipelago, the island of Mykines. It is an island much favoured by artists, who come for its wild solitude and its total subordination to the nature that so entirely surrounds it. And going there left a deep impression: in all my wanderings around the Atlantic, I can think of no place that ever gave me so great an impression of perching on the world’s edge, no better place to absorb and begin to comprehend the awful majesty of this enormous ocean. The landing on Mykines was exceptionally tricky. The boat surfed in on the green breaking top of an ocean roller into the tiny harbour, its skipper tying up for just enough time to let me clamber out onto a cement quay lethal with slippery eelgrass. A staircase of rough stones rose up to the skyline, and I scrambled upwards, only too well aware of the deep chasm filled with boiling surf far below beside me. But I made it. Up on top there was a scattering of houses, a church, a shop and a tiny inn, its sitting room heavy with the smell of pipe smoke and warm wet sweater wool. A sudden furious blast of wind had driven away the morning fog, and the sun revealed a long steep slope of grass that stretched right up the island tilt, clear up to the western sky. There was a grassy pathway leading up to this high horizon, and a skein of islanders was moving slowly up it, like a line of ants. I joined them, out of curiosity. To my great surprise most were dressed in Faroese finery - the men in dark blue and scarlet jackets, with high necks and rows of silver buttons, knee breeches and silver-buckled shoes; the women in wide-striped long skirts, blue vests fastened with an elaborate cat’s cradle of chains, and fringed scarves. And though a few men had anoraks with folded felt snoods, none wore hats: the incessant wind would have whipped them away. The children, dressed just as their parents, whooped and skirled and slid on the wet grass, their elders tutting them to keep their boots clean and to be careful not to fall. It took thirty minutes to do the climb, and none of the islanders seemed to break a sweat. They all gathered at a site by the cliff top, where the grass was flattened. There was a memorial stone here, a basalt cross incised with the names, I was told, of the fishermen who had died in the Icelandic fishing grounds off to the west. The crowd, perhaps a hundred in all, arranged themselves beside the summit marker, a cairn of basalt boulders, waiting. After a few minutes a white-haired man of sixty or so, puffing a little from exercise, appeared at the top of the path. He was dressed in a long black surplice with a ruffled high collar that made him look as if he had stepped from the pages of a medieval chapbook. He was a Lutheran pastor, from the Faroese capital town of Thorshavn. He proceeded to lead a service, helped by two churchwardens who played accordions and one island lad with a guitar. A pair of pretty young blond children handed around some damp hymn sheets, and the villagers’ high voices set to singing old Norse holy songs, the thin music instantly swept away to sea by the gale, as it was designed to be. The islanders said the small religious ceremony was quite without precedent: in the past it had always been a visiting pastor from Denmark, a thousand miles south, who would come here to bless the islands’ long-drowned sailors; but today made history, it was explained, because for the first time ever the minister was Faroese. In its own gentle and respectful way the dedication service, with its prayers offered in the local tongue, offered an indication of just how these remote mid-ocean islands had drawn themselves steadily away from the benign invigilation of their European motherland. They had gone their own way at last: an island way, remarked one of the congregants. An Atlantic way. After the service was finally over, I strolled behind the dispersing crowd — and without warning suddenly and terrifyingly reached the cliff edge. The grass cut off as with a blade, and in its place there was just a huge hollow emptiness of wind and space, the black wet walls of a hurtling precipice of basalt cliffs with, crawling almost half a mile below, the tides and currents and spume of the open sea. Hundreds of puffins stood in nooks in the cliff edge, some no more than an arm’s length away, and all quite careless of my presence. They looked like ridiculous, stubby creatures, with that mask-face, chubby cheeks, and a coloured bill that was usually crammed full with a clutch of tiny fish. But every so often one took to the air and soared off into the sky with an easy and contented grace, ridiculous no more. I must have sat at the edge for a long, long time, staring, gazing, mesmerised. The gale had finally stopped its roaring, and the sun had come out and was edging its way into the afternoon. I was sitting on the cliff edge, my legs dangling over half a mile of emptiness. I was facing due west. Just below me were clouds of seabirds, the gannets and fulmars, kittiwakes and storm petrels, and beside me were the chattering congregations of puffins. Ahead of me there was just nothing - just an endless crawling sea, hammered like copper in the warm sunshine and stretching far, fifty miles, a hundred - from up this high I felt I could have been looking out on five hundred miles and more. There was an endless vacancy that at this latitude, 62 degrees north or so, I knew would be interrupted only by the basalt cliffs of Greenland, more than a thousand miles away. There were no ships’ wakes on the sea, no aircraft trails on the sky - just the cool incessant wind, the cries of the birds, and the imagined edge of the known world set down somewhere, far beyond my range of sight. And it is very much the same on any Atlantic headland, whether in Africa or the Americas, in the Arctic or from the dozens of other oceanic islands like these, places from where the views are limitless, the horizons finely curved with distance. The view is enough to give the viewer pause: it is just so stupefying, so haunting, the impressions welling up, one after another. How eternal the ocean appears, and how immense. It is anything but trite to keep reminding oneself how incalculably large the Atlantic happens to be. The big seas are so big that after just a little contemplation of this ocean you understand why it was once perfectly fitting of someone — in this case Arthur C. Clarke, who knew a thing or two about immensity - to remark on how inappropriate it is to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Sea. Then again, above all the dominant colour of this ocean is grey. It is grey, and it is slow-moving, and it is heavy with a steady heaving. The Atlantic is in most places not at all like the Pacific or the Indian oceans — it is not dominated by the colour blue, nor is it overwhelmingly fringed with leaning palm trees and coral reefs. It is a grey and heaving sea, not infrequently storm-bound, ponderous with swells, a sea that in the mind’s eye is thick with trawlers lurching, bows up, then crashing down through great white curtains of spume, tankers wallowing across the swells, its weather so often on the verge of gales, and all the while its waters moving with an air of settled purpose, simultaneously displaying incalculable power, and inspiring by this display perpetual admiration, respect, caution, and fear. The Atlantic is the classic ocean of our imaginings, an industrial ocean of cold and iron and salt, a purposeful ocean of sea-lanes and docksides and fisheries, an ocean alive with squadrons of steadily moving ships above, with unimaginable volumes of mysterious marine abundance below. It is also an entity that seems to be somehow interminable. Year in and year out, night and day, warm and cold, century after century, the ocean is always there, an eternal presence in the collective minds of those who live beside it. Derek Walcott, the Nobel laureate poet, wrote in his famous epic work Omeros of his fisherman-hero Achilles walking finally and wearily up the shingled slope of an Atlantic beach. He has turned his back on the sea at last, but he knows that even without him seeing it, it is behind him all the while and simply, ponderously, magnificently, ominously, continuing to be the sea. The Ocean is, quite simply, “still going on”. Three thousand years ago Homer introduced the poetic idea of Oceanus — the son of Uranus and of Gaia, the husband of Tethys and father of a score of river gods. The word itself signified a vast globe-encircling river, which the ancients imagined to be rimmed by both the Elysian fields and by Hades. To Homer the ocean was a river that rose far away where the sun sets. It was something totally daunting for Mediterranean sailors who spied its great greyness crashing and storming outside the Pillars of Hercules, at the Strait of Gibraltar. It was known as the Great Outer Sea, and it was a thing hugely to be feared, a world of crashing waters inhabited by terror-inspiring monsters like Gorgons and Hecatonchires, or by bizarrely unfamiliar humans like Cimmerians, Ethiopians, and pygmies. And forever, always going on. This poetic notion of the sea’s ceaseless activity is one that manages to be at once familiar, comforting, and mildly unsettling. One has a sense that the sea, whatever else it may be, however grey or immense or distempered or powerful, is a permanent presence in the world, whether it is rumbling or calm, storming or drowning. We think of it as an immutable living being, ceaselessly occupied in its unfinishable business of washing and waiting. Yet strictly speaking, this is hardly true at all. Oceans have their beginnings and their endings, too. Not in the human imagination, perhaps, but in a physical sense, most certainly. Oceans are born, and oceans die. And the Atlantic, the once much-feared Great Outer Sea, the most carefully studied and considered of them all, was not always there, and it will not remain either where it is, or what it is. For an ocean to begin, a planet must have two elemental essentials. One is water. The other is land. The enormous tonnage of water (#litres_trial_promo) that presently exists has not always been there, of course - but recent research suggests that it came into existence fairly soon after the earth was first coalesced out of clouds of space- borne planetesimals, almost five billion years ago. Studies of zircon crystals found near an iron ore mine in Western Australia indicate that liquid water was on earth just a few hundred million years after the planet was formed. It was extremely hot water, and it had all manner of noxious and corrosive dissolved gases in it; but it was liquid, it sloshed about, it could (and did) erode things that it poured over, and most important of all, it was the undeniable aqueous ancestor material of all of our present seas. The ocean I gazed down on from the puffin cliffs of Mykines is in essence the selfsame water that was created all those years ago; the principal difference is that while the Hadean sea was hot and acid and incapable of supporting anything but the most primitive of thermophilic cyanobacteria, the Faroese Sea was cold and clean, had been purified and well salted by millions of years of evaporation and condensation and recycling, was rich in chemical ions from all over, and was vibrant with life of great complexity and beauty. In all other respects the frigid waters off the North Atlantic islands and the steaming acid waters of our early and territorially undifferentiated planet of long ago were more or less the same. Territorially undifferentiated though that early planet may have been, it would not remain so for long. Solid, habitable earth was being manufactured in the cooling planet at about the same time, too. At first this land was represented by little more than the appearance of countless huge supervolcanoes, each separated from the other so that their clusterings might have looked from the air like the chimneys of a planet-sized industrial complex, giant marine mountains that belched out choking clouds of smoke and spewed thousand-mile-long puddles of thick black lava. Eventually these isolated volcanoes managed to vomit out so much new rock that they started to coalesce, and some of these coagulating masses became more or less stable, such that they could be thought of in aggregate as landmasses. Some long while later, these landmasses formed into even larger bodies of land that could fairly be described as protocontinents. And thus did the defining present-day characteristic of our planet — an entity formed of continents and seas - have its beginnings, although the process of reaching a configuration that looked anything like today’s world was infinitely slow and involved a fantastic complexity. The making and unmaking of a multidimensional topography is only now beginning to be understood. The earth in its early days may have been both water and land, but it was a scalding and wretched place. It spun on its axis much more rapidly than today: once every five hours the sun would rise, though had any inhabitants been around they would probably not have seen it through the vast clouds of ash and smoke and fire and noxious gas. If the skies ever cleared, the planet below would have been scourged by unfiltered pulses of ultraviolet radiation and gamma rays, making the surface hostile to almost everything. And the newly made moon was still so close that each time it swept around in orbit, it raised great acid tides that would inundate and further corrode such continents as existed. But some continents most certainly did exist. Today’s geological record contains the relicts of half a dozen or so identifiable former bodies mighty enough to be continents. Their remains have been dispersed by billions of years of planetary restlessness: no longer is any one of these early bodies intact. All that is left is a collection of stratal shards and sunderings that can be dated from at least three billion years ago, and which are now scattered to places as otherwise unconnected as present-day Australia (where parts of this earliest of continents are to be found) and Madagascar, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Antarctica, and India. The detective work needed to piece together the original continents is prodigiously difficult. Yet it has become possible, by looking carefully at the ages and structures of such rocks, to come up with at least an approximate sequence of events that led to the formation of today’s Atlantic Ocean and the continents that now border it. It is a sequence featuring the dozen or so continents and seas that have come into existence, briefly or for aeons, over the planet’s life. The lineage commences with the arrival of the world’s first continental body: a mighty, two-thousand-mile long land-mass shaped much like the silhouette of a monstrous albatross, which formed itself and hoisted itself above the boiling seas some three billion years ago. Today’s geological community has given it a suitably sonorous and memorable name: it is known, in honour of the Chaldean birthplace of Abraham, as the supercontinent of Ur. The remains of other ancient continents have been discovered since the finding of Ur, and they have been given names reflecting either the national pride of those living where they lie, the classical education of the explorers who discovered them, or the realities of modern global politics. They are names mostly unfamiliar beyond the sodalities of geology: Vaalbara, Kenorland, Arctica, Nena, Baltica, Rodinia, Pannotia, Laurentia. They are names that define bodies either as small as present-day Greenland, or as immense as present-day Asia. They were bodies constantly in motion, constantly changing their shape, topography, and position. Over immense stretches of time, during periods of scourging heat and colossal physical forces, they all shifted themselves slowly and in stately fashion around the surface skin of the planet. Sometime they collided with one another, creating what are now ancient and much-flattened mountain chains. More often than not, they broke apart in a series of slow-motion explosions, events that took millions of years to play out. The shards of their ruin then banged and ricocheted their way around the earth, reordering themselves and occasionally recombining with one another, as though the planet’s surface were covered with the pieces of some enormous jigsaw puzzle that was being operated by an unseen and none-too-bright giant. And all the while, the spaces between the continental bodies were filled with the seas — being constantly shape-shifted and divided up and redivided and configured into bodies of water that were each recognisable, from about one billion years ago, as true and proper oceans. By Cambrian times, some 540 million years ago, one of these oceans was starting to have a familiar look to it. When it first appeared, its shape was inconsequential - it was merely very big. But during the Ordovician period, it started to become fairly narrow, vaguely sinuous, no more than a thousand miles wide, like a great river coursing across the world from north-east to south-west. That is to say - it was in appearance not altogether unlike the North-Atlantic-to-be. And because it washed the shores of what would in time become the east of North America and the northwest of Europe, so this supposed Ordovician sea was given the name that it should by rights bear. It was called lapetus, for the mythical figure known by the ancient Greeks as the father of Atlas. The lapetus Ocean, long since dry, and now seen at its spectacular best in the sandstones and deepwater grey limestones in northern Newfoundland that memorialise its existence, was the precursor, the father or mother, of the true and eventual Atlantic Ocean. • • • The modern and recognisable world began to come about some 250 million years later - 250 million years ago, indeed - during the end of the Permian and the beginning of the Triassic eras. It was a process that got under way when four of the original protocontinental jigsaw pieces collided and formed themselves into the one supercontinent that has since managed to achieve wide familiarity: the great body known as Pangaea. This vast entity contained every piece of Permian real estate that then existed on the globe. Its name alone says this was one land that comprised all of the world’s land, and it was surrounded by one sea - Panthalassa - that was all of the world’s sea. Out of these two bodies - one water, the other land - today’s Atlantic Ocean would be made. The process began with a long era of spectacular volcanic violence, one of the planet’s most violent episodes in its entire recent history. Soon thereafter there was a mass extinction of life forms, both at sea and on the land; and then finally Pangaea started to break apart, and the new ocean started to form. The extent to which these three events were connected has been debated at length - especially over whether the vigorous volcanic activity caused both the extinction and the breakup — but these events did occur, and within relatively short order. The volcanic period was so comprehensively and terrifyingly violent, so generous in its extent and so profound in its consequences that it must have felt as though the entire world were ripping itself apart. A gigantic series of explosions started to cannonade around the central core of Pangaea. Thousands of mighty volcanoes, first thousands of Heclas, and then in time thousands of Krakatoas, or Etnas or Strombolis or Popocate-petls, pushed themselves up and out of the countryside and started to spew fire and magma thousands of feet into the air. A ceaseless round of unbearably huge earthquakes began to shake and shatter the planet, trending along a roughly delineated line that ran for hundreds of miles northwards and southwards, and splintering and smashing the earth for scores of miles downwards into the crust. Even if the immense universal continent of Pangaea had not yet broken up, it certainly had started to weaken and groan with the weight and weariness of its own long existence. The world was witnessing the beginnings of a brief and yet merciless series of spasms of tectonic mayhem that started tearing the world’s one stretch of land into pieces, from end to end. And water began to seep into the growing gap between the two halves of Pangaea that were beginning to form. The tiny weasel-tongue of water that laid down sediments that are found in today’s Greece turned into an almighty spigot: trillions upon trillions of tonnes of seawater started to rush inward from it and from the feeder-waters of the surrounding Panthalassan Ocean. In doing so - by beginning the process of prising apart, levering open, wielding a tectonic crowbar — this potent combination of volcanoes, earthquakes, and lots and lots of water started the making of a brand new ocean. It only opened up a crack, like a door cautiously ajar: but it was a process that would continue, and then accelerate and proceed without let-up, for scores of millions of years, right up to the present day. The resulting ocean had been paternally prefigured by the lapetus two hundred million years before. This tiny filigree of seawater that was fast rising between the newly made volcanic cliffs of what are now Nova Scotia and Morocco was the first small-scale indication of the coming birth of the Atlantic. • • • The volcanoes lasted for only a few-score thousand years (though some say as much as two million) but their pulses were so violent and the amount of magma they disgorged was so prodigious that the cliffs and mountain ranges that today stand as memorial are awesomely impressive. I took a family holiday in 1975 on the Canadian island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, a short distance from where Roosevelt took his summer’s ease on Campobello. We spent happy afternoons investigating the tide pools at Southwest Head, a high cape from where only the Atlantic could be seen, misty and cold, endlessly stretching to the south. Afterwards we walked home to watch the huge Fundy tides at Seal Cove, and on the way passed by a curious assortment of pure white boulders that sat incongruously at the top of a cliff composed of sheer columns of a dark brown rock. The boulders, deposited by glaciers, were called the Flock of Sheep. But it was the brown rock below them, a columnar basalt, that has most intrigued geologists -ever since, in the late 1980s, it was realised that they were quite similar in appearance and probable age to another huge pile of basalts, in a mountain range in Morocco. I went to these mountains, the High Atlas, when I was researching a different aspect of this book. I had no idea then of their connection with the Grand Manan rocks, nor did I know until I started to ask around. For although Morocco is known for its Palaeozoic as well as its Jurassic and Cretaceous fossils, the Atlas mountains have large outcrops of basalt, too - layers of volcanic rocks sandwiched between the sedimentary rocks, which, it was realised by researchers in 1988, were of exactly the same age as the rocks in places like Grand Manan, in eastern Canada. This discovery, which I was told about while sitting sunning myself in a rooftop bar in the coastal town of Essaouira, led geologists on a huge Easter egg hunt around other Atlantic coastal countries for more basalts of the same antiquity. A series of expeditions in the 1990s found scores of outcrops - sills, dykes, flood basalt sequences - all in enormous abundance, which showed almost certainly just what had been going on a little over two hundred million years ago. The outcrops were all over — four million square miles of lavas, covering parts of what in time would become four continents: in North America they ranged along the Appalachians from Alabama to Maine, and then well beyond up into Canada and along the shores of the Bay of Fundy; in South America they were found in Guyana, Surinam, French Guiana, and, most impressively, throughout the Amazon basin of Brazil; in southern Europe they were detected in France; and in Africa there were swarms of sills and dykes found not only in Morocco but in Algeria, Mauritania, Guinea, and Liberia. And all these puzzle pieces had alignments and ages and proximities that positively shouted their intimate geological connections and their probable common origin. The average age of their deposition eventually came in with some accuracy: most of the basalts had been laid down or extruded or blown into the sky 201.27 million years ago, a figure computed with an error either way of only perhaps three hundred thousand years. Some discrepancy exists between the age of the basalts on what would be the eastern side of the region — in North Africa, especially — and those in what would become North America: the American basalts seem older. This discrepancy has led to an impassioned debate over whether the volcanoes led to the extinction of so much of the flora and fauna, since that massive wiping-out - when huge numbers of amphibian species vanished, leaving environmental niches perfectly suited for the arrival of scores of Jurassic dinosaur types - occurred around 199.6 million years ago. Would volcanoes, however almighty, have their principal biological effect almost two million years later? It seems a little improbable — but some laboratories are still trying to link the two events, not least because it makes for a more dramatic, and anthropomorphically comprehensible, story. The great continent unzipped, though not like a fly on a pair of trousers. It was an inelegant, jerky process, rather like watching a camel getting to its feet, with one part of the ocean opening, then another far away, then a portion of the middle, then another section in the distance, and then back to the middle again. The first waves of water washed the shores of eastern Canada and northwest Africa as they pushed apart from each other, almost at the very beginning of the Jurassic, 195 million years ago. This was the first true moment of the Atlantic Ocean’s life. Twenty million years on, the process of sea-floor spreading got under way in earnest, in the middle of the sea — like two unrolling carpets, or two unspooling conveyor belts running away from each other from a vague submarine midpoint. The bottom of the sea started to split open, and its two halves began to diverge, the continents on either side shifting steadily apart. West Africa shifted itself about three hundred miles away from South Carolina; Mali moved a couple of hundred miles off Florida; there was a large stretch of wide-open ocean around where the Windward Islands would eventually be, and then a gap of almost a thousand miles opened between Liberia and Venezuela. In this midsection a body of seawater as large as today’s Mediterranean was created, and yet unlike the rather stable-sized Mediterranean, this body only continued to get bigger. By 150 million years ago, continuing a Canaveral-style countdown, Greenland (#litres_trial_promo) had begun to pull away from Norway, and Iceland began to be built up from deep down in the sea. (The spectacular eruption that began in the spring of 2010 from Ey-jafjoll, an Icelandic volcano that had been quiet for the previous two centuries, and which disrupted air traffic across northern Europe with its immense swathes of high-altitude volcanic dust, is part of the process of building up. Surtsey, an entirely new island born just a few miles away in 1963, may have provided somewhat clearer evidence of the steady swelling of Iceland, but Eyjafjoll produced much more lava, even if most of it was blasted high into the sky.) At the same time the shallow waters off the northern parts of the British Isles had deepened, and serious wave-tossed oceanic expanses now separated Ireland from Labrador. By ten million years later, Guinea, the Gambia, Senegal, and Sierra Leone had pulled relentlessly away from the coastlines of the putative Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana, which would occupy a similar dependent position in South America. Hitherto they had been in the same place: five hundred miles of ocean now separated them. By the early Cretaceous, 120 million years back in time, the conveyor-belt-unrolling-carpet mechanism that was now evidently driving the entire process — for there was to be no further dramatic volcanism to complicate matters - had an apparent source: the Mid-Atlantic Ridge had been formed. This linear bulge in the seabed, its centre fissured and faulted and alive with submarine volcanoes, would play a vital role for the rest of the ocean’s history. It was the place where new crustal material would be belched out of the inner earth, where the ocean floor to the east and the west of it would spread out and away, and where islands — a long string of them, the Azores, the Canaries, St. Helena, Fernando do Noronha, Tristan da Cunha, a jagged line stretching from Jan Mayen in the far north to Bouvet Island, 9,200 sea miles away to the south (#litres_trial_promo) - occasionally poked their peaks above water level, only to be pushed away in their turn to end up, remote and mostly unpeopled, in the new ocean’s farther reaches. And still the opening went on. Fifty million years more, and the north and middle portions now began to create and separate the southern coasts of Africa and South America. There was at first another sudden outbreak of volcanic activity - flood plains of basalt poured from numberless vents. But then separation began down here, too, though it is still not clear if this was connected with the volcanic spasm. And here the process did indeed look like the unzipping of a fly, and it was accomplished with similar speed. It was an opening up that rippled southwards, one coastline following hard on another. Nigeria stripped itself away from Brazil. The valleys that would one day house the Congo on one side and the Amazon on the other snapped apart. The flood basalts of the southern edge of Pangaea separated into two: on one side the enormous Etendeka Traps, which would come to lie in southern Africa — and over the edge of which the Victoria Falls now cascade - and on the other the Paran? basalts of Argentina, currently home to the sprawling spray curtains of the falls the Guarani called big waters, the Iguazu. And then in a final protracted frenzy of tearing, all of eastern Patagonia wrenched itself away from Angola, and the flatlands that were then off Cape Horn freed themselves from their geological embrace of what is now Namibia and the South African cape, and swept away to become the foothills of the southern Andes. This was all accomplished at a remarkable speed, for though in the north matters unfolded in a somewhat leisurely fashion, down south they raced almost breathlessly. The Atlantic coastlines that had once been welded together between the bulge of Brazil and the armpit of Africa - the apparently natural fit that led nineteenth century figures like Alfred Wegener to think out loud that continents might once have moved apart, thoughts that condemned him to live in near-universal and near-perpetual ridicule - had managed in a scant forty million years to spring five thousand miles apart from one another. The sea in these parts must have opened up at rather more than four inches a year - infinitely more rapidly than the separation that took place up in the brisk waters of the North Atlantic, and more than three times the rate at which the ocean continues to spread wider today. And that movement has never ended. The outline of the Atlantic Ocean that we know today was fixed perhaps ten million years ago, and though to us and our cartographers it appears to have retained its boundaries, its coastlines, and its “look” ever since the days of Columbus and Vespucci and the great German map of Martin Waldseem?ller that first defined it, it has been changing, subtly and slightly, all the time. Coastlines in the east continue to advance, those in the west to retreat. Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge continues to disgorge untold tonnages of new ocean floor; some of it appears above the water’s surface and creates new islands and reefs. And the islands that do exist continue to move, slowly and slightly, away from the sea’s centre. By ten million years ago the great split was done, and the Atlantic was fully born. At some time in the distant future — but not the unknown future, as we shall see — the rocks that opened will close and the sea will be forced to go elsewhere, and it will find another home. The vast earth-ocean, with its essentially and eternally constant volume of seawater, will be obliged by continental movement to reconfigure itself, and in time other shapes and sizes of its constituent water bodies will appear. The Atlantic that was born will in due course also die. But that will not be for a very long while. In the meantime, the Atlantic Ocean, Mare Atlanticus, the Great West Sea, is like an enormous stage set. It was ten million years ago just as it is today: a sinuous snakelike river of an ocean, stretching thousands of miles from the Stygian fogs of the north to the Roaring Forties in the south, riven with deeps in its western chasms, dangerous with shallows in eastern plains, a place of cod and flying fish, of basking sharks and blue-finned tuna, of gyres of Sargasso weed and gyres of unborn hurricanes, a place of icebergs and tides, whirlpools and sandbanks, submarine canyons and deep-sea black smokers and ridges and seamounts, of capes and rises and fracture zones, of currents hot, cold, torrential, and languorous, of underwater volcanoes and earthquakes, of stromatolites and cyanobacteria and horseshoe crabs, of seabird colonies, of penguins and polar bears and manta rays, of giant squid and jellyfish and their slow-and-steady southern majesties, the great and glorious wandering albatrosses. The stage, now so amply furnished with all this magic and mystery, has been prepared for a very long while. The supporting cast of players, all the beasts and plants, have now mostly made their entrances. The Atlantic Ocean is open wide, its physical condition fully set, and all is ready for the appearance on stage of the creature that will give full force to the human idea of the great sea. For what promises or threatens to be in relative time just the briefest moment only, the central character is set to step into the light. Mankind is finally about to confront the grey-heaving reality of all these mighty waters. To see, at last, just what is going on. Chapter One FROM THE PURPLE ISLES OF MOGADOR (#ulink_da5f0e9c-6065-5af4-99f7-f2111cd69baa) At first the infant Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms 1. ALLUREMENTS The Kingdom of Morocco has on its most widely used currency banknote neither a camel nor a minaret nor a Touareg in desert blue, but the representation of the shell of a very large snail. The shell of this shore-living marine beast — a carnivore that uses its tongue to rasp holes in other creatures’ shells and sip out the goodness - is reddish brown, slender, and spiny, with a long spire and an earlike opening. It is in all ways rather beautiful, the kind of shell not to be idly thrown away by anyone lucky enough to find one. Yet it was not the shell’s curvilinear elegance that many years ago persuaded directors of Morocco’s Central Bank in Rabat to place its image on the back of its 200 - dirham note. The reason for their choice, more befitting a currency note, had all to do With money and profit. For it was this curious sea creature that formed the basis Morocco’s Fortunes, long before Morocco was an organized nation. The Berbers of the desert were not mariners, nor were they especially interested in harvesting these snails and putting them to good use. It fell instead to sailors from far away, who came thousands of miles from the Levantine coast of the eastern Mediterranean, to realise the potential for using these gastropods to make a fortune. The great challenge would come in the business of acquiring them. For the sea in which these elegantly fashioned beasts lived so abundantly was a body of water very different in character from the placid waters of the Mediterranean. The gastropods were generally to be found, thanks to complex reasons of biology and evolutionary magic, clinging stubbornly to the rocks and reefs in the great and terrifying unknown of the Atlantic Ocean, well outside the known maritime world, and in a place where traditional navigational skills, honed in the Mediterranean, were unlikely to be of much value. To harvest these creatures, any mariners of sufficient boldness and foolhardiness would be obliged to grit their collective teeth and venture out into the deep waters of the greatest body of water it was then possible to imagine. But they did so, in the seventh century BC. They did so by blithely setting sail past the Pillars of Hercules, the exit gates of their own comfortable sea, and out into the great grey immensity of the limitless unknown beyond. The sailors who performed this remarkable feat, and yet did it so casually, were Phoenicians; they used sailing ships that were built initially only to withstand the waves of their familiar inland short sea but now had to tackle the much more daunting water of an unknown long sea beyond. There must have been something remarkable about the sailors, yes; but there must also have been something even more so about these particular North African snails that made them worth so much risk. And indeed there was. First, however, it seems appropriate to set the snails to one side and consider the lengthy and necessarily complex human journey that brought the Phoenicians to Morocco in the first place. 2. ORIGINS Early man’s march down to the ocean began in remarkably short order. Just what impelled him to move so far and so fast - curiosity, perhaps; or hunger; or a need for space and living room - remains an enigma. But the fact remains that a mere thirty thousand years after the fossil record shows him to have been foraging the grasslands of Ethiopia and Kenya — hunting for elephants and hippos, gazelles and hyenas, building shelters and capturing and controlling lightning-strike fires - he began to trek southward through Africa, a lumbering progress toward the continent’s edge, toward the southern coastlines and a set of topographical phenomena of the existence of which he had no inkling. The weather was becoming cooler as he went: the world was entering a major period of glaciation, and even Africa, astride the equator, was briefly (and before it became very cold indeed) more climatically equable, more covered with grassland, less wild with jungle. So trekking down south along the Rift was perhaps the least complicated of early man’s explorations - the mountain ranges on each side offering him a kind of protection, the rolling grassy countryside more benign than the jungles of before, the rivers less ferocious and more crossable. And so in due course, and after long centuries of a steady southern migration, man did reach the terminal cliffs, and he did find the sea. He would have been astonished to reach what no doubt seemed to be the edge of his known world, at the sudden sight of a yawning gap between what he knew and what he knew nothing about. At the same time, and from the safety of his high and grass-capped cliff top, he saw far down below him a boiling and seemingly endless expanse of water, thrashing and thundering and roaring an endless assault against the rocks that marked the margin of his habitat. Quite probably he was profoundly shaken, terrified by the sight of something so huge and utterly unlike anything he had known before. Yet he didn’t run yelping back to the safety of the savannah. All of the recently discovered evidence suggests he and his kin stopped where they were and made shelter on the shore. He chose first to do so in a large cave that was protected from the waves below by its location well above the high-tide levels. Then - whether timidly, or boldly, or apprehensively we will never know — he eventually clambered down and made it onto the beach proper. Then, while keeping himself well away from the thunder of the breakers, he knelt first to investigate, just as a child might do today, the magical mysteries of the seashore tide pools. With the cliffs of land on one side and the brute majesty of the water crashing on the other, he was briefly captivated by the entirely new world of the pools. He gazed into their depths, which were crystal clear, yet fronded with green and furtive with darting movement. He dipped his finger into the water, withdrew it, tasted — it was very different from all he had known before, not sour and brackish like the poorer of the desert wells, but not fresh and sweet, probably not good for him to drink. But nonetheless, it supported some kinds of life. The pool, as he looked at it more closely, was furiously alive with creatures -crabs, small fish, beasts with shells, weeds, anemones. And so by the same process of trial and error that had dominated his feeding and foraging habits on land in the millennia before, he eventually discovered in the pools an abundance of food for himself and his family. It was, moreover, good and nutritious food, and it was of a kind that he could hunt without running, that he could eat without cooking, that he could gather without putting his life at risk. Moreover, and mysteriously, it was a food that was somehow magically replenished with every one of the twice-daily refillings of the small watery world that lay before him. Inevitably, man’s fascination with this strange new aqueous universe brought him to settle by the sea. He had come at last to Pinnacle Point. 3. COASTING The Western Cape, the administrative name for the most southerly corner of South Africa, is where the waters of the Indian Ocean blend into the cold chill of the South Atlantic. It is a fearfully dangerous coastline, heaped with shipwrecks: oil tankers too big for Suez pass south of Cape Agulhas and then hug the coastline on their way to or from the wellheads, and seem to collide with each other with a dismaying frequency, resulting usually in the spillage of much unattractive cargo and the deaths of scores of African penguins. I have sailed in these waters, and know them to be very trying. Almost all vessels like to keep close to shore to avoid the notoriously extreme waves of the deeper sea, and there are few harbours to which one can run in the event of bad weather. The combination of crowded sealanes (all littered with local fishing vessels, too), cold and rough waters, and a forbidding and havenless rockbound coastline is one that few mariners — and certainly few quasi-inept strangers, as I used to be - care to experience. I still have my old South Africa Pilot, the blue-backed sailing directions I used on the yacht. The rather beautiful Vlees Bay it notes as a landmark lies between two rocky headlands - Vlees Point to the south and, nine miles to its north, Pinnacle Point. Back when the Pilot was written, its hydrographer-authors noted the presence near Pinnacle Point of “a group of white holiday bungalows,” noting them not for aesthetic reasons, but because they would have provided visible markers for ships making their way along the coast. This gathering of second homes has transmogrified over the thirty years since the Pilot was written into an almighty village — the Pinnacle Point Beach and Golf Resort — devoted to costly seafront hedonism. The peddlers of the resort like to say that the sea air, the Mediterranean climate, the white water, and the peculiar local floral kingdom known as fynbos, which here renders their ironbound coastal landscape unusually attractive, all combine to transform the place into “a new Garden of Eden”. Little do they know how apposite their slogan is. Pinnacle Point may be on the verge of enjoying fame among professional golfers and retired businessmen - but it has been known for very much longer to archaeologists consumed by the history of early man. For Pinnacle Point appears to be the place where the very first human beings ever settled down by the sea. Specifically there is a cave, known to the archaeological community as PP13B, situated a few-score feet above the wave line (though not quite out of earshot of the ninth tee), where evidence has been found showing that the humans who first sheltered there did such things as eat shellfish, hone blades, and daub themselves or their surroundings with scratchings of ochre. And they did so, moreover, 164,000 years ago, almost exactly. An American researcher, Curtis Marean, from the School of Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, was among the first to realise the importance of the cave, in 1999. He had long suspected, from what he knew of Africa’s chilly and inhospitable climate during the last major glaciation, that such humans as existed would probably travel to cluster along the southern coast, where the ocean currents brought warmer water down from near Madagascar, and where food was available both on the land and in the sea. He decided that these humans probably sheltered in caves - and so he looked along the coastline for caves that were sufficiently close to the then sea level (#litres_trial_promo) to allow the humans to get to the water, yet sufficiently elevated that their contents weren’t washed away by storms and high tides. Eventually he found PP13B and had a local ostrich farmer build him a complicated wooden staircase so his graduate students didn’t fall to their deaths clambering to the cave mouth - and began his meticulous research. Marean’s paper, published in Nature eight years later, drily recorded a quite remarkable find. There was ash, showing the inhabitants lit fires to keep themselves warm. There were sixty-four small pieces of rock fashioned into blades. There were fifty-seven chunks of red ochre, of which twelve showed signs of having been used to paint red lines on something — whether walls, faces, or bodies. And there were the shells of fifteen kinds of marine invertebrates, all likely to have been found in tide pools - there were shore barnacles, brown mussels, whelks, chitons, limpets, a giant periwinkle, and single whale barnacle that the Arizonans believe came attached to a whale skin found washed up on the beach. How the community decided to dine on shellfish remains open to conjecture. Most probably the inhabitants saw seabirds picking up the various shells, cracking them on the rock shelves, and gorging themselves on the flesh within. Disregarding the so far unattested assertion (#litres_trial_promo) that it was a brave man who ate the first oyster, the cave dwellers swarmed down to the oceanside and promptly wolfed down as many molluscs as they could find - eventually repeating what must have been this very welcome gastronomic adventure on every subsequent occasion that the tides generously provided them with more. The experience had a signal effect on this small colony, and on humankind in general - which makes it all the more remarkable that the financiers of the local golf course chose “Garden of Eden” as their slogan. The effect was of far greater significance than might be suggested by a mere change of diet, from buffaloes to barnacles, from lions to limpets. The limitless abundance of nourishing food meant the settlers could now do what it had never occurred to them to do before - they could settle down. They could at last begin to consider the rules of settlement - which included the eventual introduction of both agriculture and animal husbandry and, in good time, civilisation. Moreover, their ochre colourings suggest that for the first time these cave colonists began to employ symbols - signs perhaps of warning or greeting, information or suggestion, pleasure or pain, simple forms of communication that would have the most enduring of consequences. An early seaside human might go down to a certain crab-rich tide pool and merely expect or hope that others would follow him. But then he might decide to create a sign, to use his recently discovered colour-making stick to mark this same tide pool with an indelible ochre blaze — ensuring at a stroke that all his cave colleagues would now be able to identify the pool on any subsequent occasion, whether its initial finder went there or not. Thus was communication initiated — and from such symbolic message making would eventually emerge language - one of the many kinds of mental sophistication that distinguish modern man. 4. DEPARTURES The Atlantic, at its beginnings, was a very one-sided ocean, with many peoples distributed along its eastern coasts and yet for many thousands of years no one — no human or humanoid — on its western side. Moreover, its populated coasts were settled initially by newcomers from the continental heartlands, who had little experience with or aptitude for the ways of the sea. Not surprisingly it took a longtime for sailors to venture any distance from the coastline; it took thousands of years for the islands within the Atlantic to be explored; and it look an inordinately long time for anyone to cross the ocean. It was to remain a barrier of water, terrifying and impassable, for tens of thousands of years. Today’s research, which permits this kind of certainty, is hugely different from the archaeological diggings and probing that went on before Victorian times. The unravelling of the human genome in 2,000 made it possible to find out who in antiquity settled where, and when, simply by examining in great detail the DNA of the present-day inhabitants. The romance of finding potsherds and pieces of decorative artwork remains, of course, but for speedy determination of the spread of humankind, no better way can be devised than the computerized parsing of the genetic record. Communities were already forming on the Atlantic’s east side while native newcomers were still nervously pushing their way through the woodlands in the west. The first Neolithic peoples in the Levant had already created their world’s first town, Jericho. By now all the world’s peoples were Homo sapiens; no other humankind had made it beyond the end of the Palaeolithic epoch — and their advances, seen from this end of the telescope of time, seem to have taken place at an almost exponential rate. When Jericho was first founded - and this is when the western Atlantic was still essentially unpopulated - its inhabitants were busy carving stones and raising millet, sorghum, and einkorn wheat. Just a few thousand years later, when the first skin-wearing and shivering Ojibwe and Cree and Eskimos were doing their artless best to create the first hardscrabble settlements in the American north, men in the Fertile Crescent and beyond, in places as far away as Ireland, were already throwing pots, were raising dogs, pigs, and sheep, had created from stone the adze and the sickle blade, had built tombs and henges, had used salt to preserve their food, and were on the verge of smelting metals. • • • Moreover, these easterners had also made their first boats. Very early settlers in Holland and France had first carved or scorched the interior of fallen trees as much as ten thousand years ago, producing dugouts that they used to navigate their rivers and swamps and cross some of the less formidable estuaries. But these craft were really just canoes, at once both unstable and elephantine, and without keels, sails, rudders, or the kind of freeboard necessary for even the most limited push into the sea. It was to be the Crescent, once again, where the first major advance occurred: in Kuwait, two thousand years later, there appeared a proper sailing craft, made of rushes and reeds and lacquered with bitumen, that was capable of journeying at least through the tricky and unpredictable waters of the Red Sea and perhaps beyond. Oman also had such a boat, and in 2005 a very eager Omani sultan sponsored a crew of half a dozen to pilot a replica from Muscat to the Indian coast of Gujarat. The journey was to have been 360 miles, but the bitumen must have leaked, because the reeds in the hull became waterlogged three miles off the Arabian coast. The tiny craft promptly sank and everyone had to be rescued by a ship from the Royal Oman Navy. 5. SAILINGS The Phoenicians were the first to build proper ships and to brave the rough waters of the Atlantic. To be sure, the Minoans before them traded with great vigour and defended their Mediterranean trade routes with a swift and vicious naval force. Their ships - built with tools of sharp-edged bronze — were elegant and strong: they were made of cypress trees, sawn in half and lapped together, with white-painted and sized linen stretched across the planks, and with a sail suspended from a mast of oak, and oars to supplement their speed. But they worked only by day, and they voyaged only between the islands within a few days’ sailing of Crete; never once did any Minoan dare venture beyond the Pillars of Hercules, into the crashing waves of the Sea of Perpetual Gloom. The Minoans, like most of their rival thalassocracies, accepted without demur the legends that enfolded the Atlantic, the stories and the sagas that conspired to keep even the boldest away. The waters beyond the Pillars, beyond the known world, beyond what the Greeks called the oikumen?, the inhabited earth, were simply too fantastic and frightful to even think of braving. There might have been some engaging marvels: close inshore, the Gardens of the Hesperides, and somewhat farther beyond, that greatest of all Greek philosophical wonderlands, Atlantis. But otherwise the ocean was a place wreathed in terror: I can find no way whatever of getting out of this grey surf, Odysseus might well have complained, no way out of this grey sea. The winds howled too fiercely, the storms blew up without warning, the waves were of a scale and ferocity never seen in the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, the relatively peaceable inland sea of the classical world was to prove a training ground, a nursery school, for those sailors who in time, and as an inevitable part of human progress, would prove infinitely more daring and commercially ambitious than the Minoans. At just about the time that Santorini erupted and, as many believe, gave the final fatal blow to Minoan ambitions, the more mercantile of the Levantines awoke. From their sliver of coastal land — a sliver that, in time, would become Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel, and can be described as a land with an innate tendency towards ambition - the big Phoenician ships ventured out and sailed westwards, trading, battling, dominating. When they came to the Pillars of Hercules, some time around the seventh century BC, they, unlike all of their predecessors, decided not to stop. Their captains, no doubt bold men and true, decided to sail right through, into the onrushing waves and storms, and see before all other men just what lay beyond. The men from the port of Tyre appear to have been the first to do so. Their boats, broad-beamed, sickle-shaped “round ships” or galloi — so called because of the sinuous fat curves of the hulls, and often with two sails suspended from hefty masts, one at midships and one close to the forepeak—were made of locally felled and surprisingly skilfully machined cedar planks, fixed throughout with mortise and tenon joints and sealed with tar. Most of the long-haul vessels from Tyre, Byblos, and Sidon had oarsmen, too — seven on each side for the smaller trading vessels, double banks of thirteen on either side of the larger ships, which gave them a formidable accelerative edge. Their decorations were grand and often deliberately intimidating - enormous painted eyes on the prow, many-toothed dragons and roaring tigers tipped with metal ram-blades, in contrast to the ample-bosomed wenches later beloved by Western sailors. Phoenician ships were built for business. The famous Bronze Age wreck discovered at Uluburun in southern Turkey by a sponge diver in 1982 (and which, while not definitely Phoenician, was certainly typical of the period) displayed both the magnificent choice of trade goods available in the Mediterranean and the vast range of journeys to be undertaken. The crew on this particular voyage had evidently taken her to Egypt, to Cyprus, to Crete, to the mainland of Greece, and possibly even as far as Spain. When they sank, presumably when the cargo shifted in a sudden storm, the holds of the forty-five-foot-long galloi contained a bewildering and fatally heavy amassment of delights, far more than John Masefield could ever have fancied. (#litres_trial_promo) There were ingots of copper and tin, blue glass and ebony, amber, ostrich eggs, an Italian sword, a Bulgarian axe, figs, pomegranates, a gold scarab with the image of Nefertiti, a set of bronze tools that most probably belonged to the ship’s carpenter, a ton of terebinth resin, hosts of jugs and vases and Greek storage jars known as pithoi, silver and gold earrings, innumerable lamps, and a large cache of hippopotamus ivory. The possibility that the Uluburun ship journeyed as far as Spain suggests the traders’ ultimate navigational ambitions. The forty ingots of tin included in the cargo hints at their commercial motive. Tin was an essential component of bronze, and since the introduction of metal coinage in the seventh century BC, the demand for it had vastly increased. It was known anecdotally to the Levantines that alluvial tin was to be found in several of the rivers that cascaded down from the hills of central southern Spain - the Guadalquivir and the Guadalete most notably, but also the Tinto, the Odiel, and the Guadiana - and so the Phoenicians, at around this time, decided to move, and disregard the legendary warnings. For them, with the limited knowledge they had and the warnings on daily offer from the seers and priests, it was as audacious as attempting to travel into outer space: full of risk, and with uncertain rewards. And so, travelling in convoy for safety and comfort, the first brave sailors passed beneath the wrathful brows of the rock pillars - Gibraltar to the north and Jebel Musa to the south - made their halting way, without apparent incident, along the Iberian coastline, and finding matters more congenial than they imagined - for they were in sight of land all the time, and did not venture into the farther deep - they then set up the oceanic trading stations they would occupy for the next four centuries. The first was at Gades, today’s Cadiz; the second was Tartessus, long lost today, possibly mentioned in the Bible as Tarshish, (#litres_trial_promo) and by Aristophanes for the quality of the local lampreys, but believed to be a little farther north than Gades, along the Spanish Atlantic coast at Huelva. It was from these two stations that the sailors of the Phoenician merchant marine began to perfect their big-ocean sailing techniques. It was from here that they first embarked on the long and dangerous voyages that would become precedents for the following two thousand years of the oceanic exploration of these parts. They came first for the tin. But while this trade flourished, prompting the merchantmen to sail to Brittany and Cornwall and even perhaps beyond, it was their discovery of the beautiful murex snails that took them far beyond the shores of their imagination. The magic of murex had been discovered seven hundred years before, by the Minoans, who discerned that, with time and trouble, the molluscs could be made to secrete large quantities of a rich and indelible purple-crimson dye - of a colour so memorable the Minoan aristocracy promptly decided to dress in clothes coloured with it. The colour was costly, and there were laws that banned its use by the lower classes. The murex dye swiftly became — for the Minoans, for the Phoenicians, and most notably of all, for the Romans - the most prized colour of imperial authority. One was born to the purple: one so clad could only be part of the vast engine work of Roman rule, or as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, of the “emperors, senior magistrates, senators and members of the equestrian class of Ancient Rome”. By the seventh century BC, the sea-borne Phoenicians were venturing out from their two Spanish entrep?ts, searching for the molluscs that excreted this dye. They found little evidence of it in their searches to the north, along the Spanish coast; but once they headed southward, hugging the low sandy cliffs of the northern corner of Africa, and as the waters warmed, they found murex colonies in abundance. As they explored so they sheltered their ships in likely-looking harbours along the way — first in a town they built and called Lixus, close to Tangier and in the foothills of the Rif: there remains a poorly maintained mosaic there of the sea god Oceanus, apparently laid by the Greeks. Then they moved on south and found goods to trade in an estuary close to today’s Rabat. They left soldiers and encampments at still-flourishing coastal towns like Azemmour, and then, in boats with high and exaggerated prows and sterns, decorated with horses’ heads and known as hippoi - they pressed farther and farther from home, coming eventually to the islands that would be named Mogador. Here the gastropods were to be found in suitably vast quantities. And so this pair of islands, sheltering the estuary of the river named the Oued Ksob, is probably as far south as they went, (#litres_trial_promo) and this is where their murex trade commenced with a dominating vengeance. What are now known as Les ?les Purpuraires, bound inside a foaming vortex of tide rips, lie in the middle of the harbour of what is today the tidy Moroccan jewel of Essaouira. This town is now best known for its gigantic eighteenth-century seaside ramparts, properly fortified with breastworks and embrasures, spiked bastions, and rows of black cannon, and which enclose a handsome cloistered medina. The walkways on top of the curtain walls are the perfect place to watch the ever-crashing surf from the Atlantic rollers, especially as the sun goes down over the sea. The Phoenicians found that the snails gathered in their thousands there, in rock crevices, and they scooped them up in weighted and baited baskets. Extracting the dye — known chemically as 6.6’-dibromoindigo, and released by the animals as a defence mechanism — was rather less easy, the process always kept secret. The animal’s tincture vein had to be removed and boiled up in lead basins, and it would take many thousands of snails to produce sufficient purple to dye a single garment. It was traded, and the trade was tightly controlled, from the home port of the sailors who harvested it: Tyre. For a thousand years, genuine Tyrian purple was worth, ounce for ounce, as much as twenty times the price of gold. … The Phoenicians’ now-proven aptitude for sailing the North African coast was to be the key that unlocked the Atlantic for all time. The fear of the great unknown waters beyond the Pillars of Hercules swiftly dissipated. Before long a viewer perched high on the limestone crags of Gibraltar or Jebel Musa would be able spy other craft, from other nations, European or North African or Levantine, passing from the still blue waters of the Mediterranean into the grey waves of the Atlantic — timidly at first maybe, but soon bold and undaunted, just as the Phoenicians had been. “Multi pertransibunt, et augebitur scientia” was a phrase from the Book of Daniel that would be inscribed beneath a fanciful illustration, engraved on the title page of a book by Sir Francis Bacon, of a galleon passing outbound, between the Pillars, shattering the comforts and securities of old. “Many will pass through, and their knowledge will become ever greater,” it is probably best translated - and it was thanks to the purple-veined gastropods and the Phoenicians who were brave enough to seek them out, that such a sentiment, with its implication that learning only comes from the taking of chances and risk, would become steadily more true. It was a sentiment born at the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean. 6. WESTERINGS The Phoenicians eventually vanished from the scene in the fourth century BC, vanquished in battle, their country absorbed by neighbours and plunderers. And as their own powers waned, so other mariners in other parts of the world would begin to press the challenge of the new-found Atlantic ever more firmly. There was Himilco the Carthaginian (who lost the Second Punic War to the Romans, despite his fleet of forty quinquiremes), and there was Pytheas from Marseilles (who sailed up to and circumnavigated Britain, and gave it its name, then pressed on up to Norway, encountered ice floes, gave us the name Thule, and found the Baltic). Then came the Romans - a martial people never especially maritime in their mindset, and perhaps as a consequence somewhat nervous sailors at the beginning. According to the Roman historian Cassius Dio, some of the legionnaires involved in the Claudian invasion of Britain in AD 43 were so terrified at having to cross even so mild a body of Atlantic water as the Strait of Dover that they rebelled, sat on their spears, and refused to march, protesting that crossing the sea was “as if they had to fight beyond the inhabited earth”. In the end they did embark on their warships, and they did allow themselves to be transported to the beaches of Kent, and the empire did expand - but even at its greatest extent in AD 117, it was an empire firmly bounded by the Atlantic coast, from the Solway Firth in the north to the old Phoenician city of Lixus in Morocco to the south. They may have cast off and kept to the shallows for coastal trade, but otherwise the Romans kept a respectful distance from the real Atlantic, never to be as bold as their predecessors. Nor as bold as their eventual successors. For after a lengthy and puzzling period of mid-Atlantic coastal inactivity, the Arabs — sailing in the eighth century from their newly acquired fiefdom in Andalusia — and later the Genoese from northern Italy began trading in the North African Atlantic. Records show that they went as far south as the coast off Wadi Nun, close to the former Spanish possession (and a philatelists’ favourite) of Ifni, where the sailors met desert caravans from Nigeria and Senegal laden with all manner of African exotica to be hurried back to customers in Barcelona and the cities of Liguria. Yet navigational advancement and casual fearlessness were not to be a monopoly of the Mediterranean sailors. Long before the voyages of the Arabs and the Genoese - though long after the Phoenicians, whose efforts trumped those of everyone else — northern men had launched their boats into the much colder and rougher waters of the northern Atlantic. Their motives were different: curiosity, rather than commerce, tended to drive the northerners out into the oceans. Curiosity, and to a lesser extent, Empire and God. Two groups of sailors dominated, at least in the first millennium: the Vikings most famously, but initially and often half forgotten in the fog of history, the Irish. There could hardly be vessels more different than the products of the first millennium’s Scandinavian and Irish boatyards. The Vikings, men who to this day are renowned as having essentially conceived the tradition of freebooting violence, and who kept mostly to the coast, sailed out in their famous longships, bent on pillage and sack; the Norsemen, which is today’s preferred name for the more congenial and numerous of the early Atlantic’s Scandinavian traders and explorers, used slightly chubbier, more stolid vessels known in the plural as knarrer. Both were clinker-built wooden craft, high-prowed and in the case of the more menacing longships, more than a hundred feet from bow to stern, made of oak and with a figure high on the bow. Both kinds of craft had an enormous square sail, maybe thirty feet across, and weighing tons, and they needed a crew of at least twenty-five who, with a following wind, could manage fifteen knots on a smooth sea. The Irish, by contrast, sailed into the wild waters of their western seas in boats they still insist on calling, with typical Celtic self-deprecation, canoes. A curragh, the proper Gaelic name for today’s still-used descendant, is a small and stubby boat, round and squat where the longship and the knarr were sleek and fast. It required few crew, had a single sail and a single steering oar, and was made of a cage of ashwood laths covered with ox leather that had been soaked in a solution of oak bark and marinated in lanolin; the whole was stitched together with flax thread and leather thongs. Tim Severin, the noted Irish sailor-explorer who would later construct and sail one, asked a curragh maker from County Cork if such a tiny and fragile-looking craft could make it all the way to America. “Well now,” the builder replied, “the boat will do, just so long as the crew’s good enough.” … Legend has it that the wandering Irish abbot, St Brendan, was the first to make a sustained journey through the waters of the North Atlantic. Whether he was guided on the voyage by much more than blind faith in what he supposed to be a kindly god is unknown. Most imagine he carried with him the only Atlantic map then known - not that it would have been much use: it was an illustration — drawn in the first century, in Egypt, from Ptolemy’s biblically authoritative book, Geographica, which in later copied versions had the Atlantic as a mere sliver on the western edge of the sheet, and had named it either Oceanus Occidentalis or, more ominously to the north, Mare Glaciale. The beginning of the great Irish-Scottish missionary expeditions, all bent on exporting Christianity to the more remote nooks of the northern world, is generally dated with some precision at AD 563, the year that St Columba brought knowledge of the Trinity to lona, in Argyll. According to the rollicking yarns found in the medieval Navigatio Sancti Brendanis Abbatis, Brendan’s voyage was taken somewhat before this time; together with perhaps as many as sixty brother monks, he sailed from a small estuary on the Dingle peninsula of far southwestern Ireland, first north to the Hebrides, then on farther to the Faroe Islands and Iceland, and finally westward, maybe even to Newfoundland, the Promised Land of the Saints. … It is unknown who brought Christianity to the Faroes, but its legacy survives and is still in robust good health. When Brendan and his monastic brethren landed, after beating their way up through two hundred miles of gale-racked waters from Barra Head, the northern tip of the Hebrides, they were impressed by the islands’ innumerable sheep, by the extraordinary number and variety of seabirds and an almost equally abundant variety of fish, as well as by the rain, the sheer and eternally dripping rock faces and the deep green of the omnipresent tussock grass. Little has changed in almost fifteen hundred years. It was on a blustery spring day that I first sailed in the Faroes, and just as St Brendan is supposed to have done, crossing the strait between the two most westerly Faroese islands of Vagar and Mykines. I was in a little boat that bounced merrily across the swells, passing under basalt cliffs that were sheer and black and so high that they quite vanished into the swirling clouds above. But on close inspection the cliffs were not entirely black. Blotches of green grass stood out, edged by cascades of running water after each blustery shower passed through; and on each patch of grass, which must have been angled 70, 80 degrees, such that a man could not stand upright for fear of falling hundreds of feet down into the a bottomless sea of the purest indigo, were sheep. Young island men had placed them there as lambs, early in the spring. The island shepherds had climbed up the cliffs — fixed ropes could be seen, spun between a network of pitons and karabiners that glinted against the rocks when the sun was right —and men in Faroese rowing boats would hand up the lambs to them, one by one, and each climber would sling a mewing lamb across his shoulders and then heave himself, hand over hand, boots sliding on the wet rock face, up to the tiny and precipitous pasture. With one hand he would hold on to the rope, and with the other unclasp the frightened and warm-wet animal from around his neck and place it as firmly as possible on solid ground. A thousand feet below the boat looked tiny, the occupants barely visible, just craning faces gazing up to make certain everything was still all right. The young sheep would stagger for a moment, bewildered, would then sniff the air and look with amazement at the drop - and finally would realise how best to stand, foursquare, in order to survive. The animal, by now more calm, would tuck its nose into the rich grass that had been long fertilized with the guano from the whirling puffins, and remain there, nervously content, for the rest of the year. From down below I could see them, hundreds of wool-white dots, shifting slowly behind their noses and always ohmygod about to fall, but never apparently doing so, even in the gales and when the rains made the grass as slick as oilskin and blubber. St Brendan, if he had voyaged to the Faroes at all, sailed almost due northwards from the Hebrides. But after his visit (where his Navigatio reports encounters with others similar to him, suggesting he was not the first Irishman to get there), the prospect of continuing north was quite bleak: to do so would mean cold, and then intense cold, and then ice. Eastwards, too, was no picnic: the expedition would have ended on the known and dangerously rockbound coast of Norway. So westwards was the only way to go; but the small boat had to brave seas and storms and winds and currents possibly entirely beyond the competence of even the most navigationally expert of this group of innocent and most likely discalced Clonfert friars. When Tim Severin took a replica boat across the Atlantic in the summers of 1976 and 1977 (arguing that since it had taken St Brendan fully seven seasons to cross the ocean, he could legitimately take two), he made landfall in the Faroes, in Iceland, and eventually, after weathering ferocious storms in the Denmark Strait, in Newfoundland. His expedition proved it was entirely possible to cross the Atlantic in a leather boat, providing (as the Irish curragh builder had earlier told him) the crew was good enough. But while he showed that such a journey could have been made, Severin did not prove that such a journey had been made, nor that Irish monks had ever done such a thing, had been to any of these three countries at the time suggested. Nor has any firm evidence ever been adduced either that Irishmen visited or settled, or, more crucially, that they ever completed a crossing of the ocean. No early Irish artefact has ever been found in North America. So the Irish were almost certainly not the linear antecedents of Christopher Columbus. Moreover, even though many Italians claim to this day that Columbus had no predecessors at all, and that 1492 was a true historical watershed for transoceanic contact, a discovery in the middle of the twentieth century changed everything. An archaeological find in northern Newfoundland in 1961 proved that the first ocean crossing had been made four hundred years after the supposed evangelising mission of the Irish, and fully four hundred years before the commercial expedition of Columbus, but neither by an Irishman nor a Genoese. The first European to cross the Atlantic and reach the New World was a Norseman, a Viking, and probably from a family born in the fjord lands south of the coastal towns of Bergen and Stavanger, in Norway. 7. ARRIVALS Four years before these archaeologists announced their discovery, a group of antiquarian booksellers piqued public interest in the possibility that Columbus had been completely outdone. In 1957 a young dealer in New Haven, Connecticut, Laurence Witten, approached Yale University with an extraordinary offer: he had bought, by way of a dealer in Italy, what appeared to be a fifteenth-century map of the known world, but with one crucial feature that had never before been seen: the presence of a large island, with two elongated indentations on its east coast, situated on the left side of the map to the west of Greenland. The island was identified on the map as Vinlanda, and the rubric above it, written in Latin, said that it had been visited in the eleventh century, first by “companions Bjarni and Leif Eriksson,” and later by a legate from the Apostolic See. It was eight years before the discovery of the map was announced - mainly because Paul Mellon, the banking millionaire who had eventually acquired it from Witten and offered it as a gift for his alma mater, decided he would hand it over only once it had been authenticated. Eight years of tests later, a team of British Museum specialists finally declared it to be genuine, and Mellon allowed Yale to release the news. It sparked a sensation - as if it had been an arm of the True Cross, a fresh revelation about the Shroud of Turin or the rudder from Noah’s Ark. It was “the most exciting cartographic discovery of the century,” said the university’s curator of maps, “the most exciting single acquisition in modern times,” said the head of the Beinecke Library, “exceeding in significance even the Gutenberg Bible.” It made the front pages everywhere. What thrilled the world - or at least most Americans (though not Italian-Americans) and all Norwegians - was that the map appeared to be final cartographic confirmation that the “Vinland” famously mentioned in two of the best-known thirteenth-century Icelandic sagas was in North America. The map appeared to prove once and for all that Leif Eriksson — Erik the Red’s peripatetic Iceland-born son - had indeed, and in the very precisely remembered year AD 1001, landed somewhere on the American continent. Here was documentary confirmation of something all red-blooded Italians had long feared - that it was not Columbus who had first crossed the Atlantic, but an eleventh-century Norseman. Adding insult to this injury to Genoese pride was the fact that Yale, with magnificently self-evident cheek, chose to display its Viking treasure by throwing a lavish celebration dinner featuring a Viking longboat carved from ice and the normally owlish university librarian wearing an iron helmet flown over by the King of Norway - and held the party on Tuesday, 12, October, that year’s Columbus Day. It was hardly the most appropriate moment to suggest that a Norwegian made the first American landfall, and it caused much huffing. “Twenty-one million Americans will resent this great insult,” said the then president of the Italian-American Historical Society. The only problem was that the fragile and yellowing little parchment document, eleven inches by sixteen, has turned out to be a tissue freighted with all manner of uncertainties and bitter argument. The book dealer had lied about where and how it had come to be his. The Italian (an irony not lost) who had sold it to him (for $3,500) and who had previously tried in vain to sell it to the British Museum turned out to have been both a fascist and a convicted thief. Tests on the map’s ink showed high levels of chemicals that had not been invented at the time the map was said to have been made - and although the parchment itself was proved to be fifteenth century, it appeared to have been coated with an oil made in the 1950s. The fold down the map’s middle turned out not to be a fold at all, but a splice, with traces of curious chemicals at its edges. And the map’s Latin text was peppered with the ? ligature, a lexical form seldom used at the time of the map’s supposed creation. It all became too much for Yale, and in 1974 the exasperated librarian declared their costly treasure to be a forgery. This was not, however, to be the end of the story. Further tests were conducted in the mid-1980s, and these suggested that the tests of the previous decade had been botched - and so in 1987 Yale changed its mind once more, said it now had confidence in the document and had it insured for $25 million, just in case. At the time of writing the sceptics and the believers were still endlessly swapping the ascendancy: more chemical and spectroscopic and subatomic tests have raised ever more complicated doubts, and the name of a curious anti-Nazi forger (#litres_trial_promo) who might have had a powerful though complicated motive for forging such a map has come to light, even though the most senior of all Danish conservators was as recently as 2009 still insisting that the map was true. In any case, there is a further irony, a further puzzle. The ink on the map is now fading to the point of near invisibility, despite Yale’s best efforts at conservation. Just why such deterioration might suddenly accelerate, nine hundred years after the map was supposedly drawn, remains unexplained. If this is all an elaborate ruse, then this fading has produced an ironic coda to the story: just like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, the Vinland Map seems to be drifting away into nothingness. However, despite all the brouhaha surrounding Yale’s document, the finding in Scandinavian libraries of a series of other (and this time undoubtedly genuine) charts, and a further discovery in 1960 that was brought about by what those maps had drawn onto them, finally dashed any further claim for the primacy of Columbus. The other maps were all fair copies of a much less sensational, but in the end far more useful document that is known today as the Sk?lholt Map. It was drawn in Iceland in 1570 by a schoolmaster named Sigurd Stefansson, simply as an exercise to show from his readings of a variety of Icelandic texts just where the Nordic explorers and traders had landed on the various shores of the North Atlantic Ocean. The original is long gone; but the copies that exist all show the same thing: an Atlantic - here called Mare Glaciale, the icebound sea, with islands such as the Faroes, Iceland, Shetland, and Orkney all in their more or less accurate relative positions - bordered by an almost wholly connected skein of landmasses. There was Norway, of course; then Gronlandia, then Helleland, Markland and Skralingeland (which Nordic scholars suggest — as flagstone-land, forest-land, and land-of-the savages - to be portions of Labrador); and then finally, jutting from the southwest of the chart, a slender, north-pointing peninsula — marked simply as Promonterium Vinlandiae, the Peninsula of Vinland. This was the clue that concluded a decades-long search. Ever since the Icelandic sagas had mentioned Vinland, Americans, and Canadians, mainly in the north-east, had been scouring their properties and their neighbourhoods for anything that might suggest a one-time Norse settlement — for who would not wish to know that European feet had been placed first on their front garden, or that Nordic sailors had walked first on their own village beach? Runestones - all of them fakes - popped up in unlikely places like Minnesota and Oklahoma; a Nordic statue was uncovered beside Thoreau’s Merrimack River; the unusual colour and height of the Narragansett Indians of Rhode Island was bruited as evidence that Norsemen had once set up a colony near Providence; and a wealthy Harvard chemistry professor named Eben Horsford (#litres_trial_promo) claimed to have found the site of Leif Eriksson’s house in Cambridge, no less, beside a traffic light near Mount Auburn Hospital. He, along with a violinist named Ole Bull, raised funds to have a statue raised to the Nordic settler on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It still stands. Despite all this nonsense, in the mid-1950s a Norwegian scholar of Viking history, Helge Ingstad, felt certain from his studies of the Sk?lholt Map that he knew where Leif Eriksson’s Vinland must have been. It was, he surmised, in the Canadian province of Newfoundland, and somewhere on a great north-running peninsula, under the mountains of the Long Range, which lies on the island’s western side. Armed with this educated hunch, he began to make annual excursions to Canada, asking repeated questions of villagers and farmers in the outports between the town of Stephenville Crossing and the tiny inlets nearly three hundred miles north, on the shores of the Strait of Belle Isle. One day in 1960, he and his daughter Benedicte sailed on their small yacht up to the tiny settlement of L’Anse aux Meadows, at the very northern tip of the island. There Ingstad met a local fisherman, George Decker, and asked him the question he felt he had asked a thousand times. Were there by any chance any ruins nearby, which might have been from a settlement of Norsemen? Decker replied with a studied casualness. “Yeah, I know where there are some old ruins. Follow me.” He took a stunned Ingstad over a field of cloudberries, wild iris, and gale-stunted pines, to where there were stood almost a dozen very large grass-covered mounds, all set on a slight slope that ran down to Epaves Bay. Decker watched as his visitor gulped with amazement. He was delighted that the Norwegian was so astonished, he said later, but often wondered to himself why it had taken outsiders so long to get around to asking. In that instant, the world - at least, the world of archaeologists — shifted on its axis. Once the diggings began history was rewritten, profoundly, and at a stroke. L’Anse aux Meadows — the words are a linguistic contortion of the French for The Bay of the Jellyfish — became in short order the most famous archaeological site in North America. With barely a cirrus cloud of doubt, this spot is now acknowledged as the base of operations for the Norsemen who settled and lived and created homes for themselves on the far side of the sea. Quite possibly - quite probably, in fact - L’Anse aux Meadows was the Vinland settlement itself. Leif Eriksson, his kin and his kith, provably and finally, had now joined that select group of men and women who had been first to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The excavations continued. They were conducted by Ingstad and his wife over the next seven years, the pair reburying the site each winter, for protection against both the ferocious snowstorms and the destructive grinding of icebergs washed up on the beach. Formal public announcement of the find was made in the pages of the National Geographic magazine in November 1964. It was revealed that the Norsemen had built themselves a total of three large stone-and-sod houses and five workshops, one of which clearly was a smithy. Iron nails had been found, and spindles, and a copper pin used for decoration. Specialists working with the University of Toronto’s main subatomic particle accelerator and at the Radiological Dating Laboratory in Trondheim both brought the very latest technologies to bear on the various samples - mainly charcoal from the smithy furnace - and came up with agreement that everything at L’Anse aux Meadows had been created between 975 and 1020. The sagas’ date for the Vinland settlement — depending how the stories were read — was 1002. It was like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, snapping itself neatly into place, locked solid. The excavations continued until 1976, after the Canadian parks service had taken over from the then quite elderly Ingstads. They found cooking pits, bathhouses, and an enclosure for keeping cattle. Rotted remains of butternuts were also discovered - and since agricultural climatologists are certain that in the first millennium, no butternut tree could have grown north of New Brunswick, it is assumed that the visitors must have taken their knarrer and penetrated even farther south. It is also assumed that they sailed south-westwards from their camp, crossed the notoriously bumpy waters of the St Lawrence estuary to the American continent, eventually landing on Gasp?, or on Cape Breton Island, and then heading either upriver or even overland to seek richer pastures and tastier crops. (Since New Brunswick also is the northerly limit for the appearance of wild grapes, it offers some additional credence to the Norse use of the name Vinland—Wine Land.) A second site (smaller in extent than L’Anse aux Meadows) may have been found more recently: archaeologists working on the southern end of Baffin Island in 2000 say that the discovery of sod-and-stone walls, a whalebone spade, and a crude form of a house drainage system all suggest the work of Norsemen. Rival scholars deride this as wishful thinking and insist it is no more than an indication of the gathering sophistication of the palaeoInuit of the Dorset culture who are known to have occupied this corner of the Canadian subarctic. Those who support the Norse claim say it suggests their Viking-inspired knarrer were shuttling between sites in Newfoundland and Labrador and the Hudson Bay islands for far longer than imagined, and that the notion that all the Europeans scuttled back to Greenland or Norway and left Canada alone for centuries is myopic and wrong-headed. But one further intriguing morsel of history remains. In 1004 a child was born in Vinland. It was a boy, named Snorri, the child of Gudrid and Thorfin Karlsefni. According to an Icelandic custom that continues to this day, the lad was given a surname derived from his father’s first name, thus Snorri Thorfinsson. He was, undoubtedly, the first European child to be born on the American continent. Since he travelled back to Greenland with his parents if and when the L’Anse aux Meadows outpost was eventually closed down, in around 1008, he most probably died there, or in Europe - unaware to the last that he would in time come to be remembered as Canada’s first European native son. 8. REPUTATIONS How should history regard this entire Nordic Atlantic venture, when compared with the ocean crossing much more famously undertaken five centuries later, by Christopher Columbus? It certainly seems true, so far as archaeology and literature indicate, that no other sailor crossed the ocean with success (#litres_trial_promo) in the nearly five centuries between the Erikssons’ ventures over the Labrador Sea in 1001 and the self-styled Admiral of the Ocean Sea’s six-week journey from Andalusia to San Salvador island in the late summer of 1492. But even though these expeditions had precisely the same initial outcome, that of firmly placing European men onto American shores, there are many differences between the two voyages. It is 4,500 miles from Bergen to Newfoundland, but Leif Eriksson did not have to travel nearly so far, because he first came to Newfoundland only from Greenland, less than a thousand miles away. Not that this short journey was exactly a picnic. In winter, though the sea does not freeze, the weather is dire, the sea thick with ice, packs and bergs and the much more dangerous half-submerged chunks known unimaginatively as bergy bits. The winds Eriksson encountered were exceptionally fierce and almost always came from the west, or the northwest, contrary to the Norsemen’s intended direction. These gales were so fierce the tiny knarrer would have had to lie to for hours, sometimes for days at a time. Masts broke, sails ripped, everyone aboard was drenched, chill and miserable. Even in summertime matters were little better: drenching fogs and the endless high-latitude daylight - which mightily complicated sleep - made for unhappy navigation. When the party finally reached land -which was pocketed with settlements of the Dorset people -they made bases for themselves, peaceably and with a recognised veneer of civilised behaviour (these were Norsemen, remember - not Vikings). They brought women with them on the comparatively short voyage across the Labrador Sea; they settled into routines of amiable domesticity; and they got on reasonably well, so far as one can tell, with the local peoples, even though their word, skraelinger, described them as barbarians (mainly since the natives wore animals’ skins, not clothes of woven wool, as did the Europeans). The Norsemen refused to give the skraelinger any weapons: the sagas say they bartered with them, employing as trade goods not beads or useless trinkets, but milk, which the Eskimos appeared to like. All told, the Norsemen’s brief stay in America seems to have been motivated by curiosity, marked by maritime courage, and sustained with a degree of apparent civility. The much better-known voyage of Columbus, by contrast, was motivated by a combination of commercial ambition, a growing Spanish exasperation at the blockage of land trade routes to the east by the Ottoman Turks (and the thought that this East could be reached instead by heading west and sailing halfway around the world), and the evangelical yearnings of the Church. It turned out to be a voyage carried out in comparative nautical comfort, and it never actually reached the North American mainland, with Columbus to his death believing he had reached the East - the Indies - and in all probability, Japan. His three small carracks, the Ni?a, the Pinta and the Santa Mar?a, were cleverly routed to the south of the Canaries (for no one would dispute that Columbus was an exceptionally canny navigator). He then turned right, due west - for he supposed that China and Japan, the cities Marco Polo knew, and the islands where the spices grew were all on the same latitude as the Canaries — and he led his tiny squadron and his ninety crewmen on a relatively pleasant sojourn through sunny seas pressed only by gentle easterly trade winds which sped the vessels toward their destination without significant incident. It was to be a far longer sea voyage without stops than any hitherto known - and since no navigator knew the extent of the sea into which they were heading, it must have been frightening: would they fall off the edge of the world, would they reach an area of impossible storms, were there sea monsters, whirlpools, angry gods? But by great good fortune the three tiny vessels sashayed their way over the waves quite easily, their logs sometimes recording passages of more than 150 miles a day, cruising at up to eight knots. They did so until that heart-stopping predawn, moonlit moment - on the long-remembered date, 12, October, 1492 — when the Pinta’s lookout, Rodrigo de Triana, spotted a line of white cliffs directly ahead. It was the sudden vision of a new world — or the New World, as it would soon be realised. This first piece of territory seen was almost certainly one of the outer cays of what are now the Bahamas, most probably the low and sandy windward outpost now known as Watling’s Island. Columbus had his flagship’s longboat convey him ashore under the banner of Castile, then kissed the ground, wept grateful tears, annexed the place - as Isabella had given him the contractual right to do — and named it for the Holy Savior, or in Spanish, San Salvador. Rodrigo de Triana was given five thousand maravedis (#litres_trial_promo) for being so adept a lookout. Had this one journey been all, the reputation and worth of Columbus might have remained intact. But of course, his assumptions were wrong: So great a shame that the spice islands were never to be found so close! So great a pity that a jungle-covered landmass - yet still a part of the Indies, the Admiral continued to insist — had somehow so inconveniently settled itself down, blocking easy passage! But Columbus was not content with this single journey-there were to be three more ventures, all bent on the acquisition of land for Spain, and for periods of annexation and governorship that were marked for their cruelty, tyranny, greed, vindictive-ness, and racism. Columbus favoured slavery; he had a long record of cruelty towards the native peoples; and he condemned his own followers for various infractions, having their tongues cut out, their noses and ears sliced away, the women given the vilest of public humiliations. On his second voyage he brought a cargo of pigs, which he set free and which bred and provided succeeding seamen-explorers with food (but may also have brought with them some of the diseases that helped decimate the native populations). His third voyage, in 1498, brought him to the American mainland, in Venezuela, where he found the Orinoco and assumed it to be one of the rivers mentioned in Genesis; his fourth, in 1502 - made while he was still clinging stubbornly to the belief that all his discoveries were unfound parts of the Indies, such that on this particular voyage he might well find the Strait of Malacca - brought him to Honduras. And it was here that he heard whispers of an isthmus, and of a short land passage to another, mysterious ocean. But the penny never dropped - and the notion that America was a continent, and that the body of water that separated his native home from the lands he was conquering was an ocean, separate from the waters of the east, just never occurred to him. The sea he had crossed was called the Atlantic, true; but in Columbus’s mind, the Atlantic was an ocean cunningly joined to the Pacific, quite as seamlessly as if the two seas had long been one. Christopher Columbus, though he was a courageous and highly skilled sailor, was not the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean. While his voyages introduced Europe to the existence of an entirely new universe across the seas, he himself never reached North America. And in the prosecution of his aims and his duties he behaved not infrequently as a tyrant and a bully, as a slaver, an unrepentant imperialist and a man of immense avarice and self-promotion. And yet for all of this Americans have adopted and proudly sport as central to their identity the name Columbus, in Columbia; the District of Columbia; the Columbia River; Columbia, South Carolina; Columbia University; Columbus, Ohio - and Columbus Day. For the United States the reputation of the man remains intact despite the best efforts of enlightened teachers. The troubling details of his life, if known, appear in fact to trouble very few. The calendar still bends before his brand. Ever since 1792, when New Yorkers marked the three hundredth anniversary of his first landing; ever since 1869, when the Italians in the newly founded San Francisco held a similar celebration; ever since 1892, when President Benjamin Harrison urged all Americans to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary; ever since FDR made 12 October a holiday; and ever since 1972, when President Nixon shifted its observance to the second Monday in October, Americans have taken formal and honoured notice of Christopher Columbus, with the establishment of a great national holiday in his name. And even if he was somewhat more violent and avaricious than was perhaps necessary, history generally treats him well. By contrast, Leif Eriksson, who almost certainly was the first man to cross the ocean, who probably did make it onto the mainland, and who was a man whose motives seem to have been directed to the general good and who left no legacy of harm, passes largely unremembered, little memorialised. True, there has been since 1964 an annual and presidentially proclaimed Leif Eriksson Day to honour the contributions of Nordic people to the United States. Minnesota and Wisconsin were the first to observe it, by closing some offices, and with some local merchants offering discounts. But in all other respects the American nation remains largely mute and oblivious to the Norsemen. Most Americans prefer pizza, as someone put it, to lutefisk. It seems a peculiar misreading of history, one that performs a small and nagging injustice to the long story of the Atlantic Ocean. Matters are changing, though slowly. Perhaps in time a wise counsellor will accept the inequity and will publicly suggest some measure of right by moving to limit the excesses of the one memorial and to restore to its proper degree the unsung other. But one has to doubt it. Perhaps the reason for this lies less in Italian chauvinism and Nordic modesty, and more in the one undeniable reality: that though Leif Eriksson got to North America first, he never truly realised he was there. Nor did he suppose that he was anywhere of particular importance. One might argue that he just didn’t get it. As the historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin once put it: “What is remarkable is not that the Vikings actually reached America, but that they reached America and even settled there for a while without discovering America.” And so their reputation has suffered for the lack of ambition of their wanderings, for their lack of vision, ever since. … And there is always one further question that niggles away at critics of colonial adventuring and white hegemony. Is it conceivable that the pre-Columbian peoples themselves, the original inhabitants of the Americas, ever tried to head out east across the ocean, to Europe? Could any of these - the Caribs, say, or the indigenous Newfoundlanders or Mexicans — have made the journey that Eriksson and Columbus eventually made, but in reverse? Circumstantial evidence hints at the possibility, certainly. Tobacco leaves and traces of coca in Egyptian sarcophagi. A sculpted bronze head in the Louvre, said to be Roman of the second century AD, and which displays features uncannily similar to those of Native Americans. Mosaics from near Pompeii with images of objects that resemble pineapples, chilli peppers, and lemons. And the suggestions — made with varying degrees of enthusiasm by a small army of competing translators — that Christopher Columbus encountered a husband and wife from the Americas, in of all places Galway, Ireland, in 1477. Whether he met them socially, or saw their corpses, or merely heard of their existence, remains tantalisingly unclear. “People from Katayo came to the east,” wrote one of the translators of the marginal scribbles Columbus made in a history text that he was known to have read. “We have seen many notable things, and especially in Galway, in Ireland, a man and a woman on some wood dragged by the storm, of admirable form.” But could a couple have survived, in a dugout canoe - for that is the kind of craft most Caribs appear to have been using at the time the Europeans first saw them - for a journey that crossed the entire Atlantic Ocean, from the Americas to Ireland? The Gulf Stream might have carried them — it carries all manner of flotsam with it. But they would have sailed with it at a mere three knots — a total of fifty days of sailing to reach the Irish coast, and with neither food nor fresh water to sustain them. It seems highly doubtful that they came to Ireland by accident; and if it was by planning and design, which is the only possible manner in which any transatlantic voyage could reasonably be made, then one suspects that there would have been others who tried to follow them, that there would have been more artefacts of their journeying found, more evidence that such a voyage had happened. And none has ever turned up. The champions of the theory that Native Americans reached Europe by sea are as vocal as they are passionate, but thus far the arguments remain thin. The balance of probability suggests that it was Europeans - northern or southern — who sailed across the Atlantic first. 9. REALISATIONS In a matter of months after the death of Christopher Columbus in 1506, three men — a Tuscan from Chianti who at one time or another was a sailor-explorer, a pimp, and a sorcerer; and the two others simply solid German cartographers from Freiburg — put the requisite two and two together and gave formal birth both to a continent that would be called America and to a recognizably self-contained ocean called the Atlantic. Columbus had found only the vaguest adumbrations of a continent-sized landmass. He had encountered, charted, and colonized hundreds of tropical islands, as well as a subequatorial coastline that sported rivers big enough to suggest that they drained something rather larger. But in all of his voyages he had found no real evidence of a great land that was large enough to block westward passage on all the navigationally available latitudes. But then towards the turn of the century news started to trickle in from other explorers that hinted that such a body might exist. John Cabot, for instance, had almost certainly landed in eastern Newfoundland in 1497, reporting back to his sponsors in Bristol on the presence of a large landmass. Then two Portuguese brothers, Miguel and Gaspar C?rte-Real, reached a variety of points also on the northern coast, and on their return to Lisbon in the autumn of 1501 suggested - and for the first time by anyone - that the land they had just encountered in what are now the Canadian maritime provinces might well be physically connected to the landmasses already discovered to the south - the body of land we now know as Honduras and Venezuela. A somewhat inelegant little map had also started to confirm the gathering suspicions of the educated European public. It had been drawn in 1500 by Juan de la Cosa, a Cantabrian pilot who had twice accompanied Columbus and who would make five further voyages to the New World - only to be murdered by natives with poisoned arrows in 1509, on the Atlantic coast of Colombia near Cartagena. But his map, held today in Madrid’s naval museum, lives on; it was the first ever made that displayed a representation of the New World - an edge-to-edge border of territory on the map that lay far to the west of Europe. It was marked by an enormous concave embayment, with the lands found by Cabot on its northern side, those found by Columbus and company to the south (and all of the territory, thanks to the Treaty of Tordesillas, (#litres_trial_promo) supposedly Spanish). But no names were offered on the map, either on the landmass or on the sea. That was to happen just seven years later, in 1507. It took the German mapmaker Martin Waldseem?ller to fasten the name America onto what now even more clearly was a newly recognised continent. Waldseem?ller and his poetically inclined colleague, Matthias Ringmann, did so despite a welter of confusions, deceptions and falsehoods that have intrigued scholars and occupied writers for centuries, because of a vastly popular booklet they had lately seen. This slender book, truly more of a pamphlet, was known as the Mundus Novus, and together with a subsequent brief document known as the Soderini Letter, was purportedly written by Amerigo Vespucci, the colourful Italian explorer and sorcerer (and in later life the aforesaid pimp) who appears to have been the very first to claim from his own navigational evidence that the great body of land in the west was in fact a separate continent, the fourth part of the world. The Mundus Novus is a prolix, flamboyant, and in detail quite unreliable work, thirty-two pages long, printed and written in Latin, addressed initially to his Medici sponsor and then published in 1503 simultaneously, like the opening of a modern feature film, in many cities around Europe. Printers in Paris, Venice and Antwerp saw to it that Vespucci’s graphic descriptions of his sailing adventures along the coasts of what we now know to be Guyana, Brazil (where he was the first European to enter the mouth of the Amazon), and perhaps even Patagonia, enjoyed a massive circulation. The book was indeed wildly popular - helped no doubt by Vespucci’s loving discussions of the cosmetic self-mutilation, anal cleanliness and sexual practices of the people he met along the way. It was a book that not only gave him personal immortality: it also led to the explosion of European interest in the New World and the beginnings of a rolling tide of exploration and immigration that one might fairly say has not abated since. The crucial sentence in Vespucci’s pamphlet stated simply that “[on] this last voyage of mine … I have discovered a continent in those southern regions that is inhabited by more numerous peoples than in our Europe, Asia or Africa, and in addition I found a more pleasant and temperate climate than in any other region known to us….” He had found a new continent - or, more precisely, he had identified the land that he had found as a new continent, something that Columbus, some years before, had been entirely disinclined to do. To Columbus it was - and it wrongly was — an already existing continent: Asia. To Vespucci it was — and it correctly was — a totally new continent, and at the very outset it was a continent without a name. It fell to the Freiburg mapmakers to give it one. At the time the pair happened to be working in an academic community in the Vosges mountains of eastern France - and it was here that they got finally to christen this great body of land, and to offer it an identity it would then have for all time. Both of the mapmakers had read the Mundus Novus; both had read and were taken in by the more evidently forged Soderini Letter. Both agreed that in the preparation of an enormous new world map that had been commissioned from them, they would give, at least to the thinly sinuous southern part of the new continent that would be drawn on their masterpiece, a name. They would give it the feminine form of the Latinized version of Amerigo Vespucci’s Christian name: the properly feminine place-nouns of Africa, Asia and Europa would now be joined, quite simply, by a brand-new entity that they would name America. And so, in 1507, when the new map was published, and with images of the two giants of Ptolemy and Vespucci presiding in profile over an entirely fresh cartographic representation of the planet (but with neither Leif Eriksson nor Christopher Columbus in illustrated evidence anywhere), in large letters across the southern half of the southern continental discovery, just where Uruguay is situated today, was this single word. America. It was written in majuscule script, a tiny bit crooked, curiously out of scale and looking a little last-minute and just a little tentative — but nevertheless and incontrovertibly, there. The name caught on. A globe published in Paris in 1515 has the word written on both segments of the continent, north and south. It was published in a Spanish book in 1520; another from Strasbourg five years later listed “America” as one of the world’s regions; and finally, in 1538, Mercator, the new arbiter of the planet’s geography, placed the phrasal titles “North America” and “South America” squarely on the two halves of the fourth continent. With that the name was fully secure; and it would never be changed. And with a new continent in place, so the sea that lay between it and the Old World continents of Europe and Africa - the sea that had variously been named the Ocean Sea, the Ethiopian (#litres_trial_promo) Ocean, Oceanus Occidentalis, the Great West Sea, the Western Ocean, Mare Glaciale, and by Herodotus in The Histories in the fifth century BC,the Atlantic - became, at last and with certainty, a discrete and bordered ocean, too. It was no longer appended to any other sea. It was no longer a part of some larger and more amorphous worldwide body of water. It was a thing — a vast and, back then, almost unimaginable thing, true - but it was a thing nonetheless, with borders, edges, coastlines, a rim, a margin, a fringe, a brink, and a northern, a southern, a western, and an eastern limit. From a simply inexplicable green-grey immensity that stretched without apparent cease beyond the Pinnacle Point tide pools, to an even more frightening turbulence of waves and winds raging beyond the Pillars of Hercules, to a warm sea stained with purple dye or a cold sea choked with ice, and to a body of little self-importance and which was supposedly conjoined with other seas that lay far beyond, the Atlantic Ocean now at last, and from the moment of being given the early-sixteenth-century imprimatur of Mercator, had a proper identity, all of its own. It remained now to find out just what that identity was, and to set this new-found ocean in its rightful place on the world stage. The Atlantic had been found. Now it demanded to be known. Chapter TwoALL THE SHOALS AND DEEPS WITHIN (#ulink_7b9a0d57-6914-547c-b443-eed340d4169e) Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel, And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. 1. THE DEFINING AUTHORITY The Principality of Monaco, that sunny haven for shady cash on the French Riviera, is not a place sufficiently blessed by a noble history to be littered with an abundance of grand public statues. The parks and plazas naturally have plenty of marble representations of members of the Grimaldi family, the Genoese notables who have run the place since the thirteenth century. There is a kindly sculpted bust of Hector Berlioz, who is remembered for once falling over near the Opera House, and there is a dull bronze rendering of the Argentine speed demon Juan Manuel Fangio, standing beside the Formula One Mercedes in which he won so many of his local car races. But those monuments aside, there is little other statuary of interest - except in the entrance to a rather anonymous-looking modern office building on the Quai Antoine the First, beside a harbour that is permanently jammed gunwale-to-gunwale with large cruising craft. There stands a striking and rather magnificent statue in polished teak, of the great Greek god of the Sea, Poseidon. He stands there decently naked, full-bearded, and wielding his trident in the stance of a guardian outside the little-known office that, since 1921, has defined, delineated, and approved the official names of all the many oceans and seas, bays and inlets on the surface of the planet. The International Hydrographic Office has been in Monaco since 1921, invited to this improbable setting (#litres_trial_promo) by the then ruler, Prince Albert I, a man who collected charts and portolans and had a fleet of research vessels, and held great admiration for and great knowledge of the deep-sea fish and marine mammals for which he went exploring. The organisation he helped create has as members almost all the oceanside states of the world — Algeria to Venezuela, by way of Jamaica, Tonga, and Ukraine, and with all the obvious big-sea countries among the founders. One of its principal mandates is to define - in a de facto rather than a de jure sense - the boundaries of the world’s oceans and seas. This turns out to be a most contentious matter. Right from the start there was argument: “Your proposed western limit of the Mediterranean,” huffed a Moroccan delegate in the 1920s, when comments about the first proposed boundaries were invited, “makes Tangier a Mediterranean port, which it certainly is not.” The original architects had thought fit to make the boundary of the North Atlantic Ocean pass on the outside of the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, a decision that appeared to unsettle everyone. So on instructions from the senior brass, the clerk promptly erased his first boundary line and drew in a second, a mile to the east of Tangier — elevating it at a stroke to the status of an Atlantic Ocean city, and not a mere Mediterranean port - and all were reported to be happy. The IHO’s other important, practical remit is to ensure that all the world’s navigation charts look more or less the same. This is not quite as dull as it sounds. It stems from a conference held in Washington, D.C., in 1889, at which grim stories were told about ships’ captains who were compelled to use charts made by countries poorly skilled in chartmaking and so came to sudden grief on unmarked shoals or on the approaches to ill-drawn harbours. The only way such marine misadventures could be prevented, said the conferees, was for all charts and all navigational aids to be the same, and for all sailors’ maps, whether made in Britain or Burma, the United States or Uruguay, to adhere to exactly the same high standards. At a navigation conference held in St Petersburg, just before the Great War, the world’s navies and merchant mariners promptly urged that an international commission be set up to study such problems. Finally in 1921, once the European dust had settled, Monaco’s well-regarded Serene Prince offered room and board and a clutch of Mon?gasque typists (together with one charmingly styled “boy-attendant’) to help establish the IHO, which was then formally constituted and guarded by its pet Poseidon where it resides contentedly, if rather obscurely, to this day. Its most important publication occurred in 1928. Back then, and costing thirty-five American cents, it was a handsome green-covered pamphlet, printed letterpress by the Imprimerie Mon?gasque of Monte Carlo and titled IHO Special Publication No. S.23, “Limits of Oceans and Seas”. In the twenty-four pages of this endearing publication one would find such official pronouncements as the formal description of the limits of the English Channel: On the West: From the coast of Brittany westward along the parallel of the E. extreme of Ushant (L?d?nes), through this island to the W. extreme thereof (Le Kainec), thence to the Bishop Rock, the SW extreme of the Scilly Isles, and on a line passing to the Westward of these Isles as far as the N. extreme (Lion Rock) and thence Eastward to the Longships, and on to Lands End. The world may not have expanded in the years that followed, but the definitions and denominations of its seas, and the arguments among the countries that lay beside them, most certainly did. In consequences the size of this pamphlet grew, modestly at first, and then prodigiously. The twenty-four pages of the first edition grew to twenty-six pages in the second, and then thirty-eight pages in the third edition — but when the fourth edition was published in 2002, it had ballooned into 244 pages. Seas so obscure that only those who live beside them have ever heard of them now officially exist: there is a Ceram Sea, for example, a Cosmonauts Sea, an Alboran Sea, a Lincoln Sea, a somewhat tautological Sound Sea, (#litres_trial_promo) and scores upon scores of others. Three senior naval officers from member states are elected to preside over the International Hydrographic Office, usually for five years at a time. Before I travelled to Monaco to see them I had visions of this trio, all splendid in crisp blue uniforms and with coils of gold tassellage, ruling definitively on lofty matters of world navigation — on how best to define the new limits of the Kattegat, on demanding the mapping of where the Arafura Sea abuts against the Gulf of Carpentaria, on determining whether L’Anse aux Meadows was truly washed by the Labrador Sea or the Gulf of St Lawrence. They would settle these quibbles while quaffing pink gins, smoking pipefuls of rough shag and carving scrimshaw doodles on the side. As it happened, two of the officers - from the navies of Greece and Chile — were away when I called one blissful midwinter morning, and the only sailor “on deck”, as seamen in offices like to say, was the representative from Australia. He turned out to be a middle-aged, full-bearded Briton in civilian dress, a man who had long ago left the Royal Navy for its Royal Australian counterpart and was now usually based in Melbourne. His driving passion was not so much ships and the sea - they were his job - but the building in his modest apartment in Villefranche of model railway layouts, HO scale. Officially, however, he and his brother sailors spend a great deal of time wondering about, fulminating over and trying to reverse what they see as a general world ignorance of the oceans. The world’s seas may now have more names than ordinary man may care to know - that much seems true, but this is the fault of politicians, and a consequence of national pride. What troubles the IHO, which, as mentioned, has as another of its mandates the creation of charts to help ships navigate safely around the world, is just how dangerously unaware most landlubbers are of what goes on beneath the surface of these bodies of water. To illustrate the point, they mention repeatedly one unanticipated statistic: even though mankind now knows the precise altitude of the entire surface both of the moon and Mars at points little more than five feet apart, he knows the altitude of the bottom of the sea only at points that are separated in many cases by as much as five miles. For all the hydrographic surveying that has been done over the years, all the soundings taken and the reefs plotted and the headlands marked, the admirals complain that the current inhabitants of the earth know far too little about their seas, even though they cover seven-tenths of their world. This is not for want of trying, however. Europeans especially have been attempting to divine the details of their ocean for the past five hundred years. Ever since Columbus and Vespucci came home, and ever since it became clear that Europeans were inevitably going to trade and fight their way across the Atlantic and all the other seas, there have been great national efforts — in Britain, in Portugal, in Spain, and in time in America and Canada and Brazil and South Africa, too - to survey and chart the waters, to find out the seas’ depths and shallows, their tides and currents, their races and whirlpools and the accurate measure of their coastlines, their islands and their reefs, and all the other features that mark them out so peculiarly. Educating the world about the ocean — with the knowing of the Atlantic in the very forefront of the effort - was a venture that got under way as early as the fifteenth century, and it has not stopped for a moment since. To survey an entire ocean required access to all of its farther limits — access that in the case of the Atlantic was for a long while frustrated by more than a few navigational challenges. The severest limit was the existence of a highly inconvenient sandstone headland known as Cape Bojador - a West African cape that the Arab sailors had feared for centuries and knew as Abu khater or the father of danger. 2. THE ROADBLOCK IN THE WATER The road into the Sahara south from the old Moroccan seaside fort city of Essaouira happens also to be the main trunk Atlantic coast road into West Africa — it passes on to Mauritania, and then to Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau … With careful planning, good fortune, decent springs in your car, and a fair amount of time, a determined driver could make it to Cape Town, arriving in time for tea under the jacarandas at the Mount Nelson Hotel. For most of its early miles, the journey has a steady tedium. After the spectacle of the Atlas Mountains dipping into the sea to which they gave their name, and after passing through the tiny Spanish enclave of Ifni, and after seeing the chains of great French-built lighthouses and the surfers carelessly riding the rollers thundering in from the sea, you drive inland for a few miles and the road becomes flat. The groves of argan-oil trees and goat-busy scrub eventually give way to the stony desert plains of the hammada, and there is a dreary little junction town called Guelmime, where the desert proper begins. Beyond the dust and chaos of its medina - with blue-robed Touareg still to be seen, and desert-weary cameleers bringing trade goods for the souqs — the two-lane highway, oil-dark against the sands of the hammada, winds empty over the horizon, with just the occasional tanker whooshing past, and fleets of rickety Mercedes taxis travelling too fast for their own good. The sea rumbles endless to the west, and there is the glint of the high ergs of the Sahara far to the east. The east wind constantly whistles, leaving grit in one’s hair and teeth. This until lately was the entranceway to Spanish territory, and one sees it in the landscape and the feel of the place. The north of Morocco possesses a certain silky plenitude, whereas this more southerly corner of the place has a harshness: dry, dusty, and stained with oil. The towns are far apart, and generally worth stopping at only for fuel — though one of them has a monument to Antoine de Saint Exup?ry, memorialising his time as a pony express pilot for the 1930s coast airmail service between Toulouse and Dakar; and there are plenty of fishermen’s huts where one can find grouper, swordfish, and sardine, plucked from the sea and grilled over driftwood fires. The coastline itself becomes more interesting, too. Near Tarfaya it turns abruptly out to sea, a fifty-mile change of direction jutting into the ocean and into which, over the years, scores of vessels with captains sleeping, stupid, or drunk have ploughed: there are wrecks of fishing boats sitting high and dry and majestic on the rocks, all being slowly chewed away into nothing by the ever-digesting surf. The seas here have a particular reputation for peril. From high up on the hills above this headland’s terminal point, Cape Juby, it is just possible to make out the closest of the Canary Islands, Fuerteventura. Until the ever-gnawing seas did their work, a famous shipwreck also lay here: the great transatlantic star of the Fifties, the Virginia-built liner SS America broke loose in a storm while being towed to Thailand in 1994 to be turned into a floating hotel. She now lies almost wholly sunk a hundred yards off a Fuerteventura bathing-beach, a forlorn memorial to the brief greatness of America’s merchant marine. … It is indeed coastal danger that is most memorable along this stretch of the African shore. At latitude 27 South, some 150 miles south of the wrecks of Cape Juby, there rises a long, low headland, extremely undistinguished in appearance. This is a headland that remains hugely important in the history of Atlantic navigation, though in reality it is disappointingly not at all like those other famous Atlantic capes — Finisterre, Horn, Good Hope, Farewell, St Vincent, Race -that are the stuff of great poetry and legend. This, more modest in its majesty and its menace, is Cape Bojador. Though the Portuguese word bojador hints at “protrusion”, the land that makes up this low hurdle of cliffs is not a protrusion at all; nor does it pose anything but the smallest inconvenience to a vessel passing south along the African coast. But for many centuries no sailing vessel ever dared to pass it, nor was one physically able to do so. Quern quer passar al?m do Bojador, Tern que passar al?m da dor, wrote the modern Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa. He who wants to pass beyond Bojador, must also pass beyond pain. Beyond it lay a totally unknown sea — a terror-inspiring, monster-filled wilderness known in all ports as the Green Sea of Darkness. Until the fifteenth century, no sailor — whether Spaniard, Portuguese, or Venetian, whether Dane or Phoenician, and by all existing accounts no African sailors, either — had ever successfully rounded Cape Bojador from the Atlantic Ocean side. All the early navigational academies of Europe regarded the sea beyond Bojador as quite impassable. Its very existence stands as one of the reasons why the central Atlantic Ocean, despite having almost certainly the world’s most populous shores, was the last of the great seas to be properly navigated. Polynesian navigators had long before crisscrossed the Pacific; Persians and Gulf Arab sailors had taken their reed-and-creosote sailing craft across upper parts of the Indian Ocean; Chinese sailors knew the intricacies of the eastern Indian Ocean and their various littoral seas; and the Vikings knew the navigational complexities of the far north. But traditional navigation seemed not to work so well or so speedily in the Atlantic as it did elsewhere, and Cape Bojador, so far as the literature records, was one of the reasons why. The problem with Bojador was created by a unique combination of circumstances - topographic, climatic, and marine. No hint of impending difficulty would be apparent to a southbound sailor, who would perhaps leave from an Iberian port, head past the Strait of Gibraltar with light winds still favourably on his starboard quarter, and dip steadily along the African coast at a comfortable five or six knots. He would mark his passage each day by the sight of the three obvious Moroccan capes: Rhir, Draa, and Juby. He would see the twinkling fires of the settlements of Casablanca, Essaouira, and El Ayoun, taking comfort from their proximity - for like most in those early days he was probably a nervous sailor, and would always be most reluctant to leave the sight of shore, finding a degree of security in his crabwise progress along the edge of land. And then he would come to Bojador — and in an instant his illusion of comfort would evaporate. An unseen sandbar, stretching twenty miles out from the low cape and reducing the depth under his keel to a mere couple of fathoms, would first compel him to turn to starboard and, against his better judgment, head out into the deep ocean. At the same time the telltales on his mainmast would show that the slow winds off Morocco had suddenly changed to full easterly, and may well have picked up to a steady half gale. (For most of the year the winds veer east just at this point, and modern satellite pictures will show trails of desert sand being wafted each summer out across the Atlantic. (#litres_trial_promo)) And thirdly, once clear of the submerged point, a current -the North Equatorial Current — would catch his vessel in its powerful maw and begin to drag it westwards, too, for possibly as much as six hundred miles. The perils of the cape are actually even more conspiratorial than this. For most of the voyage down along the coast a persistent southbound current, called by the Portuguese mariners the Guinea Current (modern mariners call it the Canary Current), helped sailors of old to scurry along the shore, providing only that they kept close to land. This was important, because one characteristic of the Guinea Current was that it became steadily weaker the farther offshore. This then gave a ship’s master two equally unpalatable options: remain close inshore and risk being swept into the irresistible arms of the westbound equatorial stream, or sail well away from land and encounter only a fading current and weak winds, and remain motionless at sea, with food and water running out, the vessel trapped in doldrums of your own making. Small wonder not a single seaman managed to get past the cape - until a seminal moment, seventy years before Vespucci, in 1434. It was the growing intelligent acquaintance with the complexities of the sea that eventually allowed the Bojador problem to be solved - as the early phase of exploration of the Atlantic steadily gave way to a period of rigorous ocean education. To know the sea became the working phrase, for only by knowing it could its dangers be avoided and its treasures exploited. The Cape Bojador story is a classic example of this shift in attitude. It was a young Portuguese navigator named Gil Eannes who is commonly credited with having the maritime intelligence and feel for the sea so necessary for blazing a southbound trail. Though most of the papers relating to his voyage were lost in the Lisbon earthquake three centuries later, sufficient anecdotal evidence remains to hint at just how he did it. It was entirely a matter of intelligence: of using such intellectual techniques as observation, forethought, timing, planning and calculation. Prior to Eannes, sailors merely set themselves a goal (or had it set it for them by their financial sponsors), victualled their ship and set off — and in the case of their West African ventures, all were forced to turn back after little more than a thousand miles. These sailors employed the rituals of old - they followed the currents, they sailed before the winds, they followed the paths of seabirds. But what Gil Eannes did next involved an immense amount of planning, and it invoked the growing science of celestial navigation, already known to the Arab merchants after diffusing slowly from the East, where it had evolved to a fine degree under the Chinese. Eannes believed it would be possible now to move through the Atlantic and reach places unfavoured by winds and currents and migrating birds if a mariner used the new tools fast becoming available: astronomy, timekeeping, a sophisticated knowledge of weather and climatic history and the geography of the sea. To get around Cape Bojador specifically, or to double it, in seamen’s jargon, involved the scrupulous measuring of the water speeds and directions, and the measuring in detail of the average directions and strengths of the winds. It involved the development of a technique now known as current sailing. Eannes also drew current triangles onto his crude but ever-improving charts sets, and used vectors, intelligent tacking and careful, hour-by-hour timing. Once he knew the currents and the winds, their directions and their speeds, it remained a matter of simple trigonometry to plot a course that would take advantage of them both. However, his planning also involved choosing a season when the winds of one kind would be blowing while those of another would not. Only after all that information had been digested and calculated and factored in could Eannes set his rudder and trim his sails and point his bowsprit in a direction that might have seemed to his unsuccessful predecessors eccentric - but eccentric in the way that modern Great Circle routes seems oddly counterintuitive when compared with the apparent directional simplicity of a voyage made along a straight line of constant bearing, in other words a rhumb line or loxodrome. The precise details of his famous voyage remain unclear -there is no surviving diary, no ship’s log, not even the name of the ship is recorded. All we know is that Eannes went south on the explicit orders of Henry the Navigator, the princely architect of Portugal’s imperial ambitions. Henry had drily remarked that fourteen previous attempts to double the cape had failed. Eannes, who was no more than one of the personal servants in Henry’s court, might just as well make an attempt, too. He did precisely as he was ordered - he sailed south-west to Madeira and the Canaries, then performed all his complicated arithmetical elaborations. He initiated a deep-sea twisting-and-turning voyage that has been known for many years since as the Portuguese volta, and by doing so succeeded finally in rounding the dreaded cape. He was then blown by the gusts of a harmattan wind onto the African desert coast some thirty miles south of Bojador and picked a sample of the woody desert plant known as St Mary’s flower or the rose of Jericho to bring back as proof. It didn’t work: none of this convinced the sceptical prince Henry, who promptly ordered Gil Eannes to go out to sea once again. So back he went the following year, 1435, this time with a companion — a man who was also a household servant, though a spare-time sailor - and they took their puny fishing barca on almost the exact same plotted route, with its wide westerly diversion south of the Canary Islands. The men landed at almost the same African coastal spot, they named a river, they saw the footprints of men and the hoofprints of camels, and thus realised that the Torrid Zone was peopled, and they came back to a finally credulous Henry the Navigator, and in consequence to a brief period of court rapture followed by a lengthy period of public obscurity. (#litres_trial_promo) And the two ventures did the necessary trick. Within months other expeditions had set out from the Portuguese harbours, and they fanned out along the at-long-last-accessible coast of Africa to explore it, round it, and then eventually to head off east beyond the continent of Africa, to the great treasure grounds of the Indies. The ships grew steadily in size — from the tiny barcas used by Eannes, to the three- and four-masted caravels, and the gigantic naus employed on the spice runs of the sixteenth century. The equipment carried on the ships’ bridges became more sophisticated: the astrolabe was soon to be invented, the compass to be employed, sounding wires to be made long enough to deal with exceedingly deep waters, and tide tables and sight reduction tables to be published. The mariners became ever more adventurous, and history is littered with their names: Bartholomew Diaz, who first rounded the Cape of Storms; Vasco da Gama, who first went to India; Pedro Cabral, the first to land in Brazil; Alfonso d’Albuquerque, first in Malabar, Ceylon, and Malacca; and all those other sailors whose names — Fernando Poo, Tristan da Cunha, Luis Vaez de Torres - are memorialised in islands or straits (or as these three are remembered, for a slaving colony off Africa, a dangerous volcano in the far South Atlantic, and a narrow passage between New Guinea and the northern tip of Australia). Perhaps greatest of them all, though claimed by others, was Ferno de Magalh?es, the would-be circumnavigator who was born in Portugal, but sailed for Spain, and died as Ferdinand Magellan in the Philippines in 1521. All of these indefatigable sailors and a score more - who mostly came from a Portugal of which it used to be said such a tiny land to live in, but the whole world to die in — came to be legatees of the pioneering sailing techniques of Gil Eannes. They followed in his wake, both literally and figuratively, to begin the organised acquisition of knowledge about the Atlantic and all the other oceans besides. 3. MOVING THE WATERS It has to be remembered that until Amerigo Vespucci, there was no knowledge — nor even a suspicion or a hint — that the Atlantic was a separate sea. Culturally, this was an ocean that until the end of the fifteenth century was not known to exist. Then, and at a stroke, with Vespucci’s voyage, the Atlantic Ocean was born; suddenly it was there. With this realisation of a brand new sea, anchors were weighed and sails unfurled, brass clocks were wound and heaving lines leaded. Scientists were appointed and chart makers assigned, and bold and fearless skippers in their legions took their little ships out of port and headed off to measure and to mark this new body of water. At the edges of a sea, it is the daily tides that prove the most obvious features to measure and record. Out in the deeps, beyond the influence of tides, the seaman must look for other things: for the size of waves and the direction of swells, the tenor of storms, the press of fish and birds, the depths beneath the bow. And, most importantly, the unexpected and initially mysterious ways that the waters appear to move. Since these motions are among the most clearly influential on the passage of any ship - as Gil Eannes experienced off Cape Bojador, and then made use of - they were noticed very early on in the exploration of the Atlantic. They seemed like great underwater rivers, or torrents. Currents-from the French, things that run — were the first of the ocean’s many unseen features to become properly known. And perhaps no stream was more famously so than that immense rushing extension of the North Equatorial Current known, from Florida, where it begins, to the west of Scotland, where it ends (with palm trees growing beside the waters that it so conveniently warms), as the Gulf Stream. Like many mariners around the world, Columbus noticed the currents — and here the exceptionally strong currents that seemed to him so unusually prevalent in Caribbean Atlantic waters. “I found the sea ran so strangely to the westward,” he wrote in the log of his third voyage, describing his passing through the notorious Dragon’s Mouth, between Trinidad and the Venezuelan mainland, “that between the hour of Mass, when I weighed anchor, and the hour of Complines, I made sixty-five leagues of four miles each with gentle winds …” There are also accounts by Peter Martyr, the Spanish court historian who, coincidentally, was among the first to recognise the huge potential importance of the Gulf Stream, of a vain attempt by Columbus to take a sounding off the coast of Honduras, only to have the “contrary violence of the waters” force his lead upward and never once allow it to touch bottom. But Columbus was too far south to experience the power of the Gulf Stream. That happy discovery was left to his successor, Ponce de Le?n, (#litres_trial_promo) who found it in 1513, while on his quest for the fountain of youth - a search that eventually won him the ironic substitute of being the first European to find Florida. He was charting the topography of this new coast - thinking it to be a large island, the flowered one. Ponce made rendezvous with two other ships coming north from Puerto Rico, and the three vessels set themselves to sailing farther south, keeping Florida just in sight on their starboard side. One afternoon, when they were perhaps thirty miles from shore, Ponce de Le?n and his fellow sailors suddenly found themselves swept into and caught up in “a current such that, although they had a great wind, they could not proceed forward, but backward, and it seems that they were proceeding well; at the end it was known that the current was more powerful than the wind.” Whatever was the cause, this wide river of water, which he soon found swept northwards and in time turned towards the east, had huge and unstoppable power. The Spaniard became swiftly aware of its commercial implications :that however difficult it might be for ships to beat their way westwards across the middle reaches of the Atlantic, the power of this submarine river offered the guarantee that anyone who floated onto it would be taken home, in style and with considerable speed. Empty galleons might find the outbound passage a trial, but treasure-laden and stately, they could dip home from the Isthmus of Panama, pushed along by this new-found current, with a very welcome dispatch. Riding the Gulf Stream home quickly became a kind of navigational sport. The traditional means of return to Spain -though it was barely a tradition, since the passage had only been opened two decades before - was to use the winds alone, to take advantage of the westerlies that blew for most seasons in the middle latitudes of the ocean. But there was a risk inherent: on a voyage from the Main it was tempting to turn east, to turn for home, too early, and in doing so chance becoming becalmed in the fickle breezes of what is now known as the Bermuda High.Now that the Gulf Stream was known, the solution was simple — though, as with the sharp turn to sea made by Gil Eannes in rounding Cape Bojador, it was also counterintuitive. He headed west to go south; homebound Atlantic skippers needed to head north to go east. Coming from the Isthmus they would tease out the Gulf Stream’s beginnings in the Caribbean and then more properly in the shallow waters off what is now known as Cape Hatteras. Once it was found, a homebound sailor would attempt to slot his ship neatly into the sixty-mile-wide band of its warm, fast flowing waters, let the current carry him north at nearly six miles per hour, and then as it turned, head eastwards with it too, following its warm blue stream for most of its two-thousand-mile curving, Europe-bound length. Once this marvel had been discovered, and once its spread and its speed had been mapped and measured, the Gulf Stream swiftly became an object of widespread fascination. Its most resolute early champion was perhaps its most improbable: the polymathic American statesman and founding father, Benjamin Franklin. In a most remarkable letter written on board a Falmouth, England-bound packet boat in the summer of 1785, he ruminated with precision and wisdom on Sundry Circumstances Relating to the Gulph Stream — a document of such intellectual richness that it is easy to see why this most unforgettable of men went on to invent such wonders as the lightning rod, bifocal lenses, lending libraries, a superior kind of fireplace, (#litres_trial_promo) and the underlying principle behind the glass harmonica. The letter, to a French academician and friend named Alphonsus le Roy, is quite stunning, fascinating at every line. The Gulf Stream does not appear until halfway through - and by the time of getting down to writing his thoughts about it, Franklin had already offered to his friend a meandering dissertation on the design of ships’ hulls, on the possible use of propellers to steer balloons, on the most common causes of accidents at sea and on the kinds of foodstuffs best stowed for long ocean voyages (almonds, rusks, lemons and “Jamaica spirits” foremost among them). But then came the Gulf Stream moment, when Franklin reminded le Roy that a decade before, he had been America’s first postmaster general, and colonial postmaster before that, and that this was when he first fully apprehended the North Atlantic’s most unusual phenomenon of the time: About the year 1769 or 70, there was an application made by the board of customs at Boston, to the lords of the treasury in London, complaining that the packets between Falmouth and New York, were generally a fortnight longer in their passages, than merchant ships from London to Rhode-Island…. There happened then to be in London, a Nantucket sea-captain of my acquaintance, to whom I communicated the affair. He told me the difference was that the Rhode-Island captains were acquainted with the gulf stream, which those of the English packets were not. We are well acquainted with that stream, says he, because in our pursuit of whales, which keep near the sides of it, but are not to be met with in it…. I then observed that it was a pity no notice was taken of this current upon the charts, and requested him to mark it out for me which he readily complied with, adding directions for avoiding it in sailing from Europe to North-America, I procured it to be engraved by order. This stream is probably generated by the great accumulation of water on the eastern coast of America between the tropics, by the trade winds which constantly blow there. It is known that a large piece of water ten miles broad and generally only three feet deep, has by a strong wind had its waters driven to one side and sustained so as to become six feet deep, while the windward side was laid dry. Having since crossed this stream several times in passing between America and Europe, I have been attentive to sundry circumstances relating to it, by which to know when one is in it; and besides the gulf weed with which it is interspersed,I find that it is always warmer than the sea on each side of it, and that it does not sparkle in the night. Franklin then helpfully drew a map - a map somewhat short on both accuracy and elegance, but one that heralded a new field of oceanic cartography and by extension helped inaugurate the entirely new science of oceanography. 4. WRITING THE SEA This calling, as its curious name suggests - oceanography, the writing of the ocean - was at least in its early days something of a fugitive science: for how could it be possible to write of a body of water, especially deep water beyond land, an entity without visible coasts as reference points and no detectable seabed below? It was like trying to describe the invisible mass of air in a room — a task rather beyond the imaginative and descriptive powers of the time. It’s not surprising that of the graphical sciences, oceanography was so late in being born. Geography and hydrography, the descriptive analyses of bodies of land and water, were disciplines both created in the sixteenth century; it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century, two hundred years later, that there was sufficient confidence within the academic community to name a similar study that would be called oceanography. Matters might have been simpler had the science been called oceanology, but it never was, and now only the Russians use the term. On some levels the study of the sea had obvious features that were well worthy of study. There were the zoological aspects — the fish, swimming mammals, and seabirds and other animals both hugely exotic and vanishingly small to catch and record and classify. There were matters botanical: the existence of floating and sunken ocean plants - Sargasso weed in immense quantities in the centre of the gyre of the North Atlantic, kelp banks around islands in the south, and a thousand other pelagic and benthic pieces of botany besides. There was a unique maritime meteorology, too: there were ocean winds in particular to record, in their variety and persistence — trades wafting steadily from the north-east, westerly gales powering the fierce climatic tantrums of the north, and then the fitful and skittish baffling airs around the equator, which were given the name of the tantrums’ literal antithesis, the doldrums. There were the dangerous circulations of the wind, too - hurricanes, waterspouts, typhoons, cyclones. There was ice and snow, and floes and tabular icebergs. And there were maritime curiosities — St. Elmo’s fire, mermaids, the Bermuda Triangle, sea serpents, giant squids. There was all of this - but each one turned out to be merely peripheral to the ocean itself, in much the same way that the discovery of a new land mammal would be considered peripheral to geography, and the realisation of the ferocity of the harmattan wind incidental to the study of oasis formation in the Sahara. Oceans have their own very peculiar physical attributes - a list of inherences and essentials that at the very least would include such matters as the topography of the sea’s invisible underneath, the temperature and chemistry of the water, and the movement of the ocean’s currents and its tides. And early scientists did indeed notice and inquire: in the seventeenth century alone we had Robert Boyle writing on the sea’s salinity, Isaac Newton offer ing his views on the causation of tides, and Robert Hooke — the famously ill-tempered polymath and philosopher who is better known for establishing the principles of elasticity, inventing sash windows, championing microscopy, first seeing Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, and creating an elegant escapement mechanism for watches - designing a host of devices and methods that might be used for research into the deep seas. … So scientists did eventually begin to focus their attentions, to fathom the unfathomable, and they did begin to come to grips with the immensity of the challenge posed by such a vastness as the Atlantic. They did so especially in Victorian and Edwardian times, a period of both British and American history when the stupendously difficult often seemed unusually possible; this was a time when unravelling the immensity of an ocean looked only marginally more difficult than, say, the cataloguing of all the earth’s creatures, or the corralling between hard book covers of all the words of the English language, or the building of a transcontinental railroad, or the construction of a sea-level canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Fame in the early days belonged to the explorers, those hunting for land and territory and tangible acquisitions, rather than to students of the ocean itself. Bold adventurers like James Cook, Sir John Ross, the Comte de la P?rouse, Robert Fitzroy, and the Chevalier de Bougainville are still remembered and memorialised in capes and straits and islands around the world - while the very earliest true oceanographers have largely faded from memory. Who now remembers James Rennell, for instance, a young sailor from Devon, who first came upon the Atlantic proper on a long-sea trick from military service in Bengal? There is today only his tomb, a scattering of long-forgotten books, and the name of a lecture theatre at Britain’s National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. Yet he was a properly heroic figure, of the mould of Cook and la P?rouse, the kind of seaman who would do whatever was necessary in the pursuit of his calling. While leading a team in the survey of Bengal he had almost his entire arm sheared off at the shoulder during an attack by sabre-wielding tribesmen, and then had his original maps of India stolen by pirates off Calcutta, yet persisted in acquiring new knowledge of the sea, in spite of it all. Rennell’s oceanic achievements began in 1777 when he came home by sea — fathering a daughter who was to be born on the quintessentially Atlantic oceanic island of St Helena, where Napoleon would later be exiled - and en route became captivated by the Atlantic currents that his vessel was compelled to cross, and then by ocean circulation generally. He then helped to survey portions of the deep ocean, and wrote papers on the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic Drift, and on the then mysterious current that somehow compelled transatlantic ships bound for the English Channel to head north of Cornwall and toward the Bristol Channel instead. And all the while he delved painstakingly into historical curiosities: the average speed of Saharan camels, the probable landing place in Britain of Julius Caesar, and the likely site of the shipwreck of St Paul. He lived and worked until he was nearly ninety, and though he was distinguished enough to be buried alongside other national heroes under the nave of Westminster Abbey, he is otherwise widely overlooked. 5. PLUMBING THE DEEP Comparing James Rennell’s interest in the ocean with Benjamin Franklin’s a few years before illustrates to some small degree the diverging European and American motivations behind the science that would tackle the strangely sinister world of the deep. Rennell’s fascination verged on the academic and the conceptual; Franklin, whose interest in the Gulf Stream arose out of the reports that mail packets were being mysteriously delayed, had more of a commercial take on the subject. And for years this divergence continued: Britain looked at the sea as something of great theoretical interest, as well as an entranceway to its ever-expanding empire; America had its eye on the ocean as an obstacle over which mastery could only be won by practical means — by making ever more efficient the shipping lines, by laying and then expanding the use of submarine communications cables, by adroitly harvesting the sea of its edible and usable creatures. It was the lobbying of powerful merchants in the East Coast ports that eventually persuaded the US Congress to establish a coastal survey, yet at the very same time scientists in Britain, France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries were all looking to the ocean as the ultimate source, not of trade or funds or fortune, but of an endlessly diverting cavalcade of unknown animals and plants. To Europeans-the generalization may be as unfair as most, yet has enough truth to it to stand - to win knowledge of the Atlantic was to gain knowledge of the planet; to those on its far side in the nineteenth century, to know the Atlantic was to be the better equipped to make money. Charles Darwin was among those early nineteenth-century Britons who sailed into the Atlantic for the pleasure of study alone. He was just twenty-two, newly graduated from Cambridge, when he was invited in 1831 to sail “to Tierra del Fuego and home by the East Indies” on the ninety-foot-long, ten-gun naval brig HMS Beagle. It was a journey that lasted an unexpected five years, and it was principally a survey mission — there were all manner of new devices on board, including accurate chronometers, lightning conductors, and anemometers specially calibrated to measure the newly created Beaufort wind scale. On the way south, Darwin saw and collected specimens from the Cape Verde Islands, the Peter and Paul Rocks, Brazil, Montevideo and Buenos Aires and the Falkland Islands, and on the way home three years later looked in on St Helena and Ascension, too. But his interest was mainly in the geology or the wildlife of his various landfalls - the maritime aspects of the enterprise were largely left to the ship’s captain, Robert Fitzroy. Perhaps the most memorable event so far as Darwin was concerned occurred as he was about to leave his home ocean and round the Horn into the Pacific: Fitzroy had aboard the ship three extremely large Fuegian natives, captured two years before as specimens (#litres_trial_promo) and brought to London to be taught English, clothed, instructed in basic Christianity, and in other ways “civilised”. Now they were being taken back home. Despite their London tailoring, fine manners, and good knowledge of English, Darwin regarded them as little more elevated than animals, and was not entirely surprised when one of them, Jemmy Button (the others were a woman named Fuegia Basket and a man, York Minster; a fourth, who was named Boat Memory, had died of smallpox), reverted to his aboriginal state within days of being dropped near the Horn. Soon after being left, he was re-encountered when the storm-savaged ship had to put back into harbour - and to the surprise of the ship’s company he appeared as shaggy-haired and near-naked as when first found, two years before. He could not be persuaded, despite Darwin’s entreaties, to return to the ship and come back to London yet again. Though the finches of the Galapagos Islands would eventually reveal much more, these Patagonian unfortunates offered Darwin lessons for his eventual thoughts on evolution: he could say with some certainty from his knowledge of Jemmy Button that the biblical story of human creation was uncertain, at best - for some kinds of clothed men could always revert to nakedness, whatever Genesis suggested took place in the Garden of Eden. Two expeditions were landmarks in the winning of Atlantic knowledge: the first was conducted by a flotilla of American vessels that set out from Norfolk, Virginia, in the summer of 1838, and the second was the venture by a single Royal Navy vessel that stood out from Portsmouth, Hampshire, in the winter of 1872. The former was known somewhat portentously as the United States Exploring Expedition, and in terms of Atlantic history was made more famous by the absence of one invited member who resigned shortly before sailing. The second expedition has come to be remembered, rather more economically, as simply the voyage of HMS Challenger. The convoluted fate of the first is still a matter of discussion to this day; but of the second - in more recent times one of the five American space shuttles was named in honour of the single British ship, which testifies to the success of that pioneering sea voyage undertaken almost exactly a century before. (#litres_trial_promo) The American venture - known more familiarly at the time as the Ex-Ex — was an ill-timed, ill-organised, and ill-accomplished congressional attempt to divine the mysteries of America’s two neighbour oceans, especially the Pacific. Commerce was Capitol Hill’s driving force: the fast-growing American whaling and fur-sealing industries needed new hunting grounds to exploit, and landlubber traders needed new territories with which to do business. Congress offered funds, and then got itself into the most terrible pickle trying to mediate between competing claims of the scientists and the naval officers from which it had to choose to drive the venture out into the ocean. The figure who because of the endless rows chose not to go - but who would nonetheless become nineteenth-century America’s most celebrated oceanographer - was a young naval lieutenant named Matthew Fontaine Maury. His decision to forgo the expedition (he had been invited along as the official astronomer, but decided the organising civil servant in charge was an “imbecile”) turned out to benefit his own reputation: few of those on this expedition would win much kudos. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/simon-winchester/atlantic-a-vast-ocean-of-a-million-stories/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.