Author: Simon Winchester
Category: Nonfiction
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Whenever Challenger put in to a foreign port, curious visitors from ashore were invited aboard, especially ladies. To some she seemed like a steam yacht on a world cruise, and her officers were careful not to forget she served as a floating embassy, and her expedition was invariably publicized as an example of British grit and determination, so flocks of the fascinated came to gawp. But the ladies came on to dance and entertain as well, and the ships’ fiddlers and the melodeon player were kept busy during the port calls.
There was sport, too: the more middle class of the scientists had brought their shotguns along and went after the more common seabirds with abandon. The traditionalist sailors were initially horrified that, once in the Roaring Forties of the South Atlantic, the sportsmen would shoot specimens of the wandering albatross, a bird long considered taboo; but no serious harm befell the ship, accidents were trivial, and the deaths and other casualties proved to be within the statistical limits for so large a crew on so long a haul.
All told, the ship was away for three and a half years—during which she lightly hit an iceberg (probably thanks to the spirit of the well-shot albatross), was given two Galapagos tortoises that wolfed down all her pineapples, found sea-bottom waters at the equator off Brazil that were almost at freezing point and so deduced the existence of a deep current flowing north from the Antarctic, and discovered, to much zoological celebration, a tiny and excessively pretty squid called Spirula and regarded by some as a missing link in the newly revealed Darwinian scheme of species origin. The vessel returned to Portsmouth—encountering on the homestretch off Portugal a massive flotilla of patrolling British warships, one of which had its band play “Home Sweet Home” from its afterdeck. When finally she tied up at the quayside, Challenger had logged almost seventy thousand miles, at an average rate of rather more than two miles a day. Men could walk more quickly.
But, oh! the specimens she brought home: hundreds upon hundreds of crates, of animals, of plants, of bottles of seawater from various depths and places, of test tubes and Kilner jars and Petri dishes of oozes and slimes and gelatinous animals and plants. It took four years for the first volume of the Official Report to be published and another fifteen years—almost the end of the century—before the final one, and the hapless Wyville Thomson went mad and collapsed under the intense and sustained pressure from the publishers.
All told there were to be eighty volumes. It was a formidable intellectual achievement, arguably the most comprehensive study of the ocean ever undertaken, and it remains a landmark to this day. The information assembled and disseminated represented what was at the time the sum total of humankind’s knowledge of the sea, and especially the Atlantic Ocean. And once it was done, oceanography was set steadily to become what it is today, a greatly more professional calling. It would not be much longer before the sailors retired to the bridge and the specialists moved in—the chemists and zoologists and submariners and physicists, the mathematical modelers and paleoclimatologists and high-temperature bacteriologists—and changed forever what the science of oceans originally had been.
7. FASHIONING THE CHARTS
Some of the romance then inevitably bled away. With a new fashion for oceanographic progress in the twentieth century and its consequent exponential growth, and with the creation of the great institutions—Scripps in California in 1892, Woods Hole in Massachusetts in 1930, Lamont-Doherty in New York in 1949,29 and the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, and smaller European ocean stations in places like Roscoff, Kiel, and Heligoland—the vision of the sea that had impelled the pioneers began to dim somewhat. The routines of the laboratory and the computer started to slowly take over from the rhythms of the old days: the ever-shifting horizons, the knife-sharp winds, the smell of fish and Stockholm tar, the coils of rope, the flap of sails, the keening of gulls, and the thud of marine engines made way for the hum of machines and air-conditioning and the silky sounds of laser printing.
Prince Albert I of Monaco was one of the last of the gifted amateurs to be fully invested in field oceanography, before the calling was enveloped by the realm of technocracy. His interest came about at a time when nineteenth-century France was developing an acute (though rather short-lived) passion for the sea, and since it was a passion that very much involved an aristocracy that had been somewhat underemployed since the revolution of 1789, it was conducted with great style and élan. The fabulously wealthy Marquis Léopold de Folin was an early entrant. After some years spent searching the floor of the Brittany coast in a comfortably converted trawler, he managed to persuade the French navy to supply him with a full-dress paddle-steamer, the Travailleur, and in her he conducted surveys of the seabed in the Bay of Biscay and beyond; they remain classics of scholarship and brio.
Prince Albert followed suit soon after and bought a sleekly elegant yacht of his own, the Hirondelle. His subsequent studies of the North Atlantic—especially the Gulf Stream—brought him fame and wide respect: he was evidently not the silk-stockinged dilettante that had been initially supposed.30 His work on the great current took him three years and involved sailing Hirondelle on several voyages between the Azores and the Grand Banks and dropping into various sections of the stream almost 1,700 floating objects—beer barrels, glass bottles, and spheres of copper—and seeing where they ended up. Beachcombers responded to the scrupulously polite notes inside by writing to say they had found rather more than two hundred of them—discoveries that enabled the young prince (he ascended to the Monegasque throne just as this work was coming to its end, in 1889) to draw highly accurate maps of the direction and strength of the Gulf Stream, of the North Atlantic Drift that branched from it, and of the clockwise nature of the North Atlantic gyre generally.
He continued his work for most of his years as ruler. He had a 175-foot schooner built as a research vessel, the Princess Alice—the first in a long line of vessels built solely for oceanic investigation. His particular interest was in catching and cataloging the fishes and other animals that lived in the halfway-deep seas between the continents and the abyssal plains. His life of leisure and wealth meant that, unlike most salaried scientists or those subsisting on grants, he and his ships could remain on station for weeks at a time, with battalions of stewards, cooks, and valets on hand, and could unwrap the mysteries of oceanic biology as patiently as necessary.
The prince, who died in 1922, left behind three enduring and ocean-related memorials to his thirty-three years of generally congenial rule. Two of these legacies quite deliberately blended the academic approach to the sea with the growing public interest: he had an oceanographic institute of great size and style built in Paris, and another that was similar (only larger) in Monte Carlo, and which had aquariums and exhibits of ships and exploration equipment. (Both of these were financed in large part by profits from the very fashionable casinos for which Monaco was rightly famous.) The third memorial was the one with which this chapter begins: Prince Albert arranged the financing and housing for an entirely new international body, initially called the International Hydrographic Bureau, which would on one hand seek to regulate and standardize all the world’s charts and navigational aids, and on the other would seek to define the boundaries of all the world’s oceans and seas.
The bureau’s famous Special Publication No. S.23, and its fourth edition,31 created by what is now called the International Hydrographic Organization, is perhaps the most celebrated and controversial of Prince Albert’s bequeathals. Buried within its pages—looking quite prominent in the slender 1928 edition, but rather less obvious when jostled among the enormous collection of brand-new maritime names (the Ceram Sea, etc., as mentioned earlier) in the modern document—was and still is the formal definition of what and where, exactly, the Atlantic Ocean is.
The Atlantic turns out to have grown considerably in the eighty years of its supervision by the admirals of Monaco. To be sure, it has physically widened by about six feet, under the relentless pressure of seafloor spreading, the inch-a-year movement from the Mi
d-Atlantic Ridge. But that is not what the IHO meant: the newly published enlargement is more metaphorical than actual, and is all a matter of where the ocean’s boundaries are deemed appropriate to be drawn. Back in 1928 they were defined in relatively—relatively—simple terms.
The 1928 Atlantic was notionally divided into two—North and South—and the boundaries of each sub-ocean were established according to the cardinal point of the compass. The North Atlantic was thus seen to be bordered according to the Monaco-devised formula: on the west it ran to the eastern limits of the Caribbean Sea, the southern limits of the Gulf of Mexico, then from the north coast of Cuba to Key West, and along the American and Canadian coasts up to the southeastern and northeastern limits of the Gulf of St. Lawrence; on the north it was limited by the beginning of the Arctic Ocean, then a line from the coast of Labrador to the tip of Greenland, and from there to the Shetland Islands; on the east it ended with the northwestern limits of the North Sea, then the northern and western limits of the Scottish Seas, the southern limits of the Irish Sea, the western limits of both the Bristol and the English channels, the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean Sea; and finally on the south the limit was defined by the latitude line of 4˚ 25′N that ran between Cape Palmas in Liberia and Cape Orange in Brazil.
The South Atlantic in 1928 was even less complicated. The northern limit was the Liberia-Brazil line, above; the western limit was the entire coast of South America, but for the estuary of the River Plate; on the east the ocean was formally bounded by the coast of sub-Liberian Africa, except for an enormous tract of sea in the continental armpit, otherwise known as the Gulf of Guinea, which was cut off by a straight line between Liberia and Angola; and on the south an arbitrary line was drawn by the IHO draftsmen, connecting Cape Agulhas with Cape Horn.
Matters are a great deal more complicated today, and under the new guidelines the Atlantic occupies a far, far greater proportion of the planetary surface than it ever did before. A single example, delineating a part of the northern boundary of North Atlantic, will offer a general idea of the new complexity:
. . . thence a line joining Kap Edward Holm southeastwards to Bjartangar, the western extremity of Iceland, thence southeastward along the western and southern coasts of Iceland to Stokksnes on the eastern coast of Iceland, southeastward to the northmost extremity of Fuglöy in the Føroyar, thence along a line joining this extremity to Muckle Flugga, the northernmost point in the Shetland Islands . . .
Very basically, the expansion has been prompted by the IHO’s decision to include as subdivisions of the ocean many seas and embayments that once were considered entirely separate from it. The Gulf of Mexico, for instance, is now regarded as entirely Atlantic (so the 2010 oil-pollution catastrophe, occasioned by the explosion and subsequent collapse of a BP drilling platform off New Orleans, is classified as an Atlantic problem); the Caribbean Sea is part of the Atlantic Ocean; and so is the North Sea, and the English Channel, the Bay of Fundy, most of the St. Lawrence Estuary up to the western tip of the immense and sparsely inhabited Anticosti Island,32 the Celtic Sea, the Skaggerak (but not the Kattegat), and the Bay of Biscay. And the idea of the Gulf of Guinea being separate has long been discarded: now the division between the North and South Atlantics is the equator on the Brazilian side and Cape Lopez in the republic of Gabon.
(There happens to be what seems a rather eccentric small kink in this otherwise die-straight southern boundary line. The border takes a lightly angled turn to pass across a tiny palm-covered islet known as Ilhéu das Rôlas, which lies a few yards off the southern tip of the almost equally obscure island of Sao Tomé. There is a cartographic reason: Rôlas is the only Atlantic island on—or essentially on, but for a few feet—the equator. Using it as a mid-sea marker made sense—though it has to be said that in 1928 the delineators of the ocean did not worry their heads about such things. Today, though for no obviously sensible reason, they apparently do.)
This then is the full de facto extent of the Atlantic Ocean—fully 81,705,396 square kilometers (32 million square miles) of seawater, one quarter of the planet’s total water area, with the deepest water of well over five miles—8,605 meters—found off Puerto Rico, and a total of 307,923,430 cubic kilometers (74 million cubic miles) of water in its entirety.
8. WIDER STILL, AND WIDER
Only when one includes a human dimension to this story does it present a final but enriching complication. It is when one begins to add up the total numbers of the vast aggregation of humankind who live in some kind of communion with this sea, of those who can rightly be considered belonging to an Atlantic community, or who are—if they are in any communal sense ocean-blessed or ocean-styled or ocean-crossed—to be considered in some regard Atlantic people—that this complication appears.
It is a complication offered up by the great rivers that flow into the Atlantic Ocean.
A very great number do. Many more rivers flow into the Atlantic—especially the more widely defined Atlantic of the fourth edition of S.23—than flow into either the Pacific or the Indian oceans. There are the big rivers of Europe: the Seine and the Loire, the Severn and the Shannon and even, since the North Sea is now properly “Atlantic,” the Thames and the Rhine. There is the Niger, the Kunene, the Orange, and the almost impossibly vast network of the Congo flowing in from its headwaters dotted throughout central Africa. There is the Amazon, with its headwaters in Peru, and which brings more water and rain forest mud into the Atlantic Ocean than the next eight largest rivers in the world combined bring into their respective seas. There is the St. Lawrence, originating in the Great Lakes. And there is the Mississippi-Missouri river system, which hauls trillions of gallons of water each day down from the prairies and the Rocky Mountains into that officially sanctioned embayment of the far western Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico.
So to those who wish to cast the Atlantic’s net of influence as far and as wide as is technically possible, consider that it does not stop simply at Cape Race or Heart’s Content, at Montauk or the Outer Banks, or at the Argentine beaches of Bahia Blanca or Isla de los Estados or Cape Horn. Nor does it begin on the cliffs of the Faroes or on the Aran Islands, or on Ushant, on Land’s End, at Cape Bojador or Robben Island or at the rocks of Cape Agulhas or near the sea caves at Pinnacle Point.
Rather it begins and ends, to be pedantic about it, in the lakes of Zambia (where the Congo rises) and in the Swiss Alps (where a glacier drips to form the tributaries of the Rhine). It also begins in a valley near America’s Yellowstone National Park, where a late Victorian explorer named Bruce found the source waters of the Missouri River, and beside which today a Greek farmer, a long way from his old home beside the Mediterranean, lives out his life as an American rancher, raising sheep.
And the ocean also begins and ends beside an eight-thousand-foot mountain in far northern Montana named Triple Divide Peak. This is the hydrologic apex of the North American continent. Rainwaters that fall onto its northern flanks flow into Canada and into the Arctic Ocean. Waters from its western and southwestern sides slip into creeks that eventually take them to Oregon and on the Pacific. Any precipitation that happens to fall on the southeastern slope seeps down eventually into a tiny canyon at the base of which is an even tinier creek—and which makes its way to the north fork of a river that becomes the Marias River. Near the town of Fort Benton, Montana, this Marias stream flows into the Missouri; at St. Louis the Missouri joins the Mississippi; and at New Orleans the Mississippi finally reaches the Gulf of Mexico, from where its waters are connected to the Atlantic Ocean.
With great prescience the explorers of that rugged and icebound corner of Montana where Triple Divide Peak rises gave a name to that tiny creek that spills off the summit. They named the very first river that snakes its way downhill, from below the snow line at seven thousand feet to the grassland at five thousand, and its waters coursing swift and pure through a Rocky Mountain canyon. It was almost as though the river knew what the explorers knew—which was where its waters were going.
For they called it quite simply Atlantic Creek. They named it for an ocean with which the state of Montana is now ineluctably connected, but which most of its people will seldom if ever see.
Chapter Three
Oh! The Beauty and the Might of It
And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.
1. THE PLAY OF THE SEA
Although William Shakespeare wrote often and with an easy familiarity about the ocean—about tides in the affairs of men, about fleets majestical, about a thousand fearful wrecks, about fathers lying full-fathom five, about sea changes and sea nymphs and winds sitting sore upon the sails—there remains no firm evidence that he ever boarded a ship, nor ever went to sea, nor that he ever set eyes upon the Atlantic.
But such was the Atlantic’s importance to all England in his time, that Shakespeare would surely have known of its existence, and he would have heard of its many dramas. It is of little surprise to find that he deftly wove one of the most celebrated of sixteenth-century Atlantic tales into the centerpiece of his final, and perhaps his most boldly imaginative theatrical work, The Tempest. Like a few before him, and like so many after, Shakespeare plucked an image from this ocean of innumerable moods and dispositions and transformed it into art.
The play, which he wrote in 1611, happened to be staged with great imperial pomp in 2009 on the island of Bermuda, as part of the four-hundredth-anniversary celebration of Britain’s northernmost Atlantic island colony. It was put on in a theater in the capital, Hamilton, and was staged there for one very overarching reason: most literary scholars like to believe that, unlike any theatrical work created before, The Tempest was very much an Atlantic Ocean play, and that it was the original accidental settling of the island of Bermuda, four centuries before, that played a key role in the play’s creation.