Author: Simon Winchester
Category: Nonfiction
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It might not seem so at first blush. After all, the island to which Prospero and Miranda are found to have been exiled, and where Caliban was found to live, looks upon close reading of the text most likely to be in the Mediterranean. The city of Milan seems from the writing to be unduly close to the scene of the action; and when at the end of the play, the wrecked sailing ship that had brought Antonio and Alonso to the island is repaired and allowed to go home, it was to undertake a quite unexceptional journey merely back to Italy, which probably lay nearby.
But a closer study of Shakespeare’s motivations uncovers evidence beyond the text itself that supports an otherwise rather radical idea—that his inspiration for writing The Tempest came from a real shipwreck that occurred in 1609, and which happened not in the Mediterranean at all, but right in the middle of the western Atlantic.
There is, moreover, a hint within the text: a reference in passing to the “still-vex’d Bermoothes,” which shows that Shakespeare must have known something of the islands and their existence.
The dramatic circumstances of the foundering were well known in the London of Shakespeare’s day. They involved a vessel, the Sea Venture, which had been chartered in London to the Virginia Company, and which set off from the Plymouth docks to cross the ocean in June of that year. Its captain was a Dorset privateer and adventurer named Sir George Somers. His mission was to resupply the six hundred or so pioneers who a year before had settled in the infant British colonial settlement of King James’s Town, sited in one of the estuaries south of the Potomac River.
Cruel chance intervened, however. Somers and his sorely insubstantial vessel were caught in a fierce summer season hurricane. The little ship was dashed onto the reefs of a barely known group of islands—wrecked, though without loss of life, and after the crew saw as augury a spectacularly ominous display of St. Elmo’s fire among the masts and spars. The Sea Venture was a total loss, left high and dry though perched safely upright, wedged between a pair of rocks at the northeastern end of what is now known as the Bermuda island chain.
News of the shipwreck soon became the talk of the inns of early-seventeenth-century London, and Shakespeare almost certainly heard of it. The story, when told in full, had all the elements of fine drama, and the lurid tales of the strangely dancing illuminations that were seen just prior to the collision must, it is said, have led him to conjure up the notion of Ariel, the island sprite.
The story continued well beyond the wreck itself. There were aristocrats among the survivors, and ladies of some gentility, and all were soon obliged by Somers to work under the direction of his shipwrights to build from Bermuda’s abundant cedar trees a pair of replacement vessels for the Sea Venture. In these two ships, the Patience and the Deliverance, almost a year later the party sailed on—only to find the Jamestown settlement nearly completely decimated, with the sixty remaining colonists reduced to near starvation. The rescuers spent some time getting them back on their feet, whereupon Somers returned to Bermuda, an island he liked very much. But in a cruel irony he was to die there soon after his arrival. His body was returned to Lyme Regis, the Dorset village where he was born—but his heart has stayed to this day in Bermuda, in a tomb in what would become one of Britain’s earliest Atlantic possessions.
The island remains a British colony. Since 2009 marked the four hundredth anniversary of Somers’s unintended but compulsory landing, and since that landing effectively began the island’s long relationship with the British Crown, and since Shakespeare probably used elements of the story as the basis for his final play, what more appropriate way is there to celebrate Bermuda’s birthday than to have a performance of The Tempest on the island where it had all begun?
So the play was staged in the Hamilton Town Hall, a boxy limestone structure that was modeled on its much larger namesake in Sweden’s capital, Stockholm. All of the island grandees were there, including in the Royal Box the colonial governor, who arrived in the back of a BMW sedan driven by a uniformed soldier. It would be something of a stretch to say that the performance was memorably great, although Prospero was played by an English actor well-known for his matinee-idol looks, which thus brought out a large contingent of Bermudian middle-aged paying customers, most of them excitable ladies all atwitter.
They had come to see a mystical, magical piece of theater, a play conceived from an Atlantic story by a playwright at the top of his powers who was writing little more than a century after the Atlantic had been crossed by Columbus and then recognized by Amerigo Vespucci as the distinct and separate ocean we all now know it to be.
2. FIRST WORDS
Long, long before the Atlantic was recognized to be an ocean, when it was just an unknowably vast and man-devouring mass of waves and spray and far horizons, the artists were aware, were fully engaged with its awful beauty. The poets were among the earliest to take notice. Classical poets had of course long composed around the sea—but the only sea they truly knew was the Mediterranean, which in terms of its drama is a flat, warm, quite subdued, and almost suburban body of water, rather wanting of an appropriate majesty. The heaving gray waters of the Atlantic were quite another thing, and it was the Irish, when finally they were brave enough or foolhardy enough to launch their curraghs into the boiling surf off their western coasts, who seem first to have employed their literary sensibilities to meditate on their unique maritime environment.
St. Columba’s epic voyage north, from Ireland to the west coast of Scotland, in the sixth century A.D. was much written about—and there are stirring images of fleets of curraghs crossing the rough waters between Antrim and Galloway. But the literature surrounding Columba—or Colam Cille, as he is more properly known—is more narrative than contemplative. The poetry associated with the great apostle’s missions is regarded as Europe’s oldest vernacular verse, but its treatment of the ocean is mere bycatch, and it is another two centuries before the first snippets of imaginative appreciation of the sea start to become apparent.
Rumann son of Colmán was an eighth-century Gaelic poet who is said to have enjoyed a standing among the Irish equal to that of Virgil to the Romans or Homer to the Greeks. His best-known short poem, “Storm at Sea,” written around 700 A.D., is rightly regarded as one of mankind’s earliest artistic ruminations on the Atlantic. It has eight stanzas and was translated in the 1950s by the great Irish novelist and poet Frank O’Connor:
When the wind is from the west
All the waves that cannot rest
To the east must thunder on
Where the bright tree of the sun
Is rooted in the ocean’s breast.
The Celts clearly had the sea in their veins, and early Anglo-Saxon writers across ancient England were soon similarly caught up by a mighty vision of the sea, the first writings almost coeval with their Irish neighbors. It is perhaps hardly surprising that so maritime a race as the English produced, early on in their history, powerful poetry about their coastal waters. The best-known of the eighth-century Saxon poems about the ocean is to be found today in a secure loft above the Bishop’s House behind Exeter Cathedral, in Devon. Since the year 1072, when the great scholar Leofric died and left his sixty-six-volume manuscript library to the cathedral, one unremarkable-looking volume has stood head and shoulders above the rest in the quality of its contents. It is a codex known simply as the Exeter Book, and it contains unarguably the greatest collection of the poetry of its time in existence.
The precious little volume has had a life as tough as it has been long. The book’s original cover is missing, and of its 131 pages, eight have been lost, one was evidently once used as a wine coaster, others were singed by fire, and still others incised with notches suggesting they were used as cutting boards. Yet to the thanks of all, it is a survivor, and the Exeter Book is now recognized to hold about one-sixth of all the Anglo-Saxon poetry ever known to have been written. A single scribe is believed to have copied out all of the poems sometime in the tenth century, using brown ink on vellum, and wielding his
quill with an impeccable, monastically steady hand. There is almost no illumination or ornamentation in the book, and just a few small drawings in a number of the margins. It is a priceless work of art: only one other of the four known Anglo-Saxon codices is more famous, and that is the Nowell Codex, which includes the great epic poem Beowulf.
The Exeter Book, a tenth-century anthology of poetry written in minuscule Roman script, is one of the greatest treasures of English literature. It contains the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, perhaps the earliest English poem about the Atlantic Ocean.
But Beowulf is mainly about battles and funerals, and it takes place mostly on the land, in Denmark and southern Scandinavia. In the Exeter Book, on the other hand, there is one much shorter poem called The Seafarer, and this ranges a great deal further. The poem is dominated, at least in its first half, by a lengthy and mournful meditation on the trials of the sea. It is in truth an elegy to the Atlantic, in the voice of a man—though no one knows his name—who has suffered hard times winning a living from its waters, but yet who, when he is away from it, yearns for the ocean life more than he could ever imagine.
There are many translations of The Seafarer: these lines are from one of the better known, made in 1912 by Ezra Pound. It begins with a lament that all worn sailors will recognize:
. . . Lest man know not
That he on dry land loveliest liveth,
List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,
Weathered the winter, wretched outcast
Deprived of my kinsmen;
Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,
There I heard naught save the harsh sea
And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,
Did for my games the gannet’s clamour,
Sea-fowls’ loudness was for me laughter,
The mews singing all my mead-drink.
Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern
In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed
With spray on his pinion. . . .
But then, in an instant, even though the summer on shore is fast coming, the mariner’s mood changes to one of longing, a mood that all old salts will also know well:
Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries
Fields to fairness, land fares brisker,
All this admonisheth man eager of mood,
The heart turns to travel so he then thinks
On flood-ways to be far departing . . .
So that but now my heart burst from my breastlock
My mood ’mid the mere-flood,
Over the whale’s acre, would wander wide.
Did our anonymous melancholic see the Atlantic as a thing to love, or as no more than a means of getting away? The small armies of translators who have tried to come to terms, or come to grips, with the poem have worried over the inner meanings for decades. Some concluded that a journey by sea was merely a necessary inconvenience to be endured—Pound was probably counted among these. Others of more romantic mind, however, prefer to suggest that the trials of voyage itself somehow set the voyager aloof from ordinary land-bound folk, making him a superior sort, a man with reason to swagger. (And aloof, the term: this is nautical, from the order given to the steersmen to keep a-luff, away from a lee shore. So many of the words that gain traction in such early times served as reminders that Britain was steadily coming to be a maritime culture, steeped in the traditions of the sea. Luff was thirteenth century.)
But whatever the mysterious mind of its subject, The Seafarer established a fashion even as it confirmed a reality. It was on one level an allegory—the idea, to be repeated many times in later poetry, of life as voyage, and which consumes the narrator even as he contemplates returning to the ocean that has treated him so hard. Yet on another, more nationalistic level, it appears to acknowledge that the English of the time had come to understand that they inhabited a place set firmly in the ocean, surrounded by sea and strait and channel. It let it be known, unequivocally, that the accumulating identity of the English people was that of a race of islanders, a people who were in time both certain and obliged to win a living from their borderings of deep waters.
Caedmon and Cynewulf, two of the greatest Old English poets of the time, both probably lived and worked in monasteries by this bordering of sea—Caedmon at Whitby, Cynewulf probably at Lindisfarne—and their works are similarly steeped in maritime motifs. The shadowy figure of Cynewulf, who lived well on into the tenth century, writes of the sea with curiosity and passion, as with his thoughts on The Nature of the Siren:
Strange things indeed are seen in the sea world:
Men say that mermaids are like to maidens
In breast and body. But not so below:
From the navel netherward nothing looks human
For they are fishes, and furnished with fins.
These prodigies dwell in a perilous passage
Where swirling waters swallow men’s vessels . . .
Two hundred years later came the writers of Norse mythology, and the Icelandic sagas. Most likely—unless missionaries had brought manuscripts, or the evangelizing voyagings of St. Brendan had literary purpose, too—those in Iceland were unaware of the poetry of the Celts and the Saxons. In any case, they would forswear the poetic form for essays, most of them epics of great length and substance. And this new form of writing was in no sense a meditation, but rather entirely narrative in form, stories of heroism and privation, full of action and excitement.
The two essays that most memorably relate the exploits of Iceland’s seagoing explorers, the Greenland Saga and the Saga of Erik the Red, do certainly talk of the power of the North Atlantic, but they do so as part of a much larger story—that of the ocean as a passageway, albeit a very trying one, to discovery. The primary interest of the Nordic sailors was in reaching new territories, to explore and to colonize, as illustrated by a passage in the opening pages of the Greenland Saga:
. . . they put to sea as soon as they were ready and sailed for three days until land was lost to sight below the horizon. Then the fair wind failed and fog was set in, and for many days they had no idea what their course was. After that they saw the sun again and were able to get their bearing; they hoisted sail and after a day’s sailing they sighted land. They discussed among themselves what country this might be. Bjarni said he thought it could not be Greenland . . . “for there are said to be huge glaciers in Greenland.”
They closed the land quickly and saw that it was flat and wooded. Then the wind failed and the crew all said they thought it advisable to land there, but Bjarni refused . . . “for this country seems to me to be worthless.”
What they had found was almost certainly the coast of Labrador. So from the point of view of a would-be settler, Bjarni’s harsh-sounding assessment was probably and shrewdly right.
3. MONSTERS AND MAELSTROMS
The stories of the Norsemen—and one must note that their unimaginably complex mythology is still enormously popular in some circles today—brought with them one further departure from the merely written word, and that is the coming of imagery—sculpted, incised, drawn, or painted, though very little of it remains. Most of the representational art known today—and from which we have become familiar with the look of Odin and Thor and the Valkyries and the others of this vast pantheon—were re-created by nineteenth-century artists who became enraptured by heroic tales that suddenly burst out from a small legion of Scandinavian scholars in Victorian England. Some vague, contemporaneous incised images remain—of ships, for instance, including the giant vessel Skidbladnir (its name is given to cruise ships and fictional space vehicles to this day) and Naglfar, a vessel made entirely out of the finger- and toenails of the dead. There are tapestry representations, too—the medieval Swedish hanging known as the Överhogdal tapestry, found in a church warehouse at the beginning of the last century, show Viking knarrs, while the far better-known Bayeux tapestry in northern France shows the eleventh-century invasion fleets hurrying toward
England, sailing over a sea populated with fantastic creatures.
There are many images of sea monsters, too—the horrifyingly enormous Midgard Serpent, the Jörmundgandr, being one of the better known. And there are real-time pictures of the ever-present maritime dangers, of waterspouts and whirlpools and aqueous myths and legends that have been spun across the entire northern half of the ocean, from Cape Farewell in Greenland to the Scandinavian coast between North Cape and the Skaggerak. Images and tales present the maelstrom at the southern tip of the Lofoten islands, for example, and they show Corryvreckan, the terrifying water feature known as the old hag, or the cailleach, which still booms and thunders with each running tide between the western Scottish islands of Scarba and Jura;33 and there are any number of other ferocities and perils whose crudely executed pictures and vivid descriptions would have served to terrify any would-be North Atlantic oceangoers well into the fifteenth century.
The famous Carta Marina, the first map to show and name in detail the Nordic countries, and which was drawn in Rome in the sixteenth century by the Swedish cleric Olaus Magnus, is famous for showing a bull’s-eye representation of the maelstrom at the very southern tip of the Lofotens; it also has a description of an Atlantic beast, and the translation of this has a poetry all its own:
Those who sail up along the coast of Norway to trade or to fish, all tell the remarkable story of how a serpent of fearsome size, 200 feet long and 20 feet wide, resides in rifts and caves outside Bergen. On bright summer nights this serpent leaves the caves to eat calves, lambs and pigs, or it fares out to the sea and feeds on sea nettles, crabs and similar marine animals. It has ell-long hair hanging from its neck, sharp black scales and flaming red eyes. It attacks vessels, grabs and swallows people, as it lifts itself up like a column from the water.