Author: Simon Winchester
Category: Nonfiction
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Until the first of the sixteenth-century crossings, most of the imagery of the Atlantic—as in the cartouches drawn in the margins of maps—was peppered with frightening sea creatures like this, and with dragons and monster fish. Even as late as the relatively more sophisticated seventeenth century there were still engravings published showing giant fish and whales interfering with the passage of ships: St. Brendan, for example, is pictured offering Mass on the back of a whale. In the picture, engraved in a book published in 1621, the immense creature, alarmingly extravagant of teeth, grins with evil intent while letting fly twin spouts of water; yet serene on his back is the priest, gathered before an altar with corporal, chalice, and paten all laid out as neatly as if back in Clonfert, still stoically intoning the liturgy.
The monstrous and the terrifying were not so prominent in the portrayal of the ocean on its western side, however. Such pre-Columbian art as depicts the sea is more accepting, more sympathetic to the ocean caprices of calm and storm. The Incas—not an Atlantic people, true—gave thanks to Mamacocha, the goddess of their sea. Those who lived on the Pacific coasts saw her as representing a protective embrace, as the supplier of fish and whales from which they could win sustenance, and generally radiating a mood of benevolence that only altered, albeit with occasionally lethal ferocity, whenever humankind had not been suitably attentive to her needs.
The Mayans, farther north and on the side facing the Atlantic, were perhaps rather less spiritually involved with the ocean. There is precious little art that indicates the sea or anything like it, even though their best-known color, Mayan blue, would seem the ideal candidate for the making of paintings relating to the sea. They were very commercially connected to the ocean, though, constructing great trading canoes to move goods and people from peninsula to peninsula and island to island. The greatest Mayan seaside city, the port of Tulum at the tip of the Yucatán peninsula, is magnificent—but it has little specifically about the sea to its buildings and murals, and its discovered emblems are more concerned with the force of the wind and the beauty of sunrise. If Tulum is more than merely a great port for the decidedly inland Mayan city of Coba, and was constructed as some kind of homage to the ocean—as many of today’s other great Atlantic cities clearly are—it is one of the more discreet in its approach.
Similarly the Mayan creation myth, as seen in their art and literature, makes scant mention of the sea. Mountains somehow emerged from it, and then wooden men were created in the jungles on the mountain slopes, and out of them in time, real men. But the sea is not the fons et origo, has little of the comforting power known from Incan legend, is less of a source of sustenance, is more of a carriageway to profit and prosperity.
In Atlantic Africa, however, there is still today much of the kind of reverence for the ocean that was known among the Inca. Female water spirits, benevolent and erotic by turn, are enormously important in the tribal cultures of the sub-Saharan coast—especially among the Yoruba of Nigeria and in the various voodoo cults of Benin and Ghana, as well as in Liberia, Gabon, and on the island of Fernando Poo. A popular figure, Wata-mama, or more popularly now, Mammywater, has appeared for hundreds of years in the folk art of West Africa. Since the onset of slavery, it has also popped up among members of the African diaspora on the western side of the ocean, especially in Brazil.
Wata-mama is usually depicted as being quite pale-skinned, blond, and decked out in a singular array of jewelry; it is finned like a mermaid and usually possesses full breasts between which nestles, invariably, a sturdy-looking python. Anthropologists believe the origin of the spirit form is the large marine mammal the West African manatee, also somewhat unfairly named the sea cow.
Men of a certain disposition like to claim that the spirit of Wata-mama resides in promiscuous city girls, especially prostitutes—a belief that leads some of the bolder types to claim to their wives that visits to brothels are therefore somehow sacramental. Though their belief in the water spirits remains robust, few African spouses are believed to be entirely sympathetic to this argument.
4. A MORE COMFORTABLE SEA
The fifteenth-century crossings of the Atlantic coincided with, or some might argue were in part impelled by, the restless intellectual and commercial urgency of the Renaissance. This was a period when, so far as visual art was concerned, all manner of new concepts were being born—perspective most significantly, but also the incorporation of scientific realism into art, and a yearning to record the newly acquired knowledge about the natural world. It was a change in artistic direction that had a signal effect on the perception of the sea. As the ocean world became increasingly better known, and as it started to be feared less than before, and as its waters and cliffs and creatures began to become steadily more amenable to calm artistic appreciation, so the fantasy world of the unknown started to make way for a more conventional, familiar representational appreciation of a great sea.
Initially the sea is only a backdrop—it appears in some of Dürer’s work, for example, as merely a flat expanse of water tucked away as part of the scenery. To be sure, one of Dürer’s better-known works, The Sea Monster, which he painted in 1498, has at center stage a giant Triton-like figure, with scales and antlers, holding a none-too-incommoded-looking nude woman in his arms while her hysterical friends shout and gesticulate in the background. One might say this was a throwback to the more primal view of the ocean—except that the sea itself in this image is calm, the mirrored ripples suggesting no more than Beaufort wind scale No. 1. And five years later, when Dürer paints his Lamentation for Christ, the body of water—though it may well be a large lake—is quite still, mirrorlike, a reminder that whatever the tribulations of morality, the sea continues—to resuscitate Derek Walcott’s poetic idea—to go on.
As incidental as this was to Dürer, it was front and center for a young Spanish painter named Alejo Fernández: thirty years on and the Atlantic now begins both to insert itself and to assert its claim to a certain standing in art. The Virgin of the Navigators, which Fernández is thought to have painted around 1531, is the first known representation of the transatlantic achievements of Christopher Columbus and the implications of the first central European contact with the Americas. In it the Virgin Mary floats on clouds, gazing benevolently down at Spanish explorers and at converted Native Americans alike. Beneath her feet is the ocean, blue and calm and alive with ships of a variety of styles and ages.
The painting was enormous, commissioned to hang in the great Hall of Audiences at the Casa de Contratación, the agency that, from its headquarters in the Alcázar in Seville, directed all official Spanish exploration and imperial expansion. It was there to serve as inspiration for the explorers who would go out in the wake of Columbus and Vespucci; it was to serve as the centerpiece of an altar when divine blessing was sought for another trying voyage out west, or else it was there to offer thanksgiving for a homebound journey successfully accomplished.
The Atlantic Ocean was now seen, by the Spanish at least, as having been placed under the eternal, and eternally maternal, invigilation of the mother of God. It was an ocean divinely designed for the use of man, and such paintings as followed would offer it honor and respect in equal measure. Maps and charts, altarpieces and altar cloths, and hangings for ecclesiastical walls all around Europe and in the far possessions were soon emblazoned with formal imagery of what, with no intended pun, might justly be called the Holy Sea.
And then, all of a sudden, the sea was everywhere. Or rather the ships were, and with the sea beneath, beside, and beyond them, and in an endless variety of moods. It was a swift and sudden upsurge of interest beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century, and it had much to do with national pride. The sight of a cog or a carrack or galleon in full sail, or in later years a ship of the line firing a broadside into a rival mass of broken spars and shredded sails, seemed always to send a shiver of pride through the national mood. The British, the Spanish, and the Portuguese certainly all produced an abundance of paintings in thi
s era; yet it was the Dutch who, from the mid-sixteenth century onward, seemed to hold a brief monopoly on the artistic depiction of the ocean.
If any region can be said to have invented Atlantic art, it is the Netherlands, and an artistic holy trinity of the ship portrait, the port view, and the tempest by the rocks provided the dominant themes of paintings by such men as the Flemish painter and printmaker Pieter Brueghel the Elder;34 the father and son who were both named Willem van de Velde and who emigrated to England to improve their craft by winning a slew of royally patronized marine panoramas; and the man who essentially invented the craft, and who was known for creating the finest of all battle scenes, and with painstaking attention to the most gory details, the Haarlem maritime painter genius Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom.
Even now, nearly five centuries on, these are paintings that grab the attention: invariably there is the hungry sea, its waves translucent green and white-capped, the troughs between them deep and dangerous and all providing a savage contrast to the distant comforts of cow-grazed meadows and church steeples. The foreground waters are alive with a bustle of lighters and painters and churning ferryboats—and then, front and center and gleaming white in a single shaft of watery sunlight, are the sails of an enormous Hollander merchantman, leaning over in the wind and bearing away for some faraway destination, the waters beginning to churn under her mighty oak bows as the breeze catches her canvas and she begins to power offstage and out of view.
There were subtle differences in the manner in which the Europeans treated the sea in their art. The Dutch favored a draftsman-like accuracy in their depiction of the complexity of great ships, with thousands of details crammed into the immense space of an expensively commissioned canvas, and with tautly composed and harmonious settings in estuaries or beneath impressive headlands. The British, less formally, liked to paint their seaports, the more majestic vessels of the Royal Navy, and the triumphantly messy moments of the more complex naval engagements. The French, on the other hand, did rather little with their Atlantic coast, and little is known except for the works of Claude Lorrain (who in any case worked in Italy) and Claude Vernet, who turned out thirteen magnificent paintings of French Atlantic seaports, Boulogne to Biarritz (together with Marseille, on the Mediterranean) for a royal commission from Louis XV.
Canaletto famously concentrated his maritime mind on the canals of Venice, and the Russians (who had no real exposure to the Atlantic, other than nearby White Sea ports of Murmansk and Archangel) did their best to show interest—and though Catherine the Great persuaded a German artist based in Naples to do most of the kind of seascapes that she liked, when he asked for ideas for painting action-packed battle scenes she sent a squadron of her warships down to Leghorn and had one of them blown up so he could get the general idea.
5. THE LYRICAL TRANSITION
It took the poets some time to catch up with the painters, however.
Europe’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painters may have come swiftly to terms with the ocean, seeing its expanses more in terms of trade than terror; but the poets were still not entirely convinced. For example, while Dutchmen were busy recording the new glamour of sail and sea and Sir Walter Raleigh was busy exploring the New World (and composing poetry that is curiously almost entirely devoid of marine references), his good friend Edmund Spenser was composing the highly nautical and highly fanciful epic The Faerie Queen. Spenser’s take on the nature of the ocean in this work’s myriad books and cantos was nothing like that depicted in Dutch painting, was anything but glamorous, in the sense that according to Spenser it was filled with
Most ugly shapes, and horrible aspects,
Such as Dame Nature selfe mote feare to see,
Or shame, that ever should so fowle defects
From her most cunning hand escaped bee;
All dreadfull pourtraicts of deformitee:
Spring-headed Hydraes, and sea-shouldring Whales,
Great whirlpooles, which all fishes make to flee,
Bright Scolopendraes, arm’d with silver scales,
Mighty Monoceroses, with immeasured tayles.
Nor was Shakespeare—whose references to the sea are innumerable, though many so wreathed in fantasy as to reinforce the doubt he ever actually saw it—very much more cheerful. The nightmare of ocean drowning still intrudes spectacularly in his plays, as here with the soliloquy of Clarence, imprisoned in the Tower on the order of his brother, the soon-to-be King Richard III.
O Lord! methought what pain it was to drown!
What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!
What sights of ugly death within mine eyes!
Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wracks;
A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvaluèd jewels,
All scatt’red in the bottom of the sea:
Some lay in dead men’s skulls, and in the holes
Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept
(As ’twere in scorn of eyes) reflecting gems,
That wooed the slimy bottom of the deep
And mocked the dead bones that lay scatt’red by.
And John Donne similarly found Atlantic water a horror, as in “The Storm,” written in the form of a letter in 1597:
The south and west winds join’d, and, as they blew,
Waves like a rolling trench before them threw.
Sooner than you read this line, did the gale,
Like shot, not fear’d till felt, our sails assail;
And what at first was call’d a gust, the same
Hath now a storm’s, anon a tempest’s name.
Jonas, I pity thee, and curse those men
Who, when the storm raged most, did wake thee then.
Sleep is pain’s easiest salve, and doth fulfil
All offices of death, except to kill.
But then came the beginning of the Enlightenment, and with it the triumph of reason, the age of Descartes, Newton, and very early on, John Milton. He turned out to be one of the first English poets who would at last strike a more sanguine note about the sea generally. In the seventh book of Paradise Lost, for instance, he displays his admiration—perhaps not still entirely rational; this was after all only the very beginnings of a new and less superstitious time—for what he saw as the god-created deeps:
Over all the face of the earth
Main ocean flow’d, not idle but with warm
Prolific humour soft’ning all her globe
Fermented the great mother to conceive
Satiate with genial moisture, when God said,
Be gather’d now, ye waters under heaven
Into one place. . .
. . . the great receptacle
Of congregated waters He call’d Seas.
It would be some while yet before the sea became, as it is today, a thing of great romance—the archetype of the sublime, that philosophical quality of natural creations that manages to combine the magnificent and the horrific at the same time. Mountain chains, with their jaggedly vicious peaks and sheer cliffs, and the dangers of rockfalls and avalanches and lashing storms, are classic exemplars of the sublime, presenting an aesthetic that inspires awe and reverence. The sea eventually came to be seen as much the same—a thing possessed of an awesome mightiness, a lethal beauty, of which one might be fearful and respectful and overcome by, all at the same instant. Come the end of the eighteenth century and the sea—and this, to most Europeans, meant the Atlantic Ocean that washed their shores—was no longer a mere inconvenience to be overlooked in life, in art, in literature, in any creative endeavor. It was a thing to be honored and even embraced, though always warily, for the sea could always strike back, and with irresistible force and power.
6. STONES OF THE OCEANSIDE
At the same time as the Dutch were painting the Atlantic Ocean as something of ineluctable grandeur, so the builders of the European empires were beginning to create a
nd expand suitably grand cities around its periphery. And while it would never do to suggest that those who designed the cities or the buildings were purposefully offering any kind of homage to the ocean, today many of them have an architectural legacy that has a certain splendid uniqueness to it. There can be no doubt that because of the history of colonization and the passage of wealth between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, no other of the world’s ocean and seas currently possesses such a concentration of urban magnificence: five centuries’ worth of creativity in stone have left an indelible stamp on the Atlantic, as valuable a record of man’s dealing with her vastness as is the art and literature that she inspired.
The sheer number of oceanside cities could threaten to make any account seem more like a catalog. From Hammerfest to Cape Town on the eastern side, from St. John’s to Comodoro Rivadavia on the west, and aside from the great and the obvious like New York and Rotterdam, Liverpool and Rio, there are places such as Esbjerg, Vigo, Takoradi, Walvis Bay, Puerto Madryn, Wilmington, and Halifax—a sampling of the scores of ports and settlements that have come into existence solely because of their closeness to the ocean. Any selection based on the appearance of the homage each of these seems to offer or of a legacy that seems unique is certain to be contentious, forced, and false.
It is, however, possible to offer up a number of the most distinctive cities in unrelated pairs, with the one on the Atlantic’s older eastern side matched in a somewhat logical manner to a partner on the younger, newer, western side. Not for purposes of direct comparison, perhaps, and not necessarily because they enjoy any kind of formal historical linkage—as with the cities of Merseyside and the sugar ports of the Caribbean, for example, or the European migrant centers and the wharves of Ellis Island. The pairs offer simply some indication of the range of urban ambition that the Atlantic Ocean has stimulated. Some Atlantic cities are most notable for their antiquity, some for their beauty or drama or their fading magnificence; some are remarkable for their energy, some for their sheer economic or political importance. And happily, to display each of these qualities there appears by sheer happenstance to be a city on each coast. There is also, moreover, at least one city, and maybe two, that are situated not on a continental coast but in the very center of the ocean, and which also have that same quality—that peculiarly Atlantic identity—that is unique and unforgettable.