Author: Simon Winchester
Category: Nonfiction
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The Chamarel, a French-built cable-laying ship, happened to be in dock, busy with preparations to sail, taking on immense coils of fiber-optic wire to string along the West African coast. Some years before the ship had helped lay the immense SAT-3 line, running six thousand miles between Portugal and Cape Town, and since it broke down quite often she was now on near-constant patrol to help keep it in service. Small Atlantic coast countries like Togo and Benin were hooked up to this vastly important cable and relied on it to keep them in touch with the rest of the planet. Engineers were now bent on connecting the half-forgotten Atlantic countries, places like Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, small nations that might well have remained overlooked for decades more, except that lately geologists had found oil in their territorial waters. Raw economics demanded that they now have the luxury of the Internet.
An Antarctic survey ship was also tied up nearby, her hull bright orange and with the gently sloping bow that meant she was able to break through ice floes, “if there are any left,” said the lugubrious German skipper, who lived in Colorado and had been reading up on global warming.
A pair of tugs finally nosed us to the innermost of the quays, beside a pontoon that was covered with fur seals basking in the morning sun. The only buildings of any distinction close by were the Cape Town Passenger Terminal, a somewhat utilitarian PWD-built structure from Edwardian days, and a scattering of Victorian godowns as well as office blocks with gilded ironwork and fretted balconies, most of them now turned into restaurants and hotels.
The oldest structure in Cape Town—said to be the oldest in all of southern Africa—is the old Dutch castle, a five-pointed, star-shaped structure in yellow ocher walls and tucked into a park beside the main railway station. It is almost hidden between the bland office buildings and condominiums: the only colonial architecture with remnant charm are the larger mansions and hotels on the lower slopes of Table Mountain, pretty when the jacarandas are in bloom, in parks secluded from the bustle and the traffic. And in truth, traffic and flyovers and cranes and the ugly architecture of the 1960s does tend to leave the strongest impression: it is only when one gets into the cable car rotunda and whirls up to the top of Table Mountain that the oceanside uniqueness of the place returns to view—and only then does it become easier to remember why this city is where it is, why the Dutch chose it as their rest stop and victualing harbor four centuries ago, and why, though it is so very different from New York, it remains every bit as much an Atlantic city as its counterpart, thousands of miles away at the far end of the long-sea diagonal.
For from the peak the ocean is everything and everywhere. It is only a moment’s walk to get away from the grind of the cable car’s engines and the jabber of the stall holders and into the windswept peace of the remoter corners of the cliff top, in the company of the eagles, buzzards, and warblers that soar hopefully and without cease in the thermals. The Atlantic lies to the south, where you can glimpse its rough windswept rollers smashing into the continent’s most southerly point, Cape Agulhas, and onto the crags of its most famous, the Cape of Good Hope. It lies to the north, up along a coastline that, after the peninsulas of Saldhana and St. Helen’s Bay, runs straight all the way to Namaqualand and the sand dunes of Namibia and the Skeleton Coast. And it lies down across the city below, to the west—a vast, empty, crawling sheet of hammered ocean steel, with the currents and tide rips of Table Bay, the furious eddies around Robben Island, and the faint white traces of great ships leaving for suitably great and mostly beautiful ports on the far side of the Atlantic world: Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Pernambuco, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Wilmington, Charleston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Halifax, and St. John’s.
Each one of them charming, each one of them old, most of them possessed of a stunning beauty, and all settled, like this very town in the south of Africa, with wharves and port authorities and dry docks and ornately grand buildings and immense railway terminals, each set down beside an ocean that each somehow celebrates, in looks and sound and style and smell and feel. Or that is how I think of these ports as I gaze enviously down at the vessels churning off through the ocean, westward.
The Chamarel is leaving, too: I can see her crawling gingerly between the harbor moles, white and sleek, with her twin funnels and her curiously bulbous cable-laying bat nose and the drums of fiber-optic cable lashed astern: she will be heading for Angola, where there was a radio report of trouble; and maybe she will look in at the cluster of Atlantic islands tucked into the armpit of West Africa—the Cape Verdes, perhaps, or São Tomé and Principe, all of them needing electronic connections to a world that might otherwise pass them by.
And then there is one other ship, a small, stubby blue and white vessel, by now well beyond the piers, heading to the northwest. She seems to be on a different track from the big cargo vessels, a track that somehow reminds me of the direction that the old Union Castle liners would once take, back when this port served as a destination for the last great passenger liners, which went, as regular as clockwork, up to England, to Southampton. At four o’clock sharp every Thursday, one liner would leave Table Bay while a sister ship would slip southbound out of the Solent. They would pass one another, saying a brief hello, somewhere off the coast of Senegal. “Seventeen Days!” the newspaper advertisements would cry: “Weekly Mail Service to South Africa. Inquire at No. 3 Fenchurch Street, London EC3.”
But this below me is no grand passenger vessel—no lavender-hulled Pendennis Castle, no Stirling Castle, no Edinburgh Castle. Besides, the very last of these ships, the Windsor Castle, had made the company’s final voyage back in 1977, leaving at four o’clock precisely on September 6, getting back to Southampton seventeen days later. She had many owners afterward, mostly Greek; and then she went to be scrapped in India but suffered the ignominy of a steering-gear failure in the Arabian Sea, so had to be towed to a scavengers’ feast in the Bombay breakers’ yards.
No, this was no Union Castle ship below. When I was finally able to borrow a sufficiently powerful pair of binoculars I was able to identify her, though barely, as she was vanishing into nothing in the afternoon haze. Her name was painted in white on her stern. Her port of registry was Jamestown: she was the 6,000-ton mixed cargo and passenger vessel the RMS St. Helena, the only surviving vessel still formally designated a Royal Mail Ship, and as such supposed to be accorded a degree of respect and precedence by all other ships in harbor and under way. She was heading north to dock in Portland, England, eventually; but she was due on her way to stop in a week’s time at the island for which she had been named and for whom she was now the only regular lifeline of supply.
The RMS St. Helena was this warm autumn afternoon heading out into the ocean on track for her port of registry, the town I still like to think is the most simply beautiful of all the Atlantic settlements. Jamestown, the capital of the crown colony where the British once exiled the defeated Emperor Napoléon, is a place which remains today preserved to perfection by what until very recently has been her almost total isolation. The island, forty-seven square miles of basalt and supporting an almost unvarying population of five thousand, was a good four days’ sailing off the coast of Angola, in the middle of a now-trackless wilderness of sea.
Now trackless because the Union Castle liners used to call at Jamestown but long since abandoned the route. The final call was made by the northbound Windsor Castle in the autumn of 1977. The service then stopped dead, and when I first went there the journey was a little less easy to organize: no 4 P.M. every Thursday anymore.
Long ago I had been sent to the island to write a story about the curious case of a local man—a Saint, as they are still known—who had been convicted of a none-too-heinous type of murder (there had been a fight in a pub, so this was by no means premeditated slaughter) and was to be brought back to England to serve out his sentence.
There were seldom crimes of any seriousness on the island, I had been told—in fact, most islanders were so well mutually disposed that
there was an alarming abundance of bastard children, known when they turned up at weddings as “spares.” I was also told the local policemen had very little to do and were known as “the toys”; and that the Jamestown jail was so small and made so stuffy by the equatorial heat that inmates were let out each afternoon to go swimming in the Atlantic.
This, I decided one gloomy afternoon in London, was just the kind of place that had to be seen: a mid-ocean colonial possession of great antiquity where life, it seemed from afar, was lived with less gravity than in most places elsewhere. After much trial and error, I managed to get myself aboard the 1980s version of the RMS St. Helena—a smaller, stubbier, and bright red predecessor of the blue one I had watched sailed past Robben Island. After some delays and ditherings we lumbered out from the Western Approaches and proceeded to steam south at no more than ten knots past the Canaries and the Cape Verdes, through to the warming, flying-fish-filled tropical seas.
There was an interlude when we hove to briefly at another of the Atlantic Ocean’s remote colonial outposts, the expired-volcano island of Ascension, where there is an airstrip and a lot of expensive communications equipment (some for broadcasting, some for spying) and a patch of well-watered grass at the summit where there used to be a herd of cows administered from London, for complicated reasons, by an obscure department of the BBC. We had called in to collect a detachment of Saints who worked for the contractors on an island that mostly looks like a slag heap, or Hell with the Fire Put Out, as some of the more disgruntled have it. But Ascension wages are good wages, and there is little to spend them on, so back then not a few Saints were happy to work there on yearlong contracts.
But they were never so happy as when they finally got back home, which our passengers did after a further two days’ sailing. The eventual arrival at Jamestown had a sweetness all its own, as seaport returns so often do—with the unions of spouses long missed, children much grown, and then all the news and the gossip unheard. But here, although the substance of the afternoon—we dropped anchor a couple of hours before dusk—was mostly dominated by the delights of reunion, for me it was a revelation of quite another kind. Jamestown, seen both from afar and upon close contact, turned out to be a tiny Atlantic-side city unlike any other, and in scale and style and manner just exquisite. Jamestown truly is a work of art, and Atlantic Ocean art at that.
The town, which generally has around fifteen hundred inhabitants, a third of the island’s total, lies in a steep valley on the island’s north shore, and like Cape Town is wholly encircled by hills. But there is no dock of useful size, and vessels of any consequence have to lie at anchor in James Bay, with all passengers and cargoes transferred to shore by lighter.37 The legendary Atlantic swells, born in storms as far away as Newfoundland, the islanders like to tease, can make this tricky, the waits often inconveniently lengthy. But the panorama as the launch chugs in toward the crowded little pierhead seems lifted straight from an eighteenth-century print, with nothing changed or edited. There is a small and perfectly formed white-painted castle on the left, with tiny inner courtyards and cobbled squares; there is a small wooden drawbridge, and a castellated wall a dozen feet thick, built to shield the town beyond from any seaborne hostility, and this is pierced by a gateway with a portcullis and the arms of the Honourable East India Company carved and painted in red, white, and silver above it. There is a microscopic church (the cathedral, St. Paul’s, is a ways inland), a town square with a bench for old-timers set in the shade of a pipal tree brought in from India, a minute police station with its aforementioned tiny prison, and then, at the beginning of a single main street that rises gently toward the brown flax-covered hills, there are two rows of Regency houses, each brightly painted and with iron trelliswork and sash windows, which look patiently across at each other as they have for centuries.
It is a town that is, as they say, all of a piece. There is the Consulate Hotel, with a gleaming brass plate outside. There is Jacob’s Ladder, an iron-railed stairway of 699 stone steps that rises at a vertiginous angle up the valley side, and which was built to help supply a garrison of sentries placed on the cliffs to ensure that any would-be rescuers of Napoléon were seen, and then seen off. There is a public park, with a zigzag path among the jacarandas and bamboo fronds, and reserved, originally, for Ladies. There is a bustling covered market where the floors are wet with seawater and crowded with baskets of dripping fish. And once in a while the crowds part for a Jaguar, flag flying from the hood and a crown instead of a license plate, bearing His Excellency down from his mansion, Plantation House (the gardens of which have giant tortoises that were there at the time of Napoléon), to his offices in the castle.
The Atlantic eases itself into every conversation, every thought. The weather, of course, is made by it—the morning mists, the evening winds, the slapping swells that set the dockside pontoons swaying and creaking. The timetables of the ships are set by it—there is no airfield still, and many islanders suppose never will be, and the RMS in its many incarnations is still the only way to leave and to return. The daily tuna catch comes from the Atlantic; and such economy as survives on the island—for once they grew watercress for the Royal Navy, and they harvested and scutched flax for rope and string, but when the British Post Office decided to tie its parcels with plastic twine, all production ended—now depends almost entirely on the sea. The French drapeau tricolore still flies defiantly over Longwood House, where the island’s most infamous Atlantic visitor was compelled to live out his final, post-Waterloo years, having been landed there from Plymouth aboard one of the ocean’s better-known naval vessels, HMS Northumberland.38 Even the island’s address—St. Helena, South Atlantic Ocean (and with an island postal code, STHL 1ZZ, said to be recognized by the sorting computers in London)—displays a formal and official bond between the island and the sea, unique in all the world.
Of course there are nobler architectural confections around the Atlantic; there are many places of greater oceanside charm; and there many places of equal inconsequence ranged up and down the ocean, between Thorshavn in the Faroes up north, to Stanley in the Falklands down south. There is no lighthouse on St. Helena—so no opportunity for one of the great lighthouse builders, like the Stevensons of Edinburgh (Robert Louis among them), who created some of the greatest, most beautiful, and most technically challenging of all Atlantic structures.39 That single lapse aside, however, it is tempting to list St. Helena high among the great visual triumphs of the ocean sea.
As a place, pure and simple, the island is perhaps best corralled alongside the odd and the eccentric corners of the Atlantic, with such places as Puerto Madryn in Argentina, where a number of the locals (descendants of indentured Cardiganshire railway workers) still speak Welsh; or with Axim in Ghana, where there is a magnificent Dutch-built castle; or with Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana (where Captain Dreyfus was sent from Paris, to be held in solitary confinement). But I have always thought this tiny colonial outpost was deserving of something more. Without being too fanciful, I have long felt that in the architecture that defines both her and her exquisite little capital city, the island of St. Helena somehow represents, somehow stands for, somehow has become the essence of the ocean. That she somehow is a period of the Atlantic’s human history, unaltered, untinkered with, and preserved for posterity in fine old Regency stucco and well-wrought imported English iron.
7. SOUNDS OF THE WATERS
The ocean is also represented, with equal vigor, in more contemporary writing, in painting, in music. The terror that the great sea stimulated in early times has been long assuaged; the formality with which the sea was represented in her newly crossed years in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been long reversed; in modern times the Atlantic has become an entity to be recorded in all of her moods, in part for the obvious reasons of her drama, her beauty, her spectacular violence. But it also happens that she has come to be on very much more intimate terms with today’s humankind—and that, it seems, has much to do
with the present state of shore-bound civilization, a condition of existence to which the ocean is now seen as the very antithesis. Many nowadays think of the ocean admiringly, as a place of refuge from the numberless cares and wants of the landlubber. With the trials of modernity the sea has come to be regarded as refuge, as a place without the crowds, the dirt, or the want, without the slums of a vast modern city: as a place well beyond the pullulations of industry, money, and greed.
Of course, the Atlantic is a body of water that still needs to be crossed and navigated through, for reasons of commerce and curiosity and as we shall soon see, for reasons of war. But it is also a body of water that has come to be seen—and if one has to hazard a date, it began to be so from about the beginnings of the nineteenth century—as an entity for more pleasant purposes, of which human recreation, quite literally the re-creation of the human spirit, was one. It was still an illimitably large and powerful body of water, true, but so far as humankind was concerned it was now also something pure, something clean and uncongested, with a certain nobility about it sorely lacking in the slums of industrialized cities.
The ocean—and the ocean best known to nineteenth-century sophisticates was still the Atlantic—was thus something to be envied, an entity well deserving of our respect and admiration. This was a major shift in emphasis—and the art, writing, and music of more recent years has been quick to reflect it, to undergo what can without apology be called a real and very apparent sea change.