Atlantic (17 page)

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.

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.