Atlantic (4 page)

The Ages are those we remember, if scantily, from childhood, and are listed in Jacques’s all too famously gloomy monologue:

At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel,

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion;

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Infant; School-boy; Lover; Soldier; Justice; Slipper’d Pantaloon; and Second Childishness. It seemed, all of a sudden, just about the ideal. Pinioned within these seven categories, the stages of our relationship with the ocean could be made quite manageable.

I could examine in the First Age, for example, the stirrings of humankind’s initial childlike interest in the sea. In the Second, I could examine how that initial curiosity evolved into the scholarly disciplines, of exploration, education, and learning—and in this as in all the other Ages I could explore the history of that learning, so that each Age would become a chronology in and of itself. I could then become captivated in the Third Age—that of the lover—by the story of humankind’s love affairs, by way of the art, poetry, architecture, or prose that this sea has inspired over the centuries.

In the Fourth Age—that of the soldier—I could tell of the arguments and conflicts that have so often roiled the ocean, of how the force of arms over the years has compelled migration or fostered seaborne crime, of how national navies have reacted, how individual battles have been fought, and how Atlantic heroes have been born.

In the Fifth Age—that of the well-fed Justice—I could describe how the sea eventually became a sea of laws and commerce, and how tramp steamers and liners and submarine cables and jet aircraft then crossed and recrossed it in an infinite patchwork designed for the attainment of profit and comfort. In the Sixth Age, that dominated by the fatigue and tedium of the pantaloon, I could reflect upon the ways that man has recently wearied of the great sea, has come to take it for granted, to become careless of its special needs and to deal with it improvidently. And in the Seventh and final Age—the Age that ends with Shakespeare’s immemorial
sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything
—I could imagine the ways by which this much-overlooked and perhaps vengeful ocean might one day strike back, reverting to type, reverting to the primal nature of what it always was.

Alluring as this all might seem, however, there was something else. First I had to make the frame, to construct the proscenium arch, to attempt to place the long human drama within the very much longer physical context. Only when that had been achieved, and by leave of the enormous natural forces that had made the ocean in the first place, could I try to begin to unveil and recount the human stories. Only then could I attempt to tell something of the ocean’s hundreds of millions of years of life, and of the scores of thousands of its middle years during which the men and women who made up its community would eventually go out onstage, and by their own lights, each perform their unique, and uniquely Atlantic, roles.

First—just how was the ocean made? How did it all begin?

Prologue: The Beginnings of Its Goings On

All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

A big ocean—and the Atlantic is a very big ocean indeed—has the appearance of a settled permanence. Stand anywhere beside it, and stare across its swells toward the distant horizon, and you are swiftly lulled into the belief that it has been there forever. All who like the sea—and surely there can be precious few who do not—have a favored place in which to stand and stare: for me it has long been the Faroe Islands, up in the far north Atlantic, where all is cold and wet and bleak. In its own challenging way, it is entirely beautiful.

Eighteen islands, each one a sliver of black basalt frosted with gale-blown salt grass and tilted up alarmingly from east to west, make up this Atlantic outpost of the Kingdom of Denmark. Fifty-odd thousand Faroese fishermen and sheep farmers cling there in ancient and determined remoteness, like the Vikings from whom they descend and whose vestiges of language they still speak. Rain, wind, and fog mark out these islanders’ days—although from time to time, and on almost every afternoon in high summer, the mists suddenly swirl away and are replaced by a sky of a clarity and blue brilliance that seems to be known only in the world’s high latitudes.

It was on just a day like this that I chose to sail, across a lumpy and capricious sea, to the westernmost member of the archipelago, the island of Mykines. It is an island much favored by artists, who come for its wild solitude and its total subordination to the nature that so entirely surrounds it. And going there left a deep impression: in all my wanderings around the Atlantic, I can think of no place that ever gave me so great an impression of perching
on the world’s edge,
no better place to absorb and begin to comprehend the awful majesty of this enormous ocean.

The westernmost of the eighteen Faroe Islands,
Mykines
rises abruptly from the Atlantic Ocean, buffeted by wind and waves, or else socked in by thick fogs for most of the year. Puffins, whales, and sheep—the word
faroe
is Viking for sheep—support a total Faroese population of fewer than 50,000 people, all of whom are citizens of Denmark.

The landing on Mykines was exceptionally tricky. The boat surfed in on the green breaking top of an ocean roller into the tiny harbor, its skipper tying up for just enough time to let me clamber out onto a cement quay lethal with slippery eelgrass. A staircase of rough stones rose up to the skyline, and I scrambled upward, only too well aware of the deep chasm filled with boiling surf far below beside me. But I made it. Up on top there were a scattering of houses, a church, a shop, and a tiny inn, its sitting room heavy with the smell of pipe smoke and warm wet sweater wool. A sudden furious blast of wind had driven away the morning fog, and the sun revealed a long steep slope of grass that stretched right up the island tilt, clear up to the western sky.

There was a grassy pathway leading up to this high horizon, and a skein of islanders was moving slowly up it, like a line of ants. I joined them, out of curiosity. To my great surprise most were dressed in Faroese finery—the men in dark blue and scarlet jackets, with high necks and rows of silver buttons, knee breeches and silver-buckled shoes; the women in wide-striped long skirts, blue vests fastened with an elaborate cat’s cradle of chains, and fringed scarves. And though a few men had anoraks with folded felt snoods, none wore hats: the incessant wind would have whipped them away. The children, dressed just as their parents, whooped and skirled and slid on the wet grass, their elders tutting them to keep their boots clean and to be careful not to fall.

It took thirty minutes to do the climb, and none of the islanders seemed to break a sweat. They all gathered at a site by the cliff top, where the grass was flattened. There was a memorial stone here, a basalt cross incised with the names, I was told, of the fishermen who had died in the Icelandic fishing grounds off to the west. The crowd, perhaps a hundred in all, arranged themselves beside the summit marker, a cairn of basalt boulders, waiting.

After a few minutes a white-haired man of sixty or so, puffing a little from exercise, appeared at the top of the path. He was dressed in a long black surplice with a ruffled high collar that made him look like he had stepped from the pages of a medieval chapbook. He was a Lutheran pastor, from the Faroese capital town of Thorshavn. He proceeded to lead a service, helped by two churchwardens who played accordions and one island lad with a guitar. A pair of pretty young blond children handed around some damp hymn sheets, and the villagers’ high voices set to singing old Norse holy songs, the thin music instantly swept away to sea by the gale, as it was designed to be.

The islanders said the small religious ceremony was quite without precedent: in the past it had always been a visiting pastor from Denmark, a thousand miles south, who would come here to bless the islands’ long-drowned sailors; but today made history, it was explained, because for the first time ever the minister was Faroese. In its own gentle and respectful way the dedication service, with its prayers offered in the local tongue, offered an indication of just how these remote mid-ocean islands had drawn themselves steadily away from the benign invigilation of their European motherland. They had gone their own way at last: an
island
way, remarked one of the congregants.
An Atlantic way.

After the service was finally over, I strolled behind the dispersing crowd—and without warning suddenly and terrifyingly reached the cliff edge. The grass cut off as with a blade, and in its place there was just a huge hollow emptiness of wind and space, the black wet walls of a hurtling precipice of basalt cliffs with, crawling almost half a mile below, the tides and currents and spume of the open sea. Hundreds of puffins stood in nooks in the cliff edge, some no more than an arm’s length away, and all quite careless of my presence. They looked like ridiculous, stubby creatures, with that mask-face, chubby cheeks, and a colored bill that was often crammed full with a clutch of tiny fish. But every so often one took to the air and soared off into the sky with an easy and contented grace, ridiculous no more.

I must have sat at the edge for a long, long time, staring, gazing, mesmerized. The gale had finally stopped its roaring, and the sun had come out and was edging its way into the afternoon. I was sitting on the cliff edge, my legs dangling over half a mile of emptiness. I was facing due west. Just below me were clouds of seabirds, the gannets and fulmars, kittiwakes and storm petrels, and beside me were the chattering congregations of puffins. Ahead of me there was just nothing—just an endless crawling sea, hammered like copper in the warm sunshine and stretching far, fifty miles, a hundred—from up this high I felt I could have been looking out on five hundred miles and more. There was an endless vacancy that at this latitude, 62 degrees north or so, I knew would be interrupted only by the basalt cliffs of Greenland, more than a thousand miles away. There were no ships’ wakes on the sea, no aircraft trails on the sky—just the cool incessant wind, the cries of the birds, and the imagined edge of the known world set down somewhere, far beyond my range of sight.

And it is very much the same on any Atlantic headland, whether in Africa or the Americas, in the Arctic or from the dozens of other oceanic islands like these, places from where the views are limitless, the horizons finely curved with distance. The view is enough to give the viewer pause: it is just so stupefying, so haunting, the impressions welling up, one after another.

How eternal the ocean appears, and how immense. It is anything but trite to keep reminding oneself how incalculably large the Atlantic happens to be. The big seas are so big that after just a little contemplation of this ocean you understand why it was once perfectly fitting of someone—in this case Arthur C. Clarke, who knew a thing or two about immensity—to remark on
how inappropriate it is to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Sea.

Then again, above all the dominant color of this ocean is gray. It is gray, and it is slow-moving, and it is heavy with a steady heaving. The Atlantic is in most places not at all like the Pacific or the Indian oceans—it is not dominated by the color blue, nor is it overwhelmingly fringed with leaning palm trees and coral reefs. It is a gray and heaving sea, not infrequently storm-bound, ponderous with swells, a sea that in the mind’s eye is thick with trawlers lurching, bows up, then crashing down through great white curtains of spume, tankers wallowing across the swells, its weather so often on the verge of gales, and all the while its waters moving with an air of settled purpose, simultaneously displaying incalculable power and inspiring by this display perpetual admiration, respect, caution, and fear.

The Atlantic is the classic ocean of our imaginings, an industrial ocean of cold and iron and salt, a purposeful ocean of sea-lanes and docksides and fisheries, an ocean alive with squadrons of steadily moving ships above, with unimaginable volumes of mysterious marine abundance below. It is also an entity that seems to be somehow
interminable.
Year in and year out, night and day, warm and cold, century after century, the ocean is always there, an eternal presence in the collective minds of those who live beside it. Derek Walcott, the Nobel laureate poet, wrote in his famous epic work
Omeros
of his fisherman-hero Achilles walking finally and wearily up the shingled slope of an Atlantic beach. He has turned his back on the sea at last, but he knows that even without his seeing it, it is behind him all the while and simply, ponderously, magnificently, ominously, continuing to be the sea. The Ocean is, quite simply, “still going on.”

Three thousand years ago Homer introduced the poetic idea of
Oceanus
—the son of Uranus and of Gaia, the husband of Tethys and father of a score of river gods. The word itself signified a vast globe-encircling river, which the ancients imagined to be rimmed by both the Elysian fields and Hades. To Homer the ocean was a river that rose far away where the sun sets. It was something totally daunting for Mediterranean sailors who spied its great grayness crashing and storming outside the Pillars of Hercules, at the Strait of Gibraltar. It was known as the Great Outer Sea, and it was a thing hugely to be feared, a world of crashing waters inhabited by terror-inspiring monsters like Gorgons and Hecatonchires, or by bizarrely unfamiliar humans like Cimmerians, Ethiopians, and pygmies. And forever,
always going on.

This poetic notion of the sea’s ceaseless activity is one that manages to be at once familiar, comforting, and mildly unsettling. One has a sense that the sea, whatever else it may be, however gray or immense or distempered or powerful, is a permanent presence in the world, whether it is rumbling or calm, storming or drowning. We think of it as an immutable living being, ceaselessly occupied in its unfinishable business of washing and waiting.

Yet strictly speaking, this is hardly true at all. Oceans have their beginnings and their endings, too. Not in the human imagination, perhaps, but in a physical sense, most certainly. Oceans are born, and oceans die. And the Atlantic, the once much feared Great Outer Sea, the most carefully studied and considered of them all, was not always there, and it will not remain either where it is or what it is.

For an ocean to begin, a planet must have two elemental essentials. One is water. The other is land. The enormous tonnage of water
⁴
that presently exists has not always been there, of course—but recent research suggests that it came into existence fairly soon after the earth was first coalesced out of clouds of space-borne planetesimals, almost five billion years ago. Studies of zircon crystals found near an iron ore mine in Western Australia indicate that liquid water was on earth just a few hundred million years after the planet was formed. It was extremely hot water, and it had all manner of noxious and corrosive dissolved gases in it; but it was liquid, it sloshed about, it could (and did) erode things that it poured over, and most important of all, it was the undeniable aqueous ancestor material of all of our present seas.

The ocean I gazed down on from the puffin cliffs of Mykines is in essence the selfsame water that was created all those years ago; the principal difference is that while the Hadean sea was hot and acid and incapable of supporting anything but the most primitive of thermophilic cyanobacteria, the Faroese Sea was cold and clean, had been purified and well salted by millions of years of evaporation and condensation and recycling, was rich in chemical ions from all over, and was vibrant with life of great complexity and beauty. In all other respects the frigid waters off the North Atlantic islands and the steaming acid waters of our early and territorially undifferentiated planet of long ago were more or less the same.

Territorially undifferentiated though that early planet may have been, it would not remain so for long. Solid, habitable earth was being manufactured in the cooling planet at about the same time, too.