Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms

by Simon Winchester

  “Multi pertransibunt, et augebitur scientia” was a phrase from the Book of Daniel that would be inscribed beneath a fanciful illustration, engraved on the title page of a book by Sir Francis Bacon, of a galleon passing outbound, between the Pillars, shattering the comforts and securities of old. “Many will pass through, and their knowledge will become ever greater,” it is probably best translated—and it was thanks to the purple-veined gastropods and the Phoenicians who were brave enough to seek them out that such a sentiment, with its implication that learning comes only from the taking of chances and risk, would become steadily more true. It was a sentiment born at the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean.

  6. WESTERINGS

  The Phoenicians eventually vanished from the scene in the fourth century B.C., vanquished in battle, their country absorbed by neighbors and plunderers. And as their own powers waned, so other mariners in other parts of the world would begin to press the challenge of the newfound Atlantic ever more firmly. There was Himilco the Carthaginian (who lost the Second Punic War to the Romans, despite his fleet of forty quinquiremes), and there was Pytheas from Marseilles (who sailed up to and circumnavigated Britain, and gave it its name, then pressed on up to Norway, encountered ice floes, gave us the name Thule, and found the Baltic).

  Then came the Romans—a martial people never especially maritime in their mind-set, and perhaps as a consequence somewhat nervous sailors at the beginning. According to the Roman historian Cassius Dio, some of the legionnaires involved in the Claudian invasion of Britain in 43 A.D. were so terrified at having to cross even so mild a body of Atlantic water as the Strait of Dover that they rebelled, sat on their spears, and refused to march, protesting that crossing the sea was “as if they had to fight beyond the inhabited earth.” In the end they did embark on their warships, and they did allow themselves to be transported to the beaches of Kent, and the empire did expand—but even at its greatest extent in 117 A.D., it was an empire firmly bounded by the Atlantic coast, from the Solway Firth in the north to the old Phoenician city of Lixus in Morocco to the south. They may have cast off and kept to the shallows for coastal trade, but otherwise the Romans kept a respectful distance from the real Atlantic, never to be as bold as their predecessors.

  Nor as bold as their eventual successors. For after a lengthy and puzzling period of mid-Atlantic coastal inactivity, the Arabs—sailing in the eighth century A.D. from their newly acquired fiefdom in Andalusia—and later the Genoese from northern Italy began trading in the North African Atlantic. Records show that they went as far south as the coast off Wadi Nun, close to the former Spanish possession (and a philatelist’s favorite) of Ifni, where the sailors met desert caravans from Nigeria and Senegal laden with all manner of African exotica to be hurried back to customers in Barcelona and the cities of Liguria.

  Yet navigational advancement and casual fearlessness were not to be a monopoly of the Mediterranean sailors. Long before the voyages of the Arabs and the Genoese—though long after the Phoenicians, whose efforts trumped those of everyone else—northern men had launched their boats into the much colder and rougher waters of the northern Atlantic. Their motives were different: curiosity, rather than commerce, tended to drive the northerners out into the oceans. Curiosity, and to a lesser extent, Empire and God. Two groups of sailors dominated, at least in the first millennium: the Vikings most famously, but initially and often half forgotten in the fog of history, the Irish.

  There could hardly be vessels more different than the products of the first millennium’s Scandinavian and Irish boatyards. The Vikings, men who to this day are renowned as having essentially conceived the tradition of freebooting violence, and who kept mostly to the coast, sailed out in their famous longships, bent on pillage and sack; the Norsemen, which is today’s preferred name for the more congenial and numerous of the early Atlantic’s Scandinavian traders and explorers, used slightly chubbier, more stolid vessels known (in the plural) as knarrer.

  Both were clinker-built wooden craft, high-prowed and in the case of the more menacing longships, more than a hundred feet from bow to stern, made of oak and with a figure high on the bow. Both kinds of craft had an enormous square sail, maybe thirty feet across, and weighing tons, needed a crew of at least twenty-five who, with a following wind, could manage fifteen knots on a smooth sea.

  The Vikings, who became notorious for sack and pillage in Europe, generally sailed in longships; those Norsemen who, more peaceably, sailed west to Iceland, Greenland, and North America used smaller craft like this knarr.

  The Irish, by contrast, sailed into the wild waters of their western seas in boats they still insist on calling, with typical Celtic self-deprecation, canoes. A curragh, the proper Gaelic name for today’s still-used descendant, is a small and stubby boat, round and squat where the longship and the knarr were sleek and fast. It required few crew, had a single sail and a single steering oar, and was made of a cage of ashwood laths covered with ox leather that had been soaked in a solution of oak bark and marinated in lanolin; the whole was stitched together with flax thread and leather thongs. Tim Severin, the noted Irish sailor-explorer who would later construct and sail one, asked a noted curragh maker from County Cork if such a tiny and fragile-looking craft could make it all the way to America.

  “Well now,” the builder replied, “the boat will do, just so long as the crew’s good enough.”

  • • •

  Legend has it that the wandering Irish abbot, St. Brendan, was the first to make a sustained journey through the waters of the North Atlantic. Whether he was guided on the voyage by much more than blind faith in what he supposed to be a kindly god is unknown. Most imagine he carried with him the only Atlantic map then known—not that it would have been much use: it was an illustration—drawn in the first century, in Egypt, from Ptolemy’s biblically authoritative book, Geographica, which in later copied versions had the Atlantic as a mere sliver on the western edge of the sheet, and had named it either Oceanus Occidentalis or, more ominously to the north, Mare Glaciale.

  The beginning of the great Irish-Scottish missionary expeditions, all bent on exporting Christianity to the more remote nooks of the northern world, is generally dated with some precision at 563 A.D., the year that St. Columba brought knowledge of the Trinity to Iona, in Argyll. According to the rollicking yarns found in the medieval Navigatio Sancti Brendanis Abbatis, Brendan’s voyage was taken somewhat before this time; together with perhaps as many as sixty brother monks, he sailed from a small estuary on the Dingle peninsula of far southwestern Ireland, first north to the Hebrides, then on farther to the Faroe Islands and Iceland, and finally westward, maybe even to Newfoundland, the Promised Land of the Saints.

  • • •

  It is unknown who brought Christianity to the Faroes, but its legacy survives and is still in robust good health. When Brendan and his monastic brethren landed, after beating their way up through two hundred miles of gale-wracked waters from Barra Head, the northern tip of the Hebrides, they were impressed by the islands’ innumerable sheep, by the extraordinary number and variety of seabirds and an almost equally abundant variety of fish, as well as by the rain, the sheer and eternally dripping rock faces, and the deep green of the omnipresent tussock grass.

  Little has changed in almost fifteen hundred years. It was on a blustery spring day that I first sailed in the Faroes, and just as St. Brendan is supposed to have done, crossing the strait between the two most westerly Faroese islands of Vagar and Mykines. I was in a little boat that bounced merrily across the swells, passing under basalt cliffs that were quite sheer and black and so high that they quite vanished into the swirling clouds above.

  But on close inspection the cliffs were not entirely black. Blotches of green grass stood out, edged by cascades of running water after each blustery shower passed through; and on each patch of grass, which must have been angled seventy, eighty degrees, such that a man could not stand upright for fear of falling hundreds of feet down into a bottomless sea of the
purest indigo, were sheep.

  Young island men had placed them there as lambs, early in the spring. The island shepherds had climbed up the cliffs—fixed ropes could be seen, spun between a network of pitons and carabiners that glinted against the rocks when the sun was right—and men in Faroese rowing boats would hand up the lambs to them, one by one, and each climber would sling a mewing lamb across his shoulders and then heave himself, hand over hand, boots sliding on the wet rock face, up to the tiny and precipitous pasture.

  With one hand he would hold on to the rope, and with the other unclasp the frightened and warm-wet animal from around his neck and place it as firmly as possible on solid ground. A thousand feet below, the boat looked tiny, the occupants barely visible, just craning faces gazing up to make certain everything was still all right. The young sheep would stagger for a moment, bewildered, would then sniff the air and look with amazement at the drop—and finally would realize how best to stand, foursquare, in order to survive. The animal, by now more calm, would tuck its nose into the rich grass that had been long fertilized with the guano from the whirling puffins, and remain there, nervously content, for the rest of the year.

  From down below I could see them, hundreds of wool-white dots, shifting slowly behind their noses and always ohmygod about to fall, but never apparently doing so, even in the gales and when the rains made the grass as slick as oilskin and blubber.

  St. Brendan, if he had voyaged to the Faroes at all, sailed almost due northward from the Hebrides. But after his visit (where his Navigatio reports encounters with others similar to him, suggesting he was not the first Irishman to get there), the prospect of continuing north was quite bleak: to do so would mean cold, and then intense cold, and then ice. Eastward, too, was no picnic: the expedition would have ended on the known and dangerously rockbound coast of Norway. So westward was the only way to go; but the small boat had to brave seas and storms and winds and currents possibly entirely beyond the competence of even the most navigationally expert of this group of innocent and most likely discalced Clonfert friars.

  When Tim Severin took a replica boat across the Atlantic in the summers of 1976 and 1977 (arguing that since it had taken St. Brendan fully seven seasons to cross the ocean, he could legitimately take two), he made landfall in the Faroes, in Iceland, and eventually, after weathering ferocious storms in the Denmark Strait, in Newfoundland. His expedition proved it was entirely possible to cross the Atlantic in a leather boat, providing (as the Irish curragh builder had earlier told him) the crew was good enough. But while he showed that such a journey could have been made, Severin did not prove that such a journey had been made, nor that Irish monks had ever done such a thing, had been to any of these three countries at the time suggested. Nor has any firm evidence ever been adduced that suggests either that Irishmen visited or settled, nor, more crucially, that they ever completed a crossing of the ocean. No early Irish artifact has ever been found in North America.

  So the Irish were almost certainly not the linear antecedents of Christopher Columbus. Moreover, even though many Italians claim to this day that Columbus had no predecessors at all, and that 1492 was a true historical watershed for transoceanic contact, a discovery in the middle of the twentieth century changed everything. An archaeological find in northern Newfoundland in 1961 proved that the first ocean crossing had been made four hundred years after the supposed evangelizing mission of the Irish, and fully four hundred years before the commercial expedition of Columbus, but by neither an Irishman nor a Genoese.

  The first European to cross the Atlantic and reach the New World was a Norseman, a Viking, and probably from a family born in the fjord lands south of the coastal towns of Bergen and Stavanger, in Norway.

  7. ARRIVALS

  Four years before these archaeologists announced their discovery, a group of antiquarian booksellers piqued public interest in the possibility that Columbus had been completely outdone.

  In 1957 a young dealer in New Haven, Connecticut, Laurence Witten, approached Yale University with an extraordinary offer: he had bought, by way of a dealer in Italy, what appeared to be a fifteenth-century map of the known world, but with one crucial feature that had never before been seen: the presence of a large island, with two elongated indentations on its east coast, situated on the left side of the map to the west of Greenland. The island was identified on the map as Vinlanda, and the rubric above it, written in Latin, said that it had been visited in the eleventh century, first by “companions Bjarni and Leif Eriksson,” and later by a legate from the Apostolic See.

  It was eight years before the discovery of the map was announced—mainly because Paul Mellon, the banking millionaire who had eventually acquired it from Witten and offered it as a gift for his alma mater, decided he would hand it over only once it had been authenticated. Eight years of tests later, a team of British Museum specialists finally declared it to be genuine, and Mellon allowed Yale to release the news. It sparked a sensation—as if it had been an arm of the True Cross, a fresh revelation about the Shroud of Turin or the rudder from Noah’s Ark. It was “the most exciting cartographic discovery of the century,” said the university’s curator of maps, “the most exciting single acquisition in modern times,” said the head of the Beinecke Library, “exceeding in significance even the Gutenberg Bible.” It made the front pages everywhere.

  What thrilled the world—or at least most Americans (though not Italian-Americans) and all Norwegians—was that the map appeared to be final cartographic confirmation that the “Vinland” famously mentioned in two of the best-known thirteenth-century Icelandic sagas was in North America. The map appeared to prove once and for all that Leif Eriksson—Erik the Red’s peripatetic Iceland-born son—had indeed, and in the very precisely remembered year 1001 A.D., landed somewhere on the American continent.

  Here was documentary confirmation of something all red-blooded Italians had long feared—that it was not Columbus who had first crossed the Atlantic, but an eleventh-century Norseman. Adding insult to this injury to Genoese pride was the fact that Yale, with magnificently self-evident cheek, chose to display its Viking treasure by throwing a lavish celebration dinner featuring a Viking longboat carved from ice and the normally owlish university librarian wearing an iron helmet flown over by the King of Norway—and held the party on Tuesday, October 12, that year’s Columbus Day. It was hardly the most appropriate moment to suggest that a Norwegian made the first American landfall, and it caused much huffing.

  “Twenty-one million Americans will resent this great insult,” said the then president of the Italian American Historical Society.

  The only problem was that the fragile and yellowing little parchment document, eleven inches by sixteen, has turned out to be a tissue freighted with all manner of uncertainties and bitter argument. The book dealer had lied about where and how it had come to be his. The Italian (an irony not lost) who had sold it to him (for $3,500) and who had previously tried in vain to sell it to the British Museum turned out to have been both a fascist and a convicted thief. Tests on the map’s ink showed high levels of chemicals that had not been invented at the time the map was said to have been made—and although the parchment itself was proved to be fifteenth century, it appeared to have been coated with an oil made in the 1950s. The fold down the map’s middle turned out not to be a fold at all, but a splice, with traces of curious chemicals at its edges. And the map’s Latin text was peppered with the æ ligature, a lexical form seldom used at the time of the map’s supposed creation.

  It all became too much for Yale, and in 1974 the exasperated librarian declared their costly treasure to be a forgery. This was not, however, to be the end of the story. Further tests were conducted in the mid-1980s, and these suggested that the tests of the previous decade had been botched—and so in 1987 Yale changed its mind once more, said it now had confidence in the document and had it insured for $25 million, just in case. At the time of writing the skeptics and the believers were still endlessly trading the
ascendancy: more chemical and spectroscopic and subatomic tests have raised ever more complicated doubts, and the name of a curious anti-Nazi forger12 who might have had a powerful though complicated motive for forging such a map has come to light, even though the most senior of all Danish conservators was as recently as 2009 still insisting that the map was true.

  In any case, there is a further irony, a further puzzle. The ink on the map is now fading to the point of near invisibility, despite Yale’s best efforts at conservation. Just why such deterioration might suddenly accelerate, nine hundred years after the map was supposedly drawn, remains unexplained. If this is all an elaborate ruse, then this fading has produced an ironic coda to the story: just like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, the Vinland Map seems to be drifting away into nothingness.

  However, despite all the brouhaha surrounding Yale’s document, the finding in Scandinavian libraries of a series of other (and this time undoubtedly genuine) charts, and a further discovery in 1960 that was brought about by what those maps had drawn onto them, finally dashed any further claim for the primacy of Columbus. The other maps were all fair copies of a much less sensational but in the end far more useful document that is known today as the Skálholt Map. It was drawn in Iceland in 1570 by a schoolmaster named Sigurd Stefansson, simply as an exercise to show from his readings of a variety of Icelandic texts just where the Nordic explorers and traders had landed on the various shores of the North Atlantic Ocean.

  The original is long gone; but the copies that exist all show the same thing: an Atlantic—here called Mare Glaciale, the icebound sea, with islands such as the Faroes, Iceland, Shetland, and Orkney all in their more or less accurate relative positions—bordered by an almost wholly connected skein of landmasses. There was Norway, of course; then Gronlandia, then Helleland, Markland and Skralingeland (which Nordic scholars suggest—as flagstone land, forest land, and land of the savages—to be portions of Labrador); and then finally, jutting from the southwest of the chart, a slender, north-pointing peninsula—marked simply as Promonterium Vinlandiae, the Peninsula of Vinland.