Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms

by Simon Winchester

  In the terrific gales which usually occur four or five times in every year all distinction between air and water is lost, the nearest objects are obscured by spray, and everything seems enveloped in a thick smoke; upon the open coast the sea rises at once, and striking upon the rocky shores rises in foam for several hundred feet and spreads over the whole country.

  The sea, however, is not so heavy in the violent gales of short continuance as when an ordinary gale has been blowing for many days; the whole force of the Atlantic is then beating against the shores of the Orkneys, rocks of many tons in weight are lifted from their beds, and the roar of the surge may be heard for twenty miles; the breakers rise to the height of 60 feet, and the broken sea on the North Shoal, which lies 12 miles northwestward of Costa head, is visible at Skail and Birsay.

  Joseph Conrad wrote of the stormy seas, too, and in Typhoon (where the sea was the Pacific) just memorably; Richard Hughes wrote unforgettably, in In Hazard, about a storm in the Atlantic. Charles Tomlinson devoted an entire short poem to the analysis of one spectacular Atlantic wave:

  Launched into an opposing wind, hangs

  Grappled beneath the onrush,

  And there, lifts, curling in spume,

  Unlocks, drops from that hold

  Over and shoreward. The beach receives it,

  A whitening line, collapsing . . .

  But as envoi to this chapter—which is, after all, about the romantic love for the ocean—I will offer up the words of one of the most remarkable transoceanic solitary sailors, the Frenchman Bernard Moitessier. The decision that lifted him into a different maritime realm from all of those others who have circumnavigated the world was one that he took in the far south Atlantic, during the race in 1968 that was won by Robin Knox-Johnston and in which Donald Crowhurst so tragically died.

  Moitessier was spotted passing the Falkland Islands, heading northbound, and fast. Fast enough, in fact, for it to be assumed that he would win. But then suddenly, and for no apparent reason connected with the race, he decided he would not continue north at all, but would turn due east, would pass out of the Atlantic Ocean altogether, and would head into the Indian Ocean for the second time. In due course he explained himself, in a letter squeezed into a can that he fired from a slingshot toward a passing merchantman:

  My intention is to continue the voyage, still nonstop, toward the Pacific Islands, where there is plenty of sun and more peace than in Europe. Please do not think I am trying to break a record. “Record” is a very stupid word at sea. I am continuing nonstop because I am happy at sea, and perhaps because I want to save my soul.

  He was later to write his testament, an ode to the sea as the center of his happiness. Within there is a paragraph that goes to the heart of his beliefs, and which are held by most who love the Atlantic Ocean, and all the other seas besides:

  I am a citizen of the most beautiful nation on earth. A nation whose laws are harsh yet simple, a nation that never cheats, which is immense and without borders, where life is lived in the present. In this limitless nation, this nation of wind, light, and peace, there is no other ruler besides the sea.

  Chapter Four

  Here the Sea of Pity Lies

  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.

  1. MOURNING HAS BROKEN

  The missile hit home shortly after lunchtime on a cool midwinter’s day in early May 1982. The weather was overcast, with a steady westerly wind and the kind of hefty swell that is typical for the far south Atlantic. Almost no one saw the rocket coming. It was a French weapon, small and sleek and inexpensive, and it had been dropped from an Argentine fighter aircraft ten miles away. It hit square in the vessel’s midsection, just above the waterline. Sailors aboard remember only a surprisingly small explosion—shoddy bomb-aiming meant the missile was fired too close, did not have time to arm itself, and hit the ship without initially exploding—yet within moments the rocket’s remaining propellant caught ablaze and set off a volcano of fire within the ship, with torrents of black belching smoke. The aircraft that had dropped the device zoomed overhead to confirm the strike had been lethal.

  Indeed it had. Within just a few hours, HMS Sheffield, a gleaming and nearly new destroyer, a pride of the Royal Navy and on station in the South Atlantic to guard the great aircraft carriers and other warships converging for the beginning of the Falklands War, had been reduced to a burned-out hulk and was abandoned and drifting. Six days later, while she was being towed toward home, she sank. The lonely site in the deep ocean where she and more than a score of her incinerated and suffocated seamen now lie was formally declared a war grave, with the official request that the site be respected by all.

  Sheffield was the first royal naval vessel to be destroyed by enemy action since the Second World War. She would not be the last to founder during the ferocity of the brief Falklands conflict: eight other vessels, five of them from the Royal Navy and one a giant Argentine cruiser bought from the Americans, still lie at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Each still leaks a fine filigree of engine oil that floats to the surface and colors its gray waters with Newton’s rings, the stricken vessels’ only remaining visible memorial.

  Being the first British ship to go, the Sheffield has become the one most poignantly remembered. Most shocked Britons remember with vivid exactness just where they were and what they were doing when the sinking was announced in the manner of so many recent tragedies. I had good reason to remember especially well, too, because at the time I was locked up on espionage charges in a prison cell not too far away in the grim sub-Andean town of Ushuaia, in southern Tierra del Fuego.

  It was a particularly bitter cold evening. I remember a sudden commotion in the prison, and an officer from the Argentine navy running to my cell. He was jubilant and breathless, roaring in Spanish, like a football announcer. He came to the cell, gripped the bars, and with evidently undiluted glee yelled at the three of us being held there: “We have sunk one of your ships! We Argentines have sunk a Royal Navy ship! You are going to lose this war!”

  But Britain, as it happened, did not lose that war; and the Falkland Islands remain today as British as they have been for almost two centuries. The war to confirm and secure this curious colonial status—a war that was akin, in the memorable phrase of the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, to “two bald men fighting over a comb”—was brief, bitter, and exceptionally bloody. Hundreds died on both sides; the Falkland Islands remain littered today with graves and land mines and memorials, and there are battalions of ever-vigilant British soldiers posted there still to make sure no invasion force ever tries its luck again. Beyond the South Atlantic, though, the conflict is thought of little more than as a rather ridiculous skirmish; it has faded from the collective memory, and few besides those directly involved care to speak much of it today.

  Except for one subsequent event, I might well have half forgotten, too. But a great many years after the fighting was over, that same Argentine naval officer who had delivered the dismaying news of the Sheffield’s loss on that terrible midwinter evening somehow managed to track me down in Hong Kong, where I was living at the time. He wanted to meet, he said. He had something to say. And so after some complicated arrangements, the two of us did manage to meet, largely by virtue of my flying back once again to the by now very much larger and more prosperous Patagonian city of Ushuaia.

  Outwardly I could see he was a much changed man. No uniform, for a start: he was now a civilian, grizzled and careworn in appearance, and the gruff air of machismo that was so much of his naval personality in 1982 had plainly evaporated. He told me, with evident sorrow, that he had left the navy many years before, had for puzzling political reasons been put in prison himself—in my old cell, in fact—and then had sold powdered soap door-to-door in Buenos Aires just to keep his family fina
ncially afloat. Then he reinvented himself: he managed to go to university, took a degree in history, and was now teaching at a small campus of the national Patagonian university.

  He took me to dinner—he wanted me to try centolla, the giant crab for which the waters off Cape Horn are famous, and a soufflé of calafate berries, which Patagonians insist have the magic to lure anyone who eats them back to this strange and eternally gale-torn part of the world. And then, after pouring liberally from a second bottle of Malbec, he said that he wanted to explain himself.

  He cleared his throat and looked rather nervous. He would preface his remarks, he said, by reminding me that in his view las Islas Malvinas—he couldn’t bear to give the islands their British name, the Falklands41—should still be recognized as sovereign Argentine territory. The argument with Britain would go on until this was agreed, he said. But on the other hand, back in 1982 the dispute should have been settled by negotiation, he said. The war had been wrong; the imprisonment and ill-treatment of the three of us—we were reporters sent to cover the war, and we had been arrested on patently trumped-up charges—had been wrong. But most of all, he said, and this had weighed on him for many years, was the exultation he had expressed that night over the sinking of the Sheffield. That, he said, was terribly wrong.

  For, he said, it had betrayed his principles as a navy man. Even though the British at the time were his enemies, he said, no sailor should ever take the kind of delight that he had taken on that cold May night in the foundering of another ship. No one should so ardently wish a vessel of any navy, or indeed any ship, ever to be sunk in the ocean. For it was his certain belief that to die alone at sea, in the emptiness of a wilderness of cold water, was just a terrible, terrible thing. “I am a good sailor,” he kept saying. He stared sightlessly into his glass, his eyes brimming. “I am a good sailor,” he repeated. “There is no pleasure to be taken over a thing like this. There is a brotherhood of the sea.”

  2. LITTLE LOCAL DIFFICULTIES

  Brotherhood or not, the Atlantic seabed is littered with the wrecks of many thousands of ships and the long-decayed skeletons of many millions of men. War has been a constant feature of the ocean’s experience, and wars have been fought on its surface ever since there has been iron with which to fight them. Discounting any undocumented coastal skirmishes among the seagoing Caribs, or the Beothuk of Newfoundland, or the Aztecs or the Mayas, the first recorded use of naval vessels in Atlantic conflict was probably made by the Romans two thousand years ago, when they sent wooden troopships to ferry their land armies across the sea into Britain for a century-long slew of invasions.

  Biremes and triremes, with a mainsail each and two or three stories of oarsmen-slaves providing motive power, set out from ports either in northern France—Boulogne most probably—or from the river Rhine, and then wallowed slowly and dangerously across the English Channel. Eighty of these ships took part in Caesar’s famous first invasion in 55 B.C., very many more when Claudius made his much more successful landings almost a century later.

  But the fights that then followed, pitched battles that would eventually bring England under the formal rule of Rome for the next three hundred years, were land battles: any oceanic component to the Romans’ ambitions was severely limited. So the first real conflicts associated with the Atlantic Ocean were not Roman invasions at all. Rather they were the many centuries of seaborne maraudings that would become the scourge of all northern Christendom, and they were fought principally by another people entirely, the Vikings.

  For the years when the Vikings were so occupied—for the most part in coastal waters, on the eastern fringes of the ocean—their invasions offer a textbook illustration of one of the basic reasons why humans engage in this extraordinary form of activity in the first place.

  They were a highly mobile people—the maritime equivalent of the so-called wagon folk, those who in early civilization favored wandering as opposed to settlement, who were determined and nomadic pastoralists rather than fence-building and wall-constructing agriculturalists. The clash between those who built fortresses and those who drove wagons or sailed ships was a central part of early human life—from the time in the second millennium B.C. when the highly mobile Indo-European hordes swept down from the Caspian grasslands and crossed the Danube to begin populating central and southern Europe. That series of events marked the beginning of European warfare: what the Vikings unleashed when three of their marauding longships drew up on the beach beside Portland Bill on the English Channel in 789, and when four years later they murdered a group of monks at Lindisfarne, the great English Christian monastery on the North Sea’s Holy Island, marked the true beginning of Atlantic warfare.

  Historians argue over why the Vikings began their rovings and rampages. Those who believe it was a need of more agricultural land to feed a growing population are countered by those who wonder why they didn’t just push backward into their northern forests and make agriculture there. Others suggest it was a decline in the trade to which the Vikings had long been accustomed—with the expansion of Islam in the Mediterranean having an unanticipated impact on the old trade routes and prompting the Vikings to try to open new ones. Some say climate may have also played a role: the period between 800 and 1300 A.D. coincided with a period of warming in the Northern Hemisphere, which increased sea temperatures by a degree or more and would have caused the ice in many of the fjords used by the Vikings to melt, furthering their ability to sail away more frequently. Still others—pointing to Viking grave sites dotted along the Atlantic shores, which show lots of dead Viking men buried alongside a scattering of clearly local women—insist that the seafarers had gone abroad looking for wives, to better their genetic stock.

  Whatever the reason, these initial raids were followed by three centuries of Viking expansion, which rendered the eastern and northern Atlantic a zone of unpredictable and ceaseless unpleasantness. Longships thereafter left the Atlantic settlements in droves and plowed through the seas to places as far away as Archangel in the north of Russia, the various ports of the Baltic, the islands off the west coast of Ireland, and the coasts of France and Spain, and through the Mediterranean and past today’s Istanbul and Anatolia into the Black Sea and to the cities of the southern Ukraine.

  Moreover, longboats were sufficiently shallow that they could easily sail from the sea up into the estuaries of European rivers. Paris fell to Viking attacks after Ragnar Lothbrok took 120 longships and five thousand men up the Seine, declared he had never seen a land so fertile nor a people so cowardly, and refused to leave until King Charles the Bald paid out three tons of gold and silver. Soon afterward Dublin became a Viking longphort when longships sped up the Liffey, and a Norse base was established high up along the Loire, allowing the Vikings there to attack towns in northern Spain. Seville came under the harsh impress of Viking malevolence, as in later years did such places as Nantes, Utrecht, Hamburg, and Bordeaux. Add to all this the fact that Norsemen were in Iceland, Greenland, Labrador, and Newfoundland, and it can be fairly said that in their heyday the Vikings ruled the North Atlantic with much the same degree of hegemonistic influence and power that the U.S. Navy wields today.

  But as with all imperial ventures, the Vikings’ influence eventually waned. Their apogee, at least in England, came during the rule of the famous King Cnut, who had not only secured the English throne but united it with Denmark’s, thus briefly welding together the two countries under a common Viking rule. But by 1066, a mere thirty years after King Cnut’s death, the Viking rule in Britain was essentially at an end. The Normans—from the part of northern France that had not long before been under Viking control—then invaded England, speeding across the English Channel to defeat King Harold, who just weeks before had driven the last Vikings out of the north of England.

  The sea must have been an exceptionally cruel place in that autumn of 1066. First an invasion fleet arrived from Norway that had to be defeated in the north of England, and then a second invasion fleet sped in from Fran
ce in the south. King Harold had managed to inflict a savage defeat on the Vikings at the Battle of Stamford Bridge: of the three hundred longships that been had sent over from Norway, in an invasion that must count as the last of the Viking hurrahs, only a tenth of that number were needed to take back home the paltry number of the survivors and the wounded. But this victory had exhausted and depleted the king, and so when the Norman fleet arrived a month later, Harold was no match. England fell to the invaders, Harold was killed with a longbow’s arrow through the eye, and the Norman conquest got formally under way, with consequences political, cultural, and linguistic that have remained to this day.

  3. THE THEATER EXPANDS

  For the four centuries following the Norman invasions, the maritime activities of the western nations were principally concentrated in the Mediterranean. Thanks mainly to the Crusades, the inland sea became one of the many battlefields on which, in essence, the European Christians found themselves pitted against the increasingly powerful forces of Middle Eastern Islam. Yet, ironically, the growing power of the Muslim world—and most particularly, the eventual stubborn intransigence of the Ottoman Turks—would provide the spur that led to a wholesale change in the status of the Atlantic Ocean. As a direct consequence of Islamic behavior in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic became the main highway for Christian war and conquest and imperial ambition for centuries to come.

  It all had to do with Spain, which in the early part of 1492 engineered the final defeat of the Moors and the departure of the Islamic leadership from Granada and the Alhambra. Spain, suddenly and after an interlude of some seven centuries, was a united Christian kingdom again, ready to assume her place among the great nations of Europe. She also became—very rapidly—profoundly authoritarian in her attitudes and ambitions (demanding the expulsion or the conversion of the Jews, for example). She was transmuted into a Christian kingdom poised at the very beginnings of an imperial moment.