Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms

by Simon Winchester

  29 It was scientists from Lamont-Doherty on their steel-hulled research yacht Vema (formerly belonging to the banker E. F. Hutton) who in the 1950s established the true nature of the vastly long and profoundly important Mid-Atlantic Ridge, leading to the 1965 theory of plate tectonics.

  30 Privilege of rank allowed Albert to win from the Vatican permission to divorce without church sanction his first wife, the daughter of the Duke of Hamilton, and by whom he had a son. This tough Scotswoman, despite being the victim of an annulment, later married a Hungarian noblemen. One of their great-grandchildren would be the fashion designer Egon von Fürstenberg, husband of Diane.

  31 At the time of this writing it was still unpublished, eight years after its completion. A dispute between Japan and Korea over whether to name the sea that separates them the Sea of Japan or the East Sea remains stubbornly intractable.

  32 Which was once owned by a French chocolatier, was nearly bought by Hitler, and now is home to a tiny community of lighthouse keepers.

  33 George Orwell wrote 1984 in a farm at the northern tip of Jura and reputedly nearly drowned himself by going too close to the ferocious streams and tide rips of the Corryvreckan whirlpool.

  34 Brueghel came from the Dutch city of Breda, famous a century after his birth for the treaty that swapped an obscure British fort in the East Indies for a Dutch-run island in America—Manhattan.

  35 Pompeii’s remains the biggest known.

  36 Prince Alfred, Victoria’s second son, tipped the inaugural truckload of riprap into South Africa’s first Atlantic docks in 1860. As the second Duke of Edinburgh he had already given his name to the tiny capital of Tristan da Cunha (the Atlantic’s, and the world’s, most isolated inhabited island), had survived an assassination attempt while having a picnic in Sydney (his Irish assailant was hanged for having dared try), and had married the daughter of the Russian czar, Marie, who still has a popular biscuit named after her.

  37 This can on occasion be a risky procedure: when a member of the royal family visited the island in the mid-1980s, the ruling governor, in his best uniform of crisply pressed white duck and a pith helmet topped by swan feathers, stepped carelessly from a pontoon and dropped straight into the ocean, vanishing from sight. Though he survived both the ducking and the ignominy, the Foreign Office hurriedly packed him off to the rather drier post—though still on the Atlantic—of Guyana, where there is (unlike St. Helena) an airport.

  38 There have been eight with the name Northumberland, most of which ended their days in the Atlantic—either off Ushant or in Biscay, and with the first having sunk during the Great Storm of 1703. I once came across the newest, a sleek Type 23 destroyer, as she was performing high-speed turns off the island of South Georgia. She nearly came to grief there, too: in a freak accident her sonar equipment was wrenched off, nearly breaching the hull, and she had to limp over to Brazil for temporary repairs and then be brought home to England for a costly refit.

  39 Even the names of the Stevensons’ best-known Atlantic lights have a poetry all of their own: the Bell Rock, Dhu Heartach, Eddystone, Muckle Flugga, Skerryvore! I once visited the light on the Alguada Reef, at the mouth of the Irrawaddy River in Burma. Its plans had been drawn up by Stevensons, it had been built by a Scotsman named Fraser, and the sole keeper kept all the brassware gleaming bright, in case, he said, of a sudden inspection. The rulers of today’s Burma have committed many crimes: one, I have long thought, was to close down the old Alguada Reef light.

  40 He said later that it had been the sound of his plantation workers in the distance singing their working songs that triggered his interest in the kind of evocative musical compositions for which he later became known. Previously, the older Delius, a Yorkshire wool merchant, had wanted his young Frederick to become either a sheep farmer or a citrus tycoon. Neither took.

  41 Though he saw no inconsistency in using the name Malvinas, which was given by early French settlers who came from the Breton port of St. Malo.

  42 The Danish fort that still stands in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, is both named and modeled after Christiansborg Castle in Copenhagen, where the Danish royal family lives to this day, in storied splendor; and the old fort at Elmina, built by the Portuguese, had lots of decorative crests and a big sundial. Cape Coast Castle, on the other hand, is almost entirely unadorned, has dungeons with walls fourteen feet thick, four enormous bastions, seventy seaward-facing cannons, and gardens for the resident officers—but until 1820 it did not even have a chapel and gave the appearance of being a place of an overwhelmingly gimcrack creation, offering the outbound slaves only the most wretched venue for their final African farewells.

  43 Scores of such buildings litter the African coast from the Sahara to the Cape—sixty of them in Ghana alone, so close packed that many lie within sight of one another.

  44 Accounts & Paper/Session papers, Minutes of the Evidence taken before a Committee of the Whole House on Regulation of Slave Trade, 1790, xxx (699), 122–24, 127.

  45 Under the title Sufferings in Africa, Riley’s famous book is back in print today.

  46 James Monroe, U.S. president at the time of Liberia’s creation, was to become memorialized in the name of its capital city, Monrovia. William Willshire was also to win his own memorial: a small town on the Indiana-Ohio border, with a population of fewer than five hundred, was laid out by Riley in his later days: Willshire, Ohio, a place once famous for its cheese and built close to a bog known as the Black Swamp.

  47 Prime among these oceanic shambles was the decimation of the Spanish Armada off the British coasts in 1588. In the context of this account the battles fought and the fireships launched are of less interest than the terrible navigation error made by the Spanish commanders as their defeated fleet rounded the northern coast of Scotland. Not knowing exactly where they were, and discounting the effect of the Gulf Stream, they turned south far too early and were set by the westerly storms onto rocky coasts that became a lee shore. Far more ships of the would-be invasion fleet were lost as wrecks on the Irish and Scottish coasts than in the earlier naval engagements; five thousand men died; only half the fleet managed to limp home to Spain.

  48 Naval battles traditionally have taken their name for the point of land closest to the engagement—engagements farther away being given as name the date on which they were fought. Calendrical ambiguities abound—and in this case the French call this battle (not that they often refer to it, since they lost) the Bataille du 13 prairial an 2, using the Napoleonic systems of months, of which only thermidor remains in use, as the name of a lobster dish.

  49 HMS Victory is the oldest commissioned ship in the world; but the USS Constitution, though launched thirty-two years later, in 1797, remains the oldest commissioned floating ship. Victory has been in dry dock since 1922.

  50 Nelson actually asked his signaler to send “England confides that every man will do his duty,” but the young lieutenant asked to substitute the word “expects,” since it already had a purpose-made flag in the signal vocabulary, while “confides” would have had to be spelled out. As would, very oddly, the word “duty,” which was not at the time in the naval vocabulary.

  51 The southern commanders had done more than simply weld steel plates around this six-year-old, Boston-built pride of the Union fleet. They had found her abandoned, burned to the waterline, and scuttled in the Norfolk Navy Yard—but were so desperate for ships that they raised her, pumped her dry, rebuilt her without sails, and only then welded on her armor and gave her a new name.

  52 Fisher would stage whirling dance jamborees on the poop decks of his battleships, insisting that all his officers attend and docking the leave of any who remained behind the wardroom. His decision to fuel all his ships with oil rather than coal led to the founding of the oil company that became BP—an irony, considering the pollution caused by the great BP accident of 2010.

  53 By chance the last survivor of the battle, Henry Allingham, died at age 113 in July 2009, while this chapter was being writte
n. He had helped launch one of the aircraft used as spotters during the fight. The only surviving Jutland ship, the light cruiser HMS Caroline, is still in use as a training vessel in Northern Ireland.

  54 Halifax, until then little connected with twentieth-century conflict, had on December 6, 1917, been the scene of one of the Great War’s greatest catastrophes: in a congested part of the city harbor an inbound ammunition ship was struck by an outbound vessel, the MV Imo, taking relief cargo to Belgium. There was a fire, and the immense quantity of ammunition packed into the holds of the MV Mont Blanc exploded, leveling most of central Halifax and Dartmouth, killing more than two thousand people, leaving nine thousand homeless. Such was the size of the blast that Robert Oppenheimer later studied it as a model of what might happen with the first atom bomb.

  55 A legendary editor perhaps best remembered for his cautionary remark to his journalists that comment is free but facts are sacred.

  56 The word survives still in the name of the German national airline, Lufthansa.

  57 Made briefly famous by Winston Churchill in his 1945 speech in Fulton, Missouri, when he spoke of the new “iron curtain” then descending between “Stettin in the Baltic and Trieste in the Adriatic.” This former Hanseatic port is now Szczecin, and is in Poland.

  58 Though popular in southern Africa, few Britons still care for it, as a consequence of the importation of millions of tons of canned Atlantic snoek during the Second World War and a highly ineffectual campaign by the then Ministry of Food to persuade people to eat it. It was found to be oily, bony, and bad, and despite entreaties for cooks to prepare such dishes as snoek piquante (when it was clearly piquante enough already, once the can was opened), most remained unsold. In the 1950s the sudden appearance on shelves of similarly sized containers of cat food suggested its eventual fate.

  59 John Cabot, not as British as he sounds, was in fact a Venetian named Zuan Chabotto (or more generally, Giovani Caboto), who sailed from Bristol westward on commission from England’s King Henry VII. His eventual landings in Newfoundland and on the Labrador coast make him in all likelihood the first post-Viking European to reach North America—an achievement that was, of course, denied to Christopher Columbus.

  60 Baleen whales lack conventional teeth but have a series of filters in their (often enormous) mouths. The other division of cetaceans, the toothed whales, includes the sperm whales, the belugas, narwhals, porpoises, and dolphins—only a few of which, most notably the sperm whales, managed to excite the same degree of commercial interest that attended the baleens.

  61 Whale oil is also used in the quenching of steel, the dressing of leather, and the making of both nitroglycerine and soap.

  62 This may sound like a lot, but in the 1960s, when Russian and Japanese factory ships were operating at full bore, as many as twenty-five thousand sperm whales were taken from the North Pacific each year.

  63 Wars with France frustrated attempts at a more direct route.

  64 It was his observations of the many delays to the westbound Falmouth packet ships that led Franklin to his conclusions about the nature of the Gulf Stream.

  65 The contrary prevailing winds of the westbound passage prompted packet boat sailors to refer to it as the uphill route, whereas the services leaving America for Europe were quicker, and so downhill.

  66 It would not be until 1829, seventeen years after Marshall and Thompson began their business, that a steam locomotive ran on the tracks of the Baltimore & Ohio, America’s first freight railway.

  67 It counted William Makepeace Thackeray, the novelist, as an investor; Charles Dickens, on the other hand, displayed a Luddite hostility.

  68 The Arabia was the last wooden ship ever built for Cunard: she had two masts, two funnels, and two paddle wheels.

  69 U.K. Patent No. 12,039, granted to Marconi on July 2, 1896, was for “Improvements in transmitting electrical impulses and signals and in apparatus thereof.”

  70 Immigrant is a late-eighteenth-century word—which according to an obscure but prescient travel writer named Edward Augustus Kendall, who wrote in 1809 an account of his travels in America, “is perhaps the only new word, of which the circumstances of the United States has in any degree demanded the addition to the English language.”

  71 Marsden was also a renowned numismatist, whose coin collection is now in the British Museum, and an authority on Eastern languages—he produced a definitive dictionary of Malay, in which he was fluent. He is remembered in naval circles as being the man who woke the First Lord of the Admiralty in 1805 to tell him of the British victory at Trafalgar, as well as of the death of Nelson.

  72 Not always in vain: I once traveled in the cockpit of a Concorde, leaving London just before sunset. The sun dipped into the Bristol Channel as we left; it then rose again out of the western Atlantic horizon as we reached supersonic cruising speed, hovered in front of us for all of the journey, then slipped back below the Blue Hills of Virginia as we touched down—at a local time earlier than when we had departed.

  73 Including one sitting before a very large computer screen that shows in real time images of every single aircraft in the world that happens to be airborne.

  74 Or so it was said. Some have argued it would have been impossible for him, since he had a badly damaged leg.

  75 Waypoint names can sound very strange, but for that reason are five-letter nonsense words easily committed to pilots’ memories. The main British Isles waypoints on the near edge of the Shanwick sector are named RATSU, SUNOT, PIKIL, RESNO, VENER, DOGAL, MALOT, LIMRI, DINIM, SOMAX, and BEDRA; those on the far side, marking the edge of Gander’s responsibility—a much longer line, considering the size of territory—run from MUSVA, off the coast of Baffin Island, to VODOR, off Nova Scotia. Our BA 113 entered North American airspace at HECKK, not far from the point where Leif Eriksson landed in the tenth century.

  76 After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, nearly forty big commercial jets bound for America were diverted to Gander, and the town of 10,000 suddenly found itself playing host to an additional 6,000 bewildered newcomers. Many later spoke movingly of how hospitable the Canadians were; the Canadian premier later came to Newfoundland and told an audience in Gander, “You did us proud.”

  77 The Institute for Atmospheric Physics near Munich, in a project called SeaKLIM, carried out in conjuction with the University of Bremen.

  78 It stands for SCanning Imaging Absorpion spectroMeter for Atmospheric CHartographY.

  79 Most notable among the nuclear sea dumpers were the Russians, who hefted entire reactors into the sea, scrapped and sank atomic submarines, wrecked in remote bays legions of barges with nuclear munitions aboard, and placed thousands of tons of power-station waste into the ocean—mostly in Arctic waters near Novaya Zemlya. The Japanese government was also disquieted by reports saying that nuclear material was dumped at sea in the North Pacific, near Sakhalin Island.

  80 The NET, based in Philadelphia, is one of the many so-called Pew Trusts, founded by the children of the founder of the Sun Oil Company.

  81 The modern concept of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), when finally codified by the United Nations’ 1982 Law of the Sea, has impressively shrunk the reality of the “high seas” on the Atlantic Ocean. For while the narrowest cinch of the ocean is that of about 1,700 miles between Ponte de Calcanhar, near Natal in Brazil, and Sherbro Island, off Sierra Leone, the two closest EEZs—between the Cape Verde Islands and Brazil’s St. Peter and Paul Rocks, are separated by only seven hundred miles of truly unclaimed ocean. At its widest—EEZs included—the Atlantic high seas between Cape Town and Tierra del Fuego extend some 4,200 miles.

  82 It was an attempt in 1982 by an Argentine scrap-metal dealer to dismantle one of these disused stations—though refusing to have his teams’ passports stamped by the resident British magistrate, on the grounds that Argentina did not recognize London’s sovereignty over the islands—that led to the invasion of the Falklands and to the subsequent brief and bloody war to restore Brit
ish rule.

  83 We had to charter a small plane to ferry us in groups back from the settlement to an airfield in western Iceland. The pilot, a heroic figure named Bjorn Palsson, was killed shortly after so bravely helping us—and when I visited Iceland to research this book and mentioned his name, all remembered him, even though forty years had passed. At the time none of us knew he had long been famous in Iceland as a “rescue pilot,” the kindliest of daredevils.