by Tom Blass
If the bearings are approximate, the descriptions of the sea’s bottom are almost tender in their precision. Of Swart Bank he notes, ‘the middle . . . is like oatmeal’. Other features are to be identified by their ‘fine yellowish coloured sand’, ‘fine light coloured sand’, ‘Muddy foundings’, ‘Darkish Rock’ or ‘Whitish sort of foundings mixed with yellow particles’.
By this time, the 1660s, almost every acre of the North Sea had been mapped and named, its secrets disinterred. Cats, colliers, pinks and every other kind of vessel traipsed between Newcastle and the Thames, to Kiel, Crail, Amsterdam, Bergen, Lerwick, Ipswich, Hamburg, Edinburgh and Esbjerg. The riches of northern Europe, its timbers, furs and cloths, lured in traders from the south who sailed up from Mediterranean and Barbary Coast ports in exotically lateened caravels. And pirates, hungry for human commodities sufficiently pale to fetch a high price in the kasbah or souk, were known to chance their arms in the cold dark waters of the North Sea.
Not that the sea was free of local dangers of such a kind. Throughout the mid-sixteenth century fishermen, trading ships and coastal villages trembled at the exploits of the sea beggars – Watergeuzen – Dutch adventurers like Wigbolt Ripperda, Baron Lumey and the Baron of Middelstum. These often aristocratic outlaws had been rallied by William of Orange to the cause of independence from the Habsburgs. In their zeal to free themselves from the Catholic yoke, they were rumoured to visit terrible things upon anyone they chanced upon possessing anything of value. And more localised opportunistic piracy remained endemic to much of the coast; sometimes fishermen preferred to steal a rival’s catch than catch their own. Privateers, ‘licensed pirates’ to all extents and purposes, added to the muddle of the sea’s moral compass.
The reign of the Watergeuzen came to an end as Habsburg tyranny gave way to the Dutch golden age, placing Amsterdam at the heart of north European culture, the pivot of trade between the North and Baltic Seas and more distant oceans. Bankrolling the gilded glory was a silvery but modestly sized fish – albeit found in shoals sometimes several miles in length. The Dutch mastered the catching and curing of the herring in a way that no other nation could match. That their descendants have perfected the art of eating a whole fish in a single gulp and still possess affection for the herring while the English can scarcely stomach them, is perhaps a legacy of that.
Herring meant money, and money meant power and the right to trade. At the end of the seventeenth century the Dutch and English embarked on half a century of maritime pugilism: the Anglo Dutch Wars, I–IV. Their skirmishes, such as the Battle of Kentish Knock, the Battle of Texel, the Battle of Lowestoft and the Medway Raid, were slow, loud and carefully choreographed – almost like courtly dances set to a pyrotechnic accompaniment, and as such not without entertainment value. Onlookers from the shore would be spellbound by the sight of upwards of sixty or eighty ships of war, entirely at the mercy of the vicissitudes of their own clumsiness and the shifty, changeable North Sea winds, enveloping themselves in great plumes of smoke, spewing round shot and musket balls, frequently to uncertain tactical effect.
Not all such encounters were inconclusive, neither were they mere theatre. From Dutch dykes, cliffs and beaches, relatives would watch for the return of the fleets, hope sometimes crumbling to despair as the smashed ships limped into harbour with their bloodied, blinded menfolk – or without them. Though sluggish and the trajectories of their primitive missiles were erratic, seventeenth-century warships could inflict damage reaching deep inland: the Battle of the Gabbard, fought off the coast of Suffolk, resulted in so comprehensive a victory for the English that they were able to impose a blockade on the Dutch, many of whom, reliant on imports of rye and wheat, were pushed beyond the edge of starvation. And yet, so necessary to each other’s economic and cultural survival were the two nations that the packet service between Harwich and Holland, a small fleet of single-masted, shallow-draughted galliots and hoys, traversed the North Sea unmolested even when Dutch and British relations were at their blackest.
For some years in Oslo a batch of correspondence passed between the Dutch, German and British embassies and the Norwegian government as a sort of parlour game. The letters had been written in the 1600s by the owner of a repair yard at a town called Gismeroya on the southern coast of Norway. None of the ambassadors could translate these letters in their entirety, but each could pick out individual words and phrases, for they were composed in a jumble of North Sea languages. Their author was native to no single country but a true denizen of the North Sea. (Earlier still, the Hanseatic League had operated through the medium of its own language comprised mostly of Middle Low German, embellished with a smattering of Dutch, Danish, Finnish and a touch of Slav.)
What these letters proved was that by the beginning of the eighteenth century the North Sea rim had almost become a world unto itself – not cut off from that beyond, because of course there had been trade links with Africa, the Baltic and the Mediterranean since well before recorded history. Nonetheless a communality of experience now bound together North Sea peoples almost regardless of nationality and sometimes with greater cohesion than that bonding coast dwellers to their inland compatriots. Small coastal towns, perhaps dependent on the export of a single product or handful of products or raw materials – coprolite, rye, coal, hemp, mutton or whisky – became cosmopolitan trading centres and their inhabitants accustomed to, even conversant with, languages that were not their own.
Such was the appetite of Amsterdam for imported labour that long after the golden age it drew thousands of domestic labourers, journeymen, shipwrights – a kind of New York of its day. (What is now New York is fittingly built on the bones of New Amsterdam.) Moreover, advances in navigational technology and even the contested sharing of the wealth of the sea created both a lingua franca of experience and opportunities for coastal dwellers to live well beyond the confines of their own parishes. Rates of literacy were significantly higher than they were inland, just as the incidence of witchcraft accusations was lower, coast dwellers being that much better acquainted with human variety and difference.
The waves sparkled brighter still beneath the enlightened gaze of the eighteenth century, the sea acquiring a new, more abstract identity and a role as a source of pleasure and health – in essence, more than a mere resource, a conduit for trade or theatre of war, rather as a thing in itself. Around the same time Europe was drawn to new markets and the promise of greater riches in the Indies, East and West, in North America and Sub-Saharan Africa. The North Sea remained at the hub, but of ever-spreading concentric circles of wealth, power and possibility. Now the use of larger ships with deeper draughts relegated coastal towns with shallow harbours and channels to second-class trading posts or made them entirely redundant. Meanwhile, improved roads and canal networks spread like a mesh of capillaries throughout Europe, undermining the importance of the old sea routes.
Communities that had relied on cultural and economic ties with their equivalents across the North Sea or along the coast began to look inland for markets. Smaller settlements dependent on trade or on artisanal fishing from open boats or nets worked from the shore could no longer compete with the bigger fishing towns with their large trawler basins and deep-water docks equipped for transporting by rail.
But the railway was coming, bringing a new breed of seasonal migrant, the tourists with their bathing machines, dance cards and donkey riding and the descendants of whom continue to return in droves each summer.
By the early nineteenth century the North Sea was very much safer than it had ever been. Piracy had been rooted out, the sea too well policed to permit its existence. Following the defeat of Napoleonic France, Europe was mostly at peace, and the glory days of smuggling, which had begun with wool and only later included the more glamorous contraband commodities of tea, brandy, wine and hollands (gin), were fading, although there must have been those who ached for its return.
Once it had been possible to lure, bribe or terrorise whole communities into
complicity with the illicit trade, and fortunes could be made from outwitting the red-coated and ill-equipped customs authorities. Smuggling even expedited the evolution of the sailing boat. The invention of the cutter, a vessel with a fore-and-aft rig, faster before more points of wind than any predecessor, is attributed to what in effect amounted to an arms race between the smugglers and the revenue officers pursing them.
Governments, especially in times of war, made strenuous if often futile efforts to prevent the loss of customs duties. A typical British ordinance was a 1779 act of Parliament that demanded that ‘All Dealers in Tea, Coffee, Chocolate and Foreign Spirituous Liquors, who have not those Articles painted or written in large legible characters over their Outer Door, or some conspicuous Part of their Houses . . . forfeit two hundred pounds.’ But officers of the law could be induced to turn a blind eye for very much less.
Smugglers and wreckers, prostitutes and dealers in duty-free chocolate, these were the dark side of the seaside. Then as now such pursuits coexisted with the effete cosmopolitanism of the surging tide of summer visitors, the latter smoothing away the sharper edges of the former, and the former adding some spice to the latter.
If the twentieth century saw North Sea waters placated by science, trade and other totems of nineteenth-century rationalism (tide tables, timetables and the hiss of steam), it still simmered with a tension that would boil over fourteen years after its start.
Strangely enough, on the day that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot by his Serb assassin Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo the top brass of the Royal Navy were in the Baltic town of Kiel with their German counterparts, celebrating with oompah bands and bumpers of champagne the expansion of its eponymous waterway, now sufficient to allow a dreadnought battleship to pass from the North to the Baltic Sea (and vice versa) without necessitating the trip around Denmark.
Maps from before 1914 describe the North Sea as the German Ocean, but ironically Germany’s poor access to the North Sea and its lack of harbours suitable for berthing battleships fed the strident ascent of militarism and hence its march to war.
Within a few years of his country’s creation in 1871, Admiral von Tirpitz of the German Imperial Navy had masterminded the doctrine of Flottenpolitik, which held that if it were to enjoy its ‘rightful’ share of colonial spoils and trade Germany would need to match its rivals in naval strength. The North Sea, seen through such a prism, was the anteroom to the world and all its riches.
The boat-loving Kaiser Wilhelm II became infatuated with the idea, and by the turn of the century, the arms race had started in earnest.
The British regarded Willy, grandson of Queen Victoria, as pompous, silly and erratic. Victoria herself was aghast on hearing in 1890 that her prime minister Lord Salisbury had agreed to sign over the British resort island of Heligoland to Germany in exchange for a free run in Zanzibar, and came close to exercising her royal prerogative to prevent it. Many Heligolanders, having experienced the ‘despotism’ Victoria despised in Wilhelm, came to wish she had.
In 1903 an upper-class government clerk, keen yachtsman and former soldier in the Boer War published a ripping yarn of a novel in which its protagonist – strangely enough, an upper-class government clerk – uncovers a German plan to send an invasion force across the North Sea in a fleet of barges.
Erskine Childers’sThe Riddle of the Sands, perhaps the greatest North Sea novel written and still riveting despite its sometimes laboured prose, has not been out of print since. It had an incendiary effect on the British public, convincing it that the government was lackadaisical in its response to German shipbuilding and putting pressure on Lloyd George to step up production in the shipyards of the Clyde and Tyne.
Through both world wars the coasts of each side of the North Sea were tense with anticipation and barbed wire, and the sea itself hosted thunderous and terrible sea battles. Just as many of the shoot-outs between the fleets of the Anglo-Dutch wars concluded with exhausted and expensive stalemates, so First World War encounters were often of a similar kind – who or whether anyone won the Battle of Jutland remains a moot point; that nearly 10,000 men lost their lives is not. Thick with mines and shot with submarines, the abstract politics of the sea exploded into life, and death.
The North Sea was more subdued during the Second World War – heavily mined and criss-crossed by submarines. But with the Allied victory in Europe in 1945, it was if the North Sea littoral states collectively exhaled with relief. Peace allowed the return of trawlers to waters which, having been only lightly harvested for five years, were now burgeoning with fish, while business-hungry resorts lured pleasure-craving tourists from Whitby to Wilhelmshaven. The maritime centres of gravity of the new conflict between the communist bloc and the capitalist West lay far to the north, in the Atlantic Ocean and the Bering Sea, and fishing communities, at least those in the United Kingdom, found themselves hard hit not by the Cold War, but by the Cod Wars, a series of disputes over fishing rights with Iceland, upon whose fish stocks much of the British industry relied.
Britain played its hand badly and greedily, and the Icelanders, whom even the UK press invariably described as ‘plucky’, prevailed, raising their tiny sub-Arctic nation to new heights of prosperity while the social and economic structures of some British coastal towns began to come undone.
The discovery of oil didn’t quite step into the breach left by the decommissioning of trawlers, but it did promise new opportunities.
Only two countries stood to benefit from the deposits of valuable goo deep beneath the seabed. Norway, a thrifty country with a small population to support, took prudent measures to ensure the windfall would benefit future generations. In Britain the prospect of oil money threatened to raise as many issues as it could ever solve. Most dangerously it threatened to reignite the fitfully dormant issue of Scottish independence. And it created new physical hazards on the seascape culminating in an explosion on the Piper Alpha production platform in which 167 oil workers burned, drowned or suffocated to death on 6 July 1988.
North Sea Sybils have long whispered that the reservoirs would run dry. That has yet to happen. The platforms have however permanently altered the architecture of the sea to an extent that no single other thing did before them, though now they have been joined by the giant turbines of the wind farms – Gunfleet Sands off the coast of Kent, Princess Amalia in Dutch waters, Horns Rev 2, Alpha Venus, Beatrice, Thornton Bank – the push for renewable energy adding a new layer to the process of place-naming the North Sea that began before it became a sea.
Oil and wind cast the North Sea in an industrial, functional light, but not everything changes. Even in the face of cheap flights to ‘sunny Spain’ and Phuket, we continue to chance a North Sea holiday. Freighters ply many of the same routes as the fluyts and cogs of centuries past. Fish, despite the gloomy auguries of scientists and conservationists, still spawn and shoal and are caught and grace our tables. But the North Sea is a so-so repository of its own physical memories, in places erasing its inheritance with the reckless speed of a spendthrift heir. And it can be a lonely place. Just as the Mediterranean is garrulous, busy and bright even where its shores are empty, its North Sea counterparts tend towards the sombre, the still and the stern, even where trampled by happy summer crowds.
For all that, I reasoned, in conceiving this book and these journeys, it scarcely deserves our indifference. Other seas may be more photogenic, more televisual, their ports and harbours exotic and sensual, but was it fair to permit the North Sea to become unfamiliar through being overfamiliar? What did I know previously of the courtship rituals of the island of Föhr, the tragedies inflicted upon Heligoland, the mysterious language of Norn, the genius of the Ostend painters, the trials and tribulations of the German Warft dwellers who each year confront the power of the Sturmflut, or even the boozy pleasures waiting behind the portals of the Nordern Lights Pub? Indeed, what had I experienced hitherto of the magic of a winter’s evening in the marshes of the estuary of the Thames, from where
I set out, by bus, boat, bicycle and train, to explore the sea that lay beyond?
2
In Defence of the Estuary
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea . . . that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard . . . and that the dark flat wilderness intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with the scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Descend slippery steps from the embankment at Gabriel’s Wharf to poke along a furlong’s length of foreshore and the tenor of the Thames shifts abruptly. There is an odour, cool, dank and ancient, pertaining to the very bedrock of London. Here among the broken bricks and stones are the smashed atoms of the city, the pipe stems, bones, bullets and crockery shards (willow-patterned, heavy-glazed, IKEA), revealing a history in fragments, tantalisingly and magnificently jumbled with no regard for hierarchy or pomp.
The sanitised and trammelled Thames is only an echo of its former self. Before embankment filtration its tendrils branched everywhere, feeding and poisoning the city in almost equal measure. Where river and man now stand aloof from each other, they were once intimate. Wherries, lighters and barges clogged the banks and watermen jostled for fares. At the rat runs where the wharfmen unloaded – Kidney Stairs, Pelican Stairs, Pickled Herring Stairs, Mason’s Stairs – vice, pleasure and business thrived and could scarcely be distinguished. Mudlarks, children caked in the river’s grey ooze, inhabited its banks, scraping a half-life from the recovery of the accidentally lost (buttons, nails and pennies), the washed up in the tide, the long since forgotten.