The Naked Shore

by Tom Blass

  Childers spent the war fighting with the Royal Navy in the North Sea and the Dardanelles. Early on he was asked by Churchill to explore the possibility of reversing the premise of The Riddle of the Sands for a British landing on the Frisian coast. When the war ended he resumed his involvement in Irish politics. In 1919 Erskine and Molly moved from London to Dublin. By 1921 he had become a Sinn Fein member of the Irish Dáil. Later that year, Childers, whom many had once regarded as the epitome of Britishness, was part of the Irish delegation negotiating the terms of independence from Britain.

  However, the man whose alter ego, the amateur yachtsman Carruthers, had two decades earlier paced ‘the deck of the Flushing steamer with a ticket for Hamburg’ would soon fall foul of the vicious web of Irish politics in which he was entangled. Tried by a hastily convened Irish Free State military tribunal for possession of a Spanish pistol – a token of affection from his one-time friend Michael Collins – Childers was sentenced to be executed by firing squad at the Beggars Bush Barracks in Dublin.

  To his wife he wrote, ‘It all seems perfectly simple . . . like lying down at the end of a long day’s walk.’ To the firing squad he joked, ‘Take a step or two forward, lads. It’ll be easier that way.’ And Childers fell dead, his own riddle brutally and prematurely solved by the age of fifty-two.

  *By the grey shore, by the grey sea,

  And set apart, lies the town;

  The fog lies heavy on the roofs,

  And through the stillness roars the sea,

  Dully around the town

  *Wherever I go on this Earth,

  whatever name a land may have

  there’s only one Isle of Föhr,

  that in my mind is best.

  If I came upon the happiest place,

  where worries don’t exist,

  all the day from dawn till dusk I’d think

  of you, my Isle of Föhr.

  *Beach thistle

  Beach thistle is my flower,

  Beach thistle they call me too.

  She grows on the dune-sand,

  I on the life beach,

  And we both have thorns!

  8

  Myths of Origin – a Land Beneath the Sea

  In the midst of this stillness the earth began to tremble as if she was dying. The mountains opened forth to vomit fire and flames. Some sank into the bosom of the earth, and in other places mountains rose out of the plain. Atland disappeared, and the wild waves rose so high over hill and dale that everything was buried in the sea.

  The Oerla and Linda Chronicles*

  One day – or night – towards the end of what has come to be lazily labelled the Mesolithic Period, at a spot twenty-three miles east of where the Norfolk town of King’s Lynn is now located, a hunter mislaid a mainstay of his or her livelihood, a spear-like implement with rear-facing barbs carved from the antler of a stag. In all probability, this man or woman was hunting deer, dogs, boar or otters. Once thrown the spear sank beneath fen-like marsh, embedded itself in dense foliage or was simply lost in the forest of ash, elder, birch or oak.

  It would, ironically enough, be retrieved by another hunter, this time armed with trawl nets and going by the name of Pilgrim Lockwood, skipper of a steam trawler called the Colinda. Lockwood was trawling between two fishing banks, the Leman and the Ower, when the net brought up something which aroused his curiosity. Having carefully broken away a thick encrustation of peat, he found an object which reminded him of a harpoon and, arriving back in port at Lowestoft, handed it to the curator of a local museum. Eight or ten thousand years had elapsed between loss and retrieval. In the intervening period a whole world had disappeared. The harpoon-owning hunter had inhabited an expanse of land that would later become Ireland, Britain and Europe but then made up a contiguous whole, scored by rivers and streams, hatched with thick forests, prowled and grazed by beasts, some suited, others less so, to the soft, gentle hills of today’s Norfolk: red deer, hyena, mammoths, archaic kinds of rhinoceros and bears.

  Neither this hunter nor his or her kind would bequeath any great civilisation – at least not in the sense of edifices and temples – and archaeologists would chastise Mesolithic folk for their lack of industry and flair. We now consider them to have been civilised, in the sense that they imposed their artistic and technical abilities upon the world they inhabited, though less generously than they might. The harpoon was not the first hint of the North Sea’s previous terrestrial existence, but hitherto, when trawlers had hauled the skulls of mammoths from the Dogger Bank, the explanation for their presence was presumed to be either the extravagant animal-keeping proclivities of the Romans or the Great Flood.

  There was a particular barrier to further speculation – on the western side of the North Sea especially. What British scholar could, with a clear conscience, denude his race of its island specialness? As late as 1851 the eminent historian Daniel Wilson concluded that ‘the first colonist of the British Isles must have been able to construct some kind of boat’ and that this was the ‘certain starting point’ of any investigation of the matter. It was true that a boat was an indispensable tool for navigating a marshy landscape – like that of the Fens of Cambridgeshire before they were drained. But for many thousands of years after the retreat of the great ice sheets the water was brackish and shallow, Britain being part of the great landmass of Europe. The sea came later and gradually. At the point at which Britain and the Continent lost their grip on each other there remained an island the size of Denmark smack in the middle of the North Sea. Possibly it remained inhabited until rising waters and geological forces pushed it below the surface to create the present Dogger Bank.

  An autodidact with a sharp grey beard most forcefully captured the vision of the pre-North Sea. In a slim tome called Submerged Forests published in 1913 Clement Reid described his investigations into the vegetable life he had found below the present-day tideline, which demonstrated without recourse to biblically derived pseudo-science the existence of a land which had once flourished before inundation. Clues proving his hypothesis were abundant, he said, pointing out that at numerous seaside resorts there were places where fishermen ‘will tell you of black peaty earth, with hazel-nuts, and often with tree-stumps still rooted in the soil, seen between tide-marks when the overlying sea-sand has been cleared away . . . if one is fortunate enough to be on the spot when such a patch is uncovered this “submerged forest” is found to extend right down to the level of the lowest tides’. He added, ‘These . . . “Noah’s Woods” . . . have attracted attention from early times, all the more so owing to the existence of an uneasy feeling that, though like most other geological phenomena they were popularly explained by Noah’s deluge, it was difficult thus to account for trees rooted in their original soil, and yet now found well below the level of high tide.’

  Reid (and Mrs Reid) dug for days on cold wind-battered foreshores in fear of being so absorbed by their trowelling that they might get caught out by the tide. In so doing he discovered why few shared his passion. The material unearthed was ‘particularly dirty to handle or walk upon; so that the archaeologist is inclined to say that they belong to the province of geology, and the geologist remarks that they are too modern to be worth his attention; and both pass on.’

  Uncovering how far the forests extended beyond the present shoreline was literally out of Reid’s depth, with the exception of Dogger Bank, where, for the preceding fifty years or so an ever more rapacious fishing fleet had been stripping the bank of fish, but also of mammal bones. These were critical and exciting clues to Dogger’s past, but their value was diminished by the manner of their collection. Typically they were dredged up by trawler men, who deposited them out of harm’s way in deeper waters. And if they did find their way into academic hands, it was without an accurate record of where they had been found.

  Mr and Mrs Reid had better luck with the peat – the fishermen called it ‘moorlog’ – which they boiled in a strong soda solution for up to four days to extract the zool
ogical remains. Their endeavours revealed a strange menagerie of beasts, the bones of which had lain cheek by jowl on the seabed, including ‘bear, wolf, hyaena, Irish elk, reindeer, red deer, wild ox, bison, horse, woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, beaver, walrus’.

  Reid speculated about the human inhabitants of the world beneath the sea which he had brought to the surface, estimating that its submergence had begun around 3000 BC, at which time, he pointed out, the Egyptian, Babylonian and Minoan civilisations were flourishing, though ‘Northern Europe was then probably barbarous and metals had not come into use, but the amber trade of the Baltic was probably in full swing.’ Could not, he asked, have rumours of a great disaster, such as the submergence of thousands of square miles of land, been the origin of some of the Great Flood myths?

  The harpoon more pointedly brought the world of men into the picture. In 1932 archaeologist Sir Graham Clark suggested that Reid’s forested land must once have afforded an ‘easier passage [from the present day British Isles to the Continent] to early settlers than is now the case’. But he dampened any notion that what had been lost was ever more than a glorified causeway between two land masses, as if the making of that final leap was somehow indecorous. Six decades passed before this land was recolonised by an archaeologist from the University of Exeter, Bryony Coles, who suggested that her colleagues should ‘instead of focusing on land as bridge . . . focus on land as a place to be’. Daring to christen this new, old world Doggerland (after the Dogger Bank, which must once have been its last outpost), Coles amplified the significance of Reid’s research and provided the impetus for archaeologists to trawl deeper for evidence of lives long submerged.

  The current explanation for the emergence of the North Sea is that where its southern basin now lies was previously a great plain, free from ice and rich in game, vegetation and rivers, where men and women hunted and fished with tools made of wood, flints and antlers. But as the ice to the north retreated, sea levels rose, flooding the plain until the increasingly slender land bridge remaining between continental Europe and Britain was finally severed.

  On the island of Sylt a different myth held until the early nineteenth century: one which attributed the North Sea’s creation to the bitter fruits of a soured love. The legend holds that an English queen, Fra Garhoren, was engaged to be married to the King of Denmark, but he broke it off. At that time (according to the myth) England and Europe were united by a sandbank, which Garhoren ‘caused to be pierced by the labour of 700 men in seven years with the intention that the waters for the new channel would flood all the territories of the Danish king’. They succeeded, and the tide ‘rose suddenly on the North Sea shore and between the Elbe and River Forth a hundred thousand men lost their lives’.

  The story was first transcribed in the mid-seventeenth century and is impossible to date. Floods around the North Sea have always been frequent. But if the tale recalls a catastrophic inundation, perhaps it was the Cymbrian Flood, which battered the coast of Jutland and northern Germany around 115 BC, forcing the exodus of the shore-dwelling Celts and Teutons for new lands safer from the sea.

  ‘Atlantis’ is an easy word to throw at any settlement which has the misfortune to find itself permanently submerged, and the North Sea’s Atlantises are almost innumerable. The entire plain, which over a period of thousand years or so succumbed gradually to meltwater, can be so described – as can in their own singular capacity the towns of Dunwich and Ravenser Odd (once bustling harbour economies premised on fishing, trade and piracy) and the island of Rungholdt. But the bolder claim is that the North Sea is the location not of any Atlantis, but the Atlantis as described by Plato and typically depicted by images of mouldering columns and arches in an azure wonderland.

  In the 1860s a manuscript written in old Frisian surfaced in the Netherlands which was promoted by its supporters as a thirteenth-century text with near-mystic qualities. Its authors were given as the mysterious and genderless Oerla, writing in AD 800 or thereabouts, and a later Linda. Between them they purported to tell first-hand the story of the ancient Frisians, their religion and travails, and a depiction of the destruction of a now-lost world. The subtitle to its 1876 English translation is ‘A Purported Chronicle of the Descendants of the Lost Atlantis – of the North Sea’.

  The rulers of Oerla and Linda’s Atlantis were members of a line of mother-goddesses springing from the loins of the Norse goddess Freya. Some of its inhabitants devoted their lives to the gathering of amber, others to fishing. A nearby country was Britain – a ‘land of exiles’ whose inhabitants had the letter B tattooed on their foreheads. The great cataclysm came one summer, when

  the sun hid behind the clouds, as if unwilling to look upon the earth. There was perpetual calm, and the damp mist hung like a wet sail over the houses and marshes . . . in the midst of this stillness the earth began to tremble as if she was dying. The mountains opened forth to vomit fire and flames. Some sank into the bosom of the earth, and in other places mountains rose out of the plain. Atland disappeared, and the wild waves rose so high over hill and dale that everything was buried in the sea.

  The text was quickly exposed as a fake but as late as the 1930s continued to possess a momentum which attracted a following of cranks and conspiracy theorists, most dangerously of all Heinrich Himmler, for whom the notion of a North Sea ur-civilisation was in serendipitous accord with his own search for Aryan origins. Two decades later the theory was dusted down, dressed up and its more noxious Nazi connotations discarded by a German priest, Jürgen Spanuth, who advanced the theory that a great flood had destroyed a sophisticated civilisation close to the coast of Jutland, whose people had moved south, almost invading Egypt. Spanuth dismissed what he described as the ‘quackery’ of his predecessors (among others, a member of the Tolstoy clan who set off from Bermuda to discover Atlantis in the Caribbean) but then created his own.

  He did at least nod to all the requisite sources on Atlantis – Plato, Marcellus, Xenophon, Pliny, Solon and so on – to concoct his own interpretation of events, a series of natural calamities culminating in the destruction of the Royal Isle Basileia, which he deduced was located upon Heligoland. In 1952 Spanuth visited the rediscovered Atlantis and, armed to the gills with state-of-the-art diving and underwater photographic equipment, set out to uncover its riches. Unfortunately, he reported, the water was far too murky to make the taking of photographs worthwhile.

  There are in fact the ruins of a civilisation on Heligoland, for the island was bombed almost out of existence by one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history in 1947, the shock waves of which still reverberate, as I would discover. And Spanuth’s claims have left a legacy, in that the Atlantis industry, alongside duty-free booze and gannet-clad red cliffs, is part of the charm of Heligoland. Every trinket shop on the island sells knick-knacks more obviously suited to Cairo than to a North Sea rock: pharaoh masks, sarcophagus pencil cases and T-shirts that lament, MY BOYFRIEND WENT TO ATLANTIS, AND ALL HE BOUGHT ME WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT. Yet if Spanuth’s construction of history proved as damp as the submerged and silt-concealed pillars upon which it rested, the evidence suggests that the North Sea’s pre-story is no less fantastical, sophisticated and incredible than the one that he imagined.

  Two mornings after my departure from the Humber on the Longstone we pulled into the Swedish city of Gothenburg, tucked safely into the mouth of the River Göta, where its harbour cradled a rich dawn light like an old flame. The ship bumped against a quayside and was swiftly attended to by more luminescent men, whose voices – this time – I couldn’t understand, though their tenor and pitch matched those of their counterparts in Killingholme.

  I had crossed the North Sea, but it had been an uneventful passage, sans pirates, storms or other incident – blessings for a sailor if not for a writer. Technology has all but neutered the risks of sea voyages and whittled down ships’ crews to a mere handful of men, and increasingly women. The sense of cohesion and mutual reliance that once kept a vessel afloat is no longe
r required to the same degree, for each crew member’s function frequently demands only a small share of their time, the remainder of which is spent alone in their cabin. Ennui is a much greater threat to personal welfare than shipwreck.

  Though there was of course Lewis, the Liverpudlian cook. Patrick the mate said that Lewis’s under-the-breath comments were reviled as much as his cooking. I understood the latter gripe – with the exception of the big blocks of bread and butter pudding, which seemed to be constantly available, Lewis’s concoctions were as revolting as they were archaic. But I had the Barchester Chronicles and a notebook, and a pair of binoculars with which to better admire the storm petrels dancing on the waves.

  The next stage of my journey was to be by bus to a town called Tanumshede, two hours north of Gothenburg, close to the border with Norway and five miles from the coast. It is not in itself a remarkable place; indeed it is scarcely more than a high street around which is clustered a smattering of dwellings, clapboard red and yellow houses for the most part. The surrounding countryside is composed of rich pastures and quiet fields and solemn forests of ever-so-upright pines which could have been the fruit of Arthur Rackham’s pencil. It is in these forests that Tanumshede’s splendours are to be found, strange engravings born of imaginations stranger than Rackham’s and more beguiling than that of Spanuth, incised into the smooth flanks of great rocks lying beneath the sombre pines. They are easily the most remarkable prehistoric representations in Europe. For the most part they’re figures of men, largely in a state of priapism, and some women, and blowers of upward-curving trumpets known as lures.

  Etched into one rock is the figure of a man who recoils, hands raised in alarm at the approach of a large snake or perhaps at a bolt of lightning. Other images depict goats, deer, oxen, pigs and even a blue whale. But most striking of all are the thousands of outlines of boats, some the size of canoes, some so much larger that they accommodate several dozen people, blowing lures, sporting elaborate and extravagant headdresses or wielding axes. In others figures vault over these strange ships, the scenes reminiscent of images from Knossos of Minoan bull-jumping but with boats for bulls. Whoever these people were, boats must have been central to their existence. Some of the engravings appear to represent wedding ceremonies being conducted on the decks of boats.