Atlantic

by Simon Winchester

  • • •

  Athens is by most reckonings the oldest major city in Europe; Cádiz in Spain is among the oldest of those on the continent’s Atlantic coast. There is a claim that Cádiz was founded in 1104 B.C., a date noted in a diary by a prominent Roman historian. But even the proudest of today’s citizenry think this improbable, and are content to use the ninth century B.C. as the city’s birth date, at a time when the Phoenicians used Cádiz as a trading base for their later journeys to southwest Britain and to northwest Africa.

  And while there has never been a Parthenon or an Acropolis found in Cádiz, by chance what would soon afterward come to be recognized as the most ancient of the city’s surviving buildings—a Roman ruin—happened to be discovered on the very occasion that I stayed there, on my first-ever visit to Cádiz, in the early 1980s.

  I was on a reporting assignment, journeying between the Atlantic Ocean side of Spain to the Mediterranean by walking fifty miles or so along the cliff tops and through the cork forests of southern Andalusia. My starting point was Cádiz, my destination the British outpost of Gibraltar.

  Before leaving from London for the walk, I had supposed the high point of this modest expedition would be the stop at Tarifa, Europe’s most southerly town, from where I should be able to see the snow-covered cliff tops of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. It somehow seemed barely conceivable to me—I was in my mid-thirties, and still wide-eyed in my wanderings—that from the quayside of a small southern European town there could possibly be a view of Africa, that unimaginably distant and unutterably different continent of lions and giraffes and Moors and bushmen and Mount Kilimanjaro.

  But yes, it was all there, large and looming and pink with Moroccan desert dust, and it was quite the spectacle I had imagined, full of symbolism and portent. Yet somehow it did not quite rival the thrill that Cádiz was feeling at the time I left there, just a few days before—because it turned out there had been a curious occurrence: a fire had broken out in an old part of what was already a very old city, some necessary demolitions had been carried out, and on the first blue-washed seaside morning I spent in the city, the maître d’ in the Hotel Atlántico could hardly suppress his excitement with that morning’s news: They have found the ruins of a Roman theater! he whispered to me as he handed me my pair of boiled eggs. It is maybe the biggest in the world!

  The second largest, as it happens.35 But the discovery of a structure built by one of Julius Caesar’s lieutenants in the first century B.C. gave concrete form to this otherwise modestly self-effacing city’s notion of itself as a place of once great importance and antiquity. The Romans had used Cádiz as a naval base, and here was proof that they had had the wherewithal to entertain their sailors. The Carthaginians had done much the same, and before them the Phoenicians—who named it Gadir, the walled place. It had been a city of substance well before the Atlantic was even known to be an ocean.

  The old center of Cádiz is on a slender spit of land between the ocean and the bay. At the seaward tip there is a fort, with thick walls and cannon and barbicans with slit windows from which wardens could once stand sentry over the sea. Immediately inside the walls is a rabbit warren of old structures, most dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Beyond there are mansions and palaces and grand plazas, all built from the accumulated wealth of the two centuries when Cádiz was the principal Iberian entrepôt for commerce with the Americas.

  I chose as the starting point of my long march east the plaque under the palms in the Plaza del Candelaria that marked the house of Bernardo O’Higgins, the Irish-Chilean who in the nineteenth century freed Chile from Spanish rule. I first strolled beneath the small scattering of towers from which merchants’ wives once used to spy for homebound ships, much as New Englanders’ spouses in later years gazed down from their widow’s walks. I walked past the old tobacco warehouse, past the impeccably preserved cathedral and the convent, and finally out onto the great south road—the Roman theater under its protective tarpaulins to my left, the causeway to the Andalusian mainland and the road to Gibraltar stretching hot and dusty ahead. I managed to get a little lost, and asked an elegant and elderly Spaniard for directions. He was less haughty than he looked, and not at all brusque: Keep the ocean on your right hand, he said, and you can’t go far wrong. And mind you keep a lookout for Africa on the way!

  The oceanfront has been dignified for centuries by architecture that reflects an enduring respect for the sea. Cádiz has reminders of traders and explorers dating from Phoenician and Roman times. There is a muscularly commercial aspect to New York and Liverpool, and Jamestown, on the mid-ocean island of St. Helena, has provided for three centuries a Georgian sanctuary in miniature for passing merchants.

  Hispaniola’s sprawling city of Santo Domingo, three thousand miles away across the ocean to the west, has few such obvious charms, at least initially. Well over two million people are crowded into what is a generally ugly and uninspiring capital of an irredeemably corrupt and venal island (shared with Haiti, and lying between Puerto Rico and Cuba). But on the right bank of the Ozama River there is the old quarter, the reliquary of the city that Bartholomew Columbus, the brother of the explorer, founded in 1496, and which was rebuilt after a devastating hurricane four years later. And it is much more the kind of thing one hoped for.

  Such buildings as remain show just how grand, how very much like Cádiz, this city could have come to look. As recently as a century and a half ago the ciudad colonial—formally known as Santo Domingo de Guzman, and in fact first named La Isabella in honor of the expedition’s sponsoring queen—was still recognizable as an iconically Atlantic city. There was a huge seawall, the waves crashing noisily below. There was a dock, and a lighthouse, and within the walls a barracks, a powder magazine, and a signal tower. A brief orgy of early-sixteenth-century colonial building then brought an enormous and handsomely styled palace of government, a decently proportioned cathedral, a private merchant’s mansion or two, a monastery, a hospital, and even more mundane but elegant structures—a warehouse, a slaughterhouse. On the landward side a great gateway pierced the wall with oak doors and two castellated towers, and from which Spanish troops could fan out on expeditions into the Hispaniolan hinterland.

  Santo Domingo was in so many ways a classic of the oceanside fortress town: the narrow streets laid out in a perfect grid, all the essentials of expatriate life and imperial expansion crammed together along them within the protective walls of coral limestone blocks carved three feet thick. What little remains is well protected now: the United Nations sees that its unique standing is kept secure for the benefit of all, and that the great buildings—the First Cathedral in America, the First Castle in America, the First Palace in America—are kept beyond the reach of the developers who have so scarred the capital beyond with their skyscrapers and shopping centers. There are cobbled streets and a bustling Plaza de Espana; seagulls from the sea outside the walls swoop and skirl in the breezes.

  Anyone walking at evening time high on the walls beside the iron-black cannon can feel very much at one with some stroller who might be in Cádiz, half a world away. This, one might be tempted to whisper across the sea to the other, is the way that the first cities of the Atlantic must have looked and felt and sounded in their first days. The tramp and clang of iron-shod infantry boots on polished limestone sett-stones, the importuning calls of merchants, the creak of ships’ timbers and mooring ropes, the cries of the seabirds, the endless grumbling crash of the rollers and the sea beyond, all bathed in the warm seaside light of early morning or late evening, salmon pink on the high coral walls. Cádiz and Santo Domingo might at such a moment be the selfsame city, linked in style and feeling by the men who first built them, and then by the ocean they have risen beside.

  • • •

  And then there are mighty Atlantic cities of today, New York incomparable among them. America’s “sea-washed sunset gates,” as Emma Lazarus has it in her famous inscription for the Statue of Liberty, remains toda
y what it has been for more than a hundred and fifty years: the entranceway to hope and opportunity for millions upon millions of transatlantic peoples. To be sure, it is the great airports that bring in most of the migrants today, and most from far beyond the Atlantic, but the story of today’s New York is still in its essentials that of the great funnel opening into which the huddled masses from the storied pomp of old Europe were poured without cease from the middle of the nineteenth century until today.

  Even now, the vision of New York as a great harbor city can be powerfully felt. Just below the massive concrete anchor points of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, in Brooklyn, beside a stretch of truck-thundering concrete known as Leif Ericson Drive, is a sorry patch of worn grassland, and from there one can be close enough to the passing ships almost, but for an iron railing, to be able to reach out and touch their hulls. And what an endless procession they make! Bulk carriers from the African ports, fully laden and headed for the wharves of Bayonne, New Jersey. Sleek container ships from Gothenburg, filled no doubt with cheap Ikea furniture bound for the quay beside the main store in Elizabeth, New Jersey; blinding white and windowless car carriers from the assembly plants in Belgium and France headed for the docks along the Port Newark Channel; oil tankers heading gingerly up channel for the tank farms south of Kearny; and maybe even a liner, a still-elegant Cunarder perhaps, or else a more vulgar-looking and alarmingly top-heavy ship from Carnival headed for the piers on the west side of Manhattan, or the newly furbished terminal at Red Hook, Brooklyn, right by the tiny factory where some say the best Key lime pies in all America are made.

  The outbound ships thunder slowly past, too, their gigantic screws thrashing through the waves as they head past Sea Gate and Breezy Point in New York, and past Sandy Hook and the low hills known rather generously as the Atlantic Highlands in New Jersey, past the highly secure navy piers where ocean-bound American warships are loaded with ammunition, out into the standing swells of the Atlantic. The smell of the sea margin is everywhere, and except on the sultriest of summer days there seems always to be a good breeze, and there are dozens of smaller craft scurrying about between the mighty ones, like those insects that as children we called waterboatmen. Police and coast guard tenders are lurking there, too, just in case, with uniformed officers at the helm and engines capable of great speed idling quietly.

  And then behind is the roadway, with its informal spelling of the Norwegian who first crossed this ocean, and on it are streams of trucks and private cars and yellow taxis, mostly coming back from Kennedy Airport the long way, because of reported traffic jams on the amusingly misnamed Van Wyck Expressway. Few taxis will care to stop, but if one can be persuaded to, then it is a mere five more westbound minutes to pass beneath the Brooklyn Esplanade, then up over the gossamer basket of the Brooklyn Bridge, to where suddenly in front rises the glittering crystal wall of Manhattan, like a curtain in a spectacular theater. I once brought a young Filipina woman here after a long flight from Manila. It was a crisp winter’s day, and when she saw the first snow of her life, and then touched it for the first time, she shrieked with a mixture of shock and delight. But when she first saw Manhattan—and it was late afternoon, and the first lights were begin to prick like diamonds in the windows of a thousand buildings—her eyes became as wide as dinner plates, she cried out, and then she burst into floods of tears.

  Manhattan hardly remains an architectural temple to the city’s maritime history, a celebration of the sea. Its legions of skyscrapers are totems of other fields of commerce and wealth. But down beside the forts and bastions of the Battery, within a few rough-water cables of Ellis Island and Governors Island and the Statue of Liberty in her park on what once was Bedloe’s Island, there are still hints of the city’s cis-oceanic origins. Most notable of all the suggestions is the magnificent Beaux Arts Custom House, little used today but mercifully spared the fate of other equally noble buildings that were ground into landfill.

  Ranged along the front of this great structure are four immense seated statues of figures. They were fashioned by Daniel Chester French, whose fame depends largely on his gargantuan statue of Lincoln in Washington, D.C. The four Custom House figures depict, with more than a nod to the ethnocentric mood of the times, the great seafaring continents.

  Asia and Africa, their statues consigned to the two outer corners of the building, are seen to be sleeping and unmoving, little more than merely forgettable and pointlessly pretty. Europe and America, on the other hand, sit across from each other at either side of the flight of steps leading up the main entrance, and they positively burst with noble attitudes, with a frozen-in-marble energy and an apparently boundless capacity for triumph and fortune. If ever two statues can be said to represent the coming together that has created the new Atlantic identity, then this latter pair of marble giants, little seen and largely overlooked deep in the canyons of far lower Manhattan, have few equals. It is a shame that they both are female and that there is no potential for any marble offspring, with all the genetic markers of the new Atlantic spirit.

  Shipping newspapers like the Journal of Commerce and Lloyd’s List are still circulated down in these lower streets of Manhattan, to those with an urgent need, and a nearby shop called New York Nautical still sells charts of the Approaches to Pernambuco and the Estrecho de Magellanes, and has available the Admiralty Pilot to the West Coast of Scotland and guides to a hundred other corners of the world’s oceans beside. A sailor home from sea can buy the List of Lights: North Atlantic, look over a good stock of sextants and brass-bound chronometers, or contemplate Adlard Coles on Heavy Weather Sailing and the Ashley Book of Knots. An hour spent on Lower Broadway, and then a taxi back to the piers of Red Hook, and one could feel entirely ready to board a ship, weigh anchor, and ease springs and head out beneath the Narrows Bridge, pushing out into the swells off Fire Island and then past Montauk, to where the Nantucket Light Vessel blinks its farewell to shallow sea, and finally set course for one of the classics of the old-world ports, three thousand sea miles ahead. To Bergen, say, in Norway. Or to Antwerp, or Rotterdam, Liverpool, Cherbourg, Vigo, Casablanca, or even, if courageous and well victualed enough to brave a heading far to the southeast, to Cape Town.

  Here at the far end of the ocean’s longest diagonal is New York City’s polar opposite, its intellectual and spiritual antipode. Here, just a matter of miles from the most southerly tip of Africa, is a city truly born of the sea, yet seemingly paying little man-made homage to it, and rather letting Nature do so instead. The spectacle of Manhattan is something entirely enthroned in her buildings, which serve to display the myriad creative capacities of humanity. Her natural landscape is all but irrelevant. The joys of Cape Town, by contrast, lie not the buildings of the city at all, but in the velvet blue mountains that frame it. And all this great scenery serves to display what the sea already knows, and which is the very opposite of New York’s self-delusion: not humankind’s creative genius at all, but our utter insignificance.

  I arrived in Cape Town recently in a small Greek ship. We were coming in on an easterly heading from the island of Tristan da Cunha, 1,800 miles and three days’ sailing away. As promised, the Ukrainian steersman had called me to the bridge soon after five in the morning of our arrival: Africa, he said, was now directly ahead and visible, and the sun would soon be rising over the mountains.

  It was a perfectly clear morning, cloudless and cool. One low-slung cargo ship, of Chinese registry, was off to the starboard on an otherwise calm and empty sea. Ahead was the glow of coming sunrise, and silhouetted in mauve below was a ragged skein of mountains, ending in a sharp cliff—the Cape of Storms that was, now the Cape of Good Hope. Northward from this cape the land first rose, then fell into a long defile, then rose again in a flattish tilt. It was from behind this that the sun first appeared, changing the color of the land, now twenty miles away, from blue to rock-dust brown and, where there was grass, to green.

  Soon we could see a fine stubble of trees on the brows of the mountai
ns, and some of the coastal suburbs—Camps Bay, Sea Point, and Three Anchor Bay—came slowly into view, though as no more than paler stains on the green slopes. Simonstown, the old Royal Navy base at the north end of False Bay, was somehow obscured by a low morning fog. As we growled steadily inshore, the dominant peak itself became ever more familiar, eventually dividing itself into its component parts: Signal Hill and the Lions Head off to the right, and directly ahead now the immense flat-topped pelmet of Table Mountain. As we turned into Table Bay the streetlights of Cape Town could be seen winking out in the distance, roadway by roadway. Traffic could be seen moving steadily along the coast roads. Down beneath its protective rim of hills, the great city was waking herself up for yet another crisp late spring South African morning.

  On we pressed into the calm and sheltered expanse of the bay, passing a scattering of anchored ships, some waiting for a berth in the docks, or others rusty and most likely riding out their time in demurrage. To port lay Robben Island, where the colonial rulers had once kept their lepers securely isolated, and where the Afrikaaners did much the same for Nelson Mandela, though with rather less success. There used to be sheep and rabbits on Robben Island, the only ones in the entire continent, it used to be said with pride. Now only the rabbits remain, as pests, and in their thousands.