The packets and the clippers had been people movers as well as shifters of cargoes. The sailing vessels in the closing years of their careers, and steamships through all the years of theirs, and until the planes came, carried scores millions of people westward, overwhelmingly westward, and in doing so they played an essential role in the populating—indeed, in the making—of the Americas. And particularly of the United States and Canada, since both of these hitherto little-populated countries, as acts of deliberate policy, decided they needed for a good long while a steady flow of immigrants70 from the Old World to the New.
Much of this migration, the shameful side of a vastly complex story, and mentioned already, was of the involuntary kind, with slaves swept up from Africa, sent under appalling conditions across the ocean, and then padlocked into humiliating servitude. Many of the others who came out at their own behest were early colonials, from the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the settlers of Jamestown to those who built cottages in such faraway places as Puerto Madryn (the Welsh), Rio de Janeiro (the Portuguese), and Halifax (many Basques, among others). Many of these were skilled and technically able men who were invited to help build the growing industrial revolution, to spin and weave or puddle iron, fish or mine coal; most of those who came to America were either from England—the young America was overwhelmingly Anglophone, after all—or from Germany or Holland; they and their like saw the populating of all the colonial possessions, which ranged along the entire American coastline from Labrador to Patagonia, as part of their own personal manifest destinies.
But by far the greatest proportion of newcomers were those who came after these colonies had one by one thrown off their foreign rulers, and who came across the sea because they saw the newly formed nations as beacons of hope and possibility. These were the now famously engraved huddled masses, people who yearned for some respite from the grinding difficulties of Europe—and it is the passage of these, the millions upon millions of men and women and children who came westward with little but a collective and an individual sense of optimism and determination to make something of the chances that were said to be on offer in the New World, that dominate the story.
Their crossings did much to alter once again the world’s perception of the Atlantic Ocean. Hitherto it had been to most an immense barrier of discouragement; now, with the payment of a modest sum for passage in bearable discomfort and the indignities of processing on the other side, the ocean was transformed into an immensely long bridge—long, to be sure, but a bridge just the same—that would take anyone bold enough to venture across into a brand-new life. In becoming the prime passageway for all these migrant journeys, the ocean became itself an integral part of a whole new world of possibility. The figures are quite staggering. While a mere one million people had arrived in America in the seventy years between independence and 1840, over the following sixty years no fewer than thirty million came flooding in—most of them northern Europeans, particularly Britons and Irish, in the years of the first great wave that lasted until 1890; and then many Italians, Germans, and Scandinavians in the half century that followed. Much the same was happening south of the equator, too: some ten million Europeans migrated to Latin America in the fifty years before the Great War, and the populations of Brazil and Argentina, which accepted particularly large numbers of migrants from Portugal, Spain, and Italy, increased massively—by tenfold in Brazil, by fifteenfold in Argentina.
And so the people came in their millions, pouring up the gangways and brought by lighters, then settling themselves uncomfortably in the ships that waited patiently at the quaysides or out in the roads. The migrants paid low “emigrant” fares for passage in the steerage—three pounds was the going rate to America for many years, though Argentina offered free passage from 1888 and handed out prepaid tickets to anyone fit and able who wished to come (a decision that Argentina was later to rue, some contend, since it brought in many less well educated migrants than the country truly needed, and proportionately fewer of the more technically able).
Atlantic Ocean: Commerce and Communication
The migrants began their new lives at quays in Liverpool (which handled nearly five million America-bound passengers on one-way tickets between 1860 and 1914) and Glasgow, in Havre, Bordeaux and Nantes, Modano and Marseilles, Naples and Genoa, Hamburg and Bremen, and the long-forgotten port of Fiume, now Rijeka in Croatia, whence came so many of the Slavs who are inhabitants of present-day Chicago.
Conditions on the emigrant ships could be decidedly unpleasant—while the swells lived and dined pleasantly in the upper decks, those on the verge of momentous change had to put up with steerage decks that were crowded, dark, with poor sanitation and limited water, had either bunk beds with straw mattresses or hammocks, offered almost no cooking facilities, the sexes harshly segregated to lessen the temptations of turpitude, and with constant reminders from unhelpful and often hostile crew members that a ticket gave steerage passengers merely the right to passage, and perhaps a handout of bread, salted meat, and occasional chunks of pemmican or ship’s biscuit, and very little else. The ship’s hatches would be closed in poor weather, and so to the passengers’ general misery would be added the terrible fear occasioned by being tossed around violently for days on end in often fetid near darkness—an experience quite foreign to most of the travelers, because few would ever have been near a ship, and even fewer out in the open sea. Morale invariably suffered as the passage groaned on—in bad weather, especially, good cheer could be sustained in the lower decks only by the travelers telling and retelling to themselves their imagined vision of what might lie ahead, in the promised land.
Of the numberless accountings of emigrant voyages, that of Robert Louis Stevenson, who traveled from Glasgow to New York in 1879 in a threadbare class just one level above the lowest steerage of them all, is perhaps the most famous and eye-opening. Stevenson’s family was horrified and tried to delay it, but in the end The Amateur Emigrant was published a year after his death, in 1895, and was deemed so graphic a description of migrant misery as to be barely credible. The event that threw even more light on their situation occurred seventeen years later, with the sinking of the RMS Titanic, in April 1912.
For one harsh reality came to dominate the saga of that tragedy: that the lives of those in the great ship’s steerage—few of whom even knew where the ship’s lifeboats were—meant evidently less to the White Star Line than those of their premium passengers. It was a shocking revelation, but undeniable, for the statistics displayed a cruel truth: that while the majority of first-class passengers survived the accident, more than three-quarters of those pinned below the waterline on the steerage decks died, unrescued either because they were physically unrescuable or because few were willing to try to save them.
Maritime laws and regulations in legions—among them laws that extended well beyond those relating to ending the shabby treatment of migrants—were changed in consequence of the Titanic’s collision with her fateful iceberg. The irony of the coincidence of location can hardly have escaped notice: new laws regulating passage by sea were occasioned by a terrible tragedy that took place in the North Atlantic in 1912; the very system of laws and the organization of parliaments to decide and promulgate them was first created but a few hundred miles away, in Iceland, in 903—almost precisely one thousand years before.
7. CASUALTIES AT SEA
Invariably it took accidents at sea to effect changes to the laws of the sea. And many of the most important recent maritime accidents took place, as with the Titanic, along some of the Atlantic’s busiest shipping lanes. Our ability to discern this in an instant is due to a forgotten nineteenth-century polymath named William Marsden,71 who while employed as secretary of the Admiralty was professionally interested in collecting and collating statistics about the world’s seas. He divided a Mercator map of the world into a series of numbered ten-degree squares, known to this day as Marsden squares.
Each quarter of every year, the insurers at Lloyd’s produce a casual
ty report—a list of vessels involved in accidents at sea and that, either through foundering, colliding, or being wrecked, were reported to have been either total losses or so seriously damaged as to require towing and rebuilding. These figures are all then plotted as black dots on a Marsden squares chart of the world, the results showing up as concentrations of accidents in all the places one might expect—in the crowded waters off Singapore, in the Black Sea, south of Sicily, in the southern Aegean.
But the Atlantic has a pall of problems on both of its coasts. Enormous numbers of accidents are reported each year along the shores of Norway and western Scotland, within the entire length of the English Channel, in south Wales, by Rotterdam, in Galicia, along the Spanish side of the Strait of Gibraltar, by Lagos and the approaches to Cape Town. South America, on the other hand, gets off comparatively lightly—squares 413 and 376, which include the entrances to the ports of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, show some activity—but then once the Caribbean and the North American coasts come into view, the maps swiftly turn black with pepperings of ink around the southern coast of Haiti, along the Gulf of Mexico coast from Mobile to Galveston, the length of Long Island from the Nantucket Light to New York City, and along the entirety of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Marsden square No.149, where the Titanic foundered, has just a scattering of dots, since accidents out in the deep sea occur only infrequently—though when they do, rescue is invariably slow to arrive and most often is too late.
Coastlines, and other ships, are what sailors fear most. Most of the infamous recent accidents have taken place within sight of land. The collision of the two passenger liners Andrea Doria and the Stockholm less than twenty miles west of Nantucket in 1956, in thick fog, became a legendary story of rescue (of the 1,706 passengers, 46 were killed) and an object lesson—resulting in yet more modified rules—in when not to rely on radar. Arguments over apportioning the blame for the costly collision between the Liberian oil tanker Statue of Liberty and the Portuguese cargo carrier Andulo off the southwestern tip of the Iberian peninsula in 1965 were so intense they had eventually to be decided by the British House of Lords, since Lloyd’s insurance claims are adjudicated there (the Liberian ship lost, being found “85 percent to blame”). And the stranding and sinking of the fully laden Liberian oil tanker Argo Merchant, which hit a reef off Nantucket at sixteen knots while making passage from Venezuela to Boston in 1976, resulted in 28,000 tons of oil being blown out to sea, and the then American president announcing new rules regarding pollution, navigation, and preserving life on the ocean.
The crippled Italian liner Andrea Doria lies on her starboard side after being struck by the Swedish liner Stockholm in the open sea approaches to New York on the foggy night of July 25, 1956. Arguments still flare over how to apportion blame for this “radar-assisted collision,” in which forty-six crew members and passengers died, though nearly 1,700 were saved.
Probably the most memorable of recent oil tanker disasters was that involving yet another Liberian vessel, the Torrey Canyon, which in March 1967 was steaming at full tilt toward southwest England, with 119,000 tons of Kuwaiti crude oil for the refineries at Milford Haven, in south Wales. The repercussions of her hitting, head-on, the sharp granite rocks of the Seven Stones Reef, off the Scilly Islands, were even more widespread—in terms of new laws and international agreements—than after the Titanic. The laconic, matter-of-fact tone of the official report, as summarized in the Times Atlas of the Oceans, takes nothing from the gravity of the disaster:
At 08.40 the position was fixed by observation of the Seven Stones light vessel—it was bearing 033ºT at a range 4.8nm [nautical miles]. The Torrey Canyon was now only 2.8nm from the rocks ahead.
At 08.42 the master switched from automatic steering to manual, and personally altered the course to port to steer 000ºT, and then switched back to automatic steering.
At 08.45 the third officer, now under stress, observed a bearing, forgot it, and observed it again. The position now indicated that the Torrey Canyon was less than 1nm from the rocks ahead. The master order hard-to-port. The helmsman who had been standing by on the bridge ran to turn it. Nothing happened. He shouted to the master who quickly checked the fuse—it was all right. The master then tried to telephone the engineers to have them check the steering gear aft. A steward answered—wrong number. He tried dialing again—and then noticed that the steering selector was on automatic control instead of manual. He switched it quickly to manual, and the vessel began to turn. Moments later, at 08.50, having only turned about 10º, and while still doing her full speed of 15.75 knots, the vessel grounded on Pollard Rock.
A number of cargo tanks were ruptured, and crude oil began immediately to spread around the vessel. . . .
With 120,00 tons of Kuwait crude oil in her tanks, a shortcut in the sailing plan, and the ship’s cook at the wheel, the California-owned, Liberian-registered supertanker Torrey Canyon was going full tilt when she struck the Seven Stones Reef off Cornwall in March 1967, causing an environmental catastrophe.
The British government eventually had to bomb the wreck with napalm—causing an additional flurry of comment, since up to this point few in the country were aware that Britain possessed the gelled-gasoline weapon then being used to such dreadful effect in Vietnam—to set fire to the spreading blaze. The court battles over the costs of the affair, and the international conferences called to consider its environmental consequences and legal and political ramifications, continued until the middle of the next decade.
Most tragedies at sea, melancholy though they may be for those involved, are events in the faraway that are invariably soon forgotten. Some—like the rescue of the men and women from the Forfarshire by the wonderfully named Grace Darling, in her rowboat in a storm off the Farne Islands in the North Sea in 1838—are remembered for offering up an episode of exceptional heroism. Others—like the two-masted brig Mary Celeste, found six hundred miles west of Portugal, sailing steadily toward Gibraltar with not a soul aboard—remain in the mind because of the mystery, in this case a puzzle amenable to so many possible causes (murder, poison, sea monster, tsunami?), very few of them good. And then there was the fate of the Teignmouth Electron, the tiny catamaran in which the British amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst had entered a round-the-world single-handed yacht race. He had cheated, had then found himself likely to win and thus most probably to be placed under scrutiny, and so had leapt off his craft to avoid discovery: the story lingers still, a vivid portrait of man made manically mad in the wide loneliness of a great ocean.
• • •
The vastness and imperturbable power of the sea, when ranged against the enforced solitude of a lonely sailor, can surely make for madness. It can also prompt in others a soaring of ambitions, a realization of great visions, perhaps for some the making of great fortunes. But in all these encounters with a sea so grand as the Atlantic, there has to be the presumption that the body of water itself inspires a large measure of respect and awe. If that inspiration wavers—if mankind ever begins to treat the sea with less respect than its own story deserves—then things begin to go awry. A great ocean is not a thing to regard with casual disdain: but in the manner and speed with which it is being so often traversed today, there is the rising of temptation to do just that. The consequences are myriad, and they are invariably malign.
Chapter Six
Change and Decay All Around the Sea
The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound.
1. CROSSING THE POND
At the international operations center of British Airways, which takes up the entire third floor of a highly secure and discreetly marked building on an empty moor some five miles west of London’s Heathrow Air
port, the staff takes care to refer to every transoceanic flight as a “mission.” They do so in part out of tradition; but they do so also as a reminder that, just as with today’s explorations of space and with nineteenth-century ventures into godless interiors, there is never anything inherently routine or safe about their allotted task: in this case the lifting against the natural force of gravity of two-hundred-odd tons of airplane and three-hundred-odd human beings to an entirely unsustainable altitude of seven or so miles, and then propelling all without interruption for many long hours, suspended by nothing more than a lately realized principle of physics, high above a cold and highly dangerous expanse of sea.
Air travel across oceans has in recent years become to most consumers, if not necessarily to the practitioners, as tedious as it is commonplace. Its relative cheapness has rendered brief visits to the faraway perfectly imaginable to enormous swaths of society. The Atlantic, being of a width manageable for most to cross by air today without too much time or pain, is currently the most obvious pathway for millions to the most exotic of foreign fields. The Pacific is just too big; the Indian Ocean for most just too far away. So Mancunians who back in the 1970s might have considered Marbella an alluring mystery now in the first decades of the twenty-first century readily consider Miami an obvious destination for a long weekend. Parisians cross the Atlantic almost without thinking for tanning vacations in Martinique. Bored Brazilian city dwellers fly to see the giraffes and springbok near Cape Town, Belgians go in herds to sun in Cancún, Texans set off to visit the theaters in London, and Norwegians head southwest to try the slopes in Bariloche. All of this flying—together with the cargo and the courier planes trundling windowless through the nights, and with official government aircraft on routine business and military planes on secret missions—has conspired to make the Atlantic, of all the oceans, more flown across than any other.
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