by Philip Hoare
Meanwhile, many other wrecks lie out there like time machines. Thoreau saw the bottom of the sea as ‘strewn with anchors, some deeper and some shallower, and alternately covered and uncovered by the sand, perchance with a small length of iron cable still attached, – of which where is the other end?’
‘So many unconcluded tales to be continued another time,’ he wrote. ‘So, if we had diving-bells adapted to the spiritual deeps, we should see anchors with their cables attached, as thick as eels in vinegar, all wriggling vainly toward their holding-ground. But that is not treasure for us which another man has lost; rather it is for us to seek what no other man has found or can find.’
Wreckage and the wrecked: they merge into one, a mangling of man and land, of vessel and sea. I think of Crusoe cast up on the shore waiting for Friday’s footsteps, as the waves washed over a plaintive nineteen-sixties soundtrack; of Ishmael, another orphan, clinging to a coffin carved for Queequeg which provided his lifebuoy; of beached whales and beached humans. And I hear my father singing, ‘My bonny lies over the ocean, my bonny lies over the sea, my bonny lies over the ocean, O, bring back my bonny to me.’ I used to hear ‘body’ for ‘bonny’.
When Thoreau was visiting the Cape, an average of two ships every month would be lost in winter storms, especially on the deceptive bars off the Race at Peaked Hill, where shoulders of sand shadow the ocean’s edge. The roaring breakers catch white on the shifting shelf, luminous at night with the memory of the lives they’ve taken. And all this happened within sight of land.
‘Ship ashore! All hands perishing!’
These tempests were not conjured up by a magician, nor were there any sprites on hand to guide the survivors to safety. Commonly, sailors did not learn to swim – partly through superstition – ‘What the sea wants, the sea will have’ – and partly through practicality, knowing that adrift on the open ocean, their flailing would only prolong their fate. Any attempts to save the shipwrecked were often defeated by the elements. Would-be rescuers could only look on and wait until the storms subsided, by which time it was too late. All that was left to do was to salvage the wreck. In the eccentric museum at the Highland Light, housed in a 1906 hotel standing in the shadow of the lighthouse on the windblown headland, one of the most haunted places I have ever visited, a row of assorted chairs from many different disasters stands as a testimony to lost souls and salvaged domesticity: a sad line of mismatched seating, ranged along a wall at a students’ party. Upstairs, rooms with stable doors lined along a long, narrow and dimly-lit corridor; they still seemed filled with fitful guests, and something in the darkness down the end told me to get out.
Those who did make it ashore could die of exposure in this no-man’s-land, with no hope of reaching dwellings set deep inland, far from the raging sea. In 1797 the Massachusetts Humane Society set up ‘Humane-houses’, a series of huts equipped with straw and matches to provide survivors with warmth and shelter. Their echoes remain in the shacks still scattered through the dunes: rough constructions put together from grey beach-wood and timbers as though assembled by those lost sailors. Even in the town, salvaged ships’ knees propped up houses against the storms that brought the flotsam here, while Thoreau recorded fences woven with whale ribs.
Other dangers lurk in these countervailing waters, seen and unseen. Locals told Thoreau there was ‘no bathing on the Atlantic side, on account of the undertow and the rumour of sharks’, and he was warned by the lighthouse keepers at Truro and Eastham not to swim in the surf. They would not do so for any sum, ‘for they sometimes saw the sharks tossed up and quiver for a moment on the sand’. Thoreau doubted this, although he did see a six-foot fish prowling within thirty feet of the shore. ‘It was of a pale brown color, singularly film-like and indistinct in the water, as if all nature abetted this child of ocean.’ He watched it come into a cove ‘or bathing-tub’, in which he had been swimming, where the water was just four or five feet deep, ‘and after exploring it go slowly out again’. Undeterred, Thoreau continued to swim there, ‘only observing first from the bank if the cove was preoccupied’.
To the philosopher, this back shore seemed ‘fuller of life, more aërated perhaps than that of the Bay, like soda water’, its wildness lent an extra charge by that sense of life and death. Down at Ballston Beach, where Mary and I often swim out of season while seals and whales feed just off the sandbar, the powerful undertow seeks to pull us out. Not long ago a man swimming here with his son was bitten by a great white shark. Public notices instruct swimmers to avoid seals, the sharks’ true targets. Recently a fisherman showed me a photograph on his phone, taken at Race Point. A great white breaks the surfline, barely in the water, with its teeth around a fat grey seal. I place my quivering body in that tender bite, the ‘white gliding ghostliness of repose’ which Ishmael discerned, ‘the white stillness of death in this shark’. I still swim there, despite Todd Motta’s warning, ‘You don’t wanna go like that.’ The water is as hard and cold as ever. But one day, I think, I will not come out of it.
In his book The Perfect Storm, the story of a great gale which hit New England in 1991, Sebastian Junger details the way a human drowns. ‘The instinct not to breathe underwater is so strong that it overcomes the agony of running out of air.’ The brain, desperate to maintain itself to the last breath, will not give the order to inhale until it is nearly losing consciousness. This is the break point. In adults, it comes after about eighty seconds. It is a drastic decision, a final, fatal choice – like an ailing dolphin deciding to strand rather than drown because of something deep in its mammalian core; ‘a sort of neurological optimism’, as Junger puts it, ‘as if the body were saying, Holding our breath is killing us, and breathing in might not kill us, so we might as well breathe in.’
Drawing in water rather than air, human lungs quickly flood. But lack of oxygen will have already, in those last seconds, created a sensation of darkness closing in, like a camera aperture stopping down. I imagine that receding light, being drawn deep, caught between the life I am leaving and the eternity I am entering. We know, from those who have come back from death, that ‘the panic of a drowning person is mixed with an odd incredulity that this is actually happening’. Their last thoughts may be, ‘So this is drowning,’ says Junger, ‘So this is how my life finally ends.’
And at that final moment, what? Who will take care of my dog? What will happen to my work? Did I turn the gas off? ‘The drowning person may feel as if it’s the last, greatest act of stupidity in his life.’ One man who nearly drowned, a Scottish doctor sailing by steamship to Ceylon in 1892, reported the struggle of his body as it fought for the last gasps of oxygen, his bones contorting with the effort, only to give way to a strangely pleasant feeling as the pain disappeared and he began to lose consciousness. He remembered, in that instant, that his old teacher had told him that drowning was the least painful way to die, ‘like falling about in a green field in early summer’.
It is that euphoria which offers an aesthetic end, leaving the body whole and inviolate, a beautiful corpse, as if the sea might preserve you for eternity. There is an inviting compulsion about falling into the sea, because it seems such an unmessy, arbitrary way to go. You’re there one minute, in another world the next; a transition, rather than a destruction.
On his journey from New York to England in 1849 on the ship Southampton, Melville saw a man in the sea. ‘For an instant, I thought I was dreaming; for no one else seemed to see what I did. Next moment, I shouted “Man overboard!”’ He was amazed that none of the passengers or sailors seemed very anxious to save the man. He threw the tackle of the quarter boat into the water, but the victim could not, or would not, catch hold of it.
The whole incident played out in a strange, muted manner, as if no one really noticed or cared, not even the man himself.
‘His conduct was unaccountable; he could have saved himself, had he been so minded. I was struck by the expression of his face in the water. It was merry. At last he drifted off under the sh
ip’s counter, & all hands cried, “He’s gone!”’
Running to the taffrail, Melville watched the man floating off, ‘saw a few bubbles, & never saw him again. No boat was lowered, no sail was shortened, hardly any noise was made. The man drowned like a bullock.’
Melville learned afterwards that the man had declared several times that he would jump overboard; just before his final act, he’d tried to take his child with him, in his arms. The captain said he’d witnessed at least five other such incidents. Even as efforts were made to save her husband, one woman had said it was no good, ‘& when he was drowned, she said “there were plenty more men to be had.”’
Half a century later, in 1909, Jack London – who was a deep admirer of Melville – published Martin Eden, his semi-autobiographical account of a rough young sailor who becomes a writer. London, the son of an astrologist and a spiritualist, was born in San Francisco in 1876. He had led an itinerant life as seaman, tramp and gold prospector. He was a self-described ‘blond-beast’, a man of action, the first person to introduce surfing from Hawaii to California; he also became the highest-paid author in the world with books such as The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf and White Fang. But the proudest achievement of his life, he said, was an hour spent steering a sealing ship through a typhoon. ‘With my own hands I had done my trick at the wheel and guided a hundred tons of wood and iron through a few million tons of wind and waves.’
London wrote Martin Eden while sailing the South Pacific, trying to escape his own fame; the New York Times had reported FEAR JACK LONDON IS LOST IN PACIFIC when he didn’t arrive as expected at the Marquesas, the remote islands where Melville himself had jumped ship in 1840. In London’s book, Eden, the first man to himself, cynical about his new-found celebrity, contemplates suicide in the early hours of the morning. He thinks of Longfellow’s lines – ‘The sea is still and deep; | All things within its bosom sleep; | A single step and all is o’er, | A plunge, a bubble, and no more’ – and decides to take that step. Midway to the Marquesas, he opens the porthole in his cabin and lowers himself out.
Hanging by his fingertips, Eden can feel his feet dangling in the waves below. The surf surges up to pull him in. He lets go.
Everything in his strong constitution fights against this act of self-destruction. As he hits the water, he begins to swim; his arms and legs move independently of his will, ‘as though it were his intention to make for the nearest land a thousand miles or so away’. A tuna takes a bite out of his white body. He laughs out loud. He tries to breathe the water in, ‘deeply, deliberately, after the manner of a man taking an anaesthetic’. But even as he pushes his body down vertically, sinking like ‘a white statue into the sea’, he is pushed back to the surface, ‘into the clear sight of the stars’.
Finally, Eden fills his lungs with air and dives head-first, past luminous tuna, plunging as deep as he can. His body bursts with bubbles. He is aware of a flashing bright light, like a lighthouse in his brain. He feels he is tumbling down an interminable stairway. ‘And somewhere at the bottom he fell into darkness. That much he knew. He had fallen into darkness. And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know.’ Eden, this handsome sailor whose body is described as solid, hewn and tanned, is compressed by the weight and darkness of the sea, falling asleep on its bed, so still that a shake of the shoulder could not wake him. He has been sacrificed to his own ideals, his own masculinity. London said his novel was about a man who had to die, ‘not because of his lack of faith in God, but because of his lack of faith in men’. His writing is vivid enough to recall his own youthful attempt to drown himself in San Francisco Bay, when ‘some maundering fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me’. ‘The water was delicious,’ he wrote. ‘It was a man’s way to die.’
There have been moments in the water when I felt they might be my last. One dark November afternoon I swam off Brighton, under the shadow of its burnt-out West Pier, while a murmuration of starlings eddied about the rusting ribs above me. I hadn’t realised, until I entered the water, how strong the undertow was; or, as I swam out, how it would take me up, take control, tipping me head over heels before dragging me back out.
I’d lost my grip on the world. The heavy pebbles of the beach rolled beneath me, and in the falling darkness, as the lights came on along the esplanade, I thought how banal it would be to die within sight of a dual carriageway and a row of fish-and-chip shops and burger bars. And I wonder, when I am dead, what thoughts will be left in my head, like the black box recorder of a downed plane.
Another time, on Dorset’s West Bay, under its towering cliffs, the tow played a similar trick. I quickly realised what I had done, and tried to climb out. Again I was turned over for my impudence and thrown face-down on the shingle, my features squashed like a peat bog man. Mark told me this was the way surfers smashed their faces, and that evening in town, someone warned me that the beach was notorious, and that only a few months before a young man had drowned there.
And I thought about Virginia Woolf’s body being taken out, as if her death were a culmination of all her words, moving inexorably towards the sea.
It’s odd to return to the books I was required to read at college, their unbroken backs covered in clear plastic to protect them against some future event, preserving them for a time when I would actually understand them, although their pages are now vignetted in brown, as if the sun had penetrated their closed edges. They wait for me to open them, to bring them back to life, familiar and strange and dangerous, as though I were reading them for the first time.
To the Lighthouse is set in the Hebrides, but it draws on Woolf’s childhood holidays in Cornwall, and memories of her Victorian mother. Mrs Ramsay hears and feels the waves as they ‘remorselessly beat the message of life’; they make her think of ‘the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea’. At night, as her guests sit around the candlelit table, she looks out of the uncurtained windows through the dark rippling glass – ‘a reflection in which things waved and vanished, waterily’, as if all the world was at sea – and she thinks of herself as a sailor who, if the ship had sunk, ‘would have whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea’. In the distance, the lighthouse stands tall and white on a rock.
The water possessed an ambivalent power for Woolf. One moonlit night, when she was a young woman, she and Rupert Brooke swam naked in the river Cam at Byron’s Pool, named after the poet, who had swum there when he was at Cambridge. Brooke was proud of his improbable and Byronic ability to emerge from the water with an erection. Later, Woolf joined Brooke and his Neo-Pagans, as she called them, when they camped on Dartmoor and swam in the moorland river. Virginia, both prim and liberated, did not quite feel at ease with their attempts to commune with nature; her future biographer Hermione Lee would lament the fact that the nude photographs taken on that occasion did not survive.
Woolf – only an extra O away from being an animal herself, a virgin wolf – had a relationship with the natural world that was both paradoxical and predatory. Nature was unfeeling, going about its business. The beach was no consolation. In To the Lighthouse, after a scene in which ‘the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand … to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer’ – we discover, almost in passing, that Mrs Ramsay has died. In the aftermath, the sea seems to take over the house, as death has overtaken the Ramsays. Of their eight children, Andrew is killed in the war and Pru dies in childbirth. Virginia’s own mother, Julia, died aged forty-nine, and her brother Thoby died of typhoid fever when he was twenty-six years old. For Woolf, the water meant death as well as life.
What remains of the Ramsay family and their friends return ten years later. The house, once so full, has stood empty; the elements threaten to overtake it. We expect the de
luge of war to have washed it away. But it is rescued by the housekeeper, to whom Mrs Ramsay appears as a ‘faint and flickering’ image, a kind of ghost, ‘like a yellow beam or the circle at the end of a telescope, a lady in a grey cloak, stooping over her flowers’. The memory is electric, almost cinematic: Virginia’s mother Julia was photographed by her aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron, more than fifty times, her profile turned this way or that, her smooth hair, glaucous eyes and strangely vacant face the same as her daughter’s, wearing a black gown, white cuffs and collar, caught on the path at Freshwater, moving in her dark clothes; then not moving, stilled in the instant, then moving on, ‘the Star like sorrows of Immortal Eyes’.
So too Virginia would pose for Vogue in her mother’s dress in 1924, ravished by a Pre-Raphaelite sea, acting as her own sepia ghost, rehearsing her last scene, floating down the Ouse as Ophelia, ‘her clothes spread wide, | And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up’. After her father died, and Virginia and her orphaned siblings moved to Bloomsbury, she hung Cameron’s fantastical portraits of famous men and fair women in the hallway as an ironic gesture. For all her modernism, Virginia was anchored in a Victorian past, shaped and damaged by its history, and her own.
Those remote summers by the sea would remain with her. In her book, the ferocious Atlantic becomes a character itself, like the moor in Wuthering Heights or the whale in Moby-Dick (of which she owned two copies, and which she read at least three times). ‘In both books,’ she wrote in an essay on Brontë and Melville in 1919, ‘we get a vision of presence outside the human beings, of a meaning that they stand for, without ceasing to be themselves.’ Woolf’s white lighthouse is Melville’s white whale; an impossible mission over unfathomable waters.