The Sea Inside

by Philip Hoare

  In an interview for the BBC conducted at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, the writer Arthur C. Clarke spoke, in his heavy Somerset accent, of things to come. ‘The only thing we can say of the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic,’ he declared. He went on to make a specific prediction for the year 2000, even though he thought ‘it may not exist at all’. Not through nuclear war or a ‘new stone age’, he said, but because of incredible revolutions in communication.

  Clarke foresaw a world ‘in which we could be in instant contact with each other, wherever we may be … for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti just as well as London, independent of distance’. By then the globe would have ‘shrunk to a point where men will no longer commute, but communicate’, and the modern notion of the city would have been abolished – although at the same time Clarke feared that the world would become one great suburb.

  The prophetic air of the black-and-white film – faintly undermined by its very British voiceover – is animated by a glimpse of a working model of that future world, one in which ‘from the heart of what was once tropical jungle will spring new and glossy cities’, with superhighways and laser-felled trees, settlements at the poles, and underwater hotels and cars; an entirely inhabited world, the vast suburb that the writer dreaded.

  By then Clarke himself had retreated from the modern world to live in Ceylon, ostensibly to pursue his passion for scuba-diving, although he may have been drawn by its other attractions. Inspired by his love of the sea, he also conjured up a more disturbing vision: ‘In the world of the future, we will not be the only intelligent creatures. One of the coming techniques will be what we might call bioengineering – the development of intelligent and useful servants among the other animals on this planet, particularly the great apes and, in the oceans, the dolphins and whales.’ Clarke thought it a scandal that man had neglected to domesticate any animals since the Stone Age. ‘With our present knowledge of animal psychology and genetics, we could certainly solve the servant problem,’ he said, although he also foresaw animal trades unions, ‘and we’d be right back where we started’.

  It’s difficult to tell how old Anoma is. He may be half my age, or older than me; he has a youthfulness about him. Since he was a boy he has trained himself to be open to the natural world. He was born here in Galle, knows it intimately. Walking through the remains of its Dutch ramparts, he points out a giant ficus whose roots seem more solid than the massive stone walls of the seventeenth-century fort, fingering its way in clusters to the cracks, slowly pulling the place apart.

  We emerge out of the deep, gloomy gateway that regulates those seeking admission to Galle’s ancient precincts, and which might well have been built to allow the passage of an elephant. Above us the museum rises like a cliff face. It is punctuated with arched windows, and seems impossibly old, ark-like; indeed, within its dark belly lay the skeleton of a Bryde’s whale, articulated and displayed there till the sea came to reclaim it. Anoma shows me the level to which the water rose that day, a memory marked in feet, although every inch measured out disaster. The slow withdrawal of the water. The fish flapping in the pools. The silence. Then, roaring out of the ocean, an unbelievable rising, an incomprehensible volume produced by one tectonic plate sliding under another. Below, whales had already fled the submarine sound waves; above, millions of lives were about to change.

  That morning, 26 December 2004, Anoma was sitting in his office in the Lighthouse Hotel, watching the sea swell over a great rock called Whale Head. Now it was lost in the surging waves that engulfed the lower floors of the luxury hotel. Two of Anoma’s colleagues, on their way to work, were simply washed away. Bicycles, tuk-tuks, animals, cars, houses, boats, stupas, people; there was no discrimination in the natural destruction, nor any dominion, either. Nor would it have occurred to anyone to worry about the inhabitants of the sea as those terrible tremors coursed through its depths.

  In a recent study it was found that, after an earthquake off California measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale, a single fin whale covered thirteen kilometres in twenty-six minutes as it attempted to flee the source of the two-hundred-decibel sound. In Sri Lanka, animals on land were said to have left the coast for higher land long before humans had warning of the tsunami. At Taprobane, the flying foxes left their caves in broad daylight, of their own accord. Later, when new shocks threatened the same waters, naturalists at sea, unaware of earthquake alerts, were mystified to see every cetacean, from blue whales to spinner dolphins, disappear. Meanwhile, the water in hotel swimming pools lurched and lapped like little oceans.

  On the road back to Colombo, posters and plastic bunting proclaim rival allegiances; political symbols are spray-painted onto the tarmac. On the city’s outskirts at night, young men march behind wire fences. ‘People are afraid,’ my friend tells me. Suddenly it seems even darker outside. What do they do, those slim young men? What will they be expected to do?

  And out at sea, the whales leave black holes behind, taking everything in their wake.

  6

  The southern sea

  We cannot think of a time that is oceanless

  Or of an ocean not littered with wastage

  Or of a future that is not liable

  Like the past, to have no destination

  T.S. ELIOT

  ‘The Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets, 1941

  On 29 January 1831, the convict ship John I arrived in Van Diemen’s Land. On board was a new consignment of two hundred prisoners from Britain. Among them was a twenty-nine-year-old cabinet maker from Newcastle-under-Lyme, described as a ‘very bad old offender’. Two years previously he had been convicted of stealing fowl, for which he was given a month in prison. In 1830 he repeated the offence in Stoke-on-Trent, this time with nineteen hens and one cock, and was tried for his crime at Stafford Assizes. He was sentenced to seven years’ transportation. His name was James Nind, and he was my distant cousin. Like my other relatives of that same name, he had travelled far from England, but unlike them, he had no choice in the matter.

  I know little of James’s life before his conviction – only that he came from the extended family of Ninds who had flourished in middle England – but his crime has bequeathed him a kind of immortality in the penal records of Britain and Tasmania. After his conviction, he was kept in gaol with his fellow transportees until they were taken south, chained hand and foot, to Portsmouth. There they were decanted into prison hulks – slowly rotting, superannuated Napoleonic ships named York and Leviathan which lay stranded in the mud as if serving their own sentence, overbuilt arks with shed-like structures and redundant rigging from which laundry fluttered in the breeze; in Dickens’ Great Expectations, Magwitch escapes from such a hulk before being transported.

  Once on board, the men were sent deep below. At night, after lockdown, they were left to their own devices. By day they were put to work in Portsmouth’s naval dockyard. Every kind of vice ran riot in such circumstances, and although James Nind’s behaviour on his hulk was reported to have been ‘good’, he was probably relieved when the time came to embark on his voyage for the Antipodes.

  John I sailed from Spithead on 9 October 1830. Along with its cargo of convicts, it carried a detachment of thirty officers and men of the 17th Regiment, as well as eight women and nine children; the journey took 106 days, with up to five prisoners sharing one sleeping berth. Most had been found guilty of theft, although five men had been convicted of rape, and were to serve life sentences. In some cases, transportation allowed magistrates to impose more lenient punishment on those they might have been forced to send to the gallows for such crimes as James’s. Yet the voyage was a trial in itself, for innocent and guilty alike. Although the log kept by the John I’s surgeon maintains that prisoners were allowed on deck during fine weather, had their manacles removed if they were suffering from ulcers, and were given lime juice to prevent scurvy, their true situation was appalling. Men were locked together and treated little better than slaves. In bad weather and whe
n disease ran rife below decks, the journey took on the aspect of a nightmare; the surgeon serving on the John I’s previous trip had thrown himself overboard ‘in a fit of lunacy’.

  After more than three months at sea spent mostly in the dark, the prisoners emerged, blinking in the slanting southern light of Van Diemen’s Land. Their arrival coincided with the stern governorship of Sir George Arthur, a man who believed that surveillance was the key to control. He presided over an island which was, in effect, an open-air Panopticon – the all-seeing penitentiary proposed by the radical philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who regarded prison as ‘a mill for grinding rogues honest’. After the establishment of Botany Bay as a penal colony, Van Diemen’s Land had become a last resort for reoffending criminals, sent to Macquarie Harbour, a ‘Place of Ultra Banishment and Punishment’ set in a remote inlet on the far side of the island. Conditions there were so appalling that rather than endure its tortures, men would commit murder in order to be hanged in Hobart. Others were held in complete isolation. Sent to the end of the world only to be kept in utter silence and complete darkness, some simply lost their minds.

  But like Port Arthur, the infamous prison on the Tasman Peninsula, such horrors were reserved for recidivists. James’s servitude in Hobart might have been quite endurable. Convicts were employed in public construction works or as bonded labour, and although theirs was a state only a step above slavery, many were well treated. James was assigned to Captain John Montagu, ‘on loan’, and worked as a carpenter, biding his time. Men serving seven-year sentences such as his could apply for a ticket-of-leave after four years’ good behaviour.

  Unfortunately, my cousin did not behave himself. On the morning of 7 November 1831 he was found drunk in a public place, for which he was sentenced to twenty-five lashes – a punishment that could tear the flesh from a man’s back. Luckily for James, the sentence was suspended (possibly because Montagu was also justice of the peace). Four years later, on 27 July 1835, he was found guilty of another misdemeanour, solemnly inscribed in the ‘Black Book’ of convicts’ records: ‘Indecent conduct in a Public Street and exposing his Person while Making Water.’

  James’s latest indiscretion earned him a suspension of his ticket-of-leave, which had been awarded in honour of the Queen’s birthday that year. But he did not learn from his foolish ways. On 25 July 1836, a third infraction is recorded under his name: ‘Misconduct in being in an uninhabited house with a female prisoner after hours.’ James had the luck of the devil, or perhaps a certain charm. For this assignation he was jailed for fourteen days, his ticket-of-leave once more suspended.

  The female prisoner was Sarah Worth, an auburn-haired, freckle-faced young woman from Cheshire who, along with her younger sister Mary, had been transported in 1831 for stealing clothes. In November 1836, his freedom restored, James was given permission to marry Sarah. They lived in Cascade Street, Hobart, and went on to have one child, Ellen. Sarah died in Hobart in 1852, but James lived to the great age of ninety, having moved to Corowa, New South Wales, where he died, never having returned to England, in 1891.

  Orion wheels high overhead, but here his sword points upwards. This is a place of beauty and unease. I’m further south than I have ever been.

  Hobart is a frontier town, swept by polar winds. Down at the quayside, bright-orange icebreakers arrive, bringing back scientists dazed by their first glimpse of anything other than whiteness for half a year.

  I leave my room in a former whaling captain’s house and walk out onto a dark street just before dawn. At the end is a circular close, lined with low cottages. It might be an ordinary suburb, if not for the fact that these were also homes for whalers, built by convicts from convict bricks. As the sun rises, the air is so clear and unfiltered by pollution that the distant mountain seems to speed towards me. The empty streets turn back time.

  I swim from an urban cove, reluctant to push out into water once inhabited by whales – the southern rights or black whales, massive, ponderous cetaceans that came up the Derwent River to their age-old mating and calving grounds. I’ve watched these enormous animals, or at least their northern cousins, rolling around one another within sight of the Cape Cod shore, so engaged in their sensual play as to be ignorant of the human spying on them. Such self-involvement made it easier for their ancestors to be slaughtered in their thousands. Whaling was the commercial foundation of the Antipodes, closely allied to the same process that saw its islands become a convenient dumping ground for Britain’s moral rejects.

  In 1804, David Collins – a naval officer who had been sent to settle a new penal colony on Van Diemen’s Land, having been fervently lobbied by Bentham to put his Panopticon into practice there – had written to Joseph Banks from Hobart, telling him that the river was full of whales, so many that three or four ships could have filled their holds with oil. Later that year the adventurer Jorgen Jorgensen was sailing as first mate on the English whaleship Alexander when he claimed to be the first to kill a whale in the Derwent.

  Had its brothers and sisters been warned by the violent death to which their near relation was thus subjected, and avoided the fatal spot for the future, I would have little hope of living in the grateful remembrance of future whalers; but the contrary is the case, for the destruction of one apparently attracted many hundreds of others to crowd up and incur the same fate, and the rising city of Hobart Town is yearly and rapidly becoming enriched on their oleaginous remains.

  The estuary was so full of whales that it was dangerous to navigate the river, and the governor complained of being kept awake by their lusty blows. They would soon be silenced. By the 1840s, as a result of thirty-five whaling stations around the bay, there were only a few animals left for them to kill. Hobart’s hunters turned to deeper waters, and the sperm whales which swam in them.

  Yet no one had come here for the whales; at least, not at first. Two hundred years before, in 1642, Anthony van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East India Company, sent Abel Janszoon Tasman to map a place hitherto named simply Beach. In a remarkable omission, Tasman missed Australia altogether, and only brushed against its largest island, where he attempted to land at what would become known as Adventure Bay, but was driven back by storms. Having succeeded in planting the Dutch flag on North Bay, he sailed on to New Zealand.

  It took more than a century for another European to arrive. In March 1773 Tobias Furneaux’s ship, Adventure, separated from its sister ship, James Cook’s Endeavour, sheltered in the bay to be named after it. At that point, no one knew that Van Diemen’s Land was an island, nor did Cook himself land there until his third and final voyage, when he carved his name on a tree: Cook, 26 jan 1777.

  Adventure Bay lies on Bruny Island, which hangs off the coast, into the Tasman Sea, due south of Hobart. Turquoise waves break on its beach, having crossed the Pacific to get there. On an outcrop of rock stand two huge blue-grey eucalypts; they were here when Cook pulled ashore. Despite its apparent civilisation, this coast is largely untouched: those journeys of discovery might still be in progress today, sailing up and down the coast.

  At the end of the bay, I walk through an out-of-season holiday park of cabins. One large hut, containing the ‘facilities’, is bedecked with whale ribs and vertebrae. The path takes me through a closely-packed stand of eucalypts, swaying over my head. A deciduous tree’s leaves are angled to make the most of the light; a eucalypt’s hang vertically, as if they’d had enough. Out of the shadows and onto the beach, a white wallaby appears, staring at me with albino eyes. Along the shore, a desultory pile of rocks testifies to a former whaling station. At the tip of the beach is a turf-topped rock, Penguin Island. Here Cook took his leave of the land, his last step on Australian soil.

  It was for such wonders and desolations that men chose to sail around the world. When Cook engaged Joseph Banks – or, more accurately, agreed to his joining the expedition as its underwriter – the influential and wealthy young botanist declared: ‘Every blockhead does the Grand Tour. My tour shall be one
around the globe.’ These voyages too were extensions of Georgian culture and taste: for Cook’s second voyage, Banks proposed that they should be accompanied by the portrait painter Johann Zoffany, as if it were a society outing. And although Zoffany – famous for his staged ‘conversation pieces’ – did not make it to the Pacific, he nonetheless produced a heroic, neo-classical image of the story’s finale, depicting the slaughter of Cook on a Hawaiian beach in the style of a Grecian frieze. Soon after, a Parisian manufacturer produced ‘Captain Cook Wallpaper’, ready to paste on one’s drawing-room wall.

  More than a thousand years before, St Augustine had queried the practicality of travelling to the other side of the world – ‘it is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean’ – or that men could even live in a place in which the word of God had not been heard. Now the Age of Enlightenment had been alerted to the reality of an upside-down world. To Cook and Banks, the strange new species that they encountered there presented a challenge of identification and order. To those who followed, they were ready for the taking.