by Philip Hoare
By that point, this peninsula had become a profitable shore-whaling centre for the Europeans who first settled here. Around its headlands, in remote coves, lie the crumbling remains of whaling stations, lingering evidence of early deals done for this place’s resources. In 1838 Akaroa nearly became a French colony under another captain, Jean-François Langlois, sailing on the Le Havre whaler Cachalot. He bought most of the peninsula’s land from the local Māori, who received, in part payment, two cloaks, six pairs of trousers, two shirts, twelve hats, two pairs of shoes, some pistols and a few axes. At one point Langlois suggested the peninsula as a penal colony for his motherland. He set sail from France with his first group of free settlers, only to discover that by the time he arrived in August 1840, the Māori had resold the land to the British, who had established their control of New Zealand with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, and had planted the Union Jack in Akaroa.
Akaroa has not forgotten that it was nearly French. The Tricolore still flies in the centre of town; quaint gabled houses bear such names as La Belle Villa; you all but expect to see onion-sellers cycling down the streets. It is a peaceful, almost stage-set place, not unlike Freshwater Bay; a sense of sleepiness, if not complacency, masking its history. But it is not its history that has brought me to this last near-island. It is an animal named after an Englishman, and now one of the rarest of its kind.
I’m lying in my wetsuit on the wooden pier in the sun, almost falling asleep, when I’m called. The boat is ready to leave. I clamber aboard, and we sail out towards the open ocean. The forecast is for high seas. I chat to the skipper, a New Zealander named Ian, and Alan, his first mate, a young Welshman. The water here is turbid – the perfect conditions for the Hector’s dolphin, named after Sir James Hector, Victorian director of Wellington’s Colonial Museum. They are the smallest of all dolphins; calves are barely bigger than rugby balls, and adults hardly more than a metre long.
Unlike their acrobatic dusky cousins, Cephalorhynchus hectori do not immediately announce their presence with backflips and breaches. Their subtle circular fins slice through the waves before you have the chance to establish what they are. Small and fleet, they prefer the sanctuary of cloudy, coastal water as protection against predators, principally sharks. But those same waters make them vulnerable to human actions, subject to the pressures of a maritime nation which owns more boats per head than any other on earth. Stressed by noise, poisoned by chemical and agricultural pollution, and drowning in undiscriminating gillnets, as Dr Barbara Maas observes, these animals are dying more quickly than they breed. The North Island subspecies, known as Maui’s dolphin, constitutes just fifty-five individuals; as the most endangered of any cetacean, they are unable to sustain any more losses. They are on the brink of disappearance, here, at the end of the world, about to go the same way as the thylacine and the moa.
It is almost impossible to imagine that these animals might not survive the century; that I could outlive them. While the deeper waters around New Zealand conceal species of beaked whales that have never been seen alive, the sheer energy of these diminutive cetaceans so close to shore seems to defy any notion of extinction. There’s something cartoon-like about them; not just in the way they move but in their rounded dorsals, like the handles on Continental coffee cups, the kind you can’t put your finger through; I might lean over and pick one up for a closer look.
Togged-up and raring to go, like a greyhound at the gate, I perch on the diving platform at the back of the boat, blowing through my snorkel and slapping the water with my fins. ‘You’ve done this before, haven’t you?’ says Alan.
The skipper shuts off the engine and I leap in. It’s terrifically difficult to tread water. The grey-white bodies begin to circle around me; it’s like being surrounded by sheep dogs. Then they begin leaping into the air, showing off their beautifully marked bodies, like little aeroplanes. Their black-and-white masked faces and striped bellies might as well be moko. But my body declines to act like a dolphin, and there’s as much seawater up my nose as there threatens to be in my lungs. I feel like a circus animal myself; and although the dolphins come to me of their own accord, I can’t help feeling they’d be better left alone. Exhausted, I haul myself up over the boat’s side. Sometimes it’s better to watch than to take part.
Back in the guesthouse, in a tiny room made smaller by lace and chintz, I take two painkillers and fall asleep, to the memory of the rocking waves. I wake at dusk, still woozy with the sea. I wander through the empty town, closed-up and out of season. I look in through the windows of the only restaurant still open and see a handful of diners bent over their meals.
I buy a bag of chips from the nearby takeaway and retreat to a bench overlooking the harbour. Afterwards I walk to the end of the pier, looking out to sea. I’m weary of being away, of shabby oil-stained shorts and basin-washed T-shirts, of being removed from family and friends by half a dozen time zones. I feel homeless, rather than homesick, faced with the familiar strangeness of this place, so orderly like home, yet on the edge of utter wilderness. More than anything, I feel abandoned, as I always have.
My notebook sits on my bedside cabinet. Everything is invested in its pages: the postcards and dried leaves and ticket stubs I’ve stuck in it, the slivers of whale skin, the sketches of unknown places and animals. In the absence of anything else, it is my home, my life spiral-bound between black card, the anchor I let down.
Maybe I’ll never get back. In my dreams I sink into invisible magnetic fields and invisible suffering; my head is filled with migrations and invasions, travellers and victims. All the while, giant albatrosses glide and great whales dive into abyssal canyons, and Hector’s tiny dolphins play hide and seek in the water.
It’s time to go home.
9
The sea in me
Time has never existed, and never will; it is a purely artificial arrangement. It is eternity now, it always was eternity, and always will be.
RICHARD JEFFERIES,
The Story of My Heart, 1883
There could hardly be a more common bird, yet you could travel around half the world and never hear anything so beautiful as a blackbird in a suburban garden. Their big eyes sense the slight slip from darkness to the semblance of light before all other garden birds; only robins can rival them in this keen awareness. I listen to the first notes of the first song, a lone voice in the dark, joined by another, then another, until they form a circle of sound. From dawn to dusk they rise and fall, fit and start, from roofs to trees, announcing their allure. Their songs are asymmetrical, apparently random; phrases are thrown out to be echoed by rivals, in the way humpback whales take up that year’s song and repeat it through the oceans. As the philosopher and musician David Rothenberg showed me, when you speed up the song of a humpback, it sounds very much like birdsong, with the same ‘sustained whistles, rhythmic chirps, and noisy brawphs’.
Each sequence is its own narrative, precisely measured out. Blackbirds have the ability to sound both ridiculous and sublime at the same time, with their querying intonation ending in an upnote, like a teen’s mallspeak – duh-duh-duh?; or duh-duh-lu, duh-duh-lu! But theirs is a serious intent, bent on preventing any incursion into their fiefdom, as well as sounding sexy to a potential mate. They’ll fly just a few feet off the ground, to evade predators from above – although a habit which made sense when their only enemies were raptors is less useful now that their low flight-paths take them directly into potentially lethal traffic; it amazes me, as yet another black streak almost zooms through my bike wheels, that they don’t sustain more casualties. They must retain a race memory of when all this was only heathland. A blackbird defends its territory all its life; some may live for up to twenty years. The same bird bobs and bows and runs across my garage roof year after year, looking up at me in turn.
How can such a grey, wet day be so beautiful? After days of rain I ride out at dawn, taking my chance during a brief interlude of dryness. There’s nothing to focus on, just cloud. Und
er such skies, anything is a gain. It’s May Day. The rain intensifies the smell of the morning. The woods through which the road runs lean over and meet tree-to-tree, negating the tarmac below. At the beach, the water is flat calm. The world has opened up again.
A new shape appears high over the shore; the slender wings of a swallow, zigzagging its way from the sea to the trees, thousands of miles from sub-Saharan Africa. Later, I’ll watch them from water level as they swoop within inches of my head, so close that I can see every detail: blue-black backs as iridescent as a mineral, pure white bellies and rosy chins. To the Romans, the swallow represented the household gods because it nested in the eaves; it was unlucky to kill one. But its name comes from Scandinavia, whose early Christians believed that it had flown over the Crucifixion crying Svala! Svala! – Console! Console!, and called it svalow in tribute to its piety.
The birds’ annual disappearance was a source of mystery. Some said they flew to the moon, or even changed species. As late as the sixteenth century it was believed that they hibernated in the water, from where fishermen could cast their nets and pull out swallows, ‘huddled against each other, beak to beak, wing to wing, foot to foot … among the reeds’.
When Gilbert White watched great flocks getting ready to leave, the sight touched him ‘with a secret delight, mixed with some degree of mortification’, since no one yet knew where they went. ‘If there are any animals with no memory they may be happy,’ wrote his descendant T.H. White, ‘but even swallows remember last year’s nest.’ To Ted Hughes the swallow was ‘a whiplash swimmer’, ‘a fish of the air’, ‘the barbed harpoon’. For sailors they were bluebirds, heralds of home; a swallow tattoo would ensure its bearer’s safe return to dry land, in the same way that an anchor symbolised hope. But my artist friend Angela, who saw her first bluebird weeks ago in Cornwall, tells me that a tattooed dagger through a swallow’s heart is the sign of a lost loved one.
I wash off the night in the water, my scrapes and aches numbed by the sea. My bones have become boughs, all scarred knees and gnarled knuckles. None of us are the same person we once were, since the human body entirely replaces itself every seven years; there have been at least six different mes.
A few days ago a pair of common terns appeared. They were once called sea swallows for their forked tails – hence their name, Sterna hirundo, from the Old English stearn, and the Latin hirundo, swallow – but they also resemble stripped-down, go-faster gulls, all cackling cries and electrical energy. They scan and dive, feeding furiously to replace calories lost on their own long flight from Africa. They look as though they’d barely make it over the Solent, but the Arctic tern holds the world record for bird migration. One was found to have flown from Finland to Western Australia, a journey of fourteen thousand miles.
The winter birds have all flown. One morning in March, we’d descended on the shore with cannon nets in an attempt to catch brent geese before they left. Our leader marshalled his troops with military ease, taking the sight-lines of the metal tubes embedded in the mud, ready to fire over our unsuspecting prey. We stood, and waited. A passing dog cocked its leg on Peter’s bag. Suddenly, a bang and a puff of smoke, and we ran to retrieve the netted birds, as if to drag them out of the water. I feared for one which had its head in a shallow pool. But in all eight brent were bagged in sacks – along with a single oystercatcher.
The nine wriggling bundles of hessian lay on the shingle awaiting processing, the more ambitious attempting to escape, scrabbling inside as if in an avian sack race. The oystercatcher was first out. Ruth held the now-ringed bird, showing me how its head and eyes remained focused on the ground while she moved its body like a compass, its bright red bill always pointing to its food. Then she handed it to me, and I let it loose. Its white-flashed wings vanished in an instant. We set to ringing the geese.
I felt the faint oiliness of the birds in my hands; saw their neat black heads, the subtle white collars around their necks, their serrated bills trying to peck my fingers. Up close, they were much smaller than I’d expected, more duck-sized than goose, and yet so fearless and intrepid: fine, proud, wild creatures, Arctic emissaries to this suburban shore. We set them free together, and soon they too were gone, their burnt-grey shapes fading into the sky.
Back home, I pluck up the courage to clear my mother’s room. The bed in which she lay, and from which she left to go to the hospital for a routine operation and never returned, has not been disturbed for six years. I left it, reassured by the smell, as if the room, like the house, were still full of her. Now I pull back the bedclothes, heartlessly. Twenty-four hours later, it’s all gone. The room is bare and empty. From the windows where the curtains always seemed to be drawn, I peel the sticky plastic film that imitated stained glass in the fanlights. As it comes away, with a final yank that sends me flying backwards off the stool on which I’m balanced, the light pours in.
All the things I imagined as a child, all the things I feared; they’re not at the end of the world, and they’re not here, either. I close my notebook and put it on the shelf, along with all the others.
There’s no such place as home. And we live there, you and me.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my brothers Laurence and Stephen, and my sisters Christina and Katherine, and their partners; Harriet, Jacob, Lydia, Max, Oliver and Cyrus for their comments; and Mark Ashurst, for his steadfast support. For their encouragement and advice: John Waters, Michael Bracewell, Neil Tennant, Hugo Vickers, Ruth Wilson, Clare Goddard; Adam Low and Martin Rosenbaum, for our antipodean adventures together; Andrew Sutton and Rachel Collingwood for their excellent company; and Angela Cockayne, for her constant inspiration.
My editor, Nicholas Pearson for his unfailing enthusiasm, and Olly Rowse for his Anglo-Saxon attitudes; Robert Lacey, Julian Humphries, Terence Caven and Patrick Hargadon for their work on the text, design and publicity. A special thanks to Joe Lyward for his beautiful drawings. My sterling agent, Gillon Aitken, and his colleagues Anna Stein, Sally Riley, Imogen Pelham, Leah Middleton; and my Spanish publishers, Claudia and Joan at Atico do los Libros, Barcelona. I would also like to acknowledge, with gratitude, the support of the Leverhulme Trust as Artist-in-Residence, the Marine Institute, Plymouth University.
United Kingdom: Ken Collins and Jenny Mallinson and the National Oceanographic Centre, Southampton; Peter Wilson; Jolyon Chesworth and the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust; Peter Potts; Lydia Fulleylove and the writers of HMP Albany; David Chunn; Mary Hallett; Fr Claro Conde; Tobie Charlton at Bike Guy; Angela Barrett; Hilary Franklin; Barry Udall, Nicholas Moore; Cynthia Walsh, Vanessa Williams-Grey, Mark Simmonds, Whale and Dolphin Conservation; Mark Carwardine; Dylan Walker and Ian Rowlands, Planet Whale; Dr Malgosia Nowak-Kemp, Oxford University Museum of Natural History; Dr Stephen Sleightholme; Anthony Caleshu, Sarah Chapman and Peninsula Arts, Plymouth University; Martin Attrill, Simon Ingram and the Marine Institute, Plymouth University; Ruth Leeney; Rob Deaville and Matt Perkins, Cetacean Strandings Investigation Unit, Zoological Society of London; Richard Sabin and Jon Ablett, Natural History Museum; Phoebe Harkins, Wellcome Library; Anthony Wall, Adam Nicolson, Tim Dee, Viktor Wynd, Mat Humphrey, Paul Bonaventura, Jeremy Millar, Brian Dillon, Alison Turnbull, David Gray, Peter Doig, Keith Collins, George Shaw, Marc Riley, Richard Hawley, Paul Ballantyne, Michael Holden.
The Azores: Serge Viallelle, João Quaresma and Espaço Talassa; Malcolm and Dorothy Clarke; Karin Hartman, Helena Cepêda; Sara Vanessa Santos; Rui Prieto; Secretariado da Direcção Regional dos Assuntos do Mar.
Sri Lanka: Geoffrey Dobbs, Shyam Selvadurai; Hiran Cooray, Anoma Alagiyawadu and Riaz Cader, Jetwing; Sanjika Perera, Sri Lankan Tourist Board; Dr Chris Nonis; Gehan da Silva; Asha de Vos, Anouk Ilangakoon.
Australia: Cassandra Pybus, Iain McCalman, Andrew Darby, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Robert Dessaix, Dr Tony Brown, Thomas Keneally, Michelle de Kretser; Robert Pennicott, Tim Cunningham and Bruny Island Cruises; Ericka Bowd, 43 Degrees, Adventure Bay; Alan Smith
, State Library of South Australia; Suzanne Miller, South Australian Museum; Dr Sandy Hume.
New Zealand: Anton Van Helden, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington; Roger and Lisa Payne; Laura Kroetsch, Sandra Noakes; Mike Donoghue, Annie Wheeler, Bryan Jensen, Derek Cox and the Department of Conservation; Kauahi Ngapora and Lisa Bond, Whale Watch Kaikoura; Jo Thompson, Alastair Judkins and Encounter Kaikoura; Manuel C. Fernandez; Ian Fitzwater, Nikau Lodge, Kaikoura; Black Cat Cruises, Akaroa; Bill Morris, Gregory Rood, Witi Ihimaera.
United States and Canada: Pat de Groot, for providing the sea outside; Dennis Minsky for the birds and whales; Mary Oliver, for her poetry; and Mary Martin, for the same; Dr Charles ‘Stormy’ Mayo, Josiah Mayo; Dr John Gullett; Captains Todd Motta and Mark Delumba, Dolphin Whalewatch, Provincetown; Dr Carole Carlson, Tim Woodman, Jo Hay, Meribeth Ratzel; Skott Daltonic, Provincetown Whales; Iain Kerr, Scott McVay, Phillip Clapham; Dr John Wise, University of Southern Maine; Alex Carleton, David Rothenberg; Dr Paul Pearson, Thomas Merton Center, Louisville, Kentucky; Hal Whitehead, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia.
Philip Hoare
Southampton, March 2013
Text and Image Credits
W.G. Sebald, ‘Time Signal at Twelve’, from Across the Land and the Water (2011), by kind permission of Penguin Books; T.S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets (1949), by kind permission of Faber and Faber; Derek Mahon, ‘The Banished Gods’, New Collected Poems (2011), by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press.