Seven-Tenths

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Underwater photography naturally has to take into account this absorption of light energy by water. Even if there is enough ambient light for filming, colour values will be increasingly affected by the progressive filtering out of the warm and comforting wavelengths: first red, then orange, then yellow. ‘Correct’ colour values can be restored by carefully calculated artificial lighting. Any approach to the question of human vision under water leads back to the fact that the narrow waveband in which our eyes operate corresponds very markedly with how sunlight is transmitted in seawater. Quentin Huggett at IOS has wondered whether this setting of our visual ‘window’ reflects our aquatic origin. In air the bandspread is much wider. Several species of insect see at ultraviolet wavelengths, while the pit viper uses infrared sensing to detect warm prey in the dark. Had Homo developed differently he might have ‘seen’ a different world.

  It is sad that we cannot smell things underwater, though now and then something lodges in a taste bud or receptor to produce the simulacrum of a smell, a pungent impression located somewhere in the muzzle part of the face, neither precisely smell nor taste. Sad, too, that our hearing is not very acute, and with a limited range from about 16 cycles per second up to 20,000 cycles per second. A mere cat has three times this range, a bat six. The pitch at which human ears are at their most sensitive is that of ‘a child’s or woman’s cry’, according to Yi-fu Tuan, who thinks this suggests that our ear is adapted to favour our species’ survival rather than hunting.* This is most aggravating to those reef haunters who have no wish to listen to children and women crying, either above or below water, nor any interest in the survival of their own species, but who would dearly like to eavesdrop among the courthouses, malls, temples, palaces and suburbs of their passion.

  My lame experiments sound foolish – are foolish to scientists like those aboard Farnella who could suggest any amount of gear for increasing my sensing ability. Yet in the early days of submarine warfare the help of people with musical knowledge and perfect pitch was sought in order to classify the sounds made by submerged craft. In World War I the composer and conductor Sir Hamilton Harty was called in by the British Admiralty’s Board for Invention and Research to identify the most likely frequency bands of hull and propeller noises, ‘anticipating by a whole war a similar attempt in America, where the conductor André Kostelanetz was approached for much the same purpose …’.† Ernest Rutherford also took a colleague with perfect pitch out in a small boat as part of the war effort. At a prearranged spot, one of the great names in atomic physics took a firm grip of his companion’s ankles while this man stuck his head into the Firth of Forth and listened to the engine note of a British submarine. Hauled back into the dinghy and towelling his head he announced it was a submersible in A flat and he would recognise it anywhere.‡

  Today, with an ultrasound detector I could wiretap the citizens of this submarine city, but it would not be the same. As with medical diagnostic equipment, such apparatus can also blunt other responses. Ironically, part of the problem of the tropical reef is its very visibility. It famously stands as the icon of marine exoticism: brilliant colours, profusion of species, intricacy of shape and design. To make all this more easily seen by means of scuba gear, or more easily heard with ingenious electronics, is somehow too facile to be serious, except for detailed scientific work. Scuba equipment is, of course, indispensible for any work below 40 or 50 feet and down to 200 feet. It is a marvellous invention.* However, it has certain disadvantages which are not compatible with travelling alone in remote parts of the world since it is heavy to lug around, expensive to replace when stolen and limited by the local availability of a reliable compressor, to say nothing of the obligatory diving companion. Apart from wishing to be quite alone in the sea, I dislike scuba gear for two additional reasons. It is awkward to wear, all the time making me conscious of itself, of bits of metal and tube, of tanks as bulky as a growth, of belts and dials and rubber straps and harness. But even more importantly, I cannot hear with it. Breaths and bubbles rattle and roar in the ears; the very heart drums in the air hose. It all gets in the way as much as it facilitates, and on most occasions it is preferable to sacrifice depth for the immediacy and greater effort of free diving. The immediacy is whatever transcends discomfort and inconvenience, leaving one uncluttered on borrowed time. By making certain things too easy, scuba equipment gives rise to that curious paradox: the more accessible a thing becomes, the harder it can be to see.†

  Besides, we are not trying to push outwards the frontiers of science, but our own. We are content to have identified the calm room with the big windows letting in the blue-green undersea light and to know that whatever we learn is only a part of what goes on in its corridors and undercrofts and courtyards. It is a consoling pleasure to have hung about this cityscape at night and watched the lights winking to codes unguessed at, to the roar of conversation in a universe off at an angle. It is enough to have clung to the roots of a reef at sunrise and watched the dark gradually bleach from the water. The night shift changes, silence falls. Then the creatures of day emerge and all around the dawn chorus starts, as if invisible behind still-misty water, a great banyan were spreading its branches.

  * This statement wants qualifying. Plant-like structures may occur in the deep and highly specialised ecosystems of vent communities. These grow up around ‘black smokers’ at volcanic sites and are not based on photosynthesis. The bacteria of vent communities, on which populations of tube worms, huge crabs and oysters and other creatures depend, have metabolisms which use sulphur in place of oxygen. Hence these strange pockets of life have nothing to do with the upper world and its biochemistry. Meanwhile, the greatest depth at which conventional plant life has been found is 269 metres, a clump of maroon algae in exceptionally transparent water off the Bahamas. There is a group of cold water corals that form limited clumps and reefs at depths between 100 and 3,000 metres and at temperatures from 4° to 8°C. These are the azooxanthellate corals such as Lophelia pertusa whose outcrops off Norway and the Shetland Islands are often ravaged by deep trawling and oil and gas prospecting. These corals lack symbiotic algae, so have no need of light for photosynthesis. Their polyps depend entirely on their tentacles for food and consequently the corals are slower growing. Although individual outcrops are more limited in size than the zooxanthellate corals, they form habitats for a rich biodiversity, especially of invertebrate species.

  * The mammalian diving refflex is triggered in humans when the face is immersed in cold water. This immediately reduces the heart rate by up to 50 per cent, restricts the blood flow to the extremities in favour of supplying the brain and heart, and shifts blood to the thoracic cavity and lungs. This prevents the lungs collapsing under pressure, which otherwise would happen below about 30 metres.

  * Yi-fu Tuan, Topophilia (1974).

  † R. V. Jones, Reflections on Intelligence (1989).

  ‡ See New Scientist, 1768, p. 80.

  * Scuba gear is a vast improvement on all its predecessors, although the tonic effects of oxygen seem not to be as pronounced nowadays as they used to be. In a report in the New York Daily Times (24 August 1854) the writer considers the newly developed diving suits of the day which were made of leather and rubber and entailed the divers carrying ‘a box of condensed air’. ‘The condensed air they are forced to breathe, furnishes them a greater quantity of oxygen in a given time, and increases their strength very much for the time being. A diver, at a depth of ninety feet under water, at Portsmouth, England, was known to bend nearly double an iron crowbar in his work, which resisted the strength of four men at the surface.’ Presumably the proposition here is that if oxygen gives life, a lot of oxygen will give a lot of life.

  † c.f. Wallace Steven’s poem ‘The Creations of Sound’, in which he chides a writer (probably T. S. Eliot) whose poems ‘do not make the visible a little hard / To see …’.

  III

  MARGINALIA

  Souvenirs

  Tourist markets laden with
trinkets carry their own charge of melancholy, while seeing the objets’ provenance can be brutally sad. People in remote places labour long and hard to live by this trade. The sacks and bundles pile up in bamboo sheds or beneath a covering of dead palm fronds: the shells and corals dragged from the seabed and rotted out in heaps; the hardwood cigarette boxes stacked in piles; the sharks harvested for flesh and teeth, jaws and fins; the alligators stuffed; the baby porcupine fish inflated and lacquered; the aquarium fish poisoned.

  Often it seems the more that people become urbanised, the more they want about them talismans of nature on their walls, their shelves, their keyrings. Many souvenirs are marks of pilgrimage, like religious relics, and denote travel. Many of these talismans come from the sea. They are tokens of lineage and are to Homo what a family crest is to an aristocrat. The blood line lives on. Yet perversely, this importing from one universe to another, from water to air, is invariably fatal. Nothing looks as dead as a seashell in suburbia, a piece of coral skeleton or a stuffed fish. The otherness of a shark’s tooth, like that of a fossil, begins to ebb the moment it is held in the hand. Objets trouvés should be marvelled at, then allowed to become perdus at once. Only thus can the transient pleasure of crossed trajectories be sustained in the memory.

  The tourist’s trinkets and the traveller’s memorabilia so swiftly decay from prized objects into junk because they are never what they were believed to be. As pieces chipped from nature they have a status oddly close to that of a monument. Just as a monument purports to refer to the past but is always contemporary,* so the tourist’s relic constantly rewrites his version of its origin or the moment he acquired it. The more it tells him of his former self, the more silent it remains about its own past. A shark’s tooth is to the living actuality of the fish which once ate with it as a holiday photograph is to the scene it depicts. A wave washes over us as we hold them but it is not – as we imagine – a wave of cheerful or tearful recall. Such trinkets commemorate a moment not of acquisition but of loss. The tooth, the coral, the hardwood, the fish, were all wrenched from life so we can later discard them as the impedimenta of a previous self. From long experience we know this in advance, remembering the fate of souvenirs from former holidays even as we tell ourselves that this time they are authentic. But the things are already dead when we buy them; and their rattling into the dustbin later is the sound of our own hollow attempt to seize the ever-vanishing present.

  In this way, our own deaths prey on the deaths of others. All mementoes immediately turn into species of fossils. The intricate tracery of a coral fan, torn last year from a seabed off Barbados and bleached for export, stands as mutely on a mantelpiece as the ribs of any Carboniferous leaf embossed on a piece of coal. Our psychic recognition that last summer might as well be 90 million years ago robes our trinkets in their characteristic sadness. Acts of memory are incapacitating, trapped as we are between souvenir and memento mori. When the objects have collected enough admiration and dust to force this recognition upon us, we throw them away or donate them convulsively to a museum.

  But there is no reef after all. The swimmer pursued the dark shadow in the water, counting his strokes, until he realised it was receding at every stroke. He gave up and swam in what he hoped was the reverse direction until now he thinks he has returned to his original position.

  Still no boat. It has made no effort to materialise during his brief absence. Maybe there never was one. Maybe he has been out here in this radiant deep for days, even weeks? Only the rope’s empty tugging at his ankle as he swam reminded him of how recently he had been anchored to his precious craft.

  Surely the sun is lower than it was? For the first time he considers what it will mean to spend the night out here. He is not afraid of the dark, nor is he afraid of the sea at night. Yet out here the sharks are maybe not so timorous as they are in the shallower waters near a fringing reef. They like the freedom of a good depth beneath their bellies. Since he will be neither kicking nor struggling he has hopes of not attracting their attention. Like certain predatory humans, they are beautifully attuned to the sounds of distress. No; he will hang here quietly, counting the stars or trying to see the lights of land. Perhaps it will be impossible to resist peering into the Stygian, sparkling gulf he treads, even though the sight of a great swirl of luminescence turning suddenly in his direction might well herald his end. No doubt the strike will be shockingly abrupt, but for some reason he is more frightened by the thought of a first inquisitive tugging at the painter hanging beneath him like a bell-pull. He does not want to hear his own terror pealing out across an empty ocean. At all costs he will be stoical. Fishermen say shark attacks are painless. One feels great bangings and slammings but no actual pain.

  This is stupid. It is still broad daylight and the boat has only just gone. There is no possible way in which it could have drifted more than 50 or 100 yards. A hundred and fifty at the outside. Well, he will not wait passively in the water until death in one form or another heaves up alongside to gulp him down. He will now try to swim a grid pattern. It will not be easy without any fixable starting point, but nevertheless he will try.

  He heads for the sun, fifty strokes, then turns at what he calculates to be 90° and swims ten more; then another 90° and back parallel to his original course. He is pleased to find the surface of the water undulates more than he had thought. This convinces him that the chances of happening on the boat are excellent. No sooner has he thought this than, halfway along the new leg of his search pattern, he spies its prow. There is no question. No piece of water was ever that shape, black and slender and curved like a beak. With a cry he abandons the stupid grid and heads for it. Thank Christ, and about time too. That was close. God, that was close. Never, ever again will he do anything so damned stupidly careless. …

  There is nothing. No prow, no boat, not even a length of floating timber. Nothing but empty water taking its shape from him. His grid is broken and lost. He will never find his original position now. He turns and turns in despair and dejection, incredulous to think he will not be seen ever again while the bloody boat will probably be wrecked on some inshore reef to gladden a poor beachcomber looking for useful spars and panels of marine plywood.

  * This idea was developed by Mark Cousins in a lecture at the Architectural Association in London in March 1991.

  4

  Wrecks and Death

  A death at sea.

  I

  Many must have had the fantasy of the sea vanishing and leaving its bed open to inspection, though the imaginative leap may be accompanied by uneasiness about the sea’s sudden return, catching the fantasist out in the middle, bent over something of interest. (The ominously rising breeze, the horrid realisation that the low strip of dark cloud on the horizon is actually an onrushing wall of water hundreds of feet high.) Treasure hunters, especially, must all have entertained the fancy of strolling offshore among the wrecks and hulks drying in the sunshine, scattered as far as the eye can reach. The image is likely to be sanitised, based on pictures of stranded fishing boats canted over in the deserts of Kazakhstan where the retreating waters of the ruined Aral Sea have left them. The reality would be one of draped and stenching putrefaction.

  Wrecks have a particular fascination because they act as foci for so many preoccupations: death, loss, things being hidden and disappearing, things being discovered and reappearing, hoards of wealth. Irony is added in that wrecks and their contents are frequently quite close to their searchers. They may be no more than a few hundred feet away but the marine universe into which they have passed makes them as inaccessible as if they were miles distant or on the Moon. If one were to classify them, wrecks would conveniently fit into four categories: tombs, time capsules, gold mines and time bombs.

  *

  On Pier 40 of Honolulu Port, from which the Farnella sailed, stood a huge warehouse, practically empty. I learned from the security guard that until recently it had been used as a dump for impounded contraband and, indeed, below the wharf o
n the side opposite the ship were moored various oceangoing yachts and catamarans, all of which had belonged to drug runners now behind bars. Their craft were waiting to be auctioned off by US Customs. Before that, the warehouse had contained one of the largest collections of aluminium coffins in the world.

  Honolulu, and especially Waikiki, strikes many visitors as moronic in its empty-headedness. It is exactly the sort of place disgraced dictators would choose to go into exile, live in a tropical wedding cake of a villa and die protesting their innocence, all of which ex-President Marcos did. But the island of Oahu has long had a grimmer aspect, one which runs reassuringly beneath the sun-and-surf package tourism. Only a few miles along the coast from Waikiki is Pearl Harbor, while the air base of Wheeler Field at the island’s centre has been associated with death ever since World War II. For nearly forty years it was the stopover for American KIAs from the Philippines, the Marshalls and Solomons, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. Those killed in action in every Pacific and South-East Asian theatre of war passed through Oahu, and it was here that bodies returned by the Vietnamese government came for identification. Hence the coffins. The bulk of them are now stored elsewhere; but 100 yards away from the warehouse, on the far side of rows of dusty new Japanese cars awaiting Customs clearance, was a barbed-wire compound and in this were still a few stacks of the silver boxes, slightly corroded from the salt air and with tufts of weeds growing round the bottom.