Seven-Tenths Read online

  SEVEN-TENTHS

  THE SEA AND ITS THRESHOLDS

  James Hamilton-Paterson

  For my Mother

  Also

  to the memory of

  Ben Chong and Arnel Julao,

  last seen on 20 December 1987

  hoping to stow away aboard M/V Doña Paz

  in order to join their families

  for Christmas

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface to new edition

  Acknowledgements

  1 CHARTS AND NAMING

  ‘Nothing is more tedious than a landscape without names’

  MARGINALIA: Zetetics

  2 ISLANDS AND BOUNDARIES

  Objects of desire

  MARGINALIA: The Isles of Britain

  3 REEFS AND SEEING

  Sensing the oblique

  MARGINALIA: Souvenirs

  4 WRECKS AND DEATH

  A stitch through the nostrils

  MARGINALIA: Seasickness

  5 DEEPS AND THE DARK

  The monsters within

  MARGINALIA: Dating the Earth

  6 FISHING AND LOSS

  ‘The beauty been’

  MARGINALIA: Parrotfish

  7 PIRATES AND NOMADS

  Poems to Tecla

  MARGINALIA: Steamers/Streamers

  8 SEA BURIAL

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Preface to New Edition

  Re-reading this book was both reassuring and sobering. It was reassuring to an author that so little needed to be changed after fifteen years, and sobering for the same reason. In that time marine science has moved on and fascinating new data have emerged; but nothing, I think, to alter radically my original standpoint. On the political front, one signal and welcome development has been the ban by both the UN and the EU on drift-net fishing. Nevertheless, the steely attrition of the world’s oceans proceeds at an ever-accelerating pace. Given the examples of well-monitored commercial stocks collapsing from over-fishing, the devastation currently being wrought by fishing fleets around the world is a spectacle that makes one wonder afresh at the hubris in styling ourselves Homo sapiens. Homo stultus would have been more accurate taxonomy.

  In the long run, of course, our present cavalier treatment of the oceans matters not a jot. However heedless our self-interest, the sea will survive. It will outlive us and remain the source and origin of the planet’s biota aeons from now. In any case, in writing this book I had no interest in producing an environmentalist jeremiad. On the contrary, I wanted to convey something of the affection, awe and often loathing that people have always felt for this mysterious body of water, both our cradle and the earth’s largest geophysical feature. The sea leaks unconsciously into even the most land-lubberly of us from time to time, and manages to leave its tide marks in cultures as in rocks the world over.

  The few minor changes I have made to the original text for this new edition are nearly all updatings, and those mainly to the chapter on fishing. I have also added some footnotes to take account of things like new free-diving records or oceanographical data. The single new addition is the inclusion of ‘Sea Burial’, originally published in Granta, which describes a sea voyage I once made in the tropics. Neither precisely reportage nor fiction, it was an attempt to express that strange borderland where the sea’s power to haunt sometimes seems as real a force as a wave’s kinetic energy.

  James Hamilton-Paterson

  2006

  Acknowledgements

  I gratefully acknowledge the help given me in the writing of this book by the following:

  Anna Badini, Anabel Briggs, Paul Brown, Peter Chaplin, Mario and Roberta D’Itria, Frank Donn, Earthtrust (Hawaii), the scientists and crew of the R/V Farnella, Stephan Feuchtwang, Bill Foster, Luis Go, Abdurrahim Hasim, Ellis Hillman, Frank Sionil José, Abdurahim Kenoh, Cdr Reuben S. Lista (Philippine Navy), George May, James May, John May, Anita McConnell, Gilbert Tait, Saladin S. Teo, Marcello Vanni, Ian West.

  I would like to thank the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences, Deacon Laboratory, and especially Mike Somers and Tony Rice for their courtesy and help. Above all, Quentin Huggett has been unfailingly patient and generous with his time, a prodigality which it is a pleasure to acknowledge.

  My agents deserve – and get – my very warmest thanks for their tireless support and help, as does Patricia Reynolds.

  This book’s commissioning editor was Richard Cohen, and I am conscious that it owes everything to his original encouragement. To that extent it remains his. The task of taking it on fell to Neil Belton, my present editor. I could not have wished for a more sympathetic and astute interpreter of a project whose intentions must initially have appeared idiosyncratic and opaque.

  Finally, my gratitude to Mark Cousins is not easily expressed. One hardly thanks a friend for friendship, but one might well wish to put on record the affectionate recognition of a great debt. The entire book was written very far from his scrutiny, but scarcely a line without awareness of his presence. Private congruences apart, there was for me an especial punctuality about his public lectures at the Architectural Association in London, 1990–1, which had a profound effect on this book, just as the lectures had on all who heard them.

  The above persons are exonerated from all responsibility for any errors of fact, judgement and taste, which are entirely my own.

  Illustration acknowledgements

  from Zetetic Astronomy (1873) 2nd edition.

  British Library, London

  Private Collection

  (i) & (ii) from The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs by Charles Darwin, (1880)

  (iii) & (iv) from Corals and Coral Islands by James Dana, London (1872)

  from The Christian Miscellany (1860)

  Mary Evans Picture Library

  from Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne, (1870)

  Mary Evans Picture Library

  Miraculous Draught of Fishes by Gustav Doré

  Mary Evans Picture Library

  from Concise Oxford Atlas (1952)

  Oxford University Press

  SEVEN-TENTHS

  I am lost … These are the words the swimmer addresses in panic to the sunny universe into which he emerges, blowing water, disoriented. Ten minutes ago, perhaps twenty, he had set some fishing lines and slipped over the side of his tiny craft – a wooden insect with two bamboo outriggers – with a cord tying its prow to his ankle. He had been lying face down in the ocean, sun on his back, staring through the first thirty of a thousand metres of water. In the tropics these upper waters are flooded with light. Bright spicules drift past his eyes, crimson and electric blue, the jewelled phytoplankton streaming about the globe performing infinitesimal acts of chemistry which, much multiplied, succour all earthly life. By swimming down a couple of dozen feet he can look up and view other creatures from below: a shoal of garfish (whose bones are bright green) so high up their backs graze the rumpled mirror of air, the occasional flying fish breaking out and vanishing. The swimmer reflects on this mirror, imagining the sky weighing down on the sea and the sea holding up the atmosphere, curious about what exactly can be happening at the interface. If it were possible to magnify the activity, surely a buzzing skin of molecules would be revealed? Water molecules and air molecules so intermixed and saturated with atoms in common it would be undecidable which medium they constituted. At what point did these milling particles become waves? The swimmer loses himself in this quantum pun, in his speculations about boundaries, then suddenly an awareness breaks in that something is missing. There is a steady tug at his ankle, but too light. The long cord trails downwards, still firmly knotted to one foot. It is the
boat which has gone.

  His first act of panic is to spin in the water while trying to stand up in it: once, twice, three times, quartering a featureless horizon. Nothing. He is anchored by twenty feet of thin abaca hemp to the ocean. His masked face rams back through the surface as if by a miracle of misplacement he might discover the boat floating at ease in a fourth dimension some fathoms below. Nothing. The cord hangs down like the corals called sea whips, slightly kinked, whiskers of fibre standing out clear in this awesome lens right to the bobble of the knot in its end. The word this knot transmits through the water is ‘adrift’.

  The swimmer jerks his head up into the air again. Everything is plain. It is not possible, yet the boat has gone. I am lost. Panicked, he pants and spins, boatless, landless, and with the visceral ache of pure fear at what he has abruptly become: all alone and floating in the Pacific Ocean. Reason attempts to be reasonable. How far away could a boat possibly drift on a windless day? Also, eye level is barely six inches above sea level; a boat whose freeboard is little more than three times that could easily be hidden by the least swell. It is no doubt bobbing in and out of visibility even as he happens to scan the wrong horizon. … In any case, something altogether calmer is taking over: a lassitude, a fatalism whose roots reach back not to the beginning of his own life but, like the rope on his ankle, down into the sea itself. The twisted fibres, like ancient strands of DNA, connect him with vanished deeps, to primordial oceans lying in different beds. If he is lost now it is because he was already lost before ever setting foot in a boat, before infancy itself. He has no proper existence at all, being only a tiny hole in the water shaped like the lower two-thirds of a man. There is no way the tons of ocean can be held apart and prevented from filling the mould.

  Yet it is not possible to give up, to go within minutes from being fit and happily occupied to renouncing life as if fatally injured. Fear returns in cycles. Looking around the liquid wastes beneath a brilliant sky he is set upon at intervals by the adrenal thought: This cannot be happening to me. … But it is. Then for a little while it is not; and in between assessing his chances of death by drowning, shark attack or exposure, into the swimmer’s mind comes a sharp, vainglorious image of his predicament. Lacking all coordinates, he sees his own head occupying a fixed place. He pictures it sticking out of that expanse of curved blue ocean, a little round ball burnished with sun like the brass knob on top of a school globe. In his moment of loss he becomes the pivotal point about which the entire Earth turns.

  1

  Charts and Naming

  The world according to zetetics: not a globe but a disc of geographical features bounded by a plane of infinite – or at least unknowable – extension and thickness. The hatched outer ring, all of which represents south, marks the insurmountable Great Ice Barrier.

  I

  They are a blank to most people, these bald oceans, much as they appear on a globe. As such they have their own coherence as two-dimensional representations of not-land. ‘The sea’ survives elsewhere in piecemeal images, scattered pictures which never link up. They include beach scenes from summer holidays, an aunt being seasick, storms, sunken treasure, pirates, monsters of the deep. … ‘The sea’ as a reservoir of private imagery and public myth remains on the one hand without limits, on the other banally circumscribed. Yet it haunts us. We are full of its beauty, of that strange power it gives off which echoes through our racial history and fills our language with its metaphors. The salt which is in seawater is in our blood and tears and sweat. The lungs of an infant in utero can be seen rhythmically breathing as it inhales and expels amniotic fluid, even as its oxygen supply comes from the mother’s bloodstream via the umbilicus. Each of us has breathed warm saline for days on end and survived. The lungs themselves derive from fused pharyngeal pouches, and branchial clefts (‘gill slits’) still form temporarily in all chordate embryos, including humans, reminding us that something which became Homo did crawl up a beach many millions of years ago. The satisfaction for certain people of walking back down a beach and into the sea is akin to that of a long-postponed homecoming.

  Too late, though. We have lost our place and no longer know how to return. It is never quite enough, the ecstasy of splashing or the torpid floating while a fine slick of tanning oil spreads its iridescent pollution around us. Too much knowledge, too much strangeness slips by. Maybe we should approach the whole thing through science. Marine biology will tell us about the phytoplankton in their gemlike flakes, trigonometry will reveal where we are. The business of orientation on the blank and shifting waters of the open sea, of establishing a fixed point de repère which is not a landmark, is central not merely to navigation but to various sciences coming under the general heading of oceanography. (The very word suggests a difficulty, the writing down of an ocean.) Until a certain moment in history there must have been a conceptual impossibility in the idea of a sea chart without a coastline on it, implying as it logically would the drawing of lines and boundaries – albeit notional ones – on a fluid surface. Being boatless and lost in mid-ocean at noon in the tropics at least makes vivid certain problems which have faced all navigators and cartographers, with the sun directly overhead and the seabed far out of sight a mile below. The panic of a careless swimmer keen to avoid joining his ancestors thus makes a good starting point as he twirls despairingly round and round like a demented compass needle in search of any bearing, any point of reference, any direction other than down.

  The swimmer wanted to know many things. Gazing straight down beyond his parsnip-white feet into the purple depths he wanted to know not just what was down there but how it might be mapped. How did one make an accurate chart of the seven-tenths of the Earth’s crust hidden from sight? Since he had always wanted to know such things he wondered why he had never become a marine scientist. This was imponderable so he inverted the question and speculated about what it is that makes a scientist choose his particular field of study. This swimmer, who is almost as obsessed with the idea of the sea as with its actuality, wondered if oceanographers necessarily shared his own obsession, and if so, to what effect. Did they love to go delving into the sea? Was it scientifically useful to be imaginatively caught up in the deeps?

  *

  Such speculations bring me in due time (early December 1990) to Pier 40 of Honolulu Port and aboard the R/V Farnella, a British-registered research vessel. The Farnella is under charter to the United States Geological Survey, which is using her to map the seabed contained by the US 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone. It seems curious that this grand national task should be carried out using a system developed in Surrey and mounted aboard a converted Hull trawler. Some years ago the ship’s refrigerators were taken out and her forward hold filled with huge spools of cable for towing instruments. The stern hold is now largely given over to a spacious air-conditioned laboratory humming with bays of computers, sonographs, plotters and assorted electronic gear. When we leave Honolulu we have aboard fourteen crew, thirteen scientists (American and British) and myself, my capacity officially listed as ‘Fly on wall’.

  We spend the first two days at sea simply reaching the area of the survey, which is that surrounding Johnston Island. At this moment Johnston Island is a high-risk, high-security area since this is the atoll where the US is destroying its stocks of nerve-gas shells and other chemical weapons from bases in Germany. Several of the scientists had put ashore there briefly on a previous trip. ‘Can’t land if you’ve got a beard,’ said one, ‘or even a couple of days’ growth. Your gas mask mightn’t be airtight.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ said another. ‘We’ll be over a hundred miles away most of the time and with any luck upwind.’

  I wander the ship, stare at the ocean rolling past, meet the Captain. ‘He’s temporary,’ a crew member tells me. ‘Wicked sense of humour.’ A dapper man, he had distinguished himself during the last Cod War of 1975 by deliberately ramming an Icelandic trawler. Otherwise, his sense of humour seems not greatly in evidence. Ah, but a previous captain, now, he’d
been gross in all sorts of ways. ‘Pig fat, he was. Also, I remember up on the bridge, you’d never know when, sort of absentminded-like he’d take out his teeth to scratch the eczema on his legs, the top plate usually, and you’d see this dust like cornflour come puffing out of his trousers. Then he’d slippem back innagain.’ The sea has always been kind to eccentrics, and indeed the Farnella’s crew give off a feeling of dourly amiable tolerance, even towards scientists and flies on walls.

  The main piece of equipment for bathymetry aboard, and the chief tool of the entire USGS programme, is GLORIA: Geological Long Range Inclined Asdic (‘asdic’ being the British equivalent of the American ‘sonar’). Since seawater is four and a half times better than air at conducting sound, some kind of sonar system remains the most effective way of mapping a seabed which may be anything up to 11 kilometres below the surface. The very earliest sonars were simple echo rangers. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 had made finding some sort of defence against icebergs an urgent matter, but it was actually World War I – and specifically the development of submarine warfare – which encouraged sonar technology and in so doing gave the biggest boost to modern oceanography.* One offshoot of military research was an efficient echo sounder for cable laying.

  In 1854 Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury of the US Depot of Charts and Instruments had published a profile of the Atlantic seabed, his Bathymetrical Map of the North Atlantic Basin with Contour Lines Drawn in at 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 and 4,000 Fathoms. This was based on only a couple of hundred deep soundings achieved with a weighted line, and its imposing title suggested a survey rather more thorough than it actually was. Nevertheless, it interested a good many people, among them a rich industrialist, Cyrus W. Field. Field had long dreamed of linking America with Europe by telegraphy. The seabed between Newfoundland and Ireland was, according to Maury’s survey, mostly plateau. Suddenly, the romantic notion of voices emerging from the deep took on real commercial possibility. In 1856 the Atlantic Telegraph Company was founded and two years later it laid the first transatlantic cable. Unfortunately, Maury’s ‘plateau’ turned out to include over 1,000 miles of fracture zone: the spine, in fact, of the Earth’s largest mountain range, the mid-Atlantic Ridge. This runs for 7,000 miles with peaks rising two and a half miles above the seabed. Within three months the cable had broken. Under the continued pressure of the Company’s commercial determination, though, Maury’s team were inspired to develop better sounding devices and bathygraphy. The result was a permanent telegraph link, finally laid in 1866. Yet even the best sounding techniques using plummets and lines had great limitations (see Chapter 6). At least another half-century was to elapse before the novel alternative of sonar was devised.