Seven-Tenths Read online

  ‘Huh,’ says a heartless Brit, ‘we’d all like to be able to do that, wouldn’t we? Do we feel any better about missing our Christmas?’ And looks round rhetorically for assent. A deputation of girls plods off to the lab to comfort Sue, who has taken refuge among the charts and plotters of her disgrace. ‘Right, then. I’m off to the bridge to kick ass. Anyone coming?’

  Presumably each expedition becomes characterised by its own catchphrase. This cruise has acquired two, one of them written up on the lab’s steel bulkhead in bar magnets, ‘Yee Haa!’: a cowboy’s yell which flew one night out of the drunken Oily-Boily Bar. The other phrase is ‘Kickin’ ass’, which has recurred on surely every one of the video movies we have sat through this last fortnight – movies about cops and cops and cops, winsome black cops and shitty white ones, Marine sergeants and top gunners – so that suddenly the whole of American culture seems embodied in a catastrophic anger. It is with these furious heroes we are supposed to identify, these men with their scratched biceps and bared chests and 400-word vocabularies; so that a mild geologist from Godalming, put out because he may not make Honolulu on time and hence his flight back to England for Christmas with the family, says ‘I’m off to the bridge to kick ass.’

  During the next day, though, things look up. With all the equipment safely back on board the Farnella is able to pick up speed. The chief engineer, himself due in New Zealand for Christmas, is coaxing every last revolution out of the engines. (‘All right for him,’ says his junior. ‘He’s retiring after this trip. I’m the poor bugger’s got to put in new piston rings over the holiday.’)

  In the event we dock at 6 pm on Friday after all and nobody misses their flight. Sue is back to being one of the boys. GLORIA is back in its cradle. The rolls of printout, the reels of computer tape which are the only tangible evidence of the invisible seabed we have been criss-crossing for the past two weeks are safely packed up. It has all been a great success, is the verdict. No equipment lost, nobody swept overboard, unlike the luckless oceanographer who had disappeared recently one stormy night in the Bristol Channel. In fact, a cushy number all round. Even the sea has a satisfied look to it as it mulls around the pilings of Honolulu harbour. It has so simply kept all the secrets it had which were worth keeping.

  Cabs arrive on the quay to take the scientists on a last-minute shopping spree before their flights next morning.

  ‘Off to Hilo Hattie’s to get a really crucial pair of shorts,’ is Roger’s valediction. They vanish in a cloud of exhaust. Stuart appears at the rail next to me, slightly mournful in shore kit.

  ‘Do you know Rosalyn Tureck’s performance of the “Forty-Eight?” What do you think? Total contrast with Gould’s reading, I guess. Some of his tempos seem downright crazy but God, I remember when his first Goldberg came out in the 50s. We’d never heard Bach playing like it. Nobody had. The energy! Everyone thought the Goldberg was dead, academic, cerebral stuff, you know? But it wasn’t. It was alive.’

  He stares down at the crack of water between wharf and hull. His voice is more animated than at any time in the past fortnight.

  * Asdic: Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee.

  * The extremest pull is, of course, when the Sun and Moon are perfectly aligned, as in the total solar eclipse of July 1991. Astronomers observing this phenomenon from the top of Mauna Kea, an extinct volcano in Hawaii, noticed a minor eruption in nearby Mauna Loa, believed until then to be equally extinct. This is considered highly suggestive of there being ‘tides’ in the Earth’s crust as well as in its seas.

  * Philip Henry Gosse, A Textbook of Zoology for Schools (London, 1851), p. 220. Gosse was later criticised by his son Edmund in Father and Son for having seen ‘everything in a lens, nothing in the immensity of nature’. Yet his descriptions were both lyrical and accurate. That his sense of wonder served to reify an avowed religious purpose (the Textbook was published by SPCK) is unimportant. What counts is that he wrote about each organism with an affectionate eye, as though seeing it for the first time: the precise quality which a textbook serves to annul.

  * In 2005 the US National Marine Fisheries Service finally traced an identical Hawaiian ‘Boing’ to male minke whales marking their territory and attracting mates.

  * Yet there is still dissent. Dr Glebb Udintsev at the Moscow Institute of the Physics of the Earth consistently refuses to believe in plate tectonic theory, specifically rejecting the idea of subduction. His view is that the Earth is slowly expanding. This would indeed explain many tectonic phenomena, though much seismic data would have to be ignored or tendentiously interpreted. Unfortunately, it is not entirely easy to disprove the expanding Earth theory since any rate of change would be infinitesimally slow, too much so to be revealed by bouncing and timing radar signals off the Moon, for example.

  II

  ‘Nothing is more tedious than a landscape without names’

  Immediately to the north of Hawaii, scattered across the Murray Fracture Zone, lie the Musicians Seamounts. They stretch for maybe 200 miles, from Strauss in the north to Mendelssohn in the south. There is a Bach Ridge and a Beethoven Ridge. There is also Mozart, a considerable mountain rising from the abyssal plain 5 kilometres below to within 900 metres of the surface. Mount Mozart, while a fairly minor affair by suboceanic standards, is therefore slightly taller than Mount Fuji, although of nowhere near such classic proportions.

  The presence of this random clutch of composers engloutis in the middle of Pacific wastes is a reminder of how much of the physical world belongs in its taxonomy, description and name to the Western nations. It is also a reminder that in a sense things do not exist until they are named. Before that, everything partakes of a state of undifferentiated chaos which is never a neutral matter to human beings but carries a degree of menace. To name something is to take control of it. It could be argued that the Old Testament story of Genesis was less a matter of creation than of naming, of God taking control of chaos. Whereas before, the pre-Universe consisted of a kind of primordial babble, God-grammarian sorted out its constituent parts and uttered some solid nouns – dualities, mainly: crude oppositions such as light/dark, heaven/earth, sea/land. How he had entertained himself before this basic act of intelligence is open to speculation, but if he was anything like the humans he created (and according to Scripture he was) he was bored, repelled and finally menaced by a universe which was still a state rather than an infinite collection of objects. Ever since, Homo has felt the same and travellers have gone about the globe as adventurers, conquerors, sightseers, nomads and scientists, naming its parts and often bestowing on them their own proper names as well as those of their friends and sponsors. In his short story ‘Colomba’ (1840) Prosper Mérimée’s English heroine, Lydia Nevil, takes pleasure in learning the names of places on the Corsican coast as she passes in a schooner, for ‘nothing is more tedious than a landscape without names’. Many a sea captain found his spirits insupportably lowered by a coast such as that of Africa, when whole days might go by without sight of a single named feature. It would presumably have made little difference knowing the local tribespeople had their own names for the hills and capes and rivers. Being illiterate, they would have been ineligible to bestow valid names because unable to write them on a map. Only cartography can remove names from merely local usage and bring places into international being.

  The desire to tame a threatening landscape by subjecting it to the control of language can be seen in the old Greek name for the notoriously treacherous Black Sea: the Euxine, or hospitable. An extension of this may result in the temporary renaming of already well-known places. In World War I when British troops were mired into the static and murderous wastelands of trench warfare, micro-maps were devised for the tiny localities which bounded their lives. London place names were wistfully bestowed on slivers of Belgian and French farm-land. What a year or two earlier had been ‘Quineau’s acre’ or ‘Drownedcow bottom’ were now Haymarket and Leicester Square. This yearning domestication of threatenin
g foreign places is a common enough trope in wartime (‘Hamburger Hill’) and came equally naturally to Pincher Martin, William Golding’s wrecked sailor. Almost his first act on being able physically to patrol the Rockall-like Atlantic islet on which he was washed up was to give its features familiar names like Prospect Cliff, High Street and Piccadilly. This was in recognition that, unnamed, the place of his marooning would have remained inimical to him as well as invisible to rescuers, being quite literally off the map.

  A Mozart Seamount does, however, seem particularly arbitrary in the subtropical latitudes around Hawaii. Odder still, it is equally close to Gluck and Puccini Seamounts, just as Haydn is to Mussorgsky and Beethoven Ridges. Clearly it is useless to look for any correlation between the physical proximity of these seabed features and the chronology of their namesakes. Somebody must have thought ‘We’ve done poets, now let’s do composers,’ much as local councils name the roads of new housing estates. It is only since the invention of a technology powerful enough to map the deep seabed that the finding of names has become a pressing issue. By the early years of the twentieth century most of the planet’s territorial features had been mapped and named, with the exception of the remotest hinterlands like Antarctica and the Amazon jungle. Sidescanning sonar is now revealing ever more details which for geologists, if for nobody else, need to be identifiable by name. As far as the military is concerned the situation remains equivocal. Strategic seabeds like that beneath the Arctic ice cap have been extensively mapped by NATO and Russian submarines, but their charts remain classified. There are projects for civil mapping and geological surveys of North Polar waters, but they remain projects until somebody donates a nuclear submarine to an oceanographic institute.

  In order to cope with the need for new names on new charts there are various regulatory bodies which amount to a more or less official international committee on names. There is, for example, BGN/ACUF: the US Board on Geographic Names, Advisory Committee on Undersea Features. There is also the Monaco-based GEBCO: General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, an organisation founded at the beginning of the twentieth century. These bureaucracies are constantly turning out documents, indexes, guidelines, lists of eligible names and the like. Very occasionally a lone human voice cuts through it all, like Robert L. Fisher’s in his ‘Proposal for Modesty’. In this he inveighs against

  parvenu scientists who offhandedly baptize a deep-sea … feature that may have been known and well-explored – even if possibly unnamed – earlier, or even one bearing a long established name in another language. … Some … apparently know so little about historical courtesy, significant commemoration, or even good taste that the seafloor is becoming littered, and the literature of marine geology and geophysics cluttered, with personal, in-group, self-aggrandizing, back-scratching, trite unimaginative (‘14°N Fracture Zone’) names or ugly acronyms (‘GOFAR Fracture Zone’).*

  The Musicians Seamounts are an example of bureaucratically approved naming. It was likewise decreed that a group of submarine features off the south-west tip of Ireland should be named after Tolkien characters, which explains the Gollum Channel. The bureaucrats do not have it all their own way, however. Now and then the working names which pioneering geologists assign their discoveries stick, in all their whimsicality. A few years ago Quentin Huggett and his IOS colleagues were mapping some seabed fields of manganese nodules with GLORIA when they found a series of hills which they needed to be able to identify as they worked. One became Nod Hill, a second (felicitously named on Christmas Day) Yule. A third hill became Mango while the fourth – unfortunately never discovered – would inevitably have been Knees. Nod, Yule and Mango Hills remain to this day and probably always will, long after they have been stripped of the asset which gave them their name, like the Gold and Ivory Coasts.

  A more famous and no less whimsical example is of an area of Atlantic seabed to the west of Spain which celebrates British biscuits. This centres around the Peake Deep, modestly named after himself by the ship’s captain who discovered it. A later expedition from Cambridge found a long, shallow depression in the same area which they loyally named King’s Trough. Then they discovered a second deep near Peake Deep and called it Freane [sic] Deep. Further surveying disclosed two ridges between these features which became respectively Huntley and Palmer Ridges. Finally, the trip was completed with the identification of Crumb Seamount.

  In the late 1980s, while mapping the 200-mile EEZ around Alaska, GLORIA at the end of one of its turns revealed an unknown volcano beneath Soviet waters. Quentin Huggett, interested in pre-Soviet Russian anarchist movements, reported its existence to the Soviet Academy of Sciences with the customary apology for unintentionally having ‘spied’ into Soviet waters and suggested it should be called Kropotkin Seamount in honour of Peter Kropotkin, the celebrated geologist and anarchist. It so happened that Kropotkin’s nephew, himself a geologist, was on the panel of Academicians considering the suggestion and reportedly the proposal raised a laugh in the relaxed climate of perestroika. A certain edge to the laughter might have come from the knowledge that Peter Kropotkin had been distantly related to the Romanovs and his nephew is considered by some today to be the Russian citizen nearest in succession to the Russian throne. In this particular case, and beneath the international exchange of jocularities, curious games are perhaps being played. For while the implication of the story – heard from the Western side – is that scientists with superior technology could tell a country things it does not know about its own territory and would happily do so for a price, the story from the Russian side might be quite different. With military security it is never quite certain what is known. The Bering Strait must after all be one of the areas most familiar to Cold War submariners, and it would seem likely that this seamount was already known to the Russians, who might have declined to submit it themselves for international naming in order to disguise the extent of their own knowledge.

  * Robert L. Fisher, writing from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in Geology (June 1987).

  III

  MARGINALIA

  Zetetics

  This chapter has constantly invoked the notion of a globe, an oblate spheroid, to represent the planet. This is reasonable, given that not only do Newtonian physics and mechanics define it as such but it looks like one when viewed from space. There has long been – and still exists – a pseudoscience called zetetics which maintains that the Earth is in fact flat. Its adherents are popularly known as ‘Flat-Earthers’, a term of disparagement which connotes either stupidity or else wishful, head-in-the-sand archaism. Nor is this scorn unreasonable, given the crackpot tone in which their case is usually advanced.

  When zetetics most earnestly offers its evidence, the classical procedure is for it to cite a list of mathematical and other ‘conundrums’ which might be taken as casting doubt on Copernican theory. It first proposes a model of the Earth which is a vast disc, an irregular plane of unspecified thickness and circumference at the centre of the universe, above whose surface the sun and stars circle on concentric paths. Its circumference is indeterminable because the edge of the known Earth is surrounded by a barrier of ice (which others might call the Arctic and Antarctic) beyond which ‘the natural world is lost to human perception. How far the ice extends; how it terminates; and what exists beyond it, are questions to which no present human experience can reply.’* The words are those of ‘Parallax’, the second edition of whose Zetetic Astronomy was published in London in 1873. There is reason for thinking he might also be the S. B. Rowbotham who published a book of the same title in 1849. This earlier date has some significance because it falls in a period of great interest and debate about the age of the Earth (see Marginalia to Chapter 5) and it is not at all surprising to find that ‘Parallax’ is a firm believer in 4004 BC as the date of Creation.

  He begins by describing several experiments with flags, poles and ships to prove that the surface of water – and therefore also the sea – is not convex, and in due course reaches
his cannon test. His argument is that if Earth were a rotating sphere a cannonball fired vertically into the air could not possibly fall back on top of the cannon. There is an engaging, schoolboy quality to this idea, like that of a child who imagines himself falling in a broken lift but able at the last moment to save himself (unlike everyone else in the lift) by craftily giving a little jump just before it crashes at the bottom of the shaft. At any rate, the conundrum of the cannonball exercised the minds of some quite elderly schoolboys during the Crimean War, and on 20 December 1857 the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, wrote to his Secretary for War, Lord Panmure, to clear up a few niggling points about British gunnery. He was assuming a cannonball fired in the air would not follow exactly the rotation of the Earth’s surface but would to some extent be left behind. That being so, he wondered if the Secretary for War realised that the tactics of modern warfare ought perhaps to be altered to take into account the obvious fact that the range of guns must vary according to the direction they were pointed in. Clearly, if they were fired eastwards in the direction of the globe’s rotation the balls would ‘fly less far upon the Earth’s surface than a ball fired due west’.*

  ‘Parallax’ re-examined the accounts of the voyages of oceanographers and explorers like Maury and Sir John Ross to show where their navigation had been at fault. It was hardly surprising that a man like Ross, even though of the highest personal integrity, had been deluded into thinking he had spent four years completing a circumnavigation of the globe when all he had done was sail 69,000 miles around the inside of the Great Ice Barrier. There was an urgent need to revise the whole science of navigation, particularly knowledge of the tides, sunrise and sunset, the seasons and the laws of perspective. Some of the writer’s own conclusions about the heavenly bodies were indeed radical. The sun is ‘considerably less than 700 statute miles above the earth,’ and ‘all the visible luminaries in the firmament are contained within a vertical distance of 1,000 statute miles’. Moreover, the Moon is transparent. ‘We are often able to see through the dark side of the moon’s body the light on the other side.’