Читать книгу Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories - Simon Winchester - Страница 20

The Principality of Monaco, that sunny haven for shady cash on the French Riviera, is not a place sufficiently blessed by a noble history to be littered with an abundance of grand public statues. The parks and plazas naturally have plenty of marble representations of members of the Grimaldi family, the Genoese notables who have run the place since the thirteenth century. There is a kindly sculpted bust of Hector Berlioz, who is remembered for once falling over near the Opera House, and there is a dull bronze rendering of the Argentine speed demon Juan Manuel Fangio, standing beside the Formula One Mercedes in which he won so many of his local car races.

But those monuments aside, there is little other statuary of interest - except in the entrance to a rather anonymous-looking modern office building on the Quai Antoine the First, beside a harbour that is permanently jammed gunwale-to-gunwale with large cruising craft. There stands a striking and rather magnificent statue in polished teak, of the great Greek god of the Sea, Poseidon. He stands there decently naked, full-bearded, and wielding his trident in the stance of a guardian outside the little-known office that, since 1921, has defined, delineated, and approved the official names of all the many oceans and seas, bays and inlets on the surface of the planet.

The International Hydrographic Office has been in Monaco since 1921, invited to this improbable setting¹⁸ by the then ruler, Prince Albert I, a man who collected charts and portolans and had a fleet of research vessels, and held great admiration for and great knowledge of the deep-sea fish and marine mammals for which he went exploring. The organisation he helped create has as members almost all the oceanside states of the world — Algeria to Venezuela, by way of Jamaica, Tonga, and Ukraine, and with all the obvious big-sea countries among the founders.

One of its principal mandates is to define - in a de facto rather than a de jure sense - the boundaries of the world’s oceans and seas. This turns out to be a most contentious matter. Right from the start there was argument: “Your proposed western limit of the Mediterranean,” huffed a Moroccan delegate in the 1920s, when comments about the first proposed boundaries were invited, “makes Tangier a Mediterranean port, which it certainly is not.”

The original architects had thought fit to make the boundary of the North Atlantic Ocean pass on the outside of the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, a decision that appeared to unsettle everyone. So on instructions from the senior brass, the clerk promptly erased his first boundary line and drew in a second, a mile to the east of Tangier — elevating it at a stroke to the status of an Atlantic Ocean city, and not a mere Mediterranean port - and all were reported to be happy.

The IHO’s other important, practical remit is to ensure that all the world’s navigation charts look more or less the same. This is not quite as dull as it sounds. It stems from a conference held in Washington, D.C., in 1889, at which grim stories were told about ships’ captains who were compelled to use charts made by countries poorly skilled in chartmaking and so came to sudden grief on unmarked shoals or on the approaches to ill-drawn harbours. The only way such marine misadventures could be prevented, said the conferees, was for all charts and all navigational aids to be the same, and for all sailors’ maps, whether made in Britain or Burma, the United States or Uruguay, to adhere to exactly the same high standards.

At a navigation conference held in St Petersburg, just before the Great War, the world’s navies and merchant mariners promptly urged that an international commission be set up to study such problems. Finally in 1921, once the European dust had settled, Monaco’s well-regarded Serene Prince offered room and board and a clutch of Monégasque typists (together with one charmingly styled “boy-attendant’) to help establish the IHO, which was then formally constituted and guarded by its pet Poseidon where it resides contentedly, if rather obscurely, to this day.

Its most important publication occurred in 1928. Back then, and costing thirty-five American cents, it was a handsome green-covered pamphlet, printed letterpress by the Imprimerie Monégasque of Monte Carlo and titled IHO Special Publication No. S.23, “Limits of Oceans and Seas”. In the twenty-four pages of this endearing publication one would find such official pronouncements as the formal description of the limits of the English Channel:

On the West: From the coast of Brittany westward along the parallel of the E. extreme of Ushant (Lédènes), through this island to the W. extreme thereof (Le Kainec), thence to the Bishop Rock, the SW extreme of the Scilly Isles, and on a line passing to the Westward of these Isles as far as the N. extreme (Lion Rock) and thence Eastward to the Longships, and on to Lands End.

The world may not have expanded in the years that followed, but the definitions and denominations of its seas, and the arguments among the countries that lay beside them, most certainly did. In consequences the size of this pamphlet grew, modestly at first, and then prodigiously. The twenty-four pages of the first edition grew to twenty-six pages in the second, and then thirty-eight pages in the third edition — but when the fourth edition was published in 2002, it had ballooned into 244 pages. Seas so obscure that only those who live beside them have ever heard of them now officially exist: there is a Ceram Sea, for example, a Cosmonauts Sea, an Alboran Sea, a Lincoln Sea, a somewhat tautological Sound Sea,¹⁹ and scores upon scores of others.

Three senior naval officers from member states are elected to preside over the International Hydrographic Office, usually for five years at a time. Before I travelled to Monaco to see them I had visions of this trio, all splendid in crisp blue uniforms and with coils of gold tassellage, ruling definitively on lofty matters of world navigation — on how best to define the new limits of the Kattegat, on demanding the mapping of where the Arafura Sea abuts against the Gulf of Carpentaria, on determining whether L’Anse aux Meadows was truly washed by the Labrador Sea or the Gulf of St Lawrence. They would settle these quibbles while quaffing pink gins, smoking pipefuls of rough shag and carving scrimshaw doodles on the side.

As it happened, two of the officers - from the navies of Greece and Chile — were away when I called one blissful midwinter morning, and the only sailor “on deck”, as seamen in offices like to say, was the representative from Australia. He turned out to be a middle-aged, full-bearded Briton in civilian dress, a man who had long ago left the Royal Navy for its Royal Australian counterpart and was now usually based in Melbourne. His driving passion was not so much ships and the sea - they were his job - but the building in his modest apartment in Villefranche of model railway layouts, HO scale.

Officially, however, he and his brother sailors spend a great deal of time wondering about, fulminating over and trying to reverse what they see as a general world ignorance of the oceans. The world’s seas may now have more names than ordinary man may care to know - that much seems true, but this is the fault of politicians, and a consequence of national pride. What troubles the IHO, which, as mentioned, has as another of its mandates the creation of charts to help ships navigate safely around the world, is just how dangerously unaware most landlubbers are of what goes on beneath the surface of these bodies of water. To illustrate the point, they mention repeatedly one unanticipated statistic: even though mankind now knows the precise altitude of the entire surface both of the moon and Mars at points little more than five feet apart, he knows the altitude of the bottom of the sea only at points that are separated in many cases by as much as five miles.

For all the hydrographic surveying that has been done over the years, all the soundings taken and the reefs plotted and the headlands marked, the admirals complain that the current inhabitants of the earth know far too little about their seas, even though they cover seven-tenths of their world. This is not for want of trying, however. Europeans especially have been attempting to divine the details of their ocean for the past five hundred years. Ever since Columbus and Vespucci came home, and ever since it became clear that Europeans were inevitably going to trade and fight their way across the Atlantic and all the other seas, there have been great national efforts — in Britain, in Portugal, in Spain, and in time in America and Canada and Brazil and South Africa, too - to survey and chart the waters, to find out the seas’ depths and shallows, their tides and currents, their races and whirlpools and the accurate measure of their coastlines, their islands and their reefs, and all the other features that mark them out so peculiarly. Educating the world about the ocean — with the knowing of the Atlantic in the very forefront of the effort - was a venture that got under way as early as the fifteenth century, and it has not stopped for a moment since.

To survey an entire ocean required access to all of its farther limits — access that in the case of the Atlantic was for a long while frustrated by more than a few navigational challenges. The severest limit was the existence of a highly inconvenient sandstone headland known as Cape Bojador - a West African cape that the Arab sailors had feared for centuries and knew as Abu khater or the father of danger.