Читать книгу Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories - Simon Winchester - Страница 23

This calling, as its curious name suggests - oceanography, the writing of the ocean - was at least in its early days something of a fugitive science: for how could it be possible to write of a body of water, especially deep water beyond land, an entity without visible coasts as reference points and no detectable seabed below? It was like trying to describe the invisible mass of air in a room — a task rather beyond the imaginative and descriptive powers of the time.

It’s not surprising that of the graphical sciences, oceanography was so late in being born. Geography and hydrography, the descriptive analyses of bodies of land and water, were disciplines both created in the sixteenth century; it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century, two hundred years later, that there was sufficient confidence within the academic community to name a similar study that would be called oceanography. Matters might have been simpler had the science been called oceanology, but it never was, and now only the Russians use the term.

On some levels the study of the sea had obvious features that were well worthy of study. There were the zoological aspects — the fish, swimming mammals, and seabirds and other animals both hugely exotic and vanishingly small to catch and record and classify. There were matters botanical: the existence of floating and sunken ocean plants - Sargasso weed in immense quantities in the centre of the gyre of the North Atlantic, kelp banks around islands in the south, and a thousand other pelagic and benthic pieces of botany besides. There was a unique maritime meteorology, too: there were ocean winds in particular to record, in their variety and persistence — trades wafting steadily from the north-east, westerly gales powering the fierce climatic tantrums of the north, and then the fitful and skittish baffling airs around the equator, which were given the name of the tantrums’ literal antithesis, the doldrums. There were the dangerous circulations of the wind, too - hurricanes, waterspouts, typhoons, cyclones. There was ice and snow, and floes and tabular icebergs. And there were maritime curiosities — St. Elmo’s fire, mermaids, the Bermuda Triangle, sea serpents, giant squids.

There was all of this - but each one turned out to be merely peripheral to the ocean itself, in much the same way that the discovery of a new land mammal would be considered peripheral to geography, and the realisation of the ferocity of the harmattan wind incidental to the study of oasis formation in the Sahara. Oceans have their own very peculiar physical attributes - a list of inherences and essentials that at the very least would include such matters as the topography of the sea’s invisible underneath, the temperature and chemistry of the water, and the movement of the ocean’s currents and its tides. And early scientists did indeed notice and inquire: in the seventeenth century alone we had Robert Boyle writing on the sea’s salinity, Isaac Newton offer ing his views on the causation of tides, and Robert Hooke — the famously ill-tempered polymath and philosopher who is better known for establishing the principles of elasticity, inventing sash windows, championing microscopy, first seeing Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, and creating an elegant escapement mechanism for watches - designing a host of devices and methods that might be used for research into the deep seas.

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So scientists did eventually begin to focus their attentions, to fathom the unfathomable, and they did begin to come to grips with the immensity of the challenge posed by such a vastness as the Atlantic. They did so especially in Victorian and Edwardian times, a period of both British and American history when the stupendously difficult often seemed unusually possible; this was a time when unravelling the immensity of an ocean looked only marginally more difficult than, say, the cataloguing of all the earth’s creatures, or the corralling between hard book covers of all the words of the English language, or the building of a transcontinental railroad, or the construction of a sea-level canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Fame in the early days belonged to the explorers, those hunting for land and territory and tangible acquisitions, rather than to students of the ocean itself. Bold adventurers like James Cook, Sir John Ross, the Comte de la Pérouse, Robert Fitzroy, and the Chevalier de Bougainville are still remembered and memorialised in capes and straits and islands around the world - while the very earliest true oceanographers have largely faded from memory. Who now remembers James Rennell, for instance, a young sailor from Devon, who first came upon the Atlantic proper on a long-sea trick from military service in Bengal? There is today only his tomb, a scattering of long-forgotten books, and the name of a lecture theatre at Britain’s National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. Yet he was a properly heroic figure, of the mould of Cook and la Pérouse, the kind of seaman who would do whatever was necessary in the pursuit of his calling. While leading a team in the survey of Bengal he had almost his entire arm sheared off at the shoulder during an attack by sabre-wielding tribesmen, and then had his original maps of India stolen by pirates off Calcutta, yet persisted in acquiring new knowledge of the sea, in spite of it all.

Rennell’s oceanic achievements began in 1777 when he came home by sea — fathering a daughter who was to be born on the quintessentially Atlantic oceanic island of St Helena, where Napoleon would later be exiled - and en route became captivated by the Atlantic currents that his vessel was compelled to cross, and then by ocean circulation generally. He then helped to survey portions of the deep ocean, and wrote papers on the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic Drift, and on the then mysterious current that somehow compelled transatlantic ships bound for the English Channel to head north of Cornwall and toward the Bristol Channel instead. And all the while he delved painstakingly into historical curiosities: the average speed of Saharan camels, the probable landing place in Britain of Julius Caesar, and the likely site of the shipwreck of St Paul. He lived and worked until he was nearly ninety, and though he was distinguished enough to be buried alongside other national heroes under the nave of Westminster Abbey, he is otherwise widely overlooked.