Читать книгу Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories - Simon Winchester - Страница 7

The ocean romance that lies at the heart of this book was primed for me by an unanticipated but unforgettable small incident. It was a clear cool dawn on Sunday, 5 May 1963, and I was eighteen years old. I was alone, on passage aboard a great ocean liner, the Empress of Britain, and we were unexpectedly stopped in a remote corner of the northern seas to the east of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. We were floating quietly above a small submarine plateau some miles off the first headlands of America, an area known to oceanographers and fishermen as the Flemish Cap.

It was there that something rather curious happened.

We were five days out from Liverpool. The voyage had begun on the previous Tuesday afternoon, a wild and blustery day that had sudden gusts chasing the River Mersey’s waters with filigrees of spindrift. This was when I first spotted the ship on which I would make this first-ever crossing of the Atlantic Ocean.

It was her flanks that were most noticeable, looming massive and blinding white—the Canadian Pacific’s three sister ships were known collectively as the White Empresses — at the end of the lanes running down to the Liverpool waterfront. She was fastened securely to the Pier Head, just beside the old Princes Dock, a dozen hemp ropes as thick as a man’s arm keeping her quite still, aloof to the weather. But from the bustle of last-minute activity around her and the smoke being torn urgently from her single yellow funnel, it was clear she was already straining at the leash: with her twenty-five thousand tons of staunchly riveted Clydeside steel, the Empress was readying herself to sail three thousand miles westward, across the Atlantic Ocean, and I had a ticket to board her.

It had taken six months for me to earn enough to buy it. I must have been on slave wages, because passage all the way to Canada had not cost much more than a hundred dollars, provided I was willing to settle for one of four bunks in a windowless cabin on a deck situated so far below the waterline one could almost hear the slopping in the bilges. But though it was to be an economical crossing, one step up from steerage, in the Canadian Pacific offices off Trafalgar Square - more cathedral than bureau, all teak, marble, and hush, and with scale models of famous ocean liners from the old days illuminated in the windows - even this most modest of transactions was handled with dignity and circumstance.

Maybe time and schoolboy memory have distorted things a little, but I like to fancy that the clerk who took my savings, in frock coat and pince-nez and wearing a company badge embossed with pine trees, polar bears, and beavers, had written out the ticket in longhand, dipping his pen into an inkwell and blotting it with a roller of pink paper. Liverpool to Montreal, Voyage No. 115, it had read, and I clearly do remember spending many subsequent moments turning this precious talisman over and over, examining the engravings, the intaglio, the watermarks. It came in a scarlet and white cardboard wallet, thick and stiff and with a pocket to hold luggage tags with waxed string ties, NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE stickers, immigration forms and customs guides, and vague suggestions as to the coming maritime routine — “11 A.M.: Bouillon on the Boat Deck” was the one that stuck most firmly in my mind.

I think I developed a rather unhealthy attachment to this ticket, freighted as it was with so much symbolism — freedom, the New World, adventure, the Atlantic Ocean — and when I handed it in at the top of the gangplank that spring afternoon and saw how the purser took it with only a studied casualness, I must have looked dismayed, for he smiled and handed it back to me. “First time?” he asked, in a kindly way. “Keep it, then. This is a very grand ocean — and you’re on a White Empress crossing her. Nothing finer! You should keep your first souvenir of going across.”

By sailing time a watery sun had appeared and was lowering itself towards the horizon. All ashore who’s going ashore! came the familiar announcement, on cue. The Tannoy speaker carried the call to “ease springs” (sailor-speak for “let go the ropes”); there was shouting from shore, the crackling of radios on the bridgewing and the foredeck — and one by one the heavy iron-bound nooses of the hawsers splashed into the oily gap between hull and pier, the oily gap began to widen, and the dripping ropes were hauled in slowly by capstans that growled at the strain. A pair of well-worn tugs appeared, yelping and snorting, nosing us out into the tidestream, and then turning us, nudging our bows to the northwest.

The famous George clock on the Royal Liver Building struck five. I could see my father down on the quayside checking his wristwatch. He and my mother pointed upward in relief — they had found me at last, among the crowds of passengers lining the taffrail — and as they waved there came the three departure blasts from our steam-horn, echoing and re-echoing along the ship-crowded waterfront. Our decks started to vibrate and rumble as the engines engaged and the propellers began to thrash the waters astern.

I checked my own watch: it was nine minutes past the hour, the moment when the voyage officially got under way. The tugs let go. The Empress of Britain was at last under her own power, free of her hawsers and bollards and tugs, free of the shore and free of England, beginning to steam firmly and unstoppably away, bound for the deep ocean and the promise of tomorrow. Some of the passengers, emigrants to Canada probably, looked briefly distraught, waving through tears. I was excited, apprehensive, nervous. I watched my parents as they started to walk back to our tiny tan Ford Prefect, their heads bowed.

Darkness began to fall swiftly, and soon the lights of Liverpool and Birkenhead became a loom of orange, like a damped-down fire astern. At the famous floating lighthouse known as the Bar Light Vessel, somewhere off Crosby, the pilot boat came alongside, and a middle-aged man in a brown pullover and a stained white cap stepped nimbly down onto its afterdeck: he waved up at us, and if he mouthed something like “Take care! Have a good crossing!” his words were whipped away by the breeze. Within the hour he and his wife, I thought, would be dozing in front of his television set, the cat asleep by the fire.

We spooled up the engines once he had cleared our wake, and soon the turbines were pushing us along at a good clip, twenty knots, maybe more, and what little rain was left stung the face like needles. Soon we were positively hissing over the sea, ignoring the waves from a storm that, to judge by that last glimpse of the sunset, was now dying away. I stayed on the foredeck to watch for other vessels: there was a bustle of Fleetwood trawlers scuttling home, an inbound freighter or two, and then the outline of what looked like a warship of some sort, maybe a destroyer heading north with us, but faster and quite silent.

Ocean Passages for the World, the long-haul mariners’ route-planning bible, seems frequently eccentric in its suggestions for scheming a voyage. A map will show the obvious: Montreal is some eight degrees of latitude south of Liverpool, and one would think the best way for a ship to travel to the Canadian city from Merseyside would be to turn southward past the coast of Wales, head down through the St. George’s Channel, and, keeping Cork and the light on Fastnet Rock¹ well off to starboard, enter the Atlantic on a direct heading for the St. Lawrence estuary. But the blue-backed bible says otherwise: vessels headed from Liverpool to Canadian ports in springtime, as we were, would find it much more navigationally prudent to make a heading not to the south of Ireland but to the north of it, and only after clearing the coast of Donegal near Bloody Foreland make a very much longer southward swoop for Canada. “Although heavy weather is frequently experienced,” Ocean Passages offers in its very detailed advice for sailing vessels, “the winds are generally more favourable and the currents from the Arctic assist in the latter part of the voyage.”

We were a large, very modern, steel-hulled, and well-found power vessel, with the strength to ignore such bagatelles as winds and storms and currents from the Arctic. Our schedule called for us to pick up additional passengers and freight from Greenock, on the Clyde - and so that evening we headed not south but north out of the Mersey into the Irish Sea. Around midnight we saw the flash of the light off the Calf of Man, and later still, spotted a flurry of lights on Galloway on our starboard side and the forbidding basalt cliffs of County Antrim to port.

As dawn came up - and it was raining and blowing again -we were passing Ailsa Craig, a tiny islet made of a fine-grained granite from which are fashioned the world’s best stones for use in the wintertime sport of curling. We passed to the east of the Isle of Arran — there was still late snow on the summit of Goat Fell — and by eleven, the promised bouillon time (though none was on offer that day), we were moored off Greenock. A flotilla of small craft brought out the scattering of passengers - two were children with measles, and there was some slight quarantine-related delay until our captain, an evidently compassionate man named Thorburn, decided to take them — and by lunchtime we were back on our way, making down the Clyde for the sea. As we emerged back into salt water, we altered our heading to starboard and set a westerly course to steer safely around the notoriously rough waters north of Rathlin Island.

Now, and at last, we were making steadily for the open ocean, and as we did so the Atlantic swells began steadily and dramatically to increase. Great rollers began to buffet the bows, big thudding monster waves driven by the springtime westerly gales that blew ceaselessly at the approaches to the British Isles.

Dinner, to no one’s surprise given the pitching of the ship, was a thinly attended affair. Those few of us about on that rain-soaked evening could see the tiny island of Inishtrahull through the scudding clouds, three miles off to port, and between it and us the tiny archipelago of the Tor Rocks, Ireland’s northernmost possessions. Inishtrahull — the Island of the Empty Beach - marks one of the beginnings, or one of the ends, of a North Atlantic crossing. Through glasses we could see dimly a scattering of ruined houses and untidy lines of old stone walls, and then the slender pencil of its famous lighthouse, already winking through the gathering gloom, and which has been flashing its welcomes and farewells to thousands of transatlantic vessels for almost two centuries.

From here onward the sea yawned open wide and featureless, and soon took on the character that is generally true of all great oceans-being unmarked, unclaimed, largely unknowable, and in very large measure unknown. Our track was designed to bring us in a great, slow curve almost two thousand miles to a waypoint that hinted at the land of the New World ahead - the notorious and shallowly submerged Virgin Rocks, off Newfoundland. I remembered the Virgins from English literature classes: Kipling had written about the fishing there in Captains Courageous - the cod in legions, he wrote, marching over the leathery kelp, and all usually easily visible in the shallows.

If all went according to plan, and if we kept to the cruising speed of twenty knots that our engines could supply with ease, we should make the Virgin Rocks by Monday night, should soon thereafter sight the lighthouse on Cape Race on the southern corner of Newfoundland, and after threading our way along the St. Lawrence River be safely landed in Canada on Tuesday in time for dinner ashore.

And so it turned out. For the men up on the bridge, Voyage No. 115 was basically just another routine crossing. For me, a rank newcomer to the ocean, the crossing was at first memorable simply for being a crossing of this great ocean. We had what for me were some nail-biting moments of great spectacle and storm; we spent our time almost entirely alone on the sea - encountering just one other vessel en route, despite being on a recognised shipping lane - and that sense of pressing solitude I found more than a little intimidating; and when we passed over the Virgin Rocks we did so in darkness and I never got to see the codfish. But there was nothing desperately unusual - until the single interruption, the one small moment that I remember more vividly than perhaps it deserves, and which took place while we were lying stopped in the shallow Atlantic waters off Flemish Cap.

• • •

It was just after dawn, and bitterly cold. The season still being early spring, this being Titanic waters and with the Arctic ice fields perilously close by, our crewmen were on alert for icebergs and growlers and other similar hazards. None had yet been seen: the voyage, so far as the navigating officers were concerned, had been entirely plain sailing. Nor were there any of the fogs for which this stretch of ocean is notorious: the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream collide softly and unseen near here, and the sudden blending of tropical and Arctic waters can thicken the air above into grey pea soup for days at a time. Not this day, however, for which many had reason to be thankful.

I had risen early and, muffled to the ears, was out before breakfast, strolling the length of the boat deck. All was normal: we were hissing along nicely, dawn behind us, darkness ahead. Suddenly, however, bells started to clang, crewmen started running up and down the companionways and the decks, the ship’s engines unexpectedly stopped churning, the vessel lost way, and then it swiftly fell silent. We drifted steadily to a halt, our smooth westbound progress replaced by a heavy and ungainly rolling. The gale of the previous night had now all but blown itself out, but a stiff westerly breeze was still whistling through the aerials and gantries up above. Before long, I thought, we would be blown backwards.

The ocean here, on the very outer edge of the American continental shelf, appeared quite empty, with not a bird or any marine life in sight. It was quite rough, and though the ship herself had become smothered by an overwhelming deadness, the sea was evidently very much alive, the waves and the swell slapping ferociously against the hull.

After a few moments, though, there came an unexpected sound, from directly ahead. At first it was just a low-frequency sigh, then a hum — then recognisable as the faint sound of a motor. An aeroplane engine. Up on the bridgewings, I could see the officers of the watch, acting as one, training their binoculars to westward, towards the direction of the sound, and peering anxiously into a still half-dark sky. Soon there came a cry — the aircraft had been spotted. A few minutes later we all saw it: first a single pinprick of light, then two, and finally the outline of a propeller plane, its nose glinting in the weak sun. As it approached us it came in low and fast, a large, two-engined machine that roared and smoked as it turned above us and dipped its wings, the roundels of the Royal Canadian Air Force clearly visible on the fuselage.

Events then began to happen fast. From near the stern of the boat deck came a clank of pivots and rusty levers, and then a hard splash as the ship’s motorboat was launched. It sped out onto the ocean and came to a stop a mile or so away from us. Once it was holding position the aircraft swooped and turned, opened its cargo doors, and slowed to pass directly over the tiny craft, as it did so dropping something that floated down onto the sea on a small orange parachute. A sailor from the boat’s crew swept-it up with a billhook and the steersman, giving a thumbs-up, headed the launch back home. The aircraft rose back up into the sky, dipped its wings again in farewell, and headed to its faraway base, becoming a smoke-trailed speck, then vanishing within moments.

The motorboat was winched up, the package - which turned out to be emergency medicine for an elderly woman passenger in distress in our liner’s hospital — was duly delivered, and within the hour our engines had throbbed back into life and we were heading back onto our original course once again.

A trivial maritime incident, occasioning no more than a negligible delay in our arrival in Montreal two days later. But it was an event that has remained with me ever since. There was something uncanny about the sudden silence, the emptiness, the realisation of the enormous depths below us and the limitless heights above, the universal greyness of the scene, the very evident and potentially terrifying power of the rough seas and the wind, and the fact that despite our puny human powerless-ness and insignificance, invisible radio beams and Morse code signals had summoned readily offered help from somewhere far away. It was an augury of sorts, I have come to think in the years since, that this entire small drama had taken place on the first voyage that I ever took across the seas.

The captain’s log for the closing moment of Voyage No. 115 is entirely laconic, almost dismissive: “Pilots exchanged at Three Rivers. Fine weather continued all the way up St. Lawrence. Clock tower passed at 1813hrs. Canted into berth with aid two tugs. All fast No. 8 shed at 1853hrs. Finished With Engines.” We had crossed the ocean in seven days, six hours, and seven minutes, and despite our mid-ocean rendezvous were just fifty-four minutes late. British railway trains of the day seldom did much better.

• • •

Unknown to all of us aboard that week, and quite by coincidence, forces unseen and unseemly were hard at work. They were the dark forces of economics. As it turned out the Empress of Britain was to make only eight more scheduled crossings of the Atlantic in her life. Just six months later, in October, a peremptory announcement was made that the barely seven-year-old flagship, launched with great fanfare by the Queen in 1955, had been withdrawn from Atlantic service and would be sold. Her new owners, Greeks from Piraeus, would instead steam holidaymakers gently around the Caribbean, in a hurry no more.

The economics of large passenger liners suddenly made no sense. BOAC and Pan American had both begun air service between London’s Heathrow and New York’s Idlewild (later JFK) airports five years before, in 1958. The first flights were obliged to make refuelling stops at Gander, in Newfoundland, but then as the planes became more powerful, both airlines began to cross the ocean non-stop, and scores of other carriers soon began to do the same. One by one the great passenger liners vanished from the ocean trade, and such ships as survived began to cruise instead, helping to inaugurate what would become an entirely different maritime industry.²

So it was tellingly symbolic that I came back from America six months later by air, and did so in what turned out to be the very same week that the stunned crew of the Empress was making its final voyage with the much-loved liner. Had I known of the droll coincidence I daresay I might have looked down and seen her ploughing her last white eastbound furrow home. But my flight had its distracting moments anyway: it was aboard a Lockheed Constellation, a four-engine, triple-tailed machine designed first as a long-range bomber and then a troop transport, and operated in this case by a somewhat dubious charter company known as Capitol Airways of Nashville, Tennessee. We took off from New York, landed four hours later at Gander, then (by the skin of our teeth, the pilot later confessed, as the fuel was alarmingly low) made Shannon in the west of Ireland, but proceeded to discover that for some technical and legal reason we had no permission to land in London and were diverted to Brussels instead. Eventually, and testily, I found a flight to Manchester and made the rest of my way home by rail.

• • •

Almost half a century has passed since I made those two crossings — fifty-odd years during which I must have traversed this particular body of water five hundred times, at least. And though I have ventured out from a variety of other ports in both the North and South Atlantic, to cross in other directions, by rhumb lines or diagonally or along the lines of longitude or in huge looping curves, or to make expeditions out to the various islands that are scattered across the sea, it seems to me that the simple and most familiar route, the track from the major British ports to their major equivalents in eastern Canada or the United States, distils one aspect of what this book is about — humankind’s evolving attitude to and relationship with this enormous body of water.

And even in my lifetime, this is a relationship that has changed, and profoundly so.

In the early 1960s it was still something of a rarity to travel across the Atlantic by ship, or by any other means, for that matter. A scattering of the broke still went one-way, westbound, as migrants; a rather larger number of the wealthy and leisured travelled out and back on the great steamers with no care for time or cost. A handful of businessmen, not a few politicians, and clubby aggregations of diplomats went too, but most of them in propeller-driven aircraft rather than propeller-driven ships, for their crossings were said to be more urgent. For those who made the journey, it was still an adventure that could be daunting, exciting, memorable, suffused with romance, or cursed by the travails of mal de mer. What it most certainly was not was routine.

The same can hardly be said today. Yes, for a while it certainly was an excitement to cross the ocean by air — but for only a very short while. It must have been a considerable thrill, for instance, to take a Pan Am Clipper flying-boat service from the Solent to the Hudson, with stops in the harbours of such strange-sounding and long-forgotten coastal way stations as Foynes, Botwood, and Shediac. It must have seemed the height of style to stretch out in a bed on a double-decker Stratocruiser while the seas unrolled silently below. It was surely memorable — and foolhardy, given the plane’s dismal safety record - to fly aboard one of those first BOAC Comet services, and even in the smoky old Boeing 707s when Pan Am and TWA began to fly them non-stop. I remember well taking some of the early Concorde test flights, and being naïvely astonished at just how fast they were when, only halfway through the Arts section of the New York Times, I was told that we were decelerating over the Bristol Channel and would be in London directly and so would I return my tray table and seat to where they had been when I eased myself aboard just a few moments before. Air travel across the great ocean was for a brief time almost as romantic and memorable as travel by sea. But it all soon changed.

For me it was marked by a small semantic shift. It began some time in the 1980s, when the pilots of aircraft crossing between Heathrow and Kennedy would slip almost casually into their welcoming announcement that “our track today will take us over Iceland” — with a slight emphasis on the word today, as if yesterday the flight was much the same except that it had passed over Greenland, or the Faroes. Or else they told the passengers that “the 177” or whatever the flight number might be, and so sounding studiedly casual, would be passing “a little farther north than usual, due to strong headwinds, and we’ll make our landfall over Labrador and then head down over the state of Maine.”

It seemed to me a shame - as though the flight deck were telling its charges that there was nothing much to get excited about any more: today’s transit was much like yesterday’s, or last week’s, and the crossing of what had become called “the pond”³ (the terminology demoting the great ocean to a body of water almost without significance) would invariably be much as was generally expected at this time of year. Ho-hum, in other words.

And we passengers scarcely noticed. Having made good our nest of books and blankets, having made obligatory noises of good cheer to our stranger-neighbour, having glanced at the menu and wondered idly if it was too early to order a drink, we settled down and barely noticed a take-off that would perhaps have enthralled us twenty years before. The same was true when it came to our landing six or seven hours later. Maybe there was a little more curiosity - since home was close and one wanted to sense and maybe spot a hint of it. Generally speaking, though, whether we could see six miles beneath us the forests of Labrador or those on Anticosti Island, or whether our first solid encounter with North America was Cape Breton Island or the sand spits of Sandy Hook or Cape Cod, it made little difference: all we really cared about was that we got in on time, that the border formalities weren’t too irksome, and that we could get onto dry land and begin at once what we had journeyed to achieve. The grey-green vastness of undifferentiated ocean over which we had perforce to travel was really of no consequence whatever.

• • •

That for years was very much the case for me - until one recent summer’s afternoon, as I was crossing to New York on a British Airways 777, companionless, conversationless, and bored, pinioned uncomfortably into a starboard window seat. Lunch was long since finished. I had finished the paper and my only book. The entertainment was as much as I could bear. There were three more hours to run, and I was daydreaming. I looked idly out of the plexiglass porthole. It was quite cloudless, and miles below us was the sea, as deep blue as the sky, not smooth but vaguely crinkled, like dull aluminium foil, or pewter, or hammered steel, and seeming to inch its way slowly backwards from beneath the wing.

I had been gazing for maybe fifteen minutes at the blue sea emerging from beneath the grey flaps. Blue, blue, blue … and then as I gazed down, I fancied I saw the water surface unexpectedly and subtly change colour, becoming first rather paler, and within what can have been no more than a couple of moments, or miles, transmuting itself into a shade of light aquamarine. Seldom had I seen such a thing from this altitude: I supposed that if it was real, and not imagined, then it must have had something to do with the angle of the sun, which since I had taken a midday flight, was higher in the sky than usual.

I glanced at the sky map in the seatback in front. The chart was large-scale and poor, but the position it showed offered the obvious reason for the alteration: we had crossed the edge of the continental shelf. The deep mid-ocean abyss over which we had been passing since crossing the Porcupine Bank, which marks the western end of the European shelf and is usually reached about half an hour off the Irish coast, had now lifted itself up at last to become the faint submarine stirrings of the North American mainland.

Except that a few moments later, and even more unusually, the water became dark blue once again, though this time only for a brief interval, before lightening yet again. It was as though the aircraft had passed over a deep river in the ocean, a cleft between two high underwater plains. I squinted as far under the wing as my vision allowed: from where the plain resumed it appeared to stretch away to the west, uninterrupted. And then I remembered, from what I knew of the undersea geography of this part of the North Atlantic: I had long been fascinated by the geography of the Gulf Stream, and as I remembered, it flowed nearby. What I recalled suggested to me that the uninterrupted plain I could now see marked the beginning of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The dark blue underwater channel was known as Flemish Pass. And the first patch of green I had spotted was, I realised, the very place where we had stopped all those years before to rendezvous with the Canadian rescue plane: the well-remembered shallows known as the Flemish Cap.

• • •

Nearly half a century has gone by since I first saw the Flemish Cap and watched, captivated, as that Canadian Air Force plane swept in. Back then — I was still a youngster, to be sure, and more easily awed than today - I had savoured every detail of what seemed to me a fascinating small moment. And in the hours after our ship had started up and begun to move off westward, I had learned of other historical grace notes to the saga: a friendly deck officer on the Empress had told me that the emergency signals we had tapped out the night before had been picked up on Newfoundland by the American coast guard base in a place called Argentia - and they had taught us at school that it was at Argentia, back in 1941, that Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met aboard the battleship Prince of Wales and declared the Atlantic Charter, which so famously delineated the working of the post-war world. That I had just been hove-to, so far from all mankind, at the mercy of the sea - and yet linked by radio with so significant a piece of history: that made the moment even more special and helped burn the memory of this fragment of waterway ever more firmly into my mind.

Today that same piece of marine geography, spotted briefly from an overflying aircraft, had been no more than a faraway patch of mottled and discoloured water serving inconveniently to keep me from the timely arrival at my destination. How sad, I thought, that so vividly remembered a place should have so quickly transmuted itself into something little more than an incommoding parcel of distance.

But wait - was that not how the world at large had come to think of the ocean as a whole? Wasn’t the ocean just distance for most people these days? Didn’t we all now take for granted a body of water that, so relatively recently - no more than five hundred years before, at most—was viewed by mariners who had not yet dared attempt to cross it, with a mixture of awe, terror, and amazement? Had not a sea that had once seemed an impassable barrier to somewhere — to Japan? the Indies? the Spice Islands? the East? — transmuted itself with dispatch into a mere bridge of convenience to the wealth and miracles of the New World? Had our regard for this ocean not switched from the intimidation of the unknown and the frightening to the indifference with which we now greet the ordinary?

And yet had not this change taken place in some kind of inverse relation to the ocean’s ever-growing importance? For hadn’t the Atlantic become over the centuries much more than a mere bridge? It had surely also become a focal point, an axis, a fulcrum, around which the power and influence of the modern world has long been distributed. One might say that if the Mediterranean had long been the inland sea of the classical civilisation, then the Atlantic Ocean had in time replaced it by becoming the inland sea of Western civilisation. D. W. Meinig, the historical geographer, wrote in 1986 of this new perceived role of the Atlantic: the ocean, he wrote, was unique in having “the old seats of culture on the east, a great frontier for expansion on the west, and a long and integral African shore”. The Atlantic existed in equipoise between the blocs of power and cultural influence that have shaped the modern world. It is an entity that links them, unites them, and in some indescribable way also defines them.

It was Walter Lippmann, in 1917, who first advanced the notion of the Atlantic Community. In a famous essay in the New Republic, he wrote of it as the core of “the profound web of interest which joins together the western world.” And though today we recognise what this community is and whom it fully embraces (and even if we do not fully comprehend it), it is clear that despite the coming claims of India and China and Japan, it is a grouping of countries and civilisations that, for now at least, still manages to direct the principal doings of the planet.

It is a community of sorts, a kind of pan-Atlantic civilisation, if you will, that at its beginning involved simply the northern countries on the Atlantic shores, with the nations of Western Europe on the one hand and the United States and Canada on the other. More recently both Latin America and the nations of western and central Africa have been incorporated into the mix. Brazil and Botswana, Guyana and Liberia, Uruguay and Mauritania are now every bit as much in and of the Atlantic Community, just as for scores of years have been the peoples of more obviously Atlantic nations such as Iceland and Greenland, Nigeria, Portugal, Ireland, France, and Britain. The community is indeed much larger and more comprehensive than that, as what follows will explain.

And yet the body of water that ties these millions of people and myriad cultures and civilisations together - the S-shaped body of water covering 33 million square miles, which in the Western Hemisphere is called the Atlantic Ocean, and which on the eastern side of the world is generally known as the Great West Sea - suffers the fate of the overlooked. It is an ocean that can fairly be described as hidden in plain sight — something that is quite obviously there, but in so many ways is just not obvious at all.

It is undeniably very visible. “Even if we hang a satellite station in space,” wrote the American historian Leonard Outhwaite, in 1957, when the first Sputnik was launched, “or if we reach the moon, the Atlantic Ocean will still be the centre of the human world.”

• • •

Not all bodies of water are so very evidently alive as the Atlantic. Some inland seas that are large, topographically important, navigationally complex, and historically crucial manage somehow to seem strangely still, starved of any readily apparent vitality. The Black Sea, for one, has the feel of a rather moribund, lifeless body of water; the Red Sea also, bathed in its ochre fog of desert sand, seems perpetually half dead; even the Coral Sea and the Sea of Japan, beautiful and placid though they may be, are somehow stripped of any true kind of oceanic liveliness and come off as strangely dulled.

But the Atlantic Ocean is surely a living thing - furiously and demonstrably so. It is an ocean that moves, impressively and ceaselessly. It generates all kinds of noise - it is forever roaring, thundering, boiling, crashing, swelling, lapping. It is easy to imagine it trying to draw breath - perhaps not so noticeably out in mid-ocean, but where it encounters land, its waters sifting up and down a gravel beach, it mimics nearly perfectly the steady inspirations and exhalations of a living creature. It crawls with symbiotic existences, too: unimaginable quantities of monsters, minute and massive alike, churn within its depths in a kind of maritime harmony, giving to the waters a feeling of vibration, a kind of sub-oceanic pulse. And it has a psychology. It has moods: sometimes dour and sullen, on rare occasions cunning and playful; always it is pondering and powerful.

It also has a quite predictable span of life. Geologists believe that when all is done the Atlantic Ocean will have lived for a grand total of about 370 million years. It first split open and filled with water and started to achieve properly oceanic dimensions about 190 million years ago. Currently it is enjoying a sedate and rather settled middle age, growing just a little wider each year, and with a few volcanoes sputtering away in its mid-region, but generally not having to suffer any particularly trying geological convulsions. But in due course, these will come.

Before what geologists like to think is too much longer, the Atlantic will begin to change its aspect and size very dramatically. Eventually, as the continents around it shudder and slide off in different directions, it will start to change shape, its coasts (ac-cording to the currently most favoured scenario) will move inward and become welded together again, and the sea will eventually squeeze itself dry and vanish into itself. Planetary forecasters estimate this will take place in about 180 million years.

That is no mean life span. Assume for the sake of argument that the world’s total existence, from the postmolten Hadean to the cool meadows of today’s Holocene, encompasses some 4.6 billion years. Once tallied up, the Atlantic’s 370 million years of existence as a separate body of water within that world will have made up something like 8 per cent of the planet’s total life. Most other oceans that have come and gone have existed for rather shorter periods: so far as other competing claims for longevity are concerned the Atlantic will probably turn out to be one of the world’s longest-lived, a potential old-timer, a highly respectable record breaker.

It is both possible and reasonable, then, to tell the Atlantic Ocean’s story as biography. It is a living thing; it has a geological story of birth and expansion and evolution to its present middle-aged shape and size; and then it has a well-predicted end story of contraction, decay, and death. Distilled to its essence it is a rather simple tale to tell, a biography of a living entity with a definable beginning, a self-evident middle and a likely end.

But then there is very much more to the tale than that. For we cannot forget the human aspect of the story.

Humans have lived around the Atlantic’s peripheries and on its islands, and have crossed and recrossed it, plundered it and fought on it, seized it and surveyed it and despoiled it, and in doing so have made it quite central to our own evolving lives. That is a story, too - a story quite different from, and very much shorter than, that of the making and unmaking of the ocean itself, but one that is yet vastly more important to us as human beings.

Humans were not there when the ocean formed. We will not be there when it ceases to be. But for a definable period, poised almost in the midlife of the ocean itself, we humans arrived, we developed, and — or so we like to think — we promptly changed everything. Only by telling this second story, the kernel within the main shell of the first, can we recount in full the life of the Atlantic Ocean. The physical ocean’s history of opening and closing then becomes the context, the frame, for the history of humanity’s intimate involvement with and within it.

That human story began when man first settled on the Atlantic’s shores. As it happens, mankind spilled down to the sea most probably in southern Africa, and he did so quite possibly (and most fortunately for this account) very close to Africa’s southern Atlantic shores. What follows from that moment is every bit as complicated and multidimensional as one might imagine: the human story of the ocean swiftly becomes a saga of a mélange of peoples and parallels, of diverging languages and customs, of mixtures of acts and events, achievements and discoveries, of confusions and contests. It is a tricky tale to tell. Simple chronology might suit very well the story of the making of the physical sea itself - but the details of the human experience are scarcely so amenable.

For how would it be possible to knit together the experience of, say, a Liberian fisherman with that of an atomic submariner on patrol off Iceland? Or to link the life of an amethyst miner on the shores of Namibia with that of the American director of Man of Aran; to write of the captain of a British Airways Boeing and of an ice-patrol ship off the coast of South Georgia; or to connect the long-dead sea-painter Winslow Homer with a wide-eyed Guantanamo detainee from western China, swimming for the first time in the Atlantic Ocean off Bermuda? How best create a sensible structure from all this strange and multicoloured variety?

For a long time that remained a puzzle. I wanted so much to write the story of the ocean. But what and where was the structure? I was, as they say, all at sea.

Except that one day, gazing down at the rolling waters, I thought: if the ocean had a life, might not mankind’s relationship with it have some kind of a life about it also? After all, fossils and finds from digs show that this relationship had a particular moment of birth. It will have a likely moment of death, as well - even the most determined optimist will have to admit that an end to human existence is in sight, that in a few thousand, or maybe a few tens of thousands of years, humanity will be finished, and this aspect of the story will be over, too.

So yes, to corral the life of this human relationship with the sea, and place it within the context of the much more straightforward life of the ocean itself - this might indeed be possible as biography, too. But then there were the details, churning and daunting and devilish. The tide of human history was so filled with facts and incidents and characters and tones of subtle shading, that it might be near impossible to swim against it.

But in the end, and out of the blue, I was tossed a quite unexpected lifebelt - and by that most non-maritime of rescuers, William Shakespeare.

• • •

For many years I had carried with me on tedious plane journeys (and indeed had with me as we passed above the waters of Flem ish Cap that recent time) a well-thumbed copy of Seven Ages, an anthology of poetry that was assembled in the early 1990s by a former British foreign secretary, David Owen. He had arranged his chosen poems in seven discrete sections, to illustrate each of the seven stages of man’s life that are listed so famously in the “All the world’s a stage …” speech in As You Like It. And I was reading Owen’s book one day when I realised that this very same structure also happened to offer me just what I needed for this human aspect of the Atlantic story: a proper framework for the book I planned to write, a stage setting that would transmute all the themes of ocean life into players, progressing from infancy to senescence, so that all could be permitted to play their parts in turn.

The Ages are those we remember, if scantily, from childhood, and are listed in Jacques’s all too famously gloomy monologue:

At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms; And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel, And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lin’d, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side; His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Infant; School-boy; Lover; Soldier; Justice; Slipper’d Pantaloon; and Second Childishness. It seemed, all of a sudden, just about the ideal. Pinioned within these seven categories, the stages of our relationship with the ocean could be made quite manageable.

I could examine in the First Age, for example, the stirrings of humankind’s initial childlike interest in the sea. In the Second, I could examine how that initial curiosity evolved into the scholarly disciplines, of exploration, education, and learning - and in this as in all the other Ages I could explore the history of that learning, so that each Age would become a chronology in and of itself. I could then become captivated in the Third Age — that of the lover- by the story of humankind’s love affairs, by way of the art, poetry, architecture, or prose that this sea has inspired over the centuries.

In the Fourth Age - that of the soldier -1 could tell of the arguments and conflicts that have so often roiled the ocean, of how the force of arms over the years has compelled migration or fostered seaborne crime, of how national navies have reacted, how individual battles have been fought, and how Atlantic heroes have been born.

In the Fifth Age - that of the well-fed Justice -I could describe how the sea eventually became a sea of laws and commerce, and how tramp steamers and liners and submarine cables and jet aircraft then crossed and recrossed it in an infinite patchwork designed for the attainment of profit and comfort. In the Sixth Age, that dominated by the fatigue and tedium of the pantaloon, I could reflect upon the ways that man has recently wearied of the great sea, has come to take it for granted, to become careless of its special needs and to deal with it improvidently. And in the Seventh and final Age — the Age that ends with Shakespeare’s immemorial sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything — I could imagine the ways by which this much-overlooked and perhaps vengeful ocean might one day strike back, reverting to type, reverting to the primal nature of what it always was.

Alluring as this all might seem, however, there was something else. First I had to make the frame, to construct the proscenium arch, to attempt to place the long human drama within the very much longer physical context. Only when that had been achieved, and by leave of the enormous natural forces that had made the ocean in the first place, could I try to begin to unveil and recount the human stories. Only then could I attempt to tell something of the ocean’s hundreds of millions of years of life, and of the scores of thousands of its middle years during which the men and women who made up its community would eventually go out onstage, and by their own lights, each perform their unique, and uniquely Atlantic, roles.

First — just how was the ocean made? How did it all begin?