Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms

by Simon Winchester

  • • •

  But it will be some long while before sails take over from bunker oil, and before babassu-fueled aircraft soar between the transatlantic cities. The degradation of the air above our ocean, because of our perceived need to fly and steam across it, will continue, will be remarked on as just one of the more egregious examples of modern man’s weary disregard for a sea he once revered. Yet the ruin goes very much deeper than this, and literally. The visible surface of the sea, its waters shallow and deep, the creatures that live within it, and all of the seabeds coastal and mid-oceanic, have also suffered poisoning, not so much from aircraft and steamships but from the vast wafts of polluting residues that are being endlessly created in millions of factories on land.

  Rachel Carson first fretted about an impending maritime catastrophe in 1960, when she wrote the preface to a new edition of her first classic work, The Sea Around Us, which was initially published in 1951. This may not have been the book that established her saintly reputation—Silent Spring accomplished that in 1962, and made her the birth mother to today’s environmental movement—but it did offer the world good reason for displaying a reverence and respect toward our oceans.

  If any one person can rightly be given credit for beginning the current environmental movement, it is probably the American civil servant and marine biologist Rachel Carson, whose two most famous books were The Sea Around Us and Silent Spring.

  The first edition was a lyrical work, poignant in its innocence, adoring in its tone, never once supposing that mankind had any kind of malign intentions toward the seas, and indeed arguing powerfully for a sedulous exploitation of the mineral wealth beneath them. There is great charm, particularly, in her explanations of the world’s steadily rising temperature—this was fully evident in the 1950s with much the same phenomena as today: shrinking ice caps, retreating glaciers, violent and unpredictable storms. Rachel Carson was most impressed with the theories of a little-remembered Swedish oceanographer named Otto Pettersson, who declared that all cycles of global warming have been accompanied by anecdotal evidence of great swells of deep ocean tides: he believed that “moving mountains of unseen water” beneath the sea caused “startling and unusual occurrences” in the climate experienced on earth. There was not even a hint, either by Pettersson or by Rachel Carson, that mankind had anything to do with the alteration to the climate; it was either the tides or the untoward effect of rashes of sunspots.

  But that was in 1950; a decade later, although she offered no new theories for the continuing rise in global temperature, Carson did start to worry out loud about marine pollution—and in particular, this being the early morning of the Atomic Age, the pollution of the seas with radioactive materials.

  The power of her prose remains undimmed. For as she wrote in her deservedly famous Preface:

  Although man’s record as the steward of the natural resources of the earth has been a discouraging one, there has long been a certain comfort in the belief that the sea, at least, was inviolate, beyond man’s ability to change and to despoil. But this belief, unfortunately, had proved to be naïve. In unlocking the secrets of the atom, modern man has found himself confronted with a frightening problem—what to do with the most dangerous materials that have ever existed in all the earth’s history, the by-products of atomic fission. . . .

  . . . by its very vastness and its seeming remoteness, the sea has invited the attention of those who have the problem of disposal, and with very little discussion and almost no public notice, the sea has been selected as a “natural” burying place for the contaminated rubbish. . . .

  To dispose first and investigate later is an invitation to disaster, for once radioactive elements have been deposited at sea they are irretrievable. The mistakes that are made now are made for all time.

  It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist: the threat is rather to life itself.

  She was so very prescient. The British government turned out to be just one of the sea-besmirching villains among many—twelve nuclear countries, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, did much the same thing.79 Until the late 1970s ships chartered by the British government casually tossed radioactive waste—from atomic weapons programs, from power stations, from research projects, into a sea that, as Rachel Carson noted, was widely regarded as “beyond man’s ability to change and to despoil.” More than twenty-nine thousand tons of “highly active radioactive waste,” created mainly by the U.K. Ministry of Defence, was dropped into the Atlantic at a specially selected site four hundred miles west of Land’s End, into waters that reached the supposedly safe depth of nine thousand feet.

  The amount of radiation emitted by the material left in what was called Atlantic Deep, estimated at 4,000 curies of alpha activity and 117,000 of beta-gamma activity, was enormous. London did its best to soothe its alarmed citizens—especially those in Cornwall, Devon, and South Wales, close to where Atlantic tides might wash any errant material ashore—by saying that “dispersion and dilution” should ensure there was no danger, and that anyway, everything tossed overboard had been securely encased in steel barrels lined with cement. But the official balms soothed few, and it hardly helped when the government admitted soon afterward that it had actually dumped another sixteen thousand tons of only slightly less dangerous material in another zone, the Hurd Deep, not too far away in the English Channel, and that some had also been dropped into the Irish Sea and into waters off Scotland, ensuring that this isotopic gift will keep on giving for many hundreds of thousands of years.

  Rachel Carson had ample reason to fear radioactive pollution; but she was blissfully unaware back then of the other substances that would come to infest the seas—not even, in those innocent times, of the weed killers that Silent Spring so comprehensively managed to ban from the land.

  It was all so much simpler then. No doubt, like many who visited the seashore in the 1950s and ’60s, she would have cursed the gobbets of tar from ships that washed their tanks off shore, and she would have been vexed at the broken floats and rotten netting that washed up among the piles of Atlantic kelp. She knew her beloved ocean was far from being perfectly clean, but its contamination had a sort of understandable ordinariness about it, tainted by a forgivable kind of pollution, of the kind you might come across in a farmyard, a wine cellar, or an auto mechanic’s garage.

  She had little inkling of the sinister periodic table of foul chemistry that was then to come—of the mercury that would soon be found in the flesh of almost every tuna, shark, and swordfish; of the hundreds of thousands of tons of highly toxic, highly carcinogenic polychlorinated biphenyls—PCBs—that soon found their way into the sea, killing seabirds hundreds of miles out in the ocean, contaminating seashores, shellfish, and finned fish; of the plastics that would foul beaches and entrap fish and fill the stomachs of seabirds; of the cyanide washes from gold-processing plants; of the oil pollutants from tanker accidents, shipwrecks, or drilling mishaps; or the enormous pharmacopoeia—hormones and psychotropic drugs, antidepressants and sleep-inducing and sleep-retarding cocktails—that would slowly and steadily defy the long-standing belief in the ocean’s near-infinite capacity to dilute and dissipate. This, as Rachel Carson so wisely saw, was naïveté in the extreme: the ocean was soon determined to be not so much a machine for diluting chemicals as rather a vehicle for transporting them around the planet, either by way of its waters, or by way of the fish and other creatures that live in them.

  Pollution of the once-pristine and now more dirty and all-too-finite ocean is universally agreed to be a terrible thing, and of late a slew of international laws—most notably the so-called London Convention of 1972—have been set in place to direct that those who use the seas, and those whose countries border them, respect both their sanctity and their common value to the planet.

  3. THE CONSEQUENCES OF GREED<
br />
  Yet marine pollution by itself is not the greatest and most lasting problem that faces an ocean like the Atlantic. The sea does have a limited capacity to clean and reform itself. The creatures that live in it, on the other hand, do not. And mankind’s ever-growing need for fish and other living marine animals is currently pushing one of the most fragile resources of the sea close to the breaking point. To accommodate an almost insatiable human appetite for seafood, we are these days wantonly overfishing our seas; as a result, and astonishingly to most, we are now fast running out of fish.

  A small example of just how sensitive this matter has lately become occurred for me early in the autumn of 2009, when I encountered quite by happenstance a trivial and avoidable, but, as it happens, rather interesting and very public controversy.

  I had flown into London from New York on a daytime flight and arrived late in the evening. I checked my bags with the porter where I was staying, on Pall Mall, at around 10 P.M. It was a Saturday night. I was hungry and assumed I would have quite a hard time at that hour finding someplace halfway decent to eat. I strolled up through Leicester Square and into Covent Garden, walking past countless cafés and bistros, most with waiting clients spilling out into the street. And then, halfway along an alleyway, I came to J. Sheekey, a newly spruced-up edition of the seafood restaurant that I remember my parents taking me to when I was about ten, back in the 1950s. So fashionable is Sheekey’s these days that I imagined it would be quite impossible to get a table, at least not without a long wait, and so I started to walk on by. Except that on a whim I turned back and ventured in, fully expecting disappointment.

  Quite the contrary. The staff, looking surprised, caught unawares when the street door opened, seemed strangely relieved to see me. Their restaurant, it turned out, had tables still available. And so, unexpectedly, I was quickly seated, my glass was filled, my order taken, plates and dishes fetched and brought and cleared—and so it was that at about midnight, replete with a dozen oysters and a plate of whitebait, a fair-sized piece of sea bass, with a small dish of fennel and some new potatoes, a half bottle of Pouilly-Fumé and a cup of coffee, I strolled back down to the club. I felt good, pleasantly surprised that London, for so long a city of laughable gastronomic impoverishment, was now managing to look after its visitors so very well.

  Except that when I read the papers a few days later, it turned out that there was an explanation. A few days before my visit, J. Sheekey had been publicly flayed in the newspapers for allegedly serving to its customers fish that were on a generally agreed list of overfished and consequently endangered species.

  There had been a sudden flurry of interest in troubled fish and ocean fishing among concerned and sophisticated Londoners just a few days before. A documentary film shown on television had just exposed techniques that were said to be cruel, fishing that was said to be illegal, fish that were as a consequence heading for extinction, and the large population of shops, supermarkets, restaurateurs, cooks, customers, and diners who either did not know or did not care that by buying and eating such fish, they were contributing to the decline. A website had also appeared, publishing online the list of troubled fish, and the shops and restaurants that sold them—and among them was J. Sheekey, venerable maybe, but now quite publicly revealed and shamed. It is a moderately costly restaurant, the clientele by and large people who would be wanting to be seen to do the right thing—and so in droves, having seen, read, and clicked on the alarming reports, the customers stayed away. By doing so they left empty plenty of tables, and as it happened, they did so on the very night of this unanticipated visit from an innocent abroad.

  But by chance, this was not to be the end of the story. The owners of Sheekey, a powerful omnium-gatherum of other fashionable London restaurants, formally complained, saying they were in fact most scrupulous in the kind of fish they sold, served seafood only from sustainable stocks, and that the website had its facts wrong. There was an unusual pause, a drawing in of breath. Environmental groups tend to have a somewhat saintly air—verging on the sanctimonious, in a few cases—and most are aware that they have to be extremely careful in their various assertions of blame. An alarmed fish protection lobby promptly huddled, and after some hesitation conceded that they had in fact been somewhat hasty, had indeed got some their facts wrong. They appeared chastened. They apologized—if a little reluctantly—and they promptly restored Sheekey’s to the pantheon of the blessed. Crowds of relieved ichthyophiles happily returned, with the result that it is now all but impossible to get a table again, especially late on a Saturday night.

  It was a sorry little row, but it was one that served to point up a reality that had until then been generally overlooked: that many kinds of fish around the world are indeed in serious trouble, and that it is all the fault of the endless desire for culinary pleasure that currently afflicts Western mankind. We buy or we order our food—especially our seafood, which because it is seldom seen in situ and is much more of a mystery than our meat, which tends to graze and gambol before our eyes—without paying too much attention to its origins, to the manner in which it was caught, or to how long the populations of the fish we favor can each be sustained. Until lately, many restaurants were reluctant to offer much by way of information to those few who were concerned.

  Not that there is universal agreement on how good that information is. There are a large number of bodies that seek to protect and preserve oceans and oceanic life: the Blue Ocean Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, Sea Shepherd, the National Audubon Society, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Alaska Oceans Foundation, SeaWeb, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the National Environmental Trust among them, all with their own agendas and working methods, sometimes working in concert, more often not. One can now acquire (from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, among others) wallet-sized cards that tell you which fish it is currently prudent to eat; some of the better restaurants will identify the fisheries from which their offerings are hauled.

  Different approaches are a commonplace within the environmental establishment. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which was established in Britain in 1999, was an early science-based champion of sustainable fishing. It established a set of principles under which it could certify fisheries as being responsible and sustainable and thus recommended to customers: a blue and white oval logo is nowadays fixed (for a fee) to packages of fish that come from these fisheries—which currently make up about 7 percent of the world’s fisheries, including, in the Atlantic, those for South African hake, Thames herring, and (as we shall see later) the inelegantly named South Georgia version of the Patagonian toothfish.

  The principle underlying MSC’s approach is based on promoting what it regards as “good” fish. Many American organizations, on the other hand, do their best to organize boycotts of what they consider “bad” fish (as in the campaign by the National Environmental Trust80 to “take a pass, on Chilean sea bass”). Hence the “red list,” which Greenpeace unveiled in 2009. This is a compendium of what it considers the most endangered fish, crustaceans, and shellfish: it contains, at the time of writing, twenty-two species, or groups of species. Eighteen of these are to be found in the Atlantic Ocean, and their endangerment stems almost entirely either from relentless overfishing or from cruelly thoughtless kinds of fishing undertaken within the boundaries of the Atlantic.

  Chilean sea bass—the marketers’ adroitly chosen name for the less comely-sounding Patagonian toothfish—is on the list, but is generally found off Chile’s coast, in the Pacific, or else in Antarctic waters. Hoki, which without much public awareness constitutes the great proportion of fish sold by McDonald’s restaurants worldwide, is also regarded as endangered, and is a small, pale-colored creature generally found off New Zealand. Pollock is usually found and fished in Alaska (the MSC regards the Alaskan pollock fishery as worthy of its seal of approval, yet it is on the Greenpeace red list, an indication of the differences to be found in this complex and controversy-ridden marine universe). And swordfish, g
enerally caught by the much-criticized method of long-lining, are mainly denizens of the Pacific.

  The rest of the overfished majority are found foursquare in the Atlantic Ocean: most of the fisheries for Atlantic cod, Atlantic halibut, Atlantic salmon, and Atlantic sea scallops; the albacore tuna from the South Atlantic; the bigeye, the yellowfin, and especially the magnificent, superfast, and much-valued bluefin tuna (which can command thirty thousand dollars apiece in the famous Tsukiji market in Tokyo, and is partly because of Japanese demand the most threatened grand fish of the entire Atlantic Ocean); the Greenland halibut, the North Atlantic monkfish, the bivalve known as the ocean quahog, the redfish, the tropical red snapper, most skates, most tropical shrimp found off the west coast of Africa, and the fish now delightfully known as the orange roughy, but which, before the marketers got hold of it, was known to fishermen and biologists simply as the slimehead—all these are found between Greenland and Tierra del Fuego, between Cape Town and North Cape, in the depth and shallows, warm and cold, somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of Atlantic waters.

  Twice have I encountered the practical realities of the Atlantic’s fishing crisis, once in the northwest Atlantic, then more recently in the deep sub-Antarctic South.

  4. NORTH

  My first encounter was well up north, off Newfoundland, where there was no specific villain other than the ineptitude of mankind in general, which in the early 1990s all but destroyed one of the great fisheries of the planet. The story of the collapse of the Grand Banks cod fishery, which I came across in the late 1990s, in a heartbreakingly beautiful but sad clutch of little communities gathered along the shores of Bonavista Bay, is a sorry tale indeed.

  In the abstract, the expanse of shallow seas off Newfoundland—seas that were always portrayed, and rightly so, as rough, cold, swathed in fog, invaded by stray chunks of jagged ice and with storms so terrific and the seafloor rocks so close to the surface that the place was often lethally dangerous—long had a legendary magnificence about them. History books told us of John Cabot, who found the great silvery codfish in such abundance in these waters that he wrote that to catch them one could forget the net or the hook: a simple basket tossed from the gunwales would be filled with fish in a minute, and a mighty cod, knocked quickly insensible with a marlinspike, would be grilling on deck a minute after that. Never before had any seas anywhere in the world been so richly endowed with fish; it seemed entirely credible that oarsmen would complain that Newfoundland sea were difficult to row through, so heaving were the waters with fish; and it truly did seem possible, as others imagined, that you could probably walk from London to St. John’s on the shining muscular backs of millions of cod.