Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms

by Simon Winchester

  We spent a couple of hours at the site, just sitting, quite mesmerized. The wind picked up steadily during the morning, and though I spoke some thoughts that I imagined were fairly profound into a recorder, when I played them later the howling of the gale and the hissing of the blown sand against the microphone made them almost impossible to hear. But I could hear myself saying what I feel to this day: that it was incredibly moving, being at a place where so many people, after such privation, almost didn’t make it—but did.

  One is not supposed to take anything from sites like this. But I did, and for what I thought was good reason. I found among the jetsam a tiny glass bottle, the kind of thing that I imagine one of the elderly lady passengers on the Dunedin Star once carried in her handbag, filled with sal volatile, in case she ever took a turn. It was quite empty now, of course; but it had a working screw cap and an elegantly frosted surface; and I had a purpose for it, were I to complete the expedition I had come here for, were I to find just one final thing.

  We nearly got into big trouble. My guide was so exultant at having discovered the wreck that he drove at a quite madcap speed back along the beach. There is no road; the hard-packed sand of a carefully chosen part of the beach is an ideal substitute. But “carefully chosen” is an important caveat. Too close to land and the sand becomes deep and dry and the wheels will spin uselessly, and you have dig yourself out. Too close to the sea and the sand turns to syrup, and your wheels turn toward the ocean and you can be stranded there, caught perhaps in the onrush of the tide, just like a thousand boats before.

  And this is just what happened. The driver was heading fast along the beach, but the oh-so-carefully selected strip of hard-packed roadway became unexpectedly more narrow as a low cliff rose beside us on the left, the landward side. The tide was rushing in from the right, hungrily. We stopped just as the roadway ran out altogether, and spray from the oncoming waves started dashing against the seaward windows.

  The driver swore, lustily. We already knew the radio didn’t work, so if we were trapped, we couldn’t get help. He threw the gear into reverse, and shouted to us all to pray. A shower of gray and dirty water suddenly rose in a huge curtain in front of the car as the wheels bit uselessly into the wet porridge below—until suddenly one of the tires, possibly one of the rear tires, bit into a small patch of hard sand—and the car shot backward.

  Now he was moving—but he had to keep it moving, keep the car going backward, both straight and very, very fast. The water was coming in swiftly now, covering the packed sand—but seeming for one precious moment not to have mixed in with the grains, not to have broken through the surface tension, not to have begun to change its consistency and its viscosity. And so the car shot backward across the water, as if it were walking on it, almost miraculously—and then after five minutes of steady reversing like this we bumped over the low cliff of sand that had caused the problem, flushed out a small shower of scuttling ghost crabs—and were, quite mercifully, safe.

  The driver, his hand shaking, wiped the sweat from his brow. We sat in silence in the heat, the windows open to catch the onshore breeze, gazing out to sea. Beyond the breakers the green Atlantic growled on, restless and eternal. It had a sort of calm smugness to it, someone said. A smugness as if to say that yes, we had escaped its clutches, but it knew it would claim another victim, give it time. And then another, and another. Sufficient numbers of men would always be drawn to occupying their business in its great waters, deep or shallow, for one to be entirely certain of that.

  • • •

  We made it, eventually, to Rocky Point. It was here, sixty miles south of where the Dunedin Star had wrecked, that the Sir Charles Elliott had also stranded, and where two of her crew had drowned. I had been told there was a grave, little known and seldom seen.

  The remains of the tugboat are still visible, just. The breakers churn the water offshore into a ceaseless maelstrom of white, but at certain moments it is just possible to spy two slender pinnacles of black rising defiantly two or three feet above the sea. That is all: two corroded stanchions, or aerials, or parts of the superstructure, which break clear of the Atlantic for just a second or two between waves. Twenty years ago you could still see the bridge and parts of the funnel; but that is all gone now, and these forlorn relics will probably last for only another year or so.

  Onshore nearby and in sight of the wreck, on a sandspit protected by a shallow lagoon from the full ferocity of the sea, is the grave. It must be one of the most remote and least visited grave sites in the world, and sad to say it is quite irredeemably ugly, a boxlike structure of four courses of red brick, and with a large brass plaque sloping up to the north. Its stark lack of beauty is tempered somewhat by the mass of whalebones that cover it, some of them washed there by the sea, most others placed by the occasional visitors.

  The tomb is first and foremost a memorial to Matthias Koraseb, who came from South-West Africa and whose body was found and buried here, in the sand of his birth. But also mentioned on the plaque is Angus Campbell Macintyre, whose body was never found: he had been the first mate of the Elliott. In the old Scottish tradition of leaving a stone on a mountain cairn, I had long wanted to leave something on this grave, if ever I was able to visit it.

  I am not at all ashamed to say that I was very moved, standing there in the Atlantic wind, listening to the growling of the surf, beside this lonely little grave. And so, although I knew at the time that this would be a sentimental gesture, I wrote a note. It said quite simply, Thank You for Trying. Now Rest in Peace. I signed it and dated it, then folded it up as small as possible and pushed it down through the narrow neck of the little smelling-salts bottle that I had taken from the wreck. I screwed the cap tightly shut and placed the little token beneath the stones and the old whalebones and pieces of driftwood that covered the grave, and left it there. A message in a bottle; I hope it stays in place for many years.

  Here on a lonely beach on Namibia’s notorious Skeleton Coast is the grave of Matthias Koraseb and the memorial to the never-found Angus Macintyre, who died in a failed attempt to rescue the survivors from the SS Dunedin Star in 1942. This book is dedicated to Angus Macintyre.

  Angus Campbell Macintyre was a Scotsman. He was born beside the North Atlantic Ocean and he died, during the commission of an act of great kindness, far away from his home, in the South Atlantic Ocean. What cruel symmetry, I thought. As I leaned on the grave, looking out to sea, I thought back to that morning, nearly half a century before, when the liner on which I was crossing the same ocean for the very first time—and which was steaming across to the New World, and from a Scottish port—stopped to play a small part in a similar mission of mercy for someone who was also in distress upon the sea. On that occasion the scales were tipped in our favor: the mid-ocean rendezvous was safely made, the crisis averted.

  But on this occasion, and as is so often true, the advantage had been with the sea: the wild ocean currents had swept mankind away as if he were no more than spindrift and foam. The man has gone; his ship has almost gone; in time the grave will be submerged by the ocean’s rising waters, and all solid memory of the small event will have been washed away. I hope the dedication of this book to his memory will serve as something, to someone.

  But whatever the fate of Able Seaman Macintyre, the ocean in which he lies will long remain. In one form or another, in one shape or another, and perhaps known by other names than as a memorial to Atlas, its waters will always exist, so long as the planet exists. They will always be present, gray and heaving, washing and waiting, extending out to the deeps, stretching across to the far horizon and then far, far beyond. Mankind may come and go, but an Atlantic Ocean of some kind will endure, will always be at the end of the beach or down at the base of the cliffs. It will always be in motion. It will always be present. Whether seen or unseen, heard or unheard, it will be imperturbable and irresistible, and as the poet has it, it will be quite simply be there, always just minding its business, always just going on.
r />   A Note on the Type

  The typeface employed throughout this book is a modern interpretation of the classic eighteenth-century Bodoni face, and known as Filosofia. This was created in 1996 by the Bratislava-born type designer Zuzana Licko, who with her Dutch-born partner, Rudy VanderLans, astonished the typographic world during the closing decades of the twentieth century with a whirlwind of type design, largely occasioned by the invention of the Macintosh computer in 1984. Filosofia, with its slightly bulging serifs and lighter-than-classical-Bodoni vertical lines, clearly owes much to one of the most beloved of all Italian faces, but is more amiable and less wearing to the eyes when ranged over texts as lengthy and complex as that of Atlantic. I am proud that this book’s designer felt able to employ this wonderful new typeface, and applaud with gratitude its most gifted creator.

  SW

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