The Great Flood

by Edward Platt

  He was wrong in every way it is possible to be wrong. Most of his statements were ‘wrong when he made them, or have been disproved by subsequent discoveries’, L. Sprague de Camp said, and, even if they hadn’t been wrong, he would still have drawn the wrong conclusions from them. People on both sides of the Atlantic may have used spears and sails, got married and divorced, and believed in ghosts and flood legends, but that ‘proves nothing about sunken continents’.

  Yet being wrong is rarely a bar to success, especially in the realms of mysticism. Donnelly’s book was reprinted twenty-two times in the eight years after its publication in 1882; it become known as ‘the New Testament of Atlantism’, and attracted a following among occultists such as Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society. Blavatsky believed that Atlantis was one of several lost continents on which humanity had evolved. She claimed that her esoteric magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, was dictated on Atlantis, and that part of humanity was descended from a ‘root-race’ who lived on another vanished continent, called Lemuria. Its existence had originally been proposed by an English zoologist called Philip Sclater as a way of explaining why lemur fossils were found in Madagascar and India, but not in Africa or the Middle East. Sclater believed that India and Madagascar had been conjoined on a continent that broke apart into islands or sank beneath the waves. Blavatsky made grander claims for it. She believed that Lemuria was ‘the cradle of mankind, of the physical sexual creature who materialized through long aeons out of the ethereal hermaphrodites’. Her fellow theosophist William Scott-Elliot offered a vivid description of this ‘creature’ in The Lost Lemuria, published in 1904: ‘His stature was gigantic, somewhere between 12 and 15 feet [between 3.5 and 4.5 metres] . . . His skin was very dark, being of a yellowish brown colour. He had a long lower jaw, a strangely flattened face, eyes small but piercing and set curiously far apart, so that he could see sideways as well as in front, while the eye at the back of the head . . . enabled him to see in that direction also.’

  Once the theory of continental drift had been accepted in the early twentieth century, there was no need to propose the existence of lost continents or sunken land bridges to explain how species crossed from one land mass to another. Yet the idea of Lemuria continued to fascinate occult writers.

  In 1904, the American writer Frederick S. Oliver published an influential book called A Dweller on Two Planets, which was supposedly written under ‘spirit guidance’. It tells the story of a community of sages who escaped from Lemuria and settled on Mount Shasta, near Oliver’s home in northern California. Sightings of the Lemurian community of Mount Shasta were reported during the twenties and thirties; it was said to consist of 1,000 magi living in a ‘mystic village’ built around a Mayan-style temple. Occasionally, they appeared in neighbouring towns, clad in long white robes, ‘polite but taciturn’, and they paid for supplies with gold nuggets. Every midnight they rejoiced in their escape from Lemuria in ceremonies that bathed the mountains in red and green light.

  Californian luminaries such as the actress Shirley MacLaine, who recalled a past life as an androgynous Lemurian in her memoir I’m Over All That, and Guy Warren Ballard, founder of the religious movement I AM, were both inspired by Oliver’s novel, and it still informs the philosophy of the Lemurian Fellowship, which claims ‘the continents of Atlantis and Mu [often synonymous with Lemuria] did exist, and still do, sunken beneath the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.’

  Another occultist, the British writer James Churchward, claimed to have learnt the secrets of Mu from ancient tablets discovered in temples in India. His book The Lost Continent of Mu: The Motherland of Men was one of the last great manifestations of the mystical preoccupation with lost worlds. By the time it was published in 1926, the wild fantasies of the nineteenth-century cult of Atlantis were being displaced by a story that was no less astonishing and had the advantage of being true.

  ~

  Doggerland was lost slowly at first, and then with terrifying speed. To begin with, meltwater from the retreating glaciers erased the edges of the land and crept through its low-lying hollows and channels. It created new habitats as well, such as salt marshes, which the Mesolithic peoples must have regarded as ‘a gift of the sea’, say Gaffney, Fitch and Smith in Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland. Yet they also knew their territory was shrinking, as the sea ‘reclaimed ancestral hunting grounds, campsites and landmarks’. Some would have continued to live on newly created islands. Others may have retreated to the high ground to the west, which they had previously ignored.

  No one knows how many remained on Doggerland when a tsunami crashed across it, c. 6200 BC. It was triggered by an underwater landslide caused by an earthquake or the release of methane gas beneath the seabed near the Norwegian coast, and it replicated the pattern made tragically familiar in the tsunami that killed 230,000 people in fourteen countries bordering the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2003. At first, the water drew back to reveal ‘an amazing bonanza’ of stranded fish and shellfish, write Gaffney, Fitch and Smith, and some of those who saw it might have thought their ancestral homes had been restored. Yet what seemed like a retreat was the gathering of an irresistible force.

  During the next two or three hours, four or five waves struck the coast as the seawater that had ‘piled up in the depression’ flowed back towards land in a series of massive waves. Anyone caught in the open would have been killed. Coastal settlements flooded. In some places, the water travelled twenty-five miles inland. Further south, the water broke through the marshes that stretched to France, and the remaining barriers between the North Sea and the Atlantic disappeared.

  The way that Britain became an island, or a collection of islands, so suddenly and unexpectedly, seems all the more remarkable, given the way its sense of itself as distinct from the rest of the continent has shaped its cultural and political life. Yet the

  silver sea,

  Which serves it in the office of a wall,

  Or as a moat defensive to a house,

  as John of Gaunt says in Shakespeare’s famous lines in Richard II, is a source of danger, as well as a means of protection, for it hasn’t stopped rising since Doggerland disappeared.

  ~

  John Buxton was ten years old when the sea broke through at Horsey, on the night of 12 February 1938, and spread out in a deadening lake that engulfed all but twenty-five of 7,469 acres of his parents’ estate. He was away at school, and he was desperately disappointed to miss the excitement of the flood. ‘I was a small boy and I was so eager to see what it looked like,’ he said.

  It was July 2013 – the height of a warm, dry summer that gave no indication of the winter that would follow – and I had driven out to Norfolk to visit some of the places that had flooded in 1938 and 1953. Horsey Hall was my first stop, though I was three hours late because my car had packed up on the Norwich ring road. Mr Buxton and his wife, Bridget, were far too good mannered and hospitable to complain; they seemed more concerned by the inconvenience I had suffered than any I might have caused. They showed me into the cool, dark kitchen at the back of the house. A large black-and-white picture of a young John Buxton deer-stalking in the Highlands hung on the wall, and the windows overlooked a moss-stained lawn. It felt peaceful and secluded – yet, at the front, it was only a short walk to Horsey Gap, which led to the beach and the restless sea.

  The Buxtons had been reminded of the fragility and impermanence of the coast two years before the flood of 1938. On the night of 1 December 1936, a gale scoured the beach on the seaward side of the dune, exposing the hoofprints of unshod horses and cattle, and the foundations of a wall. There was only one possible explanation for their position: the dunes used to lie much further east.

  It was a reminder that the coastline is always changing. Two thousand years ago, Norfolk’s Yare Estuary was deep enough for ships. One and a half thousand years ago, the sea level fell and the estuary silted up to form the tidal inlet of Breydon Water. A spit of land emerg
ed where Great Yarmouth now stands. The locals harvested wood for fuel and dug peat: between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, they dug more than 900 million cubic feet (275 million cubic metres) of peat, and the rising sea flooded the holes left behind, creating the lakes and rivers that became the Norfolk Broads.

  The effect of the rising seas was particularly apparent in the south, for it was compounded by the phenomenon known as post-glacial rebound: as the temperature warmed and the glaciers retreated, the land that had borne the lightest load tilted downwards, while the land in the north that had been most heavily compressed sprang upwards. As J. E. Sainty said in a book called The Norfolk Sea Floods, the Colinda spear – which he called ‘the lovely bone harpoon or fish-spear’ – dredged up from the bed of the North Sea, off the Norfolk coast, ‘was lost by its Mesolithic owner in swamp or shallow water; whilst the cave at Oban, inhabited by hunters at a time when the breakers could occasionally sweep into it, is now high above the surf.’ As the North rises, the South sinks; and the sea encroaches on the low-lying coasts.

  ~

  John Buxton’s father, who had owned the estate for seven years by 1938, was less thrilled by the flood than his son. Instead of the drama and romance that appealed to a ten-year-old boy, he recognized its destructive effects. ‘He was devastated,’ Mrs Buxton said. ‘He had been through a war, and now he had seen Horsey flooded. He was terribly worried about the future.’

  Anthony Buxton had gone to Horsey for the first time in 1930, drawn by reports of shooting on the mere. He had always been fascinated by the natural world, though he intended to preserve Horsey as a shooting estate as well as a nature reserve – and saw no contradiction between the two. The fascination for nature was a family failing, John Buxton said. His grandfather – Anthony’s father – had founded the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire, which became Flora and Fauna International, and Anthony Buxton had inherited his approach to wildlife, which was ‘typically Victorian’: shoot anything that moves and then preserve it.

  Anthony began his career as a brewer in the family business in Spitalfields, East London, but it was interrupted by the First World War. He served in the Essex Yeomanry, and he was so horrified by what he saw that he wanted to try to stop it happening again. In 1919, he joined the Secretariat of the League of Nations in Geneva, as a member of the British delegation, which was led by Lord Perth. There, he established a pack of beagles and found a wife: ‘Mother was a cousin of the Perths,’ John Buxton said, with long familiarity with the interconnectedness of aristocratic life. ‘She went out to see them, met father, and they got married.’

  By 1930, Anthony knew that his time in Geneva had not secured world peace. ‘I suspect he felt increasingly disappointed at how ineffective the League was proving, and he was certainly looking for a change of direction in life,’ John Buxton wrote, in a book that described the discovery that cranes were nesting in Horsey after a 400-year absence from the UK.

  Lady Buxton, who came from Beauly, near Inverness, did not like the flat and seemingly empty landscape, but Anthony saw a pair of marsh harriers flying over the reed beds and knew he wanted to live there. ‘The fun of the thing to me, and I believe to many naturalists, has been to see the struggle for life,’ he wrote in his memoir, Fisherman Naturalist. Yet naturalists did not often own estates, and Anthony Buxton’s tenure of Horsey was regarded as an oddity. ‘Idiosyncratic narrative underwrites estate curiosity,’ notes a book called The Cultural Geography of the Norfolk Broads, in an epigrammatic style that might be imitating its subject’s clipped phrasing: ‘Buxton projecting a singular ownership.’

  ~

  The alarm was delivered in a countryman’s muted style: ‘The sea is in, sir,’ Anthony Buxton was told, as he came out of the house at seven thirty p.m. It had risen to within 150 yards (137 metres) of Horsey Hall, and ‘a mass of dead worms, many drowned hares, rabbits, pheasants and partridge’ had washed up in the lane. One man was caught in his car on the coastal road: ‘He tried to get away, but the sea beat him to it,’ John Buxton told me. ‘His headlights went out, and he couldn’t swim – poor man.’ The car was a soft top, Mr Buxton said, so he was able to cut himself out, but he spent a terrifying night on the top of his car in the middle of the moonlit expanse of water.

  John Buxton finally got to see it in April, when the family came back to Horsey from Happisburgh, nine miles up the coast, where they had been staying. By then, a second tide had poured through Horsey Gap, sweeping away the temporary defences built after the first one. The water had gone down, the evaporation making it saltier, but the coast road was still flooded. The water was above their boots, ‘which meant it was so high,’ Mr Buxton said, tapping his knee. He set out to explore with the son of a gamekeeper, who was a friend. He was fascinated by the stench of rotting vegetation and the endless dead fish; they had all been killed immediately, apart from the eels. Herrings, flat fish, crabs and barnacles gradually took their place. Yet his father was horrified by the ‘strange and deathly silence’ that settled over Horsey as his beloved marshes became a ‘red-brown salt desert’ that reminded him of the steppes of Asia Minor. ‘The devastation and the general air of a great flat rubbish heap on which nothing can thrive, produce a feeling of intense depression,’ he wrote. ‘There may have been . . . some beauty about the floods, particularly at sunrise, sunset and by moonlight,’ but there was none as the water receded, leaving ‘a dead and smelly waste’, littered with rubbish of every kind. At the borders of the flooded area, the transition was ‘blatantly abrupt’ – ‘from bright green life to red brown death . . .’

  The marsh-loving birds, like the bitterns and the harriers that had drawn Anthony Buxton to Horsey, disappeared. ‘The one exception are the pigeons,’ Buxton wrote: ‘wood pigeons, stock doves, and in particular turtle doves, seem to thrive on salt.’ He noted that the trees ‘behaved in a peculiar way’: many made ‘repeated, in some cases violent, efforts to produce leaves and flowers,’ but they nearly always failed. Only a line of oaks on a dyke and a group of young birches in the middle of a sedge marsh managed to produce normal foliage, for they were sustained by freshwater springs, and there was one island of 120 acres that the water hadn’t covered. It was ‘the one bright spot’ where trees and plants flourished, and birds still sang.

  ~

  The land took three months to drain, for there is no natural fall: the water had to be lifted into the high-level system of broads and dykes, through ‘day-and-night pumping’. Horsey Mere was like a bath, and the marshes were the bathroom floor, John Buxton said – an analogy that became clearer when we climbed to the platform of the Horsey wind-pump, the old windmill that used to drain the marshes, and looked down on the landscape from above.

  Mr Buxton has been going up and down the stairs inside the pepper-pot cone since he was a boy, and he waved away my offers of help. He had taken most of the photographs on the illustrated panels hanging on the walls of each floor, for he had inherited not only his father’s love of nature, but his love of film and photography as well; having spent his childhood ‘mucking about in boats on Horsey Mere’ and carrying his father’s cameras through the marshes, he had become a wildlife cameraman.

  The last flight was the steepest of them all, but when we reached the wooden balcony at the top, Mr Buxton was far more comfortable than I was: looking down at the greenish water in the dyke below made me feel sick, but he moved around the flimsy platform with a familiarity he would never lose. It was a beautiful summer day, and the mere was busy: there were people fishing from its banks and strolling along the paths that run beside it, though they were not allowed to enter the western part of the estate, where the cranes had their nests.

  Even when the salt water had been lifted out, it took a long time for the mere to purify itself; it was still salt in September 1938, seven months after the flood, and was ‘likely to remain so, until many inches of rain have fallen and been in turn pumped into the broads,’ Buxton wrote. The water moves slowly o
n its twenty-one-mile journey to the sea at Great Yarmouth, for it is propelled by nothing except the slightest of gradients and the wind. Yet the longest lasting damage was to the soil, which turned to ‘a sodium clay with the consistency of putty’. Anthony Buxton went to Holland for advice, and they told him that, if he let air get into it, it would turn to cement; he was to put away his implements, pray for rain, and not try to grow anything for the next five years. One of the three tenant farmers on the estate ignored the advice: he ploughed his fields, and Anthony Buxton sacked him.

  ~

  Horsey flooded again in the Great Tide of 1953, though not as badly as in 1938. Seawater reached Horsey Mere via Sea Palling, but only 1,200 acres of marshes were flooded. Horsey had one advantage over other places, the Buxtons said: once the defences were breached at Sea Palling, the sea poured into the high street, but, at Horsey, it spread out across the marshes. One woman, whose family climbed on to the roof of their bungalow in Sea Palling in 1953, described the sea as ‘a great sheet of water, hissing and roaring’. Seven people drowned in the village, including a baby, who was swept off her father’s back, and the landlord of the Lifeboat Inn, who was trying to reach a rescue boat.

  New sea defences at Horsey were completed in 1958, a year before John Buxton took over the estate. From the platform of the wind-pump, they looked like a breaking wave, rising from the livid green and brown patchwork of the marshes. In 1959, Horsey was connected to the water mains. Until then, they had used their own wells, which supplied water that was muddy at best, and undrinkable below ten feet (three metres). That sort of thing made it feel out on a limb, Mr Buxton said: ‘Everyone used to say that no one in Horsey ever passed their eleven-plus. No one sensible would buy a house like this and live with the permanent threat of flooding. But we have got used to it.’