The ocean—and the ocean best known to nineteenth-century sophisticates was still the Atlantic—was thus something to be envied, an entity well deserving of our respect and admiration. This was a major shift in emphasis—and the art, writing, and music of more recent years has been quick to reflect it, to undergo what can without apology be called a real and very apparent sea change.
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In music, it was the growing size of nineteenth-century orchestras that helped this change along, since for the first time it had become possible for the composer to reflect to the full extent the sheer complexity of the sea. Eighteenth-century music had an intellectual rationalism about it, limited by the kind of instruments available and the numbers of players that could be marshaled to employ them. The Romantic movement of Victorian music, on the other hand, vastly expanded both the kinds and the numbers of playable instruments—and so the ocean, with its sudden and sweeping changes of mood and color, suddenly seemed a highly appropriate subject for composers to tackle.
Beethoven, to take an early example, adapted in 1815 two short poems by Goethe to create the little-known cantata Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, which has as its theme the contrast between the quiet solemnity of a ship becalmed and the furious enthusiasm of the wild winds that would later drive her skipper home to port. Mendelssohn was much influenced by this little work and twenty years later produced a longer orchestral overture with the same title (one of Goethe’s poems is devoted to the tedium of calms, the second to wind and prosperity). The overture begins with the quiet of the calm sea, then a flute trills to indicate a sighting of a patch of blue sky and the burning away of the sea mist, after which comes a cascade of the strings swelling with the rising winds, and finally a lone cello, in one of the most languorous and beautiful of all Mendelssohn’s melodies, and which celebrates the vessel’s arrival home safe and sound. This was not a work that could have been composed or performed a hundred years before, back in those times when the ocean was not fully known: there was neither the orchestra nor perhaps the necessary musical confidence of any composer then living.
Not surprisingly, nineteenth-century Italian composers tended to favor the Mediterranean for their seaborne excursions—as with Verdi, for example, in both Simon Boccanegra and Otello. Their northern colleagues, on the other hand, were more deeply inspired by the Atlantic: Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, for instance, dealt with the legend of the spectral ship said to be haunting the tidal races around the Cape of Good Hope, and Tristan und Isolde had its doomed protagonists shuttling across a patch of that same sea between Ireland and Cornwall. Gilbert and Sullivan took both the mystique and inanities of British seaborne life as a motif for three of their light operas—HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and Ruddigore. And more modern composers still—Edward Elgar, Benjamin Britten, William Walton, and Ralph Vaughan Williams—all took turns with the ocean, and in a flurry of marine musicality dealt respectively with its majesty (Elgar’s Sea Pictures), its tragedies (Britten’s own Peter Grimes and his adaptation of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd), the bacchanalian habits of its sailors (Walton’s Portsmouth Point), and the ocean’s endless capacity for elegiac melancholy (as with Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony, a seventy-minute choral epic with Walt Whitman’s poetical work, much of it Long Island based and Atlantic related, from Leaves of Grass, providing the libretto).
Frederick Delius, who had some knowledge of the ocean from his time spent working on a grapefruit plantation in eastern Florida40 and who had lived in Virginia, was also captivated by the Atlantic beaches of Long Island, which he visited in 1903. Like Vaughan Williams, Delius was captivated by Leaves of Grass, most especially by the section titled “Sea Drift.” From a single poem within this collection, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” Delius produced his own Sea-Drift, a twenty-five-minute work for baritone and orchestra that remains one of the most poignant of ocean pieces, relating as it does to Whitman’s story that begins with the love and loss of a pair of Atlantic seagulls.
Claude Debussy, who employed an equally deft but even more solemn and reflective style, wrote at about the same time three symphonic sketches about the Atlantic—one concerned with the look and feel of the sea between dawn and midday, a second devoted to the complex and subtle play of the waves, and the last to what he termed “the dialogue between the wind and the sea.” Collectively Debussy’s three works were known simply as La mer, and their supreme success in the concert halls of Europe helped attach the word Impressionism to a new style of sea-centered music; somehow its sounds managed to leave the audience with a distinct feeling of their having experienced the presence of the sea, without any need for the kind of signs and symbols—like Mendelssohn’s trilling flute—that were required for the earlier, more direct representations.
8. CATCHING THE LIGHT
Painters had already long seized the concept of Impressionism—the deliberate vagueness, the studied imprecision, or, as one early critic had it, the conveying of “misty sentiment”—and soon found it particularly well suited to the sea. The French were in early: the newly built railways that took Parisian vacationers to the bathing resorts on the Atlantic and Normandy coasts sped painters to the seaside as well: Monet, Signac, and Seurat all famously painted the waters: the rocks, the coast, the summer indolence, the winter fury. The very name Impressionism is taken from an Atlantic ocean painting—that by Monet, of sunrise in the harbor of Le Havre, done in 1872. When asked by his dealer in Paris what he would call this quickly executed view of masts and morning mists and scattered sunlight caught from his garret window, he remarked casually that since it could hardly be called a study of Le Havre, it might as well be styled more simply an impression—so write down, he instructed: Impression, soleil levant.
John Ruskin once noted that “to paint water in all its perfection is as impossible as to paint the soul.” Many have tried. Of all those Victorian and early-twentieth-century visual artists who tackled the ocean—and right up to today’s Latvian-American pencil-genius, Vija Celmins, whose drawings severely test Ruskin’s assertion, and including the extraordinary Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto—perhaps none has been more memorably effective than an impeccably transatlantic pair: an American, the Atlantic-born Boston Yankee Winslow Homer; and rather earlier, a Londoner, J. M. W. Turner. Between the two of them they drove a galleon at full tilt through the boom of documentary sea painting and changed the view of the ocean forever.
Few English artists had such a powerful command of the sea as the great nineteenth-century romantic painter J. M. W. Turner. Here, in The Wreck of the Minotaur, Turner was able to catch the feel and power and impression of the sea in a manner that has survived him.
Turner, who devoted the first half of his life to the depiction of storms and sunsets and wrecks in oils and watercolors, was well ahead of the age, producing a huge number of paintings in a highly saturated, vividly impressionistic, and immediately recognizable style, decades before the likes of Monet. He would have been well on in years when Winslow Homer was born, dead before Homer created the first of the engravings with which he began his career. He would never see the astonishing power of Homer’s Homeward Bound, for example, a woodblock that was done for Harper’s magazine in 1867 and that shows passengers struggling to keep their balance on a sloping deck of a ship in heavy seas, and which makes those who see it feel quite seasick. He would never know of the more famous pictures—Gulf Stream or Breezing Up or After the Hurricane, Bahamas—that depict with a masterful economy, but very much born of Turner’s maritime vagueness, the power and majesty of the Atlantic. Homer loved the sea’s austerity and integrity; he loved its loneliness; he loved its calms—Rowing Home is a perfect example of the still sea in the evening afterglow—and he loved it most of all when it crashed and thundered, in the height of a storm.
I write this just a day after a storm-related tragedy—a score of people swept from a cliff top in Maine and out into the Atlantic, all the fault of a rogue wave from a dist
ant hurricane. A child drowned, her father was saved. They had come up from Manhattan and had been watching the drama of the surf on what should have been a pleasantly dramatic sunny Sunday afternoon.
It was just the sort of day that would have brought Winslow Homer out from his home on Prout’s Neck nearby. He would have sat on the cliff top, patiently watching, his walrus mustaches flittering in the gale, struggling to keep his canvas down as he applied the first layers of paint to the gesso. The struggle between humankind and the Atlantic waters was of endless fascination to him—a painting he named Undertow, in particular, made in 1886, shows on a day just like this the rescue of two young women, their burly rescuers beside them, all four struggling out from the pull of the sea beyond.
There were to be many paintings like this. Winslow Homer recorded a series of especially heroic images while spending two years in the northeast of England, where the North Sea is especially ferocious, the wrecks legion, the drowning deaths frequent. I worked there as a young newspaper reporter and knew the coast well: how often I would have to drive with a photographer to where the lifeboat had been launched at Cullercoats, or Whitley Bay, or up by the Farne Islands, and then watch as a dripping, blanket-wrapped body was wheeled out of the raging surf to an ambulance that was driven slowly away, with no blue lights. This day’s news from Maine would have saddened Homer, as it would sadden any human being: but it would remind him, a connoisseur of the awful power of the sea, that the ocean invariably wins in any contest with humans who dare it, and that is the natural order of things.
9. PEN, PAPER, AND SALT AIR
The modern sea is awash with literary sailors, and an immense treasury of literature has been produced over the years. Dickens, Trollope, and Poe have all tried their hands; Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, Virginia Woolf, Belloc, Eliot—at times one wonders if there is anything left to say, whether any marine scenario has been left undissected, undescribed. Writers have dealt with oceans known or unknown, crossed or uncrossed, from craft propelled by sail or by steam, over waters friendly or hostile, ice cold or drenched in steamy heat, and in ports gigantic or minute and with cargoes of any kind, volume, and worth. (With one exception: little contemporaneous literature of lasting quality appears to have been born directly from the slave ships of the Middle Passage. Much was written later, but little enough at the time—perhaps not too surprisingly, given the terrible exigencies of the experience.)
It is possible to distill from the raw mash of sea writing those pieces that concern the sea itself rather than using it mainly as a backdrop to some other yarn. And in this regard I have come to think that American sea writing has an energy about it that somehow overtops the writing found elsewhere—even though overall (and certainly when dealing with the North and South Atlantic) the experience of any ocean-bound writer is much the same, the sea is in a general sense similar, and the wrecks and dangers and storms and calms are none too different, no matter which port you leave from or in which direction you choose to sail.
But there is a discernible difference in the approach taken by writers in English on the two sides of the Atlantic. Some say it is a difference that stems from the fact that America possesses a continent of a magnitude about equal in scale to its neighboring seas, and a continent that is a body of land that, with its impenetrable forests and deserts and mountain ranges, is just as able to challenge and force endurance, of loneliness and privation, as is the sea itself. The British, on their side of the sea, inhabit a small and crowded set of islands, and their attitude to the ocean is not the same at all—for though Britain’s surrounding seas may be vast and cold and dangerous, they are for a romantic about the only means of escape, mountaintops aside, from the busy nuisances of land. So although the British regard the sea as something that is always there, close to hand, it also somehow manages to be precious and unique, something of a refuge. To Americans, on the other hand, the sea may be notionally very much more distant and foreign, but it has a stature that is of some equivalence to their continent, and so it is to be viewed with a greater degree of understanding and a more casual acceptance.
Thus the Briton more often than not ventures onto the sea as an act of great daring and comes home with a story of great moment. But when a Richard Henry Dana or a Joshua Slocum sails down from New York and into the wastes of the Sargasso or through the tidal rips off Cape Horn, he does so with the same happy fascination and wide-eyed innocence that he might have exploring the badlands of South Dakota or the deserts of Death Valley. As narrator he seems to get in the way less often; the sea is forefront, and it is addressed the more directly.
Joshua Slocum is my particular hero. I have long felt a connection: my first North American summer—the summer that followed my arrival in Montreal aboard the Empress of Britain, in 1963—was spent in a cottage on the Bay of Fundy, in Nova Scotia, and in these parts Joshua Slocum was a local-born hero, even though most of his later years were lived either at sea or down in Massachusetts, a state that today regards him as a favorite son, and is the state where I live now. It was in the Massachusetts waterfront town of Fairhaven—just across the Acushnet River from the great whaling town of New Bedford—that in 1892 Slocum rebuilt from scratch a worn-out thirty-six-foot sloop, the Spray, until the hard-nosed local whalers, to a man, pronounced her “A-1” and forecast that she had been built so well, of pasture oak and Georgia pine and with a mast of New Hampshire spruce, that she “would smash through ice.”
She rode at anchor “like a swan,” said Slocum, when first he floated her off the hard—and it was with his beloved Spray that he then proceeded to circumnavigate the globe, quite alone, and wrote a book, Sailing Alone Around the World, that remains perhaps the finest example of modern sea literature. There is a laconic quiet about the writing that is almost hypnotic in its evocation of the ocean. Here he is well out of Boston, heading across the North Atlantic:
I put in double reefs, and at 8.30 am turned out all reefs. At 9.40 pm I raised the sheen only of the light on the west end of Sable Island, which may also be called the Island of Tragedies. The fog, which till this moment had held off, now lowered over the sea like a pall. I was in a world of fog, shut off from the universe. I did not see any more of the light. By the lead, which I cast often, I found that a little after midnight I was passing the east point of the island, and should be clear of dangers of land and shoals. The wind was holding free, though it was from the foggy point, south-south-west. It is said that within a few years Sable Island has been reduced from forty miles in length to twenty, and that of three lighthouses built on it since 1880, two have been washed away and the third will soon be engulfed.
On the evening of July 5 the Spray, having steered all day over a lumpy sea, took it in her head to go without the helmsman’s aid. I had been steering southeast by south, but the wind hauling forward a bit, she dropped into a smooth lane, heading southeast, and making about eight knots her very best work. I crowded on sail to cross the track of liners without loss of time, and to reach as soon as possible the friendly Gulf Stream. The fog lifting before night, I was afforded a look at the sun just as it was touching the sea. I watched it go down and out of sight. Then I turned my face eastward and there, apparently at the very end of the bowsprit, was the smiling full moon rising out of the sea. Neptune himself coming over the bows could not have startled me more. “Good evening, sir,” I cried; “I’m glad to see you.” Many a long talk since then have I had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage.
Slocum’s is a plainsong kind of writing, honest and foursquare, and with a good New England Shaker simplicity to it. He was perhaps a little mad, but the affliction was a gentle one; and his writing demonstrates the author’s deep knowledge for the sea, his respect for its moods, and his fond hope for its fair treatment of his little boat. And it was a hope amply borne out: for three years after he had set out, almost to the day, Captain Slocum sailed little Spray into the harbor at Newport, Rhode Island—to rather little excitement, for the Span
ish-American War had the headlines—and to the beginnings of his writing career and his brief flirtation with fortune. A decade later, when his funds had run low, he took off once again—only this time he vanished, somewhere in the West Indies, presumably taken by the sea in circumstances that were specifically unknown but generally familiar. But his literature remains: any child not interested in Slocum’s book, wrote Arthur Ransome in a review, should be drowned at once.
Sailing alone around the world has since become almost a commonplace: there was Francis Chichester, and Robin Knox-Johnston, and the sadly mysterious affair of Donald Crowhurst (who cheated, went slowly mad, and drowned himself, all within the boundaries of the Atlantic), and since then about a hundred others. At the moment I am writing this—and hard on the heels of the news about the sad occurrence on the coast of Maine—comes the announcement that a boy of barely seventeen, by coincidence from the same small English town where I grew up, has sailed alone around the world as well. The Royal Navy sent a warship to greet him as he crossed the imaginary line between Ushant and the Lizard Point, from where such efforts are now timed and measured. That Joshua Slocum’s achievement aboard Spray—without a chronometer, and certainly without any kind of GPS—has evolved into a mere high-technology stunt, and one in which children can compete, seems, though perhaps only to the churlish of mind, some kind of a diminishment.
Economy of writing, like Slocum’s, is all too rare. This is hardly surprising, given the effort that any modern writer must now feel is essential to say something about the sea that has not already been said. But Rachel Carson—of whom the Blue Ocean Institute’s Carl Safina once wrote, her very name evokes the beatific luminosity of the canonized—recognized its occasional presence, and in an unlikely source. In a chapter of her classic work The Sea Around Us that was devoted to foul weather and furious waters, she quotes from one of the British Admiralty Pilots, the blue-backed volumes of coastal description that line the chartroom bulkheads of every ship that ever made passage to foreign shores. She writes:
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