Atlantic

by Simon Winchester

  The other group of modelers are the supporters of introversion, and in this scheme, which is somewhat more complicated, the Atlantic, after a period of expansion, would suddenly begin to shrink because subduction zones would form along the eastern seaboards of both North and South America. Lines of volcanoes would start to erupt off New York City, Halifax, and Rio de Janeiro—though both places, and all other centers of human habitation, would by this time have long since ceased to exist—and the ocean floor would start to vanish beneath the American continent. Europe and Africa would at the same time continue to collide, eventually squeezing the Mediterranean to nothing; Baja California would slide northward; Antarctica would head north. In some two hundred million years from now North America would collide with Africa, and South America would slide itself around the tip of southern Africa, heading northeastward until the moment when it collided with Southeast Asia.

  It is this scenario that involves, at least in theory, the tantalizing prospect of the collision of two lighthouses.

  • • •

  The tip of South America, where the Andes plunges into the two oceans that the mountains separate, is a place of vivid and lonely beauty, and of lives lived under the impress of endless strong and stirringly cold westerly gales. Cape Horn—a low brown island less distinguished in appearance than its history suggests—dominates the perception of the region, but there are also the snow-trimmed peaks of Tierra del Fuego, the dusty plains of Patagonia, the windswept estancias where sheep huddle against hedges and where bushes of calafate tremble in the storms; the corrugated iron-roofed frigorificos, where farmers and their gauchos would bring their lambs for slaughter and shipment, the bleached bones of long-dead whales lying along the shores of the Strait of Magellan, the bleached spars of long-lost clipper ships lying in the bays to which they ran, fatefully, on failing to double the Horn—these are what makes the southern extension of the Andes so frightful, and alluring.

  Lying twenty miles off the mainland’s eastern tip there is an island—Isla de Los Estados, the locals call it, the Spanish translation for Staten Island, since this elongate jumble of sharp peaks and deep valleys and stunted beech trees and sphagnum bogs and the ruins of old prison camps was first discovered and named by the Dutch, for the states general that directed the expedition. This is the other Staten Island; and while the one settled by the Dutch in New York is now a successful sprawling suburb with half a million people, Staten Island in South America has no one permanently living there at all. It is desolate, forbidding, quite inhospitable to man. A succession of lighthouses built there were abandoned because of the gales; even a sturdy military prison erected there in 1899 lasted only three years before being damaged by storms, provoking riots and escapes. Nowadays it has been declared a wildlife refuge for its colonies of Magellanic penguins, and a small detachment of Argentine sailors is sent there on forty-five-day rotations: they roundly dislike it, with its foul weather and inhospitable terrain.

  Jules Verne had a peculiar lifelong fascination with Isla de los Estados, though he never visited. He wrote his final novel—Lighthouse at the End of the World—about a rollicking piece of gangsterish behavior on the island, and it centered on the dousing of the light and the luring onto the island’s rocks of passing merchantmen. A century later a Parisian navigation enthusiast named André Bronner, in a delightful flash of Gallic madness, rebuilt the last of these lights, which had fallen down after being abandoned. He said later that he realized how important this single dim flicker of a light had been to all the great clippers and steamships making their way around the Horn in darkness; he developed a blinding obsession with the romance of this tiny gleam in the wilds of nowhere and managed to raise money from rich Parisian friends to build a replacement.

  It took Bronner and seven similarly deranged colleagues two long midsummer months to build the new light. He took pâté and cognac and cases of decent burgundies to sustain the party, and employed a composer to write a symphony at the end of the world, which was played on the wild March day in 1998 when the light was handed over to the Argentine navy. The sailors who man the base now attend to the light, a modest affair that is powered by solar panels, requires little maintenance, and like most of the Staten Island lights that preceded it, is as a warning to Cape Horners all but useless. The predecessors were too small, and for some curious reason were all built behind obscuring mountain ranges. Bronner’s new version has been rendered of limited value by the advent of GPS navigation, which keeps even the most delicate vessels on secure passage for a transit of the Cape.

  So far as this story of the Atlantic’s life span is concerned, the symbolic importance of the Staten Island light goes well beyond its usefulness. For the headland on which it is built—the island’s northeasternmost cliff, just below Mount Richardson and Pickersgill Point, which stand as testament to the early British explorers of the region—is likely to be the first part of the Americas to collide with Asia, once the world is done with its predicted orgy of moving.

  Two hundred fifty million years from now the continents will have coalesced into another Pangaea, and the only internal body of water will be the stagnant relic of the Indian Ocean, the Capricorn Sea. The Atlantic Ocean, 440 million years after its birth, will have vanished clear away.

  If the mathematical models are correct, in a little less than two hundred million years, the site of the light at Mount Richardson will be slowly edging toward the place where a light now stands at the most southerly point of the Malay Peninsula. This is Raffles Lighthouse, built in 1854, and lighting both the entrance to Singapore harbor and the Strait of Malacca. But when Raffles meets Richardson, when Singapore meets Staten Island, then, and finally, the long and slowly squeezed waters of the Atlantic Ocean will have been compelled to go elsewhere. The maps that Christopher Scotese creates show a small inland sea bordered by India, Arabia, East Africa, Argentina, and Sumatra; but this is hardly a sea, will in all likelihood not last, and has the melancholy distinction only of holding the last captive molecules of what was once the oldest and—in terms of the civilizations around it—the grandest ocean on the planet.

  The Atlantic Ocean was born 190 million years ago; and given the mechanics and the timing of its likely death, it will survive as an ocean for maybe another 180 million years. Its total life span will thus be getting on for 400 million years—years almost entirely given over to gigantic geological dramas, to climatic phenomena on a scale barely possible to imagine, to the evolution and extinction of thousands of kinds of animals, birds, fish, plants, and single-celled beings, and of all stages in between.

  For maybe 200,000 of those 400 million years, humankind existed and flourished on the shores of the ocean. He and she and their kin first populated the east of the sea, then swept around and across the landmasses on the far side of the world before appearing on the west side of the same ocean some thousands of years later. Humans were powerfully afraid of the ocean for centuries, assumed it represented the edge of the known world and was populated by terrifying monsters. They ventured into it timidly and retreated from it swiftly—and then finally they crossed it, from east to west, in the eleventh century of modern recorded time, and in doing so found that far from being the edge of all the world, the Atlantic was now a bridge to an entirely new one.

  It took four more centuries to find it properly. But once the existence of that new world had become a clear and undeniable certainty, once it was accepted that the water just crossed was indeed a newly known ocean, then this body of water, three thousand miles wide in the north, four thousand in the south, and rather less than two thousand at the ocean’s waist between Africa and Brazil, became the central stage for all manner of humanity’s most stupendous endeavors and amazements.

  The ocean became, in a sense, the cradle of modern Western civilization—the inland sea of the civilized Western world, the home of a new pan-Atlantic civilization itself. All manner of discoveries, inventions, realizations, ideas, the mosaic of morsels by which humanki
nd advanced, were made in and around or by way of some indirect connection with the sea. Parliamentary democracy. A homeland for world Jewry. Long-distance radio communication. The Vinland Map. The suppression of slavery. The realization of continental drift and plate tectonics. The Atlantic Charter. The British Empire. The knarr, the curragh, the galleon, the ironclad, and the battleship. The discovery of longitude. Codfish. Erskine Childers. Winslow Homer. The convoy system. St. Helena. Puerto Madryn. Debussy. Monet. Rachel Carson. Eriksson, Columbus, Vespucci. The Hanseatic League. Ernest Shackleton. The Black Ball Line. The submarine telegraph cable. The Wright brothers, Alcock and Brown, Lindbergh. Beryl Markham. The submarine. Ellis Island. Hurricanes. Atlantic Creek. Icebergs. Titanic. Lusitania. Torrey Canyon. The Eddystone Light. Bathybius. Prochlorococcus. Shipping containers. NATO. The polders. The Greenland ice cap. The United Kingdom. Brazil, Argentina, Canada. The United States of America.

  All these, and a thousand things and people and beasts and events and occurrences and people, go to make up today’s Atlantic. They act as a reminder of the immense complexity of an ocean that has been central and pivotal to the human story. They are all now part of a new continuum of study that has come to be known in recent years as Atlantic History, a discipline now widely taught, and taken so seriously that there is now a history of itself, a history of a history, so critical has the idea of an Atlantic identity become to both the contemporary and the future world.

  But such grand ideas, though necessary meat and drink to the academic world, can be elusive, fugitive concepts to those who merely like to stand on an Atlantic cliff top and contemplate the awful majesty of the sea rolling and unrolling away to the horizon. To them—to us, I would rather say, for this account has been a story told for those who regard the sea less as a concept than as a capricious and wondrous confection of water and waves and wind, of animals and birds, of ships and man—I would offer just a final story. It is a story of a forgotten man, and his small and lonely struggle with this sea, and a struggle in which the sea, as always, won. It involves a shipwreck, and a rescue, and a lonely death.

  • • •

  Perhaps we all have a secret wreck story to cherish—a saga to think about in the warmth of a much-eiderdowned bed, maybe, while a cold rain is lashing down on the windowpanes, and the trees are thrashing, and one prays silently to oneself for any sailors out on a wild night like this. My own came to me in a book I once read. It was just such a think-of-the-sailors night—cold and exceptionally wild—and I was staying on a lonely estancia in southern Patagonia, huddled beside a log fire of baronial dimension, a hot whisky to hand. I was reading by a dim library light the extraordinary story of wreck and ruin that had taken place half a century before on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, five thousand miles away.

  It was the story of a heroic rescue that had taken place on a distant Atlantic seashore where legend had long said the rescue of shipwrecked sailors was quite unthinkable: among the rocks, reefs, and utterly waterless sands of that corner of South-West Africa known as the Skeleton Coast.

  The first of the ships that had been wrecked, and which was the ultimate cause of the drama that unfolded back in that southern summer of 1942, was the MV Dunedin Star—seven years old, a 13,000-ton refrigerated cargo carrier, handsome without being graceful, Liverpool built. She had a crew of sixty-four and twenty-one passengers, most of them Londoners escaping the bombs.

  She was on passage southbound. It was a Sunday night, November 29, when she, imprudently hugging the coast to avoid prowling German U-boats, struck the Clan Alpine Shoal (marked on the Admiralty charts of the day with the ominous letters PD, position doubtful). The collision ruptured her hull below the waterline, and the captain had little choice but to beach her. He managed to get out an SOS call, and then the power failed. Before the lifeboat motor broke down some forty-two of his passengers and crew made it through the treacherous surf and onto the utterly inhospitable shore. The rest were compelled to stay aboard.

  Over the next few days four ships arrived to help with the rescue. One, a Walvis Bay tug named the Sir Charles Elliott (named for a colonial grandee), also ran aground. Two of its crew were drowned trying to swim ashore. One was the first mate, a Scotsman named Angus Macintyre; his body was never found. The other was a Namibian, Matthias Koraseb, who is buried ashore: it is his ghost that supposedly haunts this wilderness, his cries said to be the howling winds.

  The other three ships tried gamely to help those left onshore, and while the surviving men hunted for driftwood and tried vainly to fish, the women and children huddled out of the sun in a makeshift shelter. The crews offshore tried to float rafts of food and water toward the coast, but most of them were lost, swept northward by the fierce current, or else upended and lost in the raging surf. Then one by one the rescue ships, running out of food and water themselves, left, their distressed captains flashing messages of good luck by heliograph.

  Air force planes next tried to help, at first dropping food and water from the air—but all the early packages promptly burst, leaving the survivors aghast as the precious potential water supplies exploded uselessly into the sand. Two of these planes, heavy Ventura bombers loaded with supplies, then landed near the party, both getting bogged down in the dunes. After four days of digging one of them managed to lumber out and get away—only to crash into the sea half an hour later. Its crew survived, managed to swim ashore, and had to be rescued themselves.

  Unknown to all, another rescue party of police and soldiers was making its way painfully by land from Windhoek, five hundred miles south. The conditions were appalling: the sand and the salt pans with their fragile crusts meant that on some days the eight-vehicle convoy made only two or three miles. But slowly, carefully, the rescuers crept north—until finally, after twenty-six days of unimaginable suffering in the blistering and waterless heat, the party was reached. All of them, even an infant who had gone temporarily sand blind, were alive; and all of them reached safety, arriving at a military hospital down south, appropriately, on Christmas Eve.

  The story was suppressed for the rest of the war: the colonial authorities were keen to keep the German navy ignorant of Allied military dispositions along the West African coastline. The drama was never related in full until 1958, when a South African naval historian named John Marsh found the official papers and wrote Skeleton Coast, the book that so captivated me in Patagonia all those years later.

  So I decided there and then that one day I would travel to the Skeleton Coast—a place so named because of all the skeletons, of both men and the vessels in which they had wrecked—to see if I could find a trace of the Dunedin Star. Some years later I found a commercial ship to take me east from Patagonia, by way of the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, and Tristan da Cunha, and eventually to Cape Town; from there I flew to Windhoek in Namibia, and finally in a two-engined Cessna flew up to a tiny tented camp in the middle of the northern desert, close to the Angolan frontier.

  The Skeleton Coast’s waves roared away in the distance. The place was said to be entirely deserted: just a scattering of seal colonies, packs of predatory jackals, endless miles of dunes, morning fogs rolling in from the ocean, the eternal cold surf. Armed with maps and a GPS fix of the wreck site, I set off the next day with two local guides. We traveled in a large and very battered old Land Rover, a car that had twin gearboxes and was equipped with differential locks and the ability to inflate its own tires and all the other necessities of deep desert travel. The night we left was pitch-black, except for a brilliant carpet of stars above us. It was also cold, and until we reached the sea completely silent, except for a faint moaning of the wind and a very distant rumble of the ocean.

  After winding and bumping through the sands for hours, hauling ourselves up and over mountain spurs and ridges, sometimes following half-imagined tracks left by earlier wanderers, but usually driving on virgin, sea-washed beach sand or on spurs of blistering granite, we came to a place I recognized. It was a headland named Cape Fria,
with an immense colony of fur seals, stinking and noisy, and surrounded by a cordon of yellow-eyed jackals that were busily engaged in carrying away the weaker seal pups. The cape had been a landmark, mentioned in the book, since the Dunedin Star had stranded no more than fifteen miles from here. But the men and women in their shelter, who had no radio, never knew how close they were to it and thus to a potential source of food, for a seal is an easy thing to hunt and very nutritious when cooked. It was probably a blessing they did not know: in the searing heat, and without water, they never could have walked to the cape. It would have remained tantalizingly out of their reach, doing terrible damage to their ever-flagging morale.

  Heat waves were now beginning to rise from the desert. It was over ninety degrees, the summer air harsh and dry. The fog over the cold morning ocean had now vanished, and the fast-climbing sun was a coppery disk against an almost white sky. We passed over thousands of ghost crabs that scuttled in great armadas down to the water’s edge. There were flocks of seabirds, scores of skeletons of stranded whales, occasional wooden cable drums and buried carboys and spars of wood. And then, half an hour north of Cape Fria, a couple of miles after we had passed the northern tip of a long and brilliant white salt pan, I spotted something: two objects that began to loom larger and larger in our field of view.

  One turned out to be a half-buried metal cylinder, much corroded, about forty feet long, its upper part eaten away, a metal rod spearing its way up from its midsection toward the sky. To the northeast and southwest of this enormous object were rows of much-decayed wooden boxes, a number of what appeared to be hatch covers, small caches of bayonet-mounted lightbulbs (of a design once peculiar to Britain, I knew), and a scattering of bottles. All told, the site was about three hundred feet long.