The Paradoxal Compass

by Horatio Morpurgo

  Thomas Glass’s portrait still hangs at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, where he was a doctor from its foundation in 1741. His most acclaimed work was in the development of a smallpox vaccine. For this he was made an associate of the Royal Society of Medicine in Paris in 1776. But he found time, also, to write a six hundred-page commentary on an ancient Roman physician. He had mineral baths installed at the hospital and wrote about their medical benefits, as described by ancient authorities.

  How can I have been skipping in and out of Exeter all these years and never heard about this? I comfort myself that this is just the right moment to chance upon him. I wouldn’t have had the question before to which this collection is such an excellent answer. I made further appointments in the weeks that followed to see more.

  I haven’t space here to do justice to the riches of this archive. There is the magnificently illustrated second edition of Vesalius’ Fabric of the Human Body, which transformed the study of anatomy. There is an early edition of John Dee’s The Hieroglyphic Monad, a Hermetic treatise. But Conrad Gesner’s work is perhaps the most relevant here. Born in Zurich, Gesner was read all over Europe in the 1550s. He was a well-travelled man and a gifted linguist, in constant communication, like Clusius, with people right across the continent. There is perhaps no better illustration of this dispute between the old world and the emergent one than his History of Animals. It was a compendium of everything that had ever been written about each animal, by ancient zoologists, by historians, poets or medical men.

  The index of animal names is in five different European languages plus Greek, Hebrew, Persian and Arabic. Exeter’s copy belonged, in the 17th century, to a college in Moravia, where someone has added words in Hungarian here and there. The main text is, of course, in Latin, the international lingua franca of the day.

  With Gesner we are, unmistakably, in the thick of a transformative moment: the embattled state of understanding is everywhere. Sphynxes are to be found in Transylvania (why is it always Transylvania?) but for unicorns you have to go to India. A sea snake is shown in the act of devouring an entire ship, for scale. After the flying fishes come marine creatures which look just like little monks, then others which look like little bishops. And I suppose to most people in the 1550s, if you could believe that fish can fly, then why would you not also believe that the oceans are teeming with toy clergymen?

  Yet turn another page and Gesner is one of us entirely. His blackbird, say, is every inch the one I’m familiar with from my own chimney pot on summer evenings. The stork comes complete with a serpent struggling in its bill and may well be pointing a moral, but this is beyond question a real stork, too. Gesner’s birds of prey are especially jealous of this new freedom to be themselves. They puff out their feathers and glare indignantly. Escaped from that cage of heraldic poses which has held them so long captive, they are not about to be lured back into anybody’s coat of arms.

  Few witnesses to ‘the great unsettling’ are so eloquent about its effect upon relations with the natural world. But with him the dispute is in its early stages. Galileo was still under house arrest when Exeter’s copy of the book for which he was tried, A Dialogue Concerning the World’s Two Chief World Systems, was printed. His dialogue pits a defender of ancient authority against an advocate of the new learning. Johannes Kepler’s book about Copernicus, also in the collection, was also written in question and answer form.

  The Renaissance was an argument and this archive is a great place to eavesdrop on it. Any weekday you will find students or university teachers or independent scholars quietly consulting the collections. I didn’t think reading-rooms like this still existed. The glass-fronted book-cases are loaded with history and theology. At its far end sits the top half of Richard II’s head, in limestone. Stolen from the cathedral’s west front, he had already been replaced by the time this part of the original was recovered from a skip in Torrington. In his new context he appears as a dream king or as the illustration of a paradox, rising forever solemnly out of his window-sill and forever sinking back into it.

  PART THREE

  – Fetching the Future Home –

  THE BURNING OR GLITTERING LIGHT OF THE SEA

  Francis Fletcher’s narrative tells what it calls ‘A strange stoary of Birds’. I’ve already quoted a little of it. On arrival at the east coast of South America, what was still a small fleet was hit by severe storms, but they sailed on past the River Plate. There they came upon a ‘faire & large Iland’ which proved to be ‘a stoare house of victuals for a King’s army … such was the infinite stoare of Eggs & birdes.’

  Fletcher clearly made one of the party which went ashore. The birds were so thick on the ground that they could only respond by flying up to sit on the ‘heads shoulders armes’ of these unexpected visitors. In Fletcher’s account, this first phase is actually very touching, given that the reader knows, as the penguins clearly did not, what this landing party had come for.

  Once the killing starts the mood quickly changes: ‘no beating with Poles, cudgels swords & daggers would keep them ofe … till with pulling and killing we fainted.’ The mariners were beaten back by the sheer number of panicking birds, but Fletcher records that they later returned ‘to take revenge upon so barbarous adversaryes.’ Fletcher saw ‘barbarous adversaries’ in all the places where 16th-century Englishmen expected to find them. He tore down Catholic shrines. He may have enjoyed the music in Patagonia but he wrote up their religion as devil worship.

  So isn’t what I’ve attempted here a kind of special pleading? What if these lesser known figures of mine, so wrongly overlooked, were in fact fully implicated? I described earlier a large whale that was encountered on the second attempt to reach Asia by the north-east route. William Borough was in that 40-foot boat and would have been twenty at the time – then as now an impressionable age. Bowheads regularly reach 60 feet in length. A document he produced twenty years later would suggest that this early fright left its mark.

  The tone is no longer religious awe or any other kind. Its title is A note of all the necessary instruments and appurtenances belonging to the killing of the Whale. It details ‘how many harping irons, speares, cordes, axes, hatchets, knives, and other implements for the fishing’ are needed. How many ‘pullies to turn the Whale’, how many ‘furnaces to melt the Whale in.’ Another three decades would pass before the Royal Muscovy Company began to hunt commercially in these waters. But over the next three centuries, the British whaling industry would play its part in driving the northern bowhead whale to the verge of extinction.

  The darker side of this only gets darker but by denying it we make it available to those who then fasten upon this as the essence of the whole enterprise. Carl Schmitt, for example, the Nazi legal theorist, was a keen admirer of the Elizabethan explorers and much interested in their West Country connections. He thrilled to these ‘corsair capitalists’, all partners together in ‘the big business of plunder.’ He chose to see the rapacious nationalism and the nascent imperialism and nothing else. Schmitt, it’s worth recalling, was a strong influence on key advisers to the Putin administration, particularly on foreign relations. But this isn’t all about those pesky ‘Rooshans and Prooshans’: even that family of eccentrics I began with, living the simple life on their Devon hill-top, were at one time close to the British Fascist movement. Their motives in setting up that plaster statue may well have been ‘patriotic’ to a degree that would make most ‘patriots’ uneasy.

  It matters how we remember this. Drake took part in slaving voyages as a young man and this remains an indelible mark against his name. It’s also true he later returned to the Caribbean and made common cause with communities of escaped slaves. No doubt he did so from strategic considerations and out of self-interest. But he appears to have formed an enduring friendship with one of them: might this not suggest some possible awareness, at the very least, of a terrible wrong inflicted?

  As with the low points of his career, so with the highest: for popular historia
ns even today, the circumnavigation is almost invariably framed as a national achievement, then praised or condemned according to taste. But how ‘national’ was it in fact? Drake’s charts were Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish. The pilots he used were Portuguese, Greek or they were indigenous. There were French, Scottish, Basque, Afro-Caribbean, Dutch and Danish crew members.

  Drake’s cousin John, captured later by the Spanish, would describe Francis to the Inquisition as ‘a native of Menguen a hundred leagues from London.’ Was this deliberate nonsense or a translator’s struggle with some mumbled version of ‘Devon’? It certainly doesn’t sound much like Tavistock, which is where he was actually from. Scribal error or wily stratagem, being from ‘Menguen’ came nearer than anyone ever had to being from nowhere.

  Even as the explorers underwent these new forms of disorientation they were disagreeing about what it meant. Not as we might have, because they could not yet know what would follow from their actions. That ‘infinite stoare’ which they all saw, of penguins or whales or seals or cod, really did appear to be infinite. So of course the birds which rested on the ship in mid-ocean ‘had been comanded of God to yield themselves to be meat for us.’ No 16th-century chaplain had ever heard of anthropology: of course the natives are devil-worshippers. With the historical record, as with our own pasts, to remember is so often to look back on how we didn’t get it at the time. And be mocked by a voice which says: So you do now? What history teaches us is to hear that mocking voice.

  Back in 1556, the crew of the Searchthrift, throwing snow out of their ship ‘with shovels in August’, ran into storms. The ‘great and terrible abundance of ice which we saw with our eies’, soon forced the tiny vessel back. Tracking west at the end of August, they sailed straight through the waters where the Prirazlomnoye Platform is currently moored, its multiple wells ‘bringing on line’ the first oil from beneath the Arctic shelf. According to Gazprom, the millionth tonne of Russian Arctic oil was extracted in November 2015. The product is quite heavy but suitable for road-building, car tyres and pharmaceuticals.

  It was, notoriously, not friendly fishermen who greeted the Greenpeace activists when they set out to draw the world’s attention to this development. Thirty of them were arrested and then held at gunpoint as their ship was towed into Murmansk. In the charge of ‘piracy’ that was brought against them, the echo of an earlier age played round the edges of this story. The suggestion, though, that Greenpeace was trying to get its hands on Gazprom’s oil revenue was far-fetched even by the standards of Kremlin TV. Before the storm of international condemnation which followed, even the Arctic calculus of a Vladimir Putin was forced to retreat. The hostages were released.

  But this was not the first time Greenpeace’s attention had been drawn to the area. The population of Novaya Zemlya was relocated in 1954 and their island home, which bounds the Pechora Sea to the east, was renamed ‘The Novaya Zemlya Test Site’. This was Russia’s Maralinga or Bikini Atoll. More than two hundred nuclear detonations were carried out on the island, including the largest human-made explosion in history, carried out in 1961. Their combined force has been calculated to be more than a hundred times that of all the explosives used during the Second World War, the atom bombs included. Two nuclear submarines and an estimated 17,000 containers of radioactive waste are still lying in its offshore waters.

  That is all history now, of course. And it is forty years since Jan Patočka died in police custody. Gazprom continues to drill and the news cycle continues to spin. ‘Our’ version spins this story as Russia vs the rest, and little wonder. But other test sites in other ‘remote’ corners of the earth tell their own tales. British, Dutch and American oil companies were among the most eager to lend their Russian counterparts assistance in the Arctic.

  It was in these very waters that the earliest explorers, equipped with the latest technology, encountered great whales and later fatefully speculated about how oil might most efficiently be extracted from them. That conjunction may raise questions too knotty for the newsroom but are they therefore to be left unasked?

  What Greenpeace and the world were encountering in the Pechora Sea in 2013 is a problem deeply rooted in historical paradox. And to that paradox the news cycle is worse than a poor guide. It often seems to function, rather, as a purpose-built distraction, designed to delay (or, ideally, to cancel) our ever posing the real questions at all. ‘We speak of the danger as if it were not ourselves,’ as Adrienne Rich once put it.

  To this day, to take another of my ‘unjustly neglected’ figures, the British claim John Davis as the discoverer of the Falkland Islands. Even the doughtiest of UK passport holders must concede that he was hopelessly lost at the time. And he can hardly be held responsible for everything that has followed. But did he or did he not also captain the first expedition of the East India Company? He did. And as it happens he also wrote about what he thought the ultimate purpose of these voyages was or ought to be.

  In a treatise on the art of navigation, which he returned to his home by the Dart to write in the 1590s, he argued that it was a practise both ‘speculative’ and ‘mechanicall’. Most of the treatise is given over to the latter, to explaining the new technology – Davis was the inventor of a new kind of quadrant. He explained not only how such devices worked but why they mattered, too. By the ‘exceeding great hazards’ of those who put to sea, he wrote, ‘excellent benefites are atchieved … the forme of the earth, the quantities of Countries, the diuersitie of nations and the natures of Zones, Climats, Countries and people, are apparently made known unto us.’

  Navigation, he wrote, echoing Robert Norman, ‘is the meane whereby Countreyes are discouered, and communitie drawne between nation and nation …’ Of the North-West passage he writes specifically: ‘The benefits which may grow by this discovery are copious, and of two sorts – a benefit spirituall and a benefit corporall. Both which … by the laws of God and nature we are bound to regard …’

  Is it for us to convict him of hypocrisy? Davis’s references, you might argue, to the ‘great store of whales’ he encountered in the North Atlantic, these are a better guide. He wasn’t expressing naïve admiration. When he said ‘store’, he knew, as Fletcher did, exactly what he was saying. And I agree. He probably did. When he brought back quantities of cod from the same expedition, he clearly meant to attract investors. He assumed that the world’s abundance was inexhaustible. And we know now that he was wrong. But the real point for us is surely a question and the question is, for we who do now know, what shall we make of that knowledge?

  In February 2015, two women walking on a beach in the Isles of Scilly watched and photographed a 25-foot whale close inshore. They were concerned at first that it might be stranded, but after fifteen minutes or so it swam away. They had noticed the whale had no dorsal fin and the images were circulated. It was identified by local naturalists as a sperm whale. But when the photographs were sent to a specialist, the shape of the head and the jaw-line seemed wrong to him. He sent them on to colleagues in North America, who confirmed that this was in fact a young bowhead whale.

  That this creature was unfamiliar to British naturalists is only to be expected: this was in fact its first recorded sighting in UK waters. They are normally found in the high Arctic but semi-fossilised remains in North Sea sediments show they were present there at the end of the last Ice Age. So this sighting was the first sign of their presence this far south for around 11,000 years. A second was sighted close inshore off mainland Cornwall in May 2016 and probably the same one reappeared off Brittany shortly afterwards.

  You might be wondering why, at a time of warming oceans, such a creature would head south? It may be that as the Arctic ice retreats, so zooplankton have found ideal conditions, so that baleen whales, like the bowhead, are, paradoxically, flourishing.

  Bowheads can live for up to two hundred years and demonstrated this in spectacular, if gruesome fashion, when an iron arrowhead dating from the 19th century was found embedded deep inside the tissues o
f a whale as it was butchered by Inuit in 2007. Their genome has been sequenced, uniquely among sea mammals, for any clues it may offer to the secret of their longevity – they are, after the Greenland shark, the longest-lived creatures on earth. These visitors to European waters now, in other words, could be only three or four generations on from the giants that so unnerved Davis and Borough. What they could not have known, we do. So what, then, do we make of these sightings?

  Before we make anything of them, another, less mysterious, conjecture also belongs in this mix. Most of the major American and European oil companies own licenses to explore and exploit the sea bed off Northeastern Greenland. Over the last five years, therefore, the usual habitat of bowhead whales has been exposed for the first time to ‘seismic blasting’. This is carried out by specialist vessels along a 5000 mile ‘survey line’. Essentially each vessel tows an array of air guns which repeatedly blast low frequency sound-waves at the sea bed. By ‘reading’ the echo they can detect oil-bearing sediments. Above water each of those blasts would be perceived by humans as about sixty times louder than a shot gun 1 metre away.

  If we shudder, now, at William Borough and his ‘necessary instruments’, at John Davis and his ‘great store’ of whales, what in our own times comes closest to such attitudes? Perhaps what we should be marvelling at is that the appearance of such a creature made so little impression. In the news economy, it was swiftly graded as at best an intriguing snippet. Local story. In any world intent upon making sense, surely those sightings would have been just the occasion to wonder how far those bad old assumptions have not gone away at all but simply camouflaged themselves? Or are we perverse and quibbling heretics for even suggesting such a possibility?