The commission initially made fishery surveys using navy vessels or revenue cutters borrowed from the Treasury Department, but by 1883 was operating two of its own ships, the first vessels ever designed for the purpose of marine research. The Fish Hawk, a 157-foot steam-and-sail powered schooner, conducted dredging and trawling operations along the eastern seaboard and served as a mobile hatchery. The Albatross, a majestic, white-hulled behemoth, was a 234-foot brigantine with twin two-hundred-horsepower steam engines and could carry more than 7,500 square feet of sail.
With a cruising speed of nearly ten knots the Albatross could go anywhere in the world, and it did. The first government vessel equipped with electric lighting from stem to stern—Thomas Edison designed the generator—it also carried submersible electric lights for attracting marine life at night. There were two well-equipped laboratories on board and dredging gear on deck that could collect specimens from the depths of the open ocean. The Albatross made collecting expeditions along the East Coast, out into the Atlantic, down through the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, and into the Pacific. The ship traveled to the Galápagos Islands, Alaska, the Philippines, and into the Sea of Japan. Over a span of several decades, research done onboard the Albatross laid the foundation of modern marine biology. Oceanic Ichthyology, the 1895 classic on deep-sea fish by George Brown Goode and Tarleton H. Bean, was based mainly on collections made aboard the Albatross.
The commission continued to grow. It added the maintenance of food fish in inland waters to its duties and eventually established ninety stocking hatcheries around the country. In 1887, the Commission of Fish and Fisheries established a Division of Scientific Inquiry, and in 1902 the commission itself was reorganized as the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and moved into the Department of Commerce. In 1911 the bureau landed its most far-flung responsibility: jurisdiction over the Pribilof Islands, a tiny volcanic archipelago two hundred miles west of Alaska in the Bering Sea that was home to a few hundred people of Russian descent, about two hundred thousand fur seals, and an economy based almost entirely on seal hunting. Through prudent management of both the people and the seals, the seal population had steadily risen to more than 1.5 million by the time Carson joined the bureau in 1935.
Carson’s boss was Elmer Higgins, who headed what was by then called the Division of Scientific Inquiry Respecting Food Fishes. Every year, Higgins prepared a long report on the research activities of bureau personnel, including studies and findings published by the bureau itself, as well as papers and articles written for scholarly journals and the general press. In the mid-1930s, Higgins’s reports usually lamented the limited resources that curtailed all research activities and shut some down entirely. During the Depression, the bureau had come to depend increasingly on cooperative research programs with various state agencies and academic institutions. In 1936 the total budget for Higgins’s division was $109,000, about half of which was spent directly on field and lab investigations.
The annual summary emphasized emerging knowledge and the importance of conservation in promoting sustainable commercial and sport fishing. Higgins even occasionally used the still uncommon term “ecology” in discussing the study of specific marine environments—although the bureau did not hold all of the life forms composing such communities in equal regard, as some that preyed on commercially valuable species were regarded as “pests.” Between 1935 and 1937, for example, the bureau received a special appropriation of $125,000—more than its entire budget for a single year—to develop a chemical poison for the “eradication” of starfish in oyster farming operations.
Efforts to control or eliminate predatory species were consistent with the bureau’s mission as Higgins construed it—a mission that did not differ from the quest to understand and then subdue and dominate nature that had existed since the dawn of civilization. In his 1936 report, Higgins explained that the “mastery and utilization of the forces of nature” arose from the knowledge gained through research that did not necessarily have such utilitarian purposes to begin with. Knowledge, he wrote, permits nature to be “harnessed, controlled, and directed to economic advantage.” When the practical applications of marine research aren’t immediately apparent, Higgins said, such knowledge nonetheless makes “permanent contributions to social progress” even if it takes time to figure out what those contributions are.
Carson seems to have looked upon the great wealth of scientific research suddenly at her fingertips in a completely different way. For one thing, her assignment—how glorious to have one again—was to write about science. What could be better? It was like getting paid to do homework, the very thing she was best at. As she went about the work of writing short, easily consumed radio scripts, the storyteller inside her came alive again. In early 1936, just months after starting at the bureau, after having her mother neatly type up the manuscript, Carson sent off a long, loosely written piece on Chesapeake Bay shad fishing to the Baltimore Sun—which promptly bought it. Carson’s first newspaper story, “It’ll Be Shad Time Soon,” ran in the Baltimore Sun Sunday Magazine on March 1, 1936. Carson got a check for twenty dollars.
Over the next four years, Carson became a frequent contributor to the Sun, writing on a variety of wildlife subjects and being paid ten or twenty dollars for each. These stories involved little conventional journalism—Carson was not an interviewer or investigator by nature—and were more often than not about places she had never been and things she had never witnessed. She wrote about tuna fishing off Nova Scotia and oyster farming in the Chesapeake Bay. She wrote about how duck numbers were gradually increasing after years of wetland drainage and how overhunting had decimated waterfowl populations. She wrote about problems with starlings overwintering in the Baltimore area. Returning to one of her favorite subjects, Carson wrote a piece about eels and their incomprehensible migration from the Sargasso Sea to the very same coastal bays and streams from which their parents had come, but which the new generation could recognize only by instinct. “Chesapeake Eels Seek the Sargasso Sea” ran in the Sunday Sun on October 9, 1938.
Carson also sold a couple of stories to the Richmond Times-Dispatch Sunday Magazine. In “Fight for Wildlife Pushes Ahead,” an ambitious, sweeping piece about the former abundance of North American wildlife before European settlement and the long, steady decline in animal populations that had followed, Carson’s consideration of these losses and the efforts then under way to reverse the trend hinted at the depth of her affection for the natural world:
But what of wildlife today? Government services whose business it is to know conditions paint a general picture of scarcity and depletion. The last heath hen perished on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in 1933, and the passenger pigeon is now a creature of legend. Salmon are virtually gone from the rivers of New England, and the Atlantic coast shad fisheries have declined some 80 percent within a half a century. Waterfowl flights fell to their lowest point in all their history in 1933 and 1934, and although government regulations plus the establishment of sanctuaries have resulted in some improvement, the plight of certain species, notably canvasback and redhead duck, remains serious. The ranks of elk were so thinned by 1904 that domestication was urged as the only means of preventing their extinction. Although pronghorn antelope are now on the increase within refuges and reservations, they are reduced from some 30,000,000 or 40,000,000 to about 60,000. Mountain goats, moose, and Grizzly bear are also on the wane.
In July 1936, Carson was appointed to a full-time position at the bureau as a junior aquatic biologist, and she was sworn in the following month. The job mainly involved writing reports on fisheries conservation issues—but also included some lab work in making age determinations of fish. Carson’s salary was $2,000 a year.
FOUR
The English Connection and the Ocean Deep
Christmas Eve 1914 was clear and cold in Flanders. Frost glittered on the no-man’s-land that lay between the opposing lines forming the western front, a quagmire of mud and barbed wire and stalemate that r
an from near Dunkirk on the English Channel south to a point fifty miles northeast of Paris, then east toward the German border. On one side were the British, backed by Belgian and French soldiers. On the other side, in many places close enough so that the men in the trenches could call out to their enemies, were German and Prussian forces.
As the holiday season approached there had been talk of a cessation of hostilities, but leaders on both sides worried this would destroy fighting morale and undertook to prevent fraternization between the combatants. In mid-December, the British command had put forward a series of attacks along the line in hopes of heating up the stalled conflict, but these mainly produced shocking casualties—many by friendly fire—that only furthered the misery and doubt in the trenches. Then, on the night before Christmas, the fighting stopped. Up and down the lines, candles were lit on the German side, and makeshift Christmas trees appeared on the parapets. The Germans began singing carols, and the British joined in. Before sunrise the artillery batteries were unattended, rifles had been laid down, and soldiers from both sides armed only with food and cigarettes and liquor had emerged from the trenches to meet in no-man’s-land, where they sang together and exchanged gifts. Handwritten signs went up with the words “You no fight, we no fight.” So it went through Christmas Day and, in some places on the front, for several more days after that.
And then the war resumed.
Among the participants in what came to be known as the Christmas Truce was a gangly nineteen-year-old private from suburban London named Henry Williamson. The son of a stern bank clerk, Williamson was a sensitive young man. He had large eyes and sometimes wore a trim mustache that ended at the corners of his mouth. Williamson had been at the front for just over a month and had witnessed, as he put it in a letter home, “a bitter and bloody struggle” that added up to “some of the most desperate fighting of the war.” The brief pause in hostilities at Christmas caused Williamson to question the war, which suddenly seemed to him futile. Having met the enemy on friendly terms—Williamson had shaken hands with his German counterparts and merrily smoked a cigar with them—he discovered that soldiers on both sides were much the same: expendable pawns in a game played by politicians and generals. Many of the German soldiers Williamson met seemed to be waiters in civilian life. They were like himself, Williamson thought, inasmuch as they believed in their cause and yet could see its folly. Eventually, Williamson would be convinced that peace, not war, should be the natural state of the European community of nations—a conviction that would lead him down divergent paths, one into the English countryside and the other into the darkest realms of politics.
The trenches on the front—which in some areas had been dug into reclaimed swampland that was below sea level—were watery lagoons of filth, mud, and rotting flesh. Soldiers sometimes had to sleep standing up. Only a few weeks after the Christmas Truce, Williamson came down with dysentery and had to be shipped home to England. By March he was better, though he remained weak and admitted to nerves that left him feeling “joggy.” That spring Williamson got accepted for training as an officer, and in March 1917 he returned to the front as a lieutenant in the machine gun corps. Williamson again saw heavy fighting, and after being injured and falling ill during two months of artillery bombardments and poison gas attacks, Williamson was again evacuated back to England. He recovered and was returned to the war once more in the spring of 1918. It’s unclear what happened to him during his final three weeks of fighting back at the front, but he was “shaky” when he was sent home to convalesce again.
Williamson had begun a novel about his wartime experiences during one of his furloughs home, and after the war he devoted himself in equal measures to writing and tearing around the countryside on a Norton motorcycle, a passion that would later morph into a love of sporty motorcars. Sometime in the summer of 1919 Williamson discovered a slim memoir called The Story of My Heart by the English essayist and nature writer Richard Jefferies.
Raised on a farm halfway between London and Bristol, Jefferies from an early age indulged in frequent, solitary communion with the outdoors that began as an enthusiasm for hunting and tramping the countryside and evolved into a solemn reverence for nature. His reputation rested mainly on his nature essays, including the intense and revealing Story of My Heart, which he wrote as an autobiography. Published in 1883, just four years before Jefferies’s death, the book is an account of the author’s love of the natural world that is at times exquisite and in other places overripe with mystical mumbo jumbo. In the opening pages, Jefferies explains the connection to nature that illuminated his innermost feelings as a young man, when he would make a daily hike to the summit of a hilltop from which he could survey the English countryside:
Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight. I thought of the earth’s firmness—I felt it bear me up: through the grassy couch there came an influence as if I could feel the great earth speaking to me. I thought of the wandering air—its pureness, which is its beauty; the air touched me and gave me something of itself. I spoke to the sea: though so far, in my mind I saw it, green at the rim of the earth and blue in deeper ocean; I desired to have its strength, its mystery and glory.
And so on.
Jefferies was an odd man, tall but stooped, enthusiastic but humorless. As a youth, he grew his hair long and wandered about with his gun and his deepening thoughts, much to the consternation of his neighbors. By the time he came to write The Story of My Heart Jefferies had acquired a set of unusual beliefs. He thought that all accidents and diseases were preventable—that the innumerable tragedies that befall human beings were the result of carelessness and stupidity. He saw no reason why everyone should not live long past the age of one hundred. He did not believe in God. He did not believe that things “happen for the best.”
On the contrary, Jefferies was stricken by the knowledge that good people often endure nightmarish lives, while those who do evil are just as often rewarded for their misdeeds. “Human suffering,” he wrote, “is so great, so endless, so awful that I can hardly write of it.” He hated being indoors and disliked all quotidian activities, which he thought useless. His natural companions, he wrote, were “the earth, and sun, and sea, and stars by night.” Jefferies believed that we are on our own in the universe and that if human affairs could be properly directed it would be by some wise and benevolent dictator.
And yet, in a rapturous passage in The Story of My Heart, Jefferies confessed that despite the countless cruelties of existence, his hunger for life was insatiable and the one thing he wanted was more of it all: “I burn life like a torch. The hot light shot back from the sea scorches my cheek—my life is burning in me. The soul throbs like the sea for a larger life. No thought which I have ever had has satisfied my soul.”
Some readers found The Story of My Heart inspiring, while others thought it irreverent and dangerous. For Henry Williamson, scarred in equal measures by the terror and the folly of war, The Story of My Heart was profound—a true search for meaning in life that was as right and noble as what had happened to him on a night before Christmas in Flanders. Reading the book was a transforming experience, one effect of which was to convince Williamson that he should commit himself to writing. And he did. In the coming years, Williamson’s output swelled—by 1924 he had produced five books. He’d also been intrigued by a nature story he read during the same period, J. C. Tregarthen’s Life Story of an Otter. Convinced he could do better and having moved to rural Devon—“Devonshire” some people still called it affectionately—on that southwestern arm of Britain that separates the Atlantic from the English Channel, Williamson began spending time with (of all things) an otter hunting club. In 1927 he published the book that would make him famous, Tarka the Otter.
A vivid and at times brutal portrayal of nature, Tarka was a peculiar book. Almost a genre unto itself—essentially the biography of a wild animal—Tarka offered a warm portrayal of the English countryside,
brought to life by Williamson’s powers of observation and a knack for imagining how the world might look and feel to an energetic and playful nonhuman being that divides its life between land and water. But the story is grim, too. Nature is remorseless, a beautiful world also filled with privation and loss, mortal enemies and ultimately death. Williamson did not stint in depicting the daunting situations that would confront an otter in its struggle to survive and raise another generation of otters. Not the least of these difficulties was the endless pursuit of Tarka by local hunting parties and their packs of dogs. In the story’s harrowing climactic sequence, Tarka is chased for ten agonizing hours before being swept away by the river in a fight to the death.
A few months after Tarka was published, Williamson received an unusual critique of the book from one of Britain’s strangest but most eminent public figures—the celebrated soldier, hero of Arabia, and author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence’s message was in the form of a letter, more than four thousand words long and in handwriting that Williamson said was “smaller than ordinary typewriting.” Lawrence, under the mistaken impression that this was Williamson’s first book, thought Tarka was an exhilarating “achievement,” but offered numerous page-by-page suggestions for improving Williamson’s style, which Lawrence felt was overly dependent on local jargon and generally too abrupt and “staccato.” Williamson, who might have taken offense, was instead grateful—and undoubtedly awed that such a famous man had taken an interest in his book. In a subsequent edition of Tarka, Williamson even made some of the changes that Lawrence had suggested—though he later thought better of this and returned future editions to the original language. Meanwhile, Williamson and Lawrence became friends, though they wrote letters far more often than they met face-to-face over the course of the next eight years.
On a Farther Shore Page 6
