by Chris James
Pilot’s aunts had never crossed him, because his insolent wit was more than they could deal with. Although they clothed and fed him with a clumsy virtuosity unique to elderly childless females, they moved mountains to avoid spending the time of day with him. They didn’t understand the first thing about him. For his own part, Pilot was fond of them, but so disinterested he could barely tell the two apart.
At the age of eighteen, Lonnie Pilot’s life changed again. For several years he had been making weekly visits to his great-uncle, Marrek Tink, who lived in a converted net shed in Newlyn. Of the four Tink siblings, Sally, Hilda, Marrek and Merryn, only Merryn, Pilot’s grandmother, had reproduced, and Phyllis herself was an only child. With no brothers or sisters and no cousins in the locale, Pilot threw everything into his relationship with Marrek. They walked, went sailing, but mostly they talked, or rather, Marrek did. During his half century in the merchant navy, Marrek Tink had garnered the kind of knowledge not found in books, and Pilot had made the most of it until death parted them. In his will, Marrek Tink left the net shed to his great-nephew.
Living independently was one thing, but Pilot was penniless and had refused to sign on for benefits. To make ends meet, he tutored the children of local fishermen and farmers for cash, fish and dairy products. Subsistence living, Cornish style.
At 8.00am, Pilot peeled himself off Jenny’s warm body and began getting dressed in the early morning light. She stirred, but remained deep in sleep. He thought how beautiful she looked and how much he would miss her. If she could get a few paintings done quickly, perhaps they could get back on track. Not wishing to wake her, he opened the door as quietly as he could, but was stopped by Jenny’s sleep-soaked, sultry voice. “Lonnie,” she said. “Don’t do that again.” Pretending he hadn’t heard her, Pilot let himself out and began walking towards Penzance for his meeting with Forrest Vaalon.
On the stretch to Jubilee Pool and Battery Rocks, he saw no-one and heard only the occasional car or seagull. Seaweed and pebbles from the night’s strong seas decorated The Promenade, but Pilot was too distracted by his early morning love-making and the pain of Jenny’s admonition to avoid the flotsam and jetsum and he stumbled several times. He’d arranged to meet Vaalon on Battery Road at 8.30 and, true to the man’s word, there he was, with a bag of Abbey Hotel croissants, two cups and a flask of coffee. They exchanged pleasantries and sat down on a bench to have breakfast.
“It’ll have to be black,” Vaalon said, unscrewing the thermos. It was a beautiful, windless spring morning, yet not even the blue skies and mild temperature could breathe life into the boarded up former guest house across the street.
“The town’s seen better days, as you can see,” Pilot said to his companion.
“That’s one thing you will not be able to say when you plant your flag in August,” Vaalon answered. “Your new land will be one of the few places in the world notto have seen better days− at least, not in the past 5,000 years.”
Pilot thought for a while, then looked Vaalon square in the eye. “Forrest, we have the theory of an island coming up in the Bay of Biscay. No problems with that. And we have the concept of establishing a model nation capable of changing the world. No problem there, either, apart from actually doing it. There’s that bore sample, but nothing else tangible to work with. We’re just two men sitting on a bench at the end of England. How confident are you that the two things will ever happen? Out of ten. Be honest.”
Vaalon answered without hesitation. “I’ll give the theory a nine, but as to whether the island won’t kill 86 people on its way up, I’ll have to give that a five. The concept is an obvious ten. The odds on it ever being realized are for you to work out. I think anything between seven and ten is workable. Happy?”
For the next two hours, without opening his laptop, Vaalon expanded on the science of solar tides and magmatic attraction, Pilot’s crew, the specialists, the advocates, and wrapped up the meeting with a colourful description of the house he was building near Taos. “Lonnie, I’m so confident this island’s going to appear on time that I’m betting the farm on it. If the island doesn’t come up as predicted, my ranch is yours.”
Pilot laughed. “And if it does, you’ll own my net shed.” They shook hands on it. “One more question, Forrest. Jenny’s exhibition is being hung at the end of June and then she’ll be free of all her commitments. I haven’t said anything to her about this, but I think she could be an asset to us. I’d like to take her with me if that’s okay.”
A look of disappointment flashed across Vaalon’s face. “That’s the mongoose in you talking, Lonnie. You told me she’d severed the relationship. What makes you think she’d unsever it? It’s all academic, though. Jenny is not part of the plan. She’s not the one.”
Pilot felt his stomach drop at Vaalon’s answer and the firmness with which it had been delivered. The door Jenny had semi-closed had now been locked and bolted by Forrest Vaalon. There was nothing Pilot could say that would open it, and he knew better than to try.
“Jenny’s just a familiar face… a sexual dalliance,” Vaalon said, softening. “I don’t mean to be harsh, but your future’s with another. Trust me. Is there anything more you’d like to ask me?”
“Yes. What was my grandfather’s nickname?”
Vaalon gave an open mouth smile, his white teeth set off nicely by his rich man’s tan. “Would my ability to answer that question make all this credible to you, Lonnie? Is that the one word you need me to say before you can commit unconditionally to this enterprise?”
“Yes.”
“Well I have bad news for you. I didn’t know he even had a nickname.”
Pilot’s head sank in mock resignation. Then he looked up and laughed. “You pass, Forrest. He hadn’t.”
They meandered along the Promenade to Vaalon’s car, savouring the aroma of seaweed as they walked. After belting up, the man consulted a list written in his expensive leather notebook. “Credit card, passport application, airline ticket, phone, laptop, chargers, business cards – that’s everything, I think. I’ll see you soon, Lonnie. In the meantime, call me if you need anything. This has been good.” He reached out his hand and Pilot shook it firmly.
Pilot followed the car with his eyes to the South Pier. As it disappeared around the corner, the feeling of emptiness arising from his mentor’s departure was washed away by a growing sense of his own destiny.
For ten minutes he stood there, his inherited laptop cradled like a baby in his arms, and gazed vacantly at the sparkling, fishless waters of Mounts Bay before jogging back to the net shed.
Monday, May 4th, began with the sort of rain Pilot hated. He delighted in thunderstorms where the raindrops sound like gravel being offloaded from a dumper truck, but drizzle depressed him. Loath to leave his warm bed, he tried to reconnect with his thoughts of the previous three days. Foremost in his head was a vision of the barge flotilla, floating serenely in the Bay of Biscay, and a rock the size of Wales speeding towards it from below at a hundred miles an hour. Pre-coffined for a more convenient burial, he thought.
He arrived at the library just as they were unlocking the doors and was soon enthroned in his chair with three oversized tomes on the table in front of him. He wanted to get a better understanding of the physical nature of the continental shelf – anything to make it feel more real. He opened The Atlas of The Oceans to a map of the sea bed of the Bay of Biscay. Based on National Institute of Oceanography soundings, it was about as informative of the true nature of what lay at the bottom of the Bay as a man’s photograph is of his personality.
He noted that the continental shelf, from a point about forty miles off the elbow where Spain and France meet, progressed at a forty-five degree angle northwest. The edge extended farther and farther from the coast of France until by forty-eight degrees north, at the latitude of Brest, the shelf edge was at its greatest distance from land. The drop from the continental slope to the Biscay abyssal plain also got steeper and deeper as one moved northwest. O
n the floor of the abyssal plain there was the odd seamount, but the mountainous areas didn’t begin until it was no longer the Bay of Biscay, or the Celtic Sea, but the open Atlantic. Pilot squinted at the map, hoping that an obvious island shape would leap out of the page, but none did.
He photocopied the map, then began shading in a sliver of the edge of the continental shelf in a shape one hundred miles from north to south and fifteen miles east to west. The dimensions were arbitrary, but would give him a starting point. The volume of water between the shelf and the surface was vast and, when displaced, would have to go somewhere. France and southwest England would take the brunt of the tsunamis, he reckoned. A lot depended on the speed of ascent, a figure he hoped the IGP computer simulations would provide. Pilot reasoned that if the shelf rose at, say, ten feet per second, it wouldn’t be fast enough to kill them, but the barges would in all likelihood break up, unless they came up in a bed of soft, oozy sediment. How deep was the sediment on the sea floor? He opened Submarine Topography and thumbed through the pages until he found the answer.
Over millions of years the deposit of sediment on the seabed has produced a carpet in some places half a mile thick. This sediment covering consists of clay, shell particles, sand and dust, volcanic ash and cosmic spherules.
He couldn’t begin to guess the consistency of this particular mixture, but feared the worst− sediment rising past them at 30 miles an hour, leaving them buried in hundreds of feet of mud. The sooner he went to London to view the computer models the better. First and foremost, he wanted to know if the flotilla could withstand the landing. The other worry was the threat the inevitable tsunamis posed to coastal populations. If his island killed even a single person and there had been no forewarning, he and Vaalon would be dead in the water− branded as mass murderers.
Pilot then turned his mind to political issues, beginning with how far out to sea a country could claim sovereignty. He found himself a computer, logged on and typed ‘territorial waters’ in the search box. He clicked on the most promising-looking result and began skim-reading.
A state’s territorial sea extends up to 12 nautical miles (22 km) from its mean low water mark baseline.
So far, so good.
The contiguous zone is a band of water extending from the outer edge of the territorial sea to up to 24 nautical miles (44 km) from the baseline. Within this area a state can exert limited control for the purpose of preventing or punishing ‘infringement of its customs, fiscal, immigration or sanitary laws and regulations within its territory or territorial sea’…
Depends on how far we are from France, Pilot thought.
An exclusive economic zone (EEZ) extends from the outer limit of the territorial sea to a maximum of 200 nautical miles (370.4 km) from the territorial sea baseline. A coastal nation has control of all economic resources within its exclusive economic zone, including fishing, mining, oil exploration, and any pollution of those resources. However, it cannot prohibit passage or loitering above, on, or under the surface of the sea within that portion of its exclusive economic zone beyond its territorial sea.
Pilot read this last sentence three times to make sure he understood it before moving on.
Before 1982, coastal nations arbitrarily extended their territorial waters in an effort to control activities which are now regulated by the exclusive economic zone. These include offshore oil exploration and fishing rights (see Cod War). Indeed, the exclusive economic zone is still popularly, though erroneously, called a coastal nation’s territorial waters…
Using his ruler, Pilot calculated that the edge of Europe’s continental shelf at its farthest from land was about 100 miles west of Brest – outside France’s territorial waters and contiguous zone, but well within her EEZ. He felt his stomach drop, then continued looking for something positive.
Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the name ‘continental shelf’ was given a legal definition as ‘the stretch of the seabed adjacent to the shores of a particular country to which it belongs’. The relatively accessible continental shelf is the best understood part of the ocean floor. Most commercial exploitation from the sea, such as metallic-ore, non-metallic ore, and hydrocarbon extraction, takes place on the continental shelf. Sovereign rights over their continental shelves up to 350 nautical miles from the coast were claimed by the marine nations that signed the Convention in 1958. This was partly superseded by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea…
The more he read, the more Pilot’s heart sank, and it got worse.
Rights Over the Continental Shelf Articles 77 to 81 define the rights of a country over its continental shelf.
A coastal nation has control of all resources on or under its continental shelf, living or not, but no control over any living organisms above the shelf that are beyond its exclusive economic zone. This gives it the right to conduct petroleum drilling works and lay submarine cables or pipelines in its continental shelf…
Pilot was getting worried, because wherever they landed on the shelf, they’d still be within the French EEZ and thereby under French control. He went back to his original search and clicked a link to an article in Interpreter Magazine. It was a piece written in 2010 about France’s attempts to extend the EEZs of her foreign possessions – specifically, the oil rich area west of New Caledonia. Pilot skimmed the first four paragraphs, but read the fifth and sixth in their entirety.
Many nations are trying to extend control over the undersea continental shelf. Under Article 76 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, countries can ask the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf to make a ruling on the outer limits of the shelf. The commission can only make recommendations to coastal states and has no authority to determine the legitimacy of territorial claims.
France has an active program of undersea mapping and oceanographic studies to document its underwater continental shelf and show that it is a natural extension of the land.
Pilot gleaned from the article that the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf could be an important ally for them, even though they had no authority. He made a note to ask Vaalon if this were a provision of his plan for the UN.
Pilot stood up and walked over to the window to think his way out of the problem they faced. When international waters overlap a country’s continental shelf and the shelf then surfaces within them, what happens? Does it stop being a continental shelf and become something else? The change from ‘continental shelf’ to ‘island’ has no precedent. We’ll be in uncharted territory. He began to feel more hopeful. If his advocates were as good as Vaalon claimed they were, they might be able to spin their way to sovereignty.
He took his photocopy of the Bay of Biscay and began placing dots in a line twelve miles off the French coastline from the latitude of Brest down to the latitude of Bordeaux. He connected the dots, then shaded France’s Territorial Waters pink with a highlighter pen. He drew another line of dots along the edge of the Contiguous Zone 24 miles off the coastline and shaded that area yellow. The final line of dots denoted the edge of the Exclusive Economic Zone 200 miles from the coast. These waters he coloured green. In the end, he had a pretty pattern, but no answers.
At half past twelve, Sally and Hilda came upstairs from the shop for their lunch break. Pilot had called them from the library to ask if he could use their kitchen, as he often did, having only a small camping stove at the net shed. Hilda, out of curiosity, walked up to him and leaned over the pot to sniff the concoction he was creating and make some empty comment about how delicious it smelled. Instead, she couldn’t help herself recoiling at the sight that met her eyes. A sodden pancake floated on what looked like porridge. On the pancake, well over to one side, rested a slice of spam and on the spam there was a saucer piled high with sugar.
Pilot noted Hilda’s puzzlement and began to explain. “The porridge is the mantle, the pancake is the oceanic crust, the spam is the continental shelf, and the saucer is France.” The woman
nodded her head without a word or a smile and walked away.
The porridge was reaching boiling point and Pilot waited impatiently for the first bubble. Soon the pancake began to rise near the side of the pot opposite the spam, then subsided. The second bubble was nearer and the third was right on target. As it pushed up the pancake, the pancake in turn lifted the spam at its edge where it wasn’t weighed down by the saucer− just the tiniest fraction of an inch, but hundreds of metres when scaled up to the Bay of Biscay. The bubble popped, the pancake dropped and the spam flopped. Pilot turned off the gas and sat down at the table with his notepad.
He tried to picture the moment of impact – not on France, but on his barges. He thought of his rectangle of barges ballasted at four corners by the weighty earth carriers and tried to picture the effect a rising mass of land would have on it. An image came to mind from a nature film of a whale breaking the surface of the sea at a very narrow angle and then disappearing like an escalator at the top of its run. He wondered what would happen if a small boat were over the whale as it surfaced. Would it be carried along on its back, or would the upward pressure capsize it? He drew some pictures, then decided there were too many variables: whether or not the surface of the land was coming up parallel to the surface of the sea; its speed of ascent; and the physical features of the terrain rising to meet the bellies of the barges. He could only imagine what the scene would be and concluded that if all the factors were in their favour – flat terrain, parallel planes, slow ascent – it would be possible for them to make a safe landfall. Possible or not, an inner voice told him he was wasting his time speculating about Vaalon’s fantastic geological phenomenon. Whatever it was to be, it would be, regardless of what Pilot conjectured. The only thing that was in his power – the only thing that should concern him from now on− was what happened after the event.
