by Donovan Hohn
In a way, the Alguita was a kind of floating eco-friendly utopian experiment, powered mostly by the sun and the wind, and by the youthful enthusiasm of the volunteer crew, and perhaps most of all by the propulsive force of Moore’s charisma. Our food on this trip was local and organic, purchased at the Hilo farmers’ market. To exterminate the fruit flies that circulated over the mangoes and bananas piled atop a cabinet, Moore likes to suck them out of the air with a solar-powered vacuum cleaner. No pesticides here. All biodegradable trash went in one bin, nonbiodegradable trash, of which we generated little, went in another, to be recycled upon our return.
After forty-five minutes of sampling, Moore fired up the solar-powered hydraulic winch and reeled the manta trawl in. Once we’d wrestled the trawl aboard, our captain unscrewed the cod end, dumped its contents into a bowl of saltwater resting on the winch table, and delicately scraped the gauze clean with a toothbrush. In the bowl, zooplankton—sea bugs, some species of little jelly or salp—swam through a sprinkling of plastic. Moore fixed the sample in formalin and transferred it to a labeled specimen jar. Then we sent the trawl overboard again.
This was a somewhat awkward process, the trawl swaying around under the arc of the A-frame crane, its gauzy tail blowing around like a wet wind sock, Amy Young, in Bermuda shorts and tank top, poised to starboard; Cory Hungate, topless, to port; both gripping lines that held the trawl in place, waiting for Moore’s signal. When the signal came, Pool gave the thing a shove, and Moore, at the winch, paid out the line. The trawl splashed into our wake, where it floundered around as if threatening to sink. Then the line tightened and the trawl, righting itself, seemed to swim after us, bobbing up and down through the troughs and crests, gulping great mouthfuls of ocean. In his recent survey of the gyre, Moore had sieved some sixty thousand cubic meters and had found, on average, one plastic particle per meter, which might not seem like much, roughly equivalent to finding a single particle of plastic in your bathtub. But when you consider how many cubic meters of water there are in the upper layers of the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone—billions, though the exact number changes with the seasons—a particle per meter amounts to a lot of plastic.
At 8:10 in the morning, the second lowering complete, we stopped for breakfast. Complaining, in a good-humored way, that it’s hard to find deckhands willing and able to cook, Moore headed to the galley and whipped up a batch of organic banana pancakes. When my daytime watch began at ten, I resumed my position on the cabin roof and scanned the turquoise horizon for debris. In my peripheral vision there flashed what I, turning, at first took for a flock of small birds. Then I saw the silvery flock dive below the waves. Flying fish! I said to myself. Like the ones suspended over the plastic waves in the dolphin diorama at the American Museum of Natural History!
By noon on that first day, the Hawaiian Islands, by some measures the most isolated islands on earth, had sunk below the northern horizon. We were off the grid, out of contact, out of sight, beating our way south, in oceans three miles deep. By dinnertime, we were fifty miles south of South Point, conducting our fourth sample of the day, letting the sails luff. The seas had moderated a little. According to Moore, we were now at sea state 5 on the Beaufort scale. Developed in 1805 by Sir Francis Beaufort, an Irish admiral, the Beaufort scale includes descriptions of sea conditions that read like found poetry. This is how the Beaufort scale, revised several times since its author’s death, describes seas in light air, level 1: “scaly ripples, no foam crests.” This is seas in a strong breeze, level 6: “Larger waves 8–13 ft, whitecaps common, more spray.” In near gale, level 7, the “sea heaps up, waves 13–20 ft, white foam streaks off breakers.” Level 12, hurricane, the scale’s maximum, Sir Beaufort memorably described as “that which no canvas could withstand.”
“One of the things we’re trying to discover is if there’s any correspondence between sea state and the size of the plastic,” Moore told me.
Considering his lack of credentials, you might be inclined, like plastics executives, to dismiss Moore’s investigations as wishful, amateuristic grandstanding. After witnessing the meticulous sorting and analyzing in Karla McDermid’s lab, I was inclined to give Moore the benefit of the doubt. But I still had doubts.
In the scientific community, Moore’s work remains somewhat controversial. Even marine biologists who share his alarm have misgivings about the sensationalism with which the Garbage Patch is sometimes described in the press—by Moore and others. A 2006 Greenpeace report attempted to rechristen the Garbage Patch “the trash vortex,” bringing to mind a maelstrom that had sucked entire landfills into its swirling maw, and one magazine article went so far as to call the patch “evil,” comparing it to both a “trash tsunami” and a “twenty-first century Leviathan.” Other articles call it “plastic island” or the “island of plastic in the North Pacific.” Moore himself objects to such descriptions. He even objects to the term “Garbage Patch.” Despite Moore’s efforts to suggest different metaphors—“a swirling sewer,” “a superhighway of trash” connecting two “trash cemeteries”—“Garbage Patch” appears to have stuck.
Since the plastic debris in the North Pacific Convergence Zone is spread out unevenly across millions of miles of ocean, and since most of it is fragmentary, flowing through the water column like dust through air, the Garbage Patch bears little resemblance to a floating junkyard, it turns out—or to an island. And yet, on one thing scientists, plastics executives, and environmentalists agree: the amount of plastic in the ocean is increasing, more so in convergence zones than elsewhere.
Far more than his institutionalized counterparts ensconced in universities and government agencies, Moore resembles the pioneers of oceanography, among the last of the natural sciences to professionalize for the simple reason that wealthy, swashbuckling, yacht-owning amateurs were often the only ones who could afford ship time at sea. The first large-scale government-sponsored professional oceanographic research “cruise”—the charmingly vacational term modern oceanographers have bestowed on their seasickening fieldwork—was the three-and-a-half-year British circumnavigation completed in 1876 by the HMS Challenger (for which an ill-fated space shuttle would later be named). The “scientifics,” as the naturalists on the Challenger were called, didn’t think of themselves as belonging to a single discipline. The term oceanography, a German neologism derived from geography and hydrography and cartography, had yet to gain widespread currency in English. The scientifics of the Challenger referred to their interdisciplinary pelagic fieldwork as “the science of abysmal research.”
Before 1876 a naturalist of modest means who wished to conduct abysmal research had two choices: he (always a he, until the middle of the twentieth century) could either study coastal waters, as did the Venerable Bede, the medieval monk who first recognized that freshwater spreads over saltwater. Or else, like Joseph Banks on the Endeavor or Darwin on the Beagle, he could avail himself of voyages of opportunity, hitching rides with the Royal Navy, collecting whatever evidence he chanced upon. Even well into the twentieth century, oceanography like the lawless ocean itself remained open to uncredentialed amateurs—amateurs like Jacques Piccard, he of the bathyscaphe, who had no formal training in marine science; or like William Beebe, who trained as an ornithologist but became famous as an explorer of the deep. Henry Stommel, who perhaps did more than any other oceanographer to solve the riddles of ocean circulation, never completed an advanced degree. An entrance exam Stommel took his freshman year at Yale indicated that he had little aptitude in science, and he initially considered going into the law or the ministry, ending up at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution largely by accident, while conscientiously objecting to World War II.
Perhaps the swashbuckling amateur whom Charlie Moore most resembles is Prince Albert I of Monaco. Seeking relief from luxurious boredom, the young prince in 1873 bought a schooner, the Hirondelle, and became a full-time yachtie. After twelve years of recreational sailing, he began conducting a series of drift ex
periments, setting bottles, beer kegs, and floats adrift—1,675 in all, of which 227 were recovered, or 14 percent, a better return than Ebbesmeyer has ever gotten from a container spill. From their trajectories the prince was able to discern the clockwise rotation of the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre. He later turned his resources and his mind to other oceanic mysteries. Of dolphins he made living sampling devices, harpooning them, necropsying them, and studying the contents of their stomachs.18 He collected abyssal species of squid vomited by a dying sperm whale—“precious regurgitations,” he called them. When Moore’s researchers examine the upchuck balls of albatross chicks, they are following Prince Albert’s lead.
The amateur oceanography practiced by Prince Albert and Captain Charlie do differ in one fundamental respect, however: Albert, a huntsman as well as an amateur scientist, went about harpooning cetaceans with guiltless delight. He gave no thought to humanity’s impact on the sea. In the nineteenth century, next to no one did. The oceans were indomitable, unfathomable, dangerous, and divine. The Victorian ocean was still the watery chaos of J. M. W. Turner, or the teeming hunting grounds of Moby-Dick, not yet the fragile wonder world of Carson and Cousteau.
THE INFINITE SERIES OF THE SEA
Time now seemed to dilate. We weren’t on Greenwich mean time, or Hawaiian-Aleutian time. We were in a time zone of our own, Alguita time, our rhythms determined neither by the hours our busy contemporaries kept on land nor even by the circadian revolutions of the earth but by the schedule of watches and meals and naps and trawls. One imagines, before setting sail, that seafaring promises excitement or romance, but on calm tropical seas, the hours pass through one’s mind like cubic meters of water through a manta trawl, leaving a sprinkling of impressions snared in memory’s gauze.
At night, while the rest of the crew slept, Moore and I kept watch mostly in silence, he in his captain’s chair, I standing by, studying the shimmering instruments and every twenty minutes making entries in the logbook: speed over ground, set of the current, direction of the wind, state of the sea. Moore kept the hatch above the helm open. Through it we could watch the stars. They seemed to swing back and forth across the black abyss of space, though really it was the Alguita that swung, its mast an upside-down pendulum. Sometimes Moore let me take a turn standing on his chair, poking my head above decks. With Moore below and the rest of the crew asleep and the stars above, I felt more alone than I’ve ever felt.
“There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves,” Melville writes in the “Mast-Head” chapter of Moby-Dick. “The drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner.”
At midnight, my head poking out of the Alguita’s cockpit, the only white noise I heard was the hiss of the water along the hull, the wind giving the canvas the occasional shake; the only colorful noise, the halyards chiming against the aluminum mast, the creaks and clinks that accompanied the boat’s motion, keeping time.
In the heart of that convergent eddy, that purple dot on Moore’s satellite image, there was no flotsam or jetsam to be seen. Was the map wrong? Had the eddy shifted south? Or east? Or west? I could tell that Moore was disappointed. He kept consulting his satellite-generated charts, wishing aloud that they showed more detail. Meanwhile, conditions had begun to deteriorate. We’d gone almost as far south as we’d planned to go. “Getting a little sundowner,” Moore said one day at sundown. I asked him what a sundowner was. “Winds picking up as the sun goes down. It’s going to be a little hairy tonight, coming about.”
We were already at sea state 6 on the Beaufort scale. Before morning it seemed likely we’d get a taste of sea state 7 or even sea state 8. In 1866, Mark Twain rounded South Point aboard the schooner Emmeline (a name he would later give to the suicidal poetess Emmeline Grangerford in Huckleberry Finn). The Emmeline had run into “contrary winds.” So, almost a century and a half later, did we—forty-knot winds to be exact. When my watch began at ten, the boat was yawing and pitching in twelve-foot seas, spray flying. At midnight, Moore called all hands on deck, and the crew appeared, as Twain put it, “plunging about the cabin with the rolling of the ship.”
I wish that I could give an accurate account of the maneuver we performed, but circumstances permitted no note taking, nor did they permit voice recording (the wind was too loud, the rain too short-circuiting), and my memories are a sleep-deprived blur. This, the following morning, scribbling in my notebook, is what I remembered: I remembered gathering with my crewmates around the winches on the aft deck. I remembered Charlie Moore consuming packets of Emergen-C, a vitamin supplement that sailors swear by. I remembered hauling on the sheets, hand over hand, while Moore, hauling too, shouted at us to haul harder. I felt like a weakling—understandably, because I am, a weakling with a bad back. As the mainsail came down, crackling and snapping like a bonfire, a white maniac against the black sky, Moore shouted, “Somebody’s going to have to climb up onto the boom and lie down on the sail!”
Jeff Ernst volunteered for the job, and the rest of us volunteered to accompany him. Wearing emergency harnesses equipped with rescue beacons that would automatically start flashing should we fall overboard, we made our way forward (froward, as we seafarers say), following the rails, grasping at the wire stays, stumbling to the main mast as the spray came bursting over the bow. There, Ernst threw himself up onto the boom and smothered the lowering sail as if making love to it, or wrestling a crocodile. Meanwhile, Laurent Pool furled the angry canvas until, Ernst having slithered off, it was lashed tight inside a kind of green sleeve.
Taking the helm, Moore hove to, and the Alguita came about into the prevailing swell. I stumbled to the head, heaved my dinner into a bucket, then crashed into my berth, and slept through the remainder of the storm.
Bob Marley was singing over the sound system when I awoke the next morning, telling me not to worry about a thing, because every little thing was going to be all right. Evidence suggested that it would. In the galley, beside the doorstep of the crew’s quarters, Sam was making coffee. The sun was shining. Moore was at the helm. Laurent Pool was pissing off the stern. We were still almost fifty miles out. No land in sight. But the waves were calm. Sea state 3 on the Beaufort scale.
We sent the trawl over again, for a fifth time. Forty-five minutes later, when we were reeling it in, a gust plucked Moore’s ball cap from his head, the one with the sea turtle on it, and set it adrift. Mournfully, he watched it float away. This wasn’t the first time the wind had cast something overboard. The day before, a gust had plucked the nylon-upholstered mattress from a chaise longue. A great commotion had ensued. While Moore brought the boat about, Jeff Ernst, perhaps the most devoted of our captain’s youthful votaries, had plunged headlong into the water and, crawl-stroking through the waves without a life vest or an emergency harness or anything besides his swim trunks, rescued the rectangle of nylon-upholstered foam from decades of drift and his captain from embarrassment. The last thing Moore wanted me to witness was him contributing to the Garbage Patch. His cap, at least, was biodegradable, but not by now—as the currents and winds swept it out of reach, making it appear and disappear, lifting it atop a crest, then sending it down into a trough—retrievable.
The fifth lowering came up totally empty—no plastic, no plankton. “Nothing. Nada,” said Moore, failing to hide his disappointment. Was the ocean here that clean and that lifeless? Had the trawl ridden too high? Rinsing out the codpiece, Moore discovered the answer: “a hole big enough to poke your finger through.” He poked his finger through it.
While Moore repaired the hole with needle and thread, Laurent Pool, shirtless, hatless, his bald head shining, stood at the ster
n, fishing. Before long he landed a rainbow runner, long as my arm, beautiful, silver with bright yellow fins, and a blue stripe equatorially dividing the dorsal from the ventral. As it slapped about on the aft deck, Pool bludgeoned it with a wooden cudgel, then gutted it clean. At midday, when I was up on the cabin roof, on watch, Moore popped open the skylight above the helm and handed me a plate of fresh rainbow runner sashimi salad—raw fish, cubed, drizzled with sesame oil and seasonings. I sat there leaning back on the fiberglass of the Alguita, gazing out between the rubber toes of my canvas boat shoes at the blue Pacific, degusting the best, freshest sashimi I’d ever had.
