Simon Winchester

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Ramona Koval: So how do you go about charting the beginnings and ends of an ocean? For Simon Winchester, Shakespeare and a former British Foreign Secretary came to the rescue.

Simon Winchester: Shakespeare, through the wonderful offices of David Owen, the former Foreign Secretary, I always carry—and indeed have in my suitcase with me now—a paperback of anthology that David Owen wrote, called Seven Ages, which he divides his lifetime's favourite poetry along the lines of the seven ages of man from As You Like It. I'm sure you all remember it, but basically the seven ages are: infancy, schoolchild, lover, soldier, justice, old man, and then return to childhood. And it struck me that in just the same way that David Owen had managed to corral his poems according to that rubric, so it might be possible to corral everything that I knew, or could find out about the Atlantic. And so the 'Infancy' chapter, for instance, would look at mankind's or humankind's first contact with the ocean, as an infant.

Ramona Koval: So it begins in Africa. But you call the Atlantic 'the inland sea of western civilisation.'

Simon Winchester: Well, yes, I mean that's I suppose the thesis of the book, that if you accept that the Mediterranean was the inland sea of classical civilisation, then given the immense amount of things that were conceived, or born or invented, or tested, that are central to western civilisation and born or created or conceived in and around the Atlantic Ocean, then it seems fair to label it thus. And as a further example, I mean the beginnings of settlement on the Atlantic: that was really the Phoenicians about 700 or 800 years BC. And if you can imagine that—and once again there has to be a bit in this slightly new genre of what the Americans call 'creative non-fiction'—you have to, and you alert the reader to this fact, but you say, 'this is what I believe would have happened,' that you have these Phoenician merchants trading in the Mediterranean Sea and coming from ports in the Levant like Tyre and Sidon in their little boats, called galloi and hippoi and which were built to withstand the not particularly stressful waters of the Mediterranean.

And they trade all over, from ports as far west as Malaga and Alexandria and places like that. And one of the things that they're trading in at this particular point in history is the purple dye that they can extract from a shell, Murex brandaris, which is a sort of big gastropod with a snail inside it, which if you—a very complicated way of doing it—but basically you crush the snail and use some sort of lye or salt and you can extract from its veins an indelible purple dye, which to this day is called Tyrian purple and has got a specific Pantone number to it. And that's what the Mediterranean aristocracy, and most notable the Roman aristocracy, coloured their clothes with to show they'd been 'born to the purple,' or whatever the phrase is.

Ramona Koval: But they themselves were pretty timid when it came to the Atlantic, the Romans.

Simon Winchester: Well, the Romans were frightful wusses, yes. When they—this was a little later, and if I can just stick to sort of the hundreds, because that wasn't till shortly before the... But you see, you've got these Phoenicians trading in these shells, or at least the dye they extract from the shells, in the Mediterranean, but fully aware that beyond the Pillars of Hercules, beyond Gibraltar on the right-hand side and the great cliffs of Jebel Musa in what is now Morocco on the left-hand side, beyond that is a sea into which they've never ventured, 'the great sea of gloom,' as I think Homer referred to it. I mean, it was a terrifying ocean where unimaginable storms and sea monsters... and it was a sea of myth and legend and horror, but impelled by commerce, which is of course what leads humankinds to do all sorts of things. Eventually one Phoenician boat, or one small Phoenician fleet, said, 'Why don't we try and see if we can find these purple dye shells beyond?' And so they sailed through, in these little boats—and they must have been buffeted in storms—they turned left and they made their way gingerly, didn't lost sight of the coast as far as one can see, but eventually drew up to a pair of islands which to this day are called the Iles Purpuraires, the Purple Islands. And they settled there, and there were thousands of these shells, which they then, they set up an entrepôt, a trading station, and that's off the port of Essaouira in Morocco.

So that's really where we've made our first foothold, and then we went up to Spain and Biarritz and then up to Cornwall, and then trade and commerce began properly.

Ramona Koval: So what's the evidence for the Phoenicians' view of the sea and fear of the sea and courage?

Simon Winchester: Well, trading records are kept. And of course there are shipwrecks, there's a notorious ship called the Uluburun ship—it may actually not have been Phoenician, but it was a Mediterranean ship laden with all the... hippopotamus ivory and scarabs and murex shells. So there's very little written evidence, but there's enough archaeological evidence and of course of the Phoenicians having been in the Iles Purpuraires. Anyone that goes there now, although it's rather difficult to get to, will see parts of ships and odds and ends like that.

Ramona Koval: So you describe it at this stage as very much a one-sided ocean: in fact, we haven't even got the whole of the side. And we get the whole of the side because the Portuguese solve a problem of getting around this cape.

Simon Winchester: Yes, that was a major problem. I mean, it's a cape that very few people have heard of, nor of this particular chap. The cape is called Cape Bojador and the chap was called Gil Eanes, who was a fairly junior sailor working for Henry the Navigator in the 15th century. And sailors could not get south of this particular cape, which is also in Morocco. It's a long sand spit, which extends about 20 kilometres out into the ocean. And try as they might, if a navigator heading south with the hope of getting into the south Atlantic—not that he knew it was there—but he would have to turn right to avoid hitting the sandbank and the moment he did that, the currents and the prevailing winds would sweep him miles and miles out to sea and he'd be terrified: he'd either drown or he would head for home, I mean saying, 'I'm not losing sight of land.'

This man Eanes was the first person to use mathematics to work out the prevailing winds and the direction of the currents and the topography of the land. And [he] engineered for himself—even before he set out—a tactical course which would get him round. And he made it. It took him a long time, a lot of tacking and jibing and so forth, but eventually he worked out how to get round this safely. And, I think it was in 1425 or something, he got to the south of Cape Bojador and landed and picked up a flower or a plant to take back to Henry the Navigator and some evidence of camel tracks showing that were Touareg tribesmen and that there were people living here. But he got back to Lisbon, or wherever—Largos I think, where he sailed from—and Henry the Navigator didn't believe him and said, 'You've got to go back again.'

So he went back, and then, because he knew how to do it, he got back very quickly. And once that happened, then that opened the way for people like Vasco da Gama to sail...

Ramona Koval: What did he bring back for Henry the Navigator that impressed him the second time?

Simon Winchester: I think... was it called... I think two of everything he had seen the first time, which was... Oh, I think and bones of some animal as well, a camel or something. So that really opened the door for everything and then navigators started sailing, But that of course is only the east coast of the Atlantic; the really important stuff is when we realise it's an ocean, once we've reached another side. But if this book does anything, it's to displace from his position of primacy—and that which I think he doesn't deserve—displace Christopher Columbus. Christopher Columbus, '1492, sailed the ocean blue', we all know that, but he never got to North America, he never realised he was anywhere near North America, he didn't know he was in the Atlantic Ocean—I mean, he didn't know all sorts of things.

And he behaved incredibly badly; he was a cruel and unpleasant man. Whereas, 491 years beforehand, this chap called Leif Erikson sailed—he was born in Stavanger—came, admittedly not non-stop—he came by way of Iceland and Greenland—but he made it. He made it to North America. He made it to Newfoundland, and he built a settlement, which was only discovered in the 1960s. Extraordinary, beautiful settlement, called the Bay of the Jellyfish, in the northern part of that long peninsula on the west of Newfoundland. And while there, he had cattle, he forged iron stirrups and horseshoes and things. There seems to have been grapes growing s far north as New Brunswick back then; there's some evidence he made wine. But what he made—almost the most important thing is that he made a child. And the first European child, whose name was Snorri Thorfinnsson, was born at L'Anse aux Meadows in 1002 AD.

So Columbus' claim is bogus in my view and he should not be memorialised to the degree that he is. I mean, the fact that, you know, there's a district of Columbia; Columbus, Ohio; Columbia, Maryland—all of this they worship in. There's nothing for Leif Erikson. Columbus Day in America, it's the 12th of October, but in Minnesota and Wisconsin, a few hardy Norse souls still raise a glass to Leif Erikson and I'm with them all the way.

[Laughter]

Ramona Koval: So we've got now the picture of the whole, kind of. We're beginning to fill it in. And it's the discovery of the Gulf Stream, isn't it, that starts people thinking of... Well obviously there have to be settlements, and there has to be something to trade, but the Gulf Stream was very important, wasn't it.

Simon Winchester: Yes. And the people that were involved in the mapping, I mean it was Ponce de León that first noticed it off the coast, he was sailing off the coast of Florida and he was aware of this sort of 40 mile-wide band of water that was a different colour, a different temperature, and swept his boat inexorably northwards. But it was Benjamin Franklin, oddly enough, who was one of the first people to draw a—fairly accurate—map of the Gulf Stream. I mean, Benjamin Franklin at the time was America's, independent America's, first postmaster general and he was the colonial postmaster general too, and he was very interested in the relative time it took for letters to travel back and forth between Falmouth Port in south-western England and New York or Halifax or Boston, and noticed that people going on what was called the uphill route, which was to go against the wind, westbound, were not merely delayed by the wind, but delayed by this current, which blew them hugely off-course but which conversely aided eastbound mariners tremendously. And so there became—you know, techniques were developed of riding the current, as it were. Instead of heading due west out of New York, you head north and get swept round the gyre and end up in Scotland.

So, that current and then the discovery of all the other currents—and of course there are lots and lots of currents in all the oceans, but they're particularly used for commerce in the Atlantic—all began. And I suppose in the book, that is the schoolchild aspect of the story, because it's all about our education, our learning about it, our mapping it and charting it and so forth. And the Gulf Stream comes into that.

Interestingly enough, the misconceptions we had about the ocean were all sorts of extraordinary things. For instance, it was firmly believed for a very long time that the ocean had different levels of viscosity and different things would sink to different levels: that if you were to throw a gun into the sea, it would sink lower than a horse, let's say; a fat man would go further down than a thin man. A person of the Christian church then got involved in this and said a man weighed down by many sins would be 50 feet lower than a vicar (if the vicar was sinless, of course). That was obviously dispelled fairly soon by big expeditions like the Challenger expedition.

But there was another—I rather liked this one—that T.H. Huxley, the great biologist, looking at a sample of sea water that had been brought back from the Challenger expedition, found in the test tube a sort of gelatinous ooze, sort of like glue. And he said, 'My God, you know, this is clearly... we've always thought of the sea as being the origin of life; this must be the ur-slime from which we are all originated.' And he gave it a name, he called it Bathybius, which, you know, 'deep life'. And he gave it another name as well, haeckelii, Bathybius haeckelii, after a German, the man who invented the word 'ecology' as it happens. So for ten years the maritime biological community blessed T.H. Huxley for having discovered the origin of life, this test tube full of slime, and he was revered for doing this. But unfortunately ten years later a lab assistant duplicated the slime by showing that it was a reaction between preserving alcohol and seawater and could be created in a heartbeat in the test tube. And this of course had the potential to wreck T.H. Huxley's reputation, but he was very good humoured about it and said, 'No, I was mistaken and we're reclassifying this. We're going to rename it "Blunderibus".' [Laughter] And so in an instant's good PR he regained his respectability.

Ramona Koval: I'm Ramona Koval and I'm speaking with Simon Winchester at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature. His book, Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, is a story of the high sea and those who sailed on her vast swells and swirls; of adventure and exploration, but also of cramped hulls full of people for sale—shackled slaves—and of cannons and of course of piracy.

Simon Winchester: There's a lot on warfare and the development of maritime warfare, from when ships rammed each other and then they invented the gun and they could fight with each other from a distance. But at first they never wanted to lose sight of the shore and then they discovered how to work out longitude and then they could work out how it's possible to fight battles in the middle of the ocean. And how the development of fighting between wooden-walled ships and then after the Monitor and the Merrimac in Chesapeake Bay in the 1860s, suddenly plating them with iron, and this changes the nature of seaborne warfare. And then you get, you know, classic battles—the great wooden-walled battle of course being Trafalgar, the great metal-walled battle being Jutland. So there's a lot about... the Falklands War of course comes into it, because I was somewhat involved in that.

Ramona Koval: And arrested.

Simon Winchester: And arrested, yes, quite. Well, that's another story. But also, the other nastiness: the two real major episodes were the slavery—I mean, the triangular voyage that started in ports like Bristol and went down to the slave castles in places like the Gold Coast or Ghana; the famous one, Cape Coast Castle, where politicians now make ritual visits, go through the door of no return. And then the slaves would be picked up there and taken under the most unbelievable... I mean, truly heartbreaking, these accounts of the slave trade. And the slaves would then be dumped either in the barracoons in the Caribbean Islands or taken to the slave ports, places like Savannah and so forth on the west coast of the United States.

But in addition to slavery, of course, there's piracy. So that all belongs in the same chapter. So there's a lot of sort of derring-do in that chapter.

Ramona Koval: I wonder would you like to read a little bit. [To audience] Would you like to hear a little bit about pirates? I was staggered to learn that all the pirates that we watch on Hollywood movies and read about—'cos we'll talk about the Atlantic and art and literature in a moment, and poetry—all that period of time was only about 75 years?

Simon Winchester: It was a very brief period. Slavery was rather longer, but piracy, we dealt with it quite quickly, because nations have a mutual self-interest, as they do today off Somalia, in stopping this business. This is what I wrote:

[reads from: Pirates, or those who, as the law has it, take a ship on the high seas from the possession or control of those lawfully entitled to it, have created havoc in the world seas for as long as mankind has been sailing in them... to ... It was an advertisement, a warning to other mariners of the terrible sanctions that would be mounted against anyone planning to sail on a vessel that might unfurl the Jolly Roger.]

[Applause]

Ramona Koval: So you mentioned there the literary attention to the Atlantic, but you also say that if any region can be said to have invented Atlantic art, it's the Netherlands.

Simon Winchester: Yes, they were... I mean, the artistic depictions of the Atlantic initially were fanciful—it was monsters and whirlpools and storms. But once people started trading across it and found it was sort of amenable to... there was a sort of romantic side to it, then artists took a more sort of benign attitude to it and very soon decided that the things that were really most majestic about the ocean, at least in their view, were the great ships. And that was where the Dutch came in and in the seventeenth century, Dutch sea paintings were these stunning pictures of huge Dutch trading ships, keeling over in a stiff wind and loading up in the ports of the Netherlands before heading out to the Americas or wherever.

They really dominated the art galleries for quite a long time, but then people started painting the sea qua the sea, as it were, and I suppose most notably, at least my particular favourite's JMW Turner, great for painting storms at sea. Winslow Homer, the American who lived in Maine and loved nothing more than a... although he spent a lot of his career north of Newcastle upon Tyne, Whitley Bay, and painted a lot of pictures of the North Sea, which of course has its own pretty dramatic storm life. And then this wonderful—she's from I think Latvia or Lithuania—called Vija Celmins, who one can go and see today in contemporary galleries in London, who does everything with pencil, the most exquisite renderings of the ocean.

So interest in the sea as the sea is a relatively modern thing. And impressionism was really born... I mean, Monet, his first painting was described as an impression of sunrise in a port in Normandy, which is where we get the word impressionism from. So that, like so many things, was born in the Atlantic Ocean.

Ramona Koval: What about those who depict the Atlantic in the literary form? Are you specially close to any of those?

Simon Winchester: Close? Not in the sense I think you mean it. I mean, we are physically close to the earliest piece of writing about the Atlantic Ocean. It's in Exeter Cathedral, this wonderful Anglo-Saxon volume known as the Exeter Codex, which contains what is probably the earliest, certainly Anglo-Saxon poem, called 'The Seafarer', translated I think by Ezra Pound. Just absolutely majestic and it's 700AD or 800AD—I forget the precise date. We're talking lyrically about the sea and the loneliness of the sailor and the impress of storms and the majesty of the water and then the longing for the woods and the flowers and the shoreline and the family. There is this unchanging human relationship with the sea which is very well depicted in poetry and in writing.

Ramona Koval: And then you say that, I suppose, the coming of the big container ship and the moving of mass goods across the sea began to change the romantic view.

Simon Winchester: That certainly was my view, starting off with this idea that we take it for granted: we call it 'the pond'; we fly over it; it's just distance. We wish it wasn't there. We get on a plane in New York and drumming our fingers, eating this dreadful food, hoping the movies aren't too bad, and 'If only this frigging Atlantic Ocean would stop being there!' And I think that all started—well, there was a sort of semantic shift, I think, in the 1980s, when you'd get on the plane and the pilot would say, 'Well, good morning, everybody. Today's track is going to take us over such-and-such,' as if it was utterly routine; there was nothing special about crossing the Atlantic. I mean, when I took that first voyage on the Canadian Pacific vessel, it was incredibly special and I've never forgotten it. I mean, how many of us remember flights across the Atlantic? And the same I think is true with cargo shipping. I mean, there was romance, I think, in a ship, particularly the tramp steamers, who would set out from Halifax taking a cargo to let's say Hamilton, Bermuda and then looking around for another cargo and maybe taking it to St Austell and then looking for another cargo and maybe taking it to Skibbereen or somewhere.

But nowadays, ever since this man—he was called Malcolm McLean, arguably a man terribly little known. He was a truck driver from Kentucky who had served in the Korean War and noticed that the American Army, whenever it got cumbersome pieces of cargo to move, like pieces of artillery or hospital beds or whatever, rather than sort of wrapping them in hessian and putting them on the back of trucks, they'd put them all into boxes of the same size and then put the boxes on the trucks. And he thought, 'I can do that for ships.' And so he rented a ship in Norfolk, Virginia, in the 1950s, put cargo in these boxes and loaded the boxes onto the ship and sent it down to Galveston in Texas, and noticed in an instant, two things happened: one, that the tyranny of the stevedores on the dockside, that we see in films like On the Waterfront, was ended, because there were no more stevedores, there were just these big crane operators that lifted these boxes up and down. And the cost of putting cargo on ships dropped overnight from $6 a ton to 16 cents a ton. And this meant that all of a sudden it made economic sense to trade goods between, let's say, well, ports far, far away, like Singapore and Hong Kong and Kaohsiung. Getting stuff from them before, in the 1950s, was terribly expensive; put them in boxes, it became terribly cheap. And, if anything, this man Malcolm McLean, who died in the 1990s, more or less forgotten, changed the whole world. I mean, it opened up the Far East, as the entrepôts, the trading partner for most of the rest of the world. And once again something hugely important and world-changing invented on, test driven on, the Atlantic Ocean.

Ramona Koval: Yes, but the romance was a little bit lost in the...

Simon Winchester: Oh, yeah...

Ramona Koval: Even as you're speaking, I'm just staggered by the courage and enormous bravery of thought that it takes to sail across, or to put an underwater cable...

Simon Winchester: Yes, the cable ships. I love those stories. I mean, the stories of fligh,t of course—Alcock and Brown travelling across in 1916 in that little rickety bomber of theirs, from an airstrip they built themselves in Newfoundland and travelling over with their two cats, Twinkle Toes and Lucky Jim, and managing to get overhead Ireland and Galway. I hope there aren't too many people in the audience who are Irish, but eight o'clock in the morning you'd think in most of the rest of the world people would be awake, but no not at all, they were fast asleep and they had to buzz them many times in the aircraft before some chap—you know, probably a Guiness—says, 'Ah, bejesus, there's a funny thing up in the sky there!' And he lands in a bog and he says, 'You must be Alcock and Brown, we're expecting you.' [Laughter] But that changed everything as we know all too well. Do forgive me please.

But then the laying of the trans-Atlantic cables. In the end after a lot of hit and miss—it's a very difficult thing to do, because how heavy does the cable have to be to take the amount of electricity necessary for communication? If it's too heavy it'll break under its own weight. But in the end they measured what it should be; it kept breaking and so in the end they loaded half the cable onto each of two ships and they met in the middle of the Atlantic, side-by-side, joined the cable up together, tied it together, and then moved away from each other with one ship landing at Foilhommerum Bay in southwest Ireland, the other one at Heart's Content in Newfoundland, and then the cable worked and the first messages were sent. And I think the first message, someone grumbled. Someone like Mark Twain said, 'Oh this thing is a complete waste of time, it'll just tell us that Queen Victoria's got whooping cough or something.' And it did indeed say that [Princess] Adelaide cannot go to Moscow because she's got a cold. And people in America are saying, 'Why do we care? Why do we need this cable?'

But also, I mean, the radio. To me, the moment of the first radio transmission is just so romantic. You have Marconi sitting there, once again in Newfoundland, on a cliff top above St John's, what's now called Signal Hill, with this big apparatus that he'd invented, with an aerial on a kite, about 500 or 600 feet. Phenomenal storm going on, middle of the night, and he's with Mr Kemp and he's listening to this little Bakelite receiver. The howl of the gale and the wind, the rain and everything, and what he's listening for is his colleagues over in Poldhu, near the Lizard in Cornwall, who'd been instructed to—day and night for as long as it took—to send out on a similar piece of equipment the letter S in Morse code: di-di-di, di-di-di, di-di-di. And there's this incredible moment, when listening intently through the night, suddenly you see this Marconi, who, sort of half Irish himself—his family was involved in the Jameson's Whisky business—big smile coming over his face and he passes this Bakelite thing to Mr Kemp and he says, 'Do you hear that, Mr Kemp?' And Kemp listens intently and sure enough, 'di-di-di, di-di-di, di-di-di.' And he knows that... I mean, it sounds so simple now, but that moment in 1902, you know, you shout into the wind—nothing can be heard; you speak very softly or send a telegraph signal and it's transmitted through some magic across the airwaves. Once again, the Atlantic saw the birth of it.

Ramona Koval: Towards the end of the book you're really saying we're abusing the Atlantic.

Simon Winchester: We are, in many, many ways. We call it 'the pond' and so that is in a way sort of disrespectful symbolically, but in fact using the word, 'crossing the pond', the phrase was actually first used in 1650, it's nothing new at all, but the point is still valid.

I think the most illustrative way of showing how we disrespect the ocean is to look at what's happened to the fish. I mean, most notably of all, the Atlantic Codfish, Gadus morhua, this enormous fish, with this wonderful sort of white, sustaining flesh, which has been sustaining us, humankind—the Vikings and the Basques and everyone used it. And the place in the North Atlantic where it was most concentrated was in the waters to the east of Newfoundland, off the Grand Banks, Flemish Cap. And there used to be so many—even people like Cabot, who crossed in the 1490s, would say that there are so many cod, and you've only got to see this by seeing the old movie of Captains Courageous, the famous Kipling book, that it seems that you could walk from Iceland to Newfoundland on the backs of these fish. There are so many of them, you just reach your hand in and out comes this enormous fish.

Well, the factory ship was invented in the 1960s and then there was a lot of fishing. And the Canadian government decided to get involved and extended its coastal limit and suggested how much cod could be brought home to Newfoundland. And the whole province was infused, and indeed informally the motto for Newfoundland became, 'In Cod we Trust'. But it was a very false god to go after, because there are now no cod at all. I mean, the overfishing and the disastrous decisions by the Canadian government have meant that Newfoundland cod just doesn't exist: there isn't any; the whole fishery has been destroyed.

But by contrast, and it's one of the few good things that's come out as a legacy of the Falklands War in the early 1980s, was that we, the British, take a very serious view of our responsibilities in the South Atlantic now, and not just for military reasons. There is one of the greatest fisheries in the world between the Falkland Islands in the west and South Georgia in the east, most notably around a few pinnacles of rock that rise in the middle of nowhere, called the Shag Rocks. That's one of the great fisheries for what is technically known as the Patagonian toothfish, which you will all eat a great deal of under the rebranded name of Chilean sea bass. Chilean sea bass isn't a bass at all; it's an extremely ugly, very, very ugly fish, but at least it's not the orange roughy, which is the Atlantic slimefish, which is an even less attractively named fish.

But our appetite for Chilean sea bass is such that if we fish that without restriction, we'd do as much damage to the South Atlantic fishery as we've done to the North Atlantic cod fishery. But the British have policed it in a remarkably efficient way by satellite tracking and monitoring, and by having big warships with very big guns mounted on the bow. And if anyone is fishing illegally down there, even though you're a long way from anywhere, you'll be caught. And there was a notorious case a couple of years ago when the British fishery protection vessel, which was in those days called the Motor Vessel Dorada, which has a big oerlikon machine gun on the front, it chased a Galician long-line fish, trying to get toothfish illegally, and chased it all the way round and captured it off Australia in the end, having gone about 7000 miles in pursuit of it. But you know, it's like the Mounties, always get your man. And they arrested it, confiscated the catch, and the chaps went to court. So the British are policing its fishery in the South Atlantic very, very well indeed.

Ramona Koval: A positive but salutary story. Simon Winchester at the Times Cheltenham Festival of Literature and Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories is published by Harper Collins.

Publications

Title: Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

Author: Simon Winchester

Publisher: Harper Collins