Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms Read online

  The motorboat was winched up, the package—which turned out to be emergency medicine for an elderly woman passenger in distress in our liner’s hospital—was duly delivered, and within the hour our engines had throbbed back into life and we were heading back onto our original course once again.

  A trivial maritime incident, occasioning no more than a negligible delay in our arrival in Montreal two days later. But it was an event that has remained with me ever since. There was something uncanny about the sudden silence, the emptiness, the realization of the enormous depths below us and the limitless heights above, the universal grayness of the scene, the very evident and potentially terrifying power of the rough seas and the wind, and the fact that despite our puny human powerlessness and insignificance, invisible radio beams and Morse code signals had summoned readily offered help from somewhere far away. It was an augury of sorts, I have come to think in the years since, that this entire small drama had taken place on the first voyage that I ever took across the seas.

  The captain’s log for the closing moment of Voyage No. 115 is entirely laconic, almost dismissive: “Pilots exchanged at Three Rivers. Fine weather continued all the way up St. Lawrence. Clock tower passed at 1813hrs. Canted into berth with aid two tugs. All fast No. 8 shed at 1853hrs. Finished With Engines.” We had crossed the ocean in seven days, six hours, and seven minutes, and despite our mid-ocean rendezvous were just fifty-four minutes late. British railway trains of the day seldom did much better.

  • • •

  Unknown to all of us aboard that week, and quite by coincidence, forces unseen and unseemly were hard at work. They were the dark forces of economics. As it turned out, the Empress of Britain was to make only eight more scheduled crossings of the Atlantic in her life. Just six months later, in October, a peremptory announcement was made that the barely seven-year-old flagship, launched with great fanfare by Queen Elizabeth in 1955, had been withdrawn from Atlantic service and would be sold. Her new owners, Greeks from Piraeus, would instead steam vacationers gently around the Caribbean, in a hurry no more.

  The economics of large passenger liners suddenly made no sense. BOAC and Pan American had both begun air service between London’s Heathrow and New York’s Idlewild (later JFK) airports five years before, in 1958. The first flights were obliged to make refueling stops at Gander, in Newfoundland, but then as the planes became more powerful, both airlines began to cross the ocean nonstop, and scores of other carriers soon began to do the same. One by one the great passenger liners vanished from the ocean trade, and such ships as survived began to cruise instead, helping to inaugurate what would become an entirely different maritime industry.2

  So it was tellingly symbolic that I came back from America six months later by air, and did so on what turned out to be the very same week that the stunned crew of the Empress was making its final voyage with the much-loved liner. Had I known of the droll coincidence I daresay I might have looked down and seen her plowing her last white eastbound furrow home. But my flight had its distracting moments anyway: it was aboard a Lockheed Constellation, a four-engine, triple-tailed machine designed first as a long-range bomber and then as a troop transport, and operated in this case by a somewhat dubious charter company known as Capitol Airways of Nashville, Tennessee. We took off from New York, landed four hours later at Gander, then (by the skin of our teeth, the pilot later confessed, as the fuel was alarmingly low) made Shannon in the west of Ireland, but proceeded to discover that for some technical and legal reason we had no permission to land in London and were diverted to Brussels instead. Eventually, and testily, I found a flight to Manchester and made the rest of my way home by railway.

  • • •

  Almost half a century has passed since I made those two crossings—fifty-odd years during which I must have traversed this particular body of water five hundred times, at least. And though I have ventured out from a variety of other ports in both the North and South Atlantic, to cross in other directions, by rhumb lines or diagonally or along the lines of longitude or in huge looping curves, or to make expeditions out to the various islands that are scattered across the sea, it seems to me that the simple and most familiar route, the track from the major British ports to their major equivalents in eastern Canada or the United States, distills one aspect of what this book is about—humankind’s evolving attitude toward and relationship with this enormous body of water.

  And even in my lifetime, this is a relationship that has changed, and profoundly so.

  In the early 1960s it was still something of a rarity to travel across the Atlantic by ship, or by any other means, for that matter. A scattering of the broke still went one-way, westbound, as migrants; a rather larger number of the wealthy and leisured traveled out and back on the great steamers with no care for time or cost. A handful of businessmen, not a few politicians, and clubby aggregations of diplomats went too, but most of them in propeller-driven aircraft rather than propeller-driven ships, for their crossings were said to be more urgent. For those who made the journey, it was still an adventure that could be daunting, exciting, memorable, suffused with romance, or cursed by the travails of mal de mer. What it most certainly was not was routine.

  The same can hardly be said today. Yes, for a while it certainly was an excitement to cross the ocean by air—but for only a very short while. It must have been a considerable thrill, for instance, to take a Pan Am Clipper flying-boat service from the Solent to the Hudson, with stops in the harbors of such strange-sounding and long-forgotten coastal way stations as Foynes, Botwood, and Shediac. It must have seemed the height of style to stretch out in a bed on a double-decker Stratocruiser while the seas unrolled silently below. It was surely memorable—and foolhardy, given the plane’s dismal safety record—to fly aboard one of those first BOAC Comet services, and even in the smoky old Boeing 707s when Pan Am and TWA began to fly them nonstop. I remember well taking some of the early Concorde test flights, and being naïvely astonished at just how fast they were when, only halfway through the Arts section of the New York Times, I was told that we were decelerating over the Bristol Channel and would be in London directly and so would I return my tray table and seat to where they had been when I eased myself aboard just a few moments before. Air travel across the great ocean was for a brief time almost as romantic and memorable as travel by sea. But it all soon changed.

  For me it was marked by a small semantic shift. It began some time in the 1980s, when the pilots of aircraft crossing between Heathrow and Kennedy would slip almost casually into their welcoming announcement that “our track today will take us over Iceland”—with a slight emphasis on the word today, as if yesterday the flight was much the same except that it had passed over Greenland, or the Faroes. Or else they told the passengers that “the 177” or whatever the flight number might be, and so sounding studiedly casual, would be passing “a little farther north than usual, due to strong headwinds, and we’ll make our landfall over Labrador and then head down over the state of Maine.”

  It seemed to me a shame—as though the flight deck were telling its charges that there was nothing much to get excited about anymore: today’s transit was much like yesterday’s, or last week’s, and the crossing of what had become called “the pond”3 (the terminology demoting the great ocean to a body of water almost without significance) would invariably be much as was generally expected at this time of year. Ho-hum, in other words.

  And we passengers scarcely noticed. Having made good our nest of books and blankets, having made obligatory noises of good cheer to our stranger-neighbor, having glanced at the menu and wondered idly if it was too early to order a drink, we settled down and barely noticed a takeoff that would perhaps have enthralled us twenty years before. The same was true when it came to our landing six or seven hours later. Maybe there was a little more curiosity—since home was close and one wanted to sense and maybe spot a hint of it. Generally speaking, though, whether we could see six miles beneath us the forests of Labrador or those on
Anticosti Island, or whether our first solid encounter with North America was Cape Breton Island or the sand spits of Sandy Hook or Cape Cod, it made little difference: all we really cared about was that we got in on time, that the border formalities weren’t too irksome, and that we could get onto dry land and begin at once what we had journeyed to achieve. The gray-green vastness of undifferentiated ocean over which we had perforce to travel was really of no consequence whatever.

  • • •

  That for years was very much the case for me—until one recent summer’s afternoon, as I was crossing to New York on a British Airways 777, companionless, conversationless, and bored, pinioned uncomfortably into a starboard window seat. Lunch was long since done. I had finished the paper and my only book. The entertainment was as much as I could bear. There were three more hours to run, and I was daydreaming. I looked idly out of the plexiglass porthole. It was quite cloudless, and miles below us was the sea, as deep blue as the sky, not smooth but vaguely crinkled, like dull aluminum foil, or pewter, or hammered steel, and seeming to inch its way slowly backward from beneath the wing.

  I had been gazing for maybe fifteen minutes at the blue sea emerging from beneath the gray flaps. Blue, blue, blue . . . and then as I gazed down, I fancied I saw the water surface unexpectedly and subtly change color, becoming first rather paler, and within what can have been no more than a couple of moments, or miles, transmuting itself into a shade of light aquamarine. Seldom had I seen such a thing from this altitude: I supposed that if it was real, and not imagined, then it must have had something to do with the angle of the sun, which since I had taken a midday flight, was higher in the sky than usual.

  I glanced at the sky map in the seatback in front. The chart was large-scale and poor, but the position it showed offered the obvious reason for the alteration: we had crossed the edge of the continental shelf. The deep mid-ocean abyss over which we had been passing since crossing the Porcupine Bank, which marks the western end of the European shelf and is usually reached about half an hour off the Irish coast, had now lifted itself up at last to become the faint submarine stirrings of the North American mainland.

  Except that a few moments later, and even more unusually, the water became dark blue once again, though this time only for a brief interval, before lightening yet again. It was as though the aircraft had passed over a deep river in the ocean, a cleft between two high underwater plains. I squinted as far under the wing as my vision allowed: from where the plain resumed it appeared to stretch away to the west, uninterrupted. And then I remembered, from what I knew of the undersea geography of this part of the North Atlantic: I had long been fascinated by the geography of the Gulf Stream, and as I remembered, it flowed nearby. What I recalled suggested to me that the uninterrupted plain I could now see marked the beginning of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The dark blue underwater channel was known as Flemish Pass. And the first patch of green I had spotted was, I realized, the very place where we had stopped all those years before to rendezvous with the Canadian rescue plane: the well-remembered shallows known as the Flemish Cap.

  • • •

  Nearly half a century has gone by since I first saw the Flemish Cap and watched, captivated, as that Canadian Air Force plane swept in. Back then—I was still a youngster, to be sure, and more easily awed than today—I had savored every detail of what seemed to me a fascinating small moment. And in the hours after our ship had started up and begun to move off westward, I had learned of other historical grace notes to the saga: a friendly deck officer on the Empress had told me that the emergency signals we had tapped out the night before had been picked up on Newfoundland by the American coast guard base in a place called Argentia—and they had taught us at school that it was at Argentia, back in 1941, that Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met aboard the battleship Prince of Wales and declared the Atlantic Charter, which so famously delineated the working of the postwar world. That I had just been hove-to, so far from all mankind, at the mercy of the sea—and yet linked by radio with so significant a piece of history: that made the moment even more special and helped burn the memory of this fragment of waterway ever more firmly into my mind.

  Today that same piece of marine geography, spotted briefly from an overflying aircraft, had been no more than a faraway patch of mottled and discolored water serving inconveniently to keep me from the timely arrival at my destination. How sad, I thought, that so vividly remembered a place should have so quickly transmuted itself into something little more than an incommoding parcel of distance.

  In August 1941 Roosevelt and Churchill met aboard the battleship HMS Prince of Wales to agree on structuring the postwar world. Eventually they signed the Atlantic Charter, which signaled a changing of the guard, with America taking over from Britain as titular leader of the Western world.

  But wait—was that not how the world at large had come to think of the ocean as a whole? Wasn’t the ocean just distance for most people these days? Didn’t we all now take for granted a body of water that, so relatively recently—no more than five hundred years before, at most—was viewed by mariners who had not yet dared attempt to cross it with a mixture of awe, terror, and amazement? Had not a sea that had once seemed an impassable barrier to somewhere—to Japan? the Indies? the Spice Islands? the East?—transmuted itself with dispatch into a mere bridge of convenience to the wealth and miracles of the New World? Had our regard for this ocean not switched from the intimidation of the unknown and the frightening to the indifference with which we now greet the ordinary?

  And yet had not this change taken place in some kind of inverse relation to the ocean’s ever-growing importance? For hadn’t the Atlantic become over the centuries much more than a mere bridge? It had surely also become a focal point, an axis, a fulcrum, around which the power and influence of the modern world has long been distributed. One might say that if the Mediterranean had long been the inland sea of the classical civilization, then the Atlantic Ocean had in time replaced it by becoming the inland sea of Western civilization. D. W. Meinig, the historical geographer, wrote in 1986 of this new perceived role of the Atlantic: the ocean, he wrote, was unique in having “the old seats of culture on the east, a great frontier for expansion on the west, and a long and integral African shore.” The Atlantic existed in equipoise between the blocs of power and cultural influence that have shaped the modern world. It is an entity that links them, unites them, and in some indescribable way also defines them.

  It was Walter Lippmann, in 1917, who first advanced the notion of the Atlantic Community. In a famous essay in the New Republic, he wrote of it as the core of “the profound web of interest which joins together the western world.” And though today we recognize what this community is and whom it fully embraces (and even if we do not fully comprehend it), it is clear that despite the coming claims of India and China and Japan, it is a grouping of countries and civilizations that, for now at least, still manages to direct the principal doings of the planet.

  It is a community of sorts, a kind of pan-Atlantic civilization, if you will, that at its beginning involved simply the northern countries on the Atlantic shores, with the nations of Western Europe on the one hand and the United States and Canada on the other. More recently both Latin America and the nations of western and central Africa have been incorporated into the mix. Brazil and Senegal, Guyana and Liberia, Uruguay and Mauritania are now every bit as much in and of the Atlantic Community, just as for scores of years have been the peoples of more obviously Atlantic nations such as Iceland and Greenland, Nigeria, Portugal, Ireland, France, and Britain. The community is indeed much larger and more comprehensive than that, as what follows will explain.

  And yet the body of water that ties these millions of people and myriad cultures and civilizations together—the S-shaped body of water covering 33 million square miles, which in the Western Hemisphere is called the Atlantic Ocean, and which on the eastern side of the world is generally known as the Great West Sea—suffers the fate of
the overlooked. It is an ocean that can fairly be described as hidden in plain sight—something that is quite obviously there, but in so many ways is just not obvious at all.

  It is undeniably very visible. “Even if we hang a satellite station in space,” wrote the American historian Leonard Outhwaite in 1957, when the first Sputnik was launched, “or if we reach the moon, the Atlantic Ocean will still be the center of the human world.”

  • • •

  Not all bodies of water are so very evidently alive as the Atlantic. Some inland seas that are large, topographically important, navigationally complex, and historically crucial manage somehow to seem strangely still, starved of any readily apparent vitality. The Black Sea, for one, has the feel of a rather moribund, lifeless body of water; the Red Sea also, bathed in its ocher fog of desert sand, seems perpetually half dead; even the Coral Sea and the Sea of Japan, beautiful and placid though they may be, are somehow stripped of any true kind of oceanic liveliness and come off as strangely dulled.

  But the Atlantic Ocean is surely a living thing—furiously and demonstrably so. It is an ocean that moves, impressively and ceaselessly. It generates all kinds of noise—it is forever roaring, thundering, boiling, crashing, swelling, lapping. It is easy to imagine it trying to draw breath—perhaps not so noticeably out in mid-ocean, but where it encounters land, its waters sifting up and down a gravel beach, it mimics nearly perfectly the steady inspirations and exhalations of a living creature. It crawls with symbiotic existences, too: unimaginable quantities of monsters, minute and massive alike, churn within its depths in a kind of maritime harmony, giving to the waters a feeling of vibration, a kind of suboceanic pulse. And it has a psychology. It has moods: sometimes dour and sullen, on rare occasions cunning and playful; always it is pondering and powerful.

  It also has a quite predictable span of life. Geologists believe that when all is done the Atlantic Ocean will have lived for a grand total of about 370 million years. It first split open and filled with water and started to achieve properly oceanic dimensions about 190 million years ago. Currently it is enjoying a sedate and rather settled middle age, growing just a little wider each year, and with a few volcanoes sputtering away in its mid-region, but generally not having to suffer any particularly trying geological convulsions. But in due course, these will come.