A body of water with a beginning, middle and an end? Master historian and storyteller Winchester dives into the Atlantic Ocean’s past and present. Excerpted from “Simon Winchester: Atlantic – The Biography of an Ocean,” November 14, 2010.

SIMON WINCHESTER, Author, Krakatoa and Atlantic

 

I was flying across the Atlantic one day from New York to London, like most people just sort of drumming my fingers, thinking, When is this going to be over? The flights have now reduced the Atlantic to a tedious incommoding expanse of distance. You look at that little map in the seatback in front of you and you think, Oh my god, we’re just between Greenland and Newfoundland; why can’t we get there? And you forget the extraordinary romance and all the stories that went on in the ocean that’s five miles below us.

I put forth the idea to my publishers that I would write a book about the Atlantic. But how on earth do you do it?

It became clear to me after a little while of thinking that the Atlantic is an entity that can reasonably be said to have a life – certainly a life span – and that it was born at a definable time in world history, about 200 million years ago. And if you believe the geological futurologists who mainly inhabit the University of Texas, they have looked at how continents have moved in the past and they’ve drawn up algorithms which show how they’ll move in the future; they’ve proved, at least to their contentment, that the Atlantic will cease to be in another 170 million years’ time. Of course, we’ll be all extinct by that time.

Actually, that allows me to ruminate very briefly on the concept of geologic time, which some people just don’t get. There was the classic example three or four years ago. I was talking to a group of ladies who lunch in Kansas City about the Yellowstone volcano complex, which sometime in the future is going to re-erupt, and when it does so, it will be several hundred years of eruptions, which will have extraordinary effects on the cities, certainly San Francisco, but also Portland and Seattle and Vancouver. They will be buried under 100 or 200 feet of volcanic ash, and the Northwest of the United States will be toast. There’s no doubt about it. But everyone [at the lunch] was sort of nervous about this, and I said, “Don’t worry. We’re talking geological time here, and that’s 250,000 years at least, by which time everyone will be extinct.” And everyone seemed sort of relieved to hear this, except one extremely angry woman in the front row, who stood up brandishing her program and said, “What?! Even Americans will be extinct?”

So the Atlantic has a total life span of nearly 400 million years. Then, sandwiched almost in the middle, is a very geologically slender period of about 200,000 years when humankind is involved in the ocean. That’s really the core of the book. The big question was how on earth to write that.

 

Question and answer session with BRIAN HACKNEY, Science Editor and Host of “Eye on the Bay,” CBS5 

HACKNEY: One of the chapters in the book is dedicated to warfare on the open sea. You had your own personal experience with it. Let’s go back to early May 1982. Tell us what’s happening and what happened to you.

WINCHESTER: I had been in India in March of 1982 when I got a telegram from my foreign editor in London [at The Sunday Times] saying to return to London immediately. I thought, Oh my gosh, this is a problem with my expenses. So I took a British Airways flight from Delhi to London, turned up in front of Cal McCrystal, and I said, “What’s the problem?” He said, “There’s no problem. We just thought, there’s going to be a war in the South Atlantic between Argentina and Britain over the Falkland Islands, and we think you should be the chap to go.”

So I flew to Buenos Aires. I knew one friend from school who was a spy at the British embassy in Buenos Aires. I went to have lunch with him and asked, “Are the Argentines going to invade the Falklands?” He said, “I can’t possibly tell you, but I can tell you this: You can probably get a flight to the Falklands, but you may not get one back.” So I flew down to southern Patagonia, a place called Comodoro Rivadavia, took a flight to the Falklands, and they were invaded two days later. So I was there, hiding under the governor’s bed, when the Argentines were machine gunning. It was all very exciting.

Then the governor was deported. I was deported three days later and then arrested for spying, because they found the telephone number of the spy in my notebook. Suddenly, here we are [Winchester and two other journalists], under arrest, tried, sentenced to life imprisonment for spying, and put in the slammer in this town, Ushuaia. But the day that you’re referring to, the 10th of May, is when there was a sudden commotion and the governor of the prison, a man called Juan Carlos Grieco, came running up to the cell and said, “Great victory today. We, Argentina, have sunk one of your warships.” It’s one of the events that all Britains remember: where they were when the first warship of the Royal Navy was sunk since World War II. It was a destroyer called HMS Sheffield. He was exultant. It was a terrible tragedy. But the coda to that story is about 15 years later, I got a letter from Juan Carlos saying he wanted to see me.

HACKNEY: Suffice it to say you didn’t spend life in prison.

WINCHESTER: We were released once the British won the war, and we were part of the tidying up. In fact, to keep Argentina’s face, we weren’t actually exonerated, we were released on bail – and, I might say, an insultingly small sum. So Juan Carlos wrote to me and told me what had happened to him. He had been arrested, dismissed from the navy, put in my cell for a year. He then went selling soap door to door in Buenos Aires for six years, but managed to keep his family and dignity together, then went back to university, took a degree in history, and now was a lecturer in history in the Tierra del Fuego campus of the University of Patagonia. He wanted to see me very much because he wanted to say something to me.

So I flew down that day, back to Ushuaia, and there was Juan Carlos, and it was amazing. He was very tearful about it. We went to a restaurant. He said, “I want to say something about that night I came into your cell exultant about the sinking of HMS Sheffield. I am a sailor, and I would never wish on anybody to die alone at sea in the middle of the ocean, with your ship sinking beside you. And I want to apologize formally for what I said. Because there is a brotherhood of the sea, and all sailors stick together.” I thought that was amazingly touching, and so we’ve remained friends ever since.

HACKNEY: I want to cover some of the basics of the Atlantic Ocean, so let’s do it in rapid-fire fashion. How long has it been around?

WINCHESTER: Two hundred million years.

HACKNEY: When was the first time that humans said, I could go float on that thing?

WINCHESTER: One hundred sixty-four thousand years ago is when we first saw it, in southern Africa, and had our first seafood.

HACKNEY: Who were the first people who regularly set sail upon the Atlantic?

WINCHESTER: The Phoenicians, and that was in about the seventh century B.C., and they did so in an extraordinary act of bravery, going through the Pillars of Hercules, from the safety of the Mediterranean, sailing between Gibraltar and Jebel Musa out into this ocean that Homer had called the “sea of perpetual gloom,” that was full of monsters and storms, and possibly the edge of the world, if you believed that the world was not spherical. But they turned left, they found that they didn’t sink, and they discovered two islands off of what is now the Moroccan port of Essaouira where there were a huge number of these shells from which they already knew in the Mediterranean they could extract beautiful, indelible, purple dye, which the Roman and Greek aristocracy liked to dye their clothes with. So they set up a trading post, and that was the beginning of Atlantic trade. Market forces are what dragged us into the Atlantic.

I’m never going to get a reservation in an Italian restaurant again, because I try in this book to knock Christopher Columbus from his perch. In America, every child is taught that in 1492, he sailed the ocean blue and all that. Well, he may have done that, but he wasn’t the first. The first was 491 years before, this very nice chap called Leif Ericson, who imprisoned no one, enslaved nobody, he behaved in a civilized fashion, built a settlement, which still exists now, in a place called L’Anse aux Meadows in the north of Newfoundland, and had cattle and performed agriculture, and conceived – there was a child born. The first European child ever born in North America was born in Newfoundland in 1002 A.D. He has this wonderful name, Snorri Thorfinnsson.

The only big difference between Ericson up north and Columbus down south is that the weather up north was dreadful, and the Norwegians thought, Why are we staying here? And they legged it back to Norway after about eight years. That’s a pure difference of geography and latitude.

HACKNEY: I would have to think that the news of the Atlantic Ocean must have reached Europe somehow. Did people suddenly, or gradually, become aware that there was this ocean lying out there [in the] west, and were they gripped by the idea of this vast body of water?

WINCHESTER: Well, at first they were terrified, because they didn’t know if it had an end, they didn’t know there was another side. If you look at their poetry and art, it all reflects the idea that [the ocean] was full of monsters. There was one extraordinary monster called Naglfar, which was a ship made of the toe and fingernail clippings of dead seamen. People had really strange imaginations of the kind of thing that went on in the Atlantic Ocean. The poetry reflected that. But then slowly, once people began to get a handle on the ocean and realized it was full of dangers, it needed to be respected, but was not full of monsters, then we started to have a much more lyrical appreciation of the sea, and this appears in, for instance, paintings. Like Winslow Homer, one of the greatest marine artists of all time. [Or] J.M.W. Turner, of course. So it’s an interesting evolution, to see how our love affair with the sea has grown in concert with our commercial use of it.

HACKNEY: It was literally a conduit for conveying information. If you and I were around in 1820 and wanted to get word that I had bought a pair of shoes in New York, how long would it have taken word of that to get to London?

WINCHESTER: Well, I can certainly tell you that in 1865, when Lincoln was assassinated, it took 12 days. The news was conveyed essentially up to Nova Scotia and was put on a boat, taken across the ocean to Ireland, and then eventually horses and so forth took the news to London. So it was a long time. But then suddenly, this man Cyrus Field, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, came up with the idea that the telegraph, which had been recently invented, could be, if made with properly constructed cables, allowed to run under the ocean. They tried and failed many, many times until someone had the bright idea of putting about 2,000 miles of cable on one ship and 2,000 miles of cable on another, the two ships meeting in the middle of the Atlantic and splicing the two ends of cable together. The queen sent a message to the American president saying that the Old World and the New World are now one, we are now united.

HACKNEY: Of all the natural phenomena in the ocean, do you have a favorite?

WINCHESTER: I think the dominant thing is the Gulf Stream, which Ben Franklin drew the first map of. He was intrigued by the mail boats, because he was the first U.S. postmaster general and was a colonial postmaster. He wanted to know why the mail packets going from Falmouth to Halifax were battling against the sea in a way that the ships coming back were not, and how it was that a ship coming eastbound would go much more quickly if it were taken north. So he plotted a map of this great big 60-mile-wide current that came from Florida, warm water coming all the way to Scotland. I used to live in Scotland, and you’re way up at 58 degrees north latitude, when at 58 degrees in this part of the world it’s bitterly cold, but we’re growing palm trees at the bottom of our garden, because the water that washes at the bottom of the house I used to have comes from Florida, courtesy of the Gulf Stream. In fact, 30 or so years ago, when I was a small boy, someone experimented by dumping many tons of perfume into the Gulf Stream off Orlando, and sure enough, two weeks later people in Scotland were saying, “What’s that dreadful smell?” It was the perfume. [The discovery changed navigation] by enabling sailors to choose prudent routes to go most quickly across the ocean. This brought on board the mapmakers. So learning about the currents was crucially important to navigation.

HACKNEY: What’s the state of the Atlantic Ocean today?

WINCHESTER: It’s not in good shape. At the same time that we’re flying across the ocean and being bored with it, it’s the Pond. We disrespect it. The British government has tons of radioactive material that it just dumped off Cornwall and Scotland because they think it’s big enough, it’ll absorb it. Not at all. There’s tons of radioactivity in the eastern Atlantic. There’s mercury, of course, in tuna. You should never, never eat bluefin tuna. It’s an endangered fish. It’s also very dangerous to eat. My wife, who’s Japanese, gets very cross with me, because, like most Japanese, she likes sushi. But not bluefin tuna sushi, please.

But I thought one of the most sad examples of human greed and politics is what happened to the codfish off Newfoundland, off the Grand Banks. People used to say – Rudyard Kipling in Captains Courageous – that you could almost walk to Newfoundland on the backs of these magnificent, silvery fish; there were so many of them. But now, thanks to some appallingly bad decisions made largely by the Canadian government in the 1990s, pandering to the voters in Newfoundland, there are no cod left. They are a completely cod-free part of the world. Whereas down in the other end of the ocean, there’s a fish called the Patagonian toothfish, which we know on our restaurant menus as the Chilean sea bass, because no one is going to eat something called Patagonian toothfish. That is in good shape, because the governments down there have administered that fishery very well. But codfish is a great maritime tragedy.