Atlantic (20 page)

Manhattan hardly remains an architectural temple to the city’s maritime history, a celebration of the sea. Its legions of skyscrapers are totems of other fields of commerce and wealth. But down beside the forts and bastions of the Battery, within a few rough-water cables of Ellis Island and Governors Island and the Statue of Liberty in her park on what once was Bedloe’s Island, there are still hints of the city’s cis-oceanic origins. Most notable of all the suggestions is the magnificent Beaux Arts Custom House, little used today but mercifully spared the fate of other equally noble buildings that were ground into landfill.

Ranged along the front of this great structure are four immense seated statues of figures. They were fashioned by Daniel Chester French, whose fame depends largely on his gargantuan statue of Lincoln in Washington, D.C. The four Custom House figures depict, with more than a nod to the ethnocentric mood of the times, the great seafaring continents.

Asia and Africa, their statues consigned to the two outer corners of the building, are seen to be sleeping and unmoving, little more than merely forgettable and pointlessly pretty. Europe and America, on the other hand, sit across from each other at either side of the flight of steps leading up the main entrance, and they positively burst with noble attitudes, with a frozen-in-marble energy and an apparently boundless capacity for triumph and fortune. If ever two statues can be said to represent the coming together that has created the new Atlantic identity, then this latter pair of marble giants, little seen and largely overlooked deep in the canyons of far lower Manhattan, have few equals. It is a shame that they both are female and that there is no potential for any marble offspring, with all the genetic markers of the new Atlantic spirit.

Shipping newspapers like the
Journal of Commerce
and
Lloyd’s List
are still circulated down in these lower streets of Manhattan, to those with an urgent need, and a nearby shop called New York Nautical still sells charts of the
Approaches to Pernambuco
and the
Estrecho de Magellanes,
and has available the A
dmiralty Pilot to the West Coast of Scotland
and guides to a hundred other corners of the world’s oceans beside. A sailor home from sea can buy the
List of Lights: North Atlantic,
look over a good stock of sextants and brass-bound chronometers, or contemplate Adlard Coles on
Heavy Weather Sailing
and the
Ashley Book of Knots.
An hour spent on Lower Broadway, and then a taxi back to the piers of Red Hook, and one could feel entirely ready to board a ship, weigh anchor, and ease springs and head out beneath the Narrows Bridge, pushing out into the swells off Fire Island and then past Montauk, to where the Nantucket Light Vessel blinks its farewell to shallow sea, and finally set course for one of the classics of the old-world ports, three thousand sea miles ahead. To Bergen, say, in Norway. Or to Antwerp, or Rotterdam, Liverpool, Cherbourg, Vigo, Casablanca, or even, if courageous and well victualed enough to brave a heading far to the southeast, to Cape Town.

Here at the far end of the ocean’s longest diagonal is New York City’s polar opposite, its intellectual and spiritual antipode. Here, just a matter of miles from the most southerly tip of Africa, is a city truly born of the sea, yet seemingly paying little man-made homage to it, and rather letting Nature do so instead. The spectacle of Manhattan is something entirely enthroned in her buildings, which serve to display the myriad creative capacities of humanity. Her natural landscape is all but irrelevant. The joys of Cape Town, by contrast, lie not the buildings of the city at all, but in the velvet blue mountains that frame it. And all this great scenery serves to display what the sea already knows, and which is the very opposite of New York’s self-delusion: not humankind’s creative genius at all, but our utter insignificance.

I arrived in Cape Town recently in a small Greek ship. We were coming in on an easterly heading from the island of Tristan da Cunha, 1,800 miles and three days’ sailing away. As promised, the Ukrainian steersman had called me to the bridge soon after five in the morning of our arrival: Africa, he said, was now directly ahead and visible, and the sun would soon be rising over the mountains.

It was a perfectly clear morning, cloudless and cool. One low-slung cargo ship, of Chinese registry, was off to the starboard on an otherwise calm and empty sea. Ahead was the glow of coming sunrise, and silhouetted in mauve below was a ragged skein of mountains, ending in a sharp cliff—the Cape of Storms that was, now the Cape of Good Hope. Northward from this cape the land first rose, then fell into a long defile, then rose again in a flattish tilt. It was from behind this that the sun first appeared, changing the color of the land, now twenty miles away, from blue to rock-dust brown and, where there was grass, to green.

Soon we could see a fine stubble of trees on the brows of the mountains, and some of the coastal suburbs—Camps Bay, Sea Point, and Three Anchor Bay—came slowly into view, though as no more than paler stains on the green slopes. Simonstown, the old Royal Navy base at the north end of False Bay, was somehow obscured by a low morning fog. As we growled steadily inshore, the dominant peak itself became ever more familiar, eventually dividing itself into its component parts: Signal Hill and the Lions Head off to the right, and directly ahead now the immense flat-topped pelmet of Table Mountain. As we turned into Table Bay the streetlights of Cape Town could be seen winking out in the distance, roadway by roadway. Traffic could be seen moving steadily along the coast roads. Down beneath its protective rim of hills, the great city was waking herself up for yet another crisp late spring South African morning.

On we pressed into the calm and sheltered expanse of the bay, passing a scattering of anchored ships, some waiting for a berth in the docks, or others rusty and most likely riding out their time in demurrage. To port lay Robben Island, where the colonial rulers had once kept their lepers securely isolated, and where the Afrikaaners did much the same for Nelson Mandela, though with rather less success. There used to be sheep and rabbits on Robben Island, the only ones in the entire continent, it used to be said with pride. Now only the rabbits remain, as pests, and in their thousands.

We were easing very close now, and slowing. A sudden tom-tom of hammer blows could be clearly heard and we could see the sudden blue sparkle of welding torches, all from a new stadium being built on the waterfront. The engines stopped briefly and we bobbed alongside a buoy until a fussy little white pilot boat chugged out to meet us, steered by an elderly-looking black man; the pilot himself, young and breezy and in a newly pressed uniform, leapt aboard and was up on the bridge in moments, steering us to our anchorage in the Victoria and Alfred
³⁶
Dock—the only structure of any note that ever sought to mark Cape Town out as a landmark Atlantic port.

The
Chamarel,
a French-built cable-laying ship, happened to be in dock, busy with preparations to sail, taking on immense coils of fiber-optic wire to string along the West African coast. Some years before the ship had helped lay the immense SAT-3 line, running six thousand miles between Portugal and Cape Town, and since it broke down quite often she was now on near-constant patrol to help keep it in service. Small Atlantic coast countries like Togo and Benin were hooked up to this vastly important cable and relied on it to keep them in touch with the rest of the planet. Engineers were now bent on connecting the half-forgotten Atlantic countries, places like Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, small nations that might well have remained overlooked for decades more, except that lately geologists had found oil in their territorial waters. Raw economics demanded that they now have the luxury of the Internet.

An Antarctic survey ship was also tied up nearby, her hull bright orange and with the gently sloping bow that meant she was able to break through ice floes, “if there are any left,” said the lugubrious German skipper, who lived in Colorado and had been reading up on global warming.

A pair of tugs finally nosed us to the innermost of the quays, beside a pontoon that was covered with fur seals basking in the morning sun. The only buildings of any distinction close by were the Cape Town Passenger Terminal, a somewhat utilitarian PWD-built structure from Edwardian days, and a scattering of Victorian godowns as well as office blocks with gilded ironwork and fretted balconies, most of them now turned into restaurants and hotels.

The oldest structure in Cape Town—said to be the oldest in all of southern Africa—is the old Dutch castle, a five-pointed, star-shaped structure in yellow ocher walls and tucked into a park beside the main railway station. It is almost hidden between the bland office buildings and condominiums: the only colonial architecture with remnant charm are the larger mansions and hotels on the lower slopes of Table Mountain, pretty when the jacarandas are in bloom, in parks secluded from the bustle and the traffic. And in truth, traffic and flyovers and cranes and the ugly architecture of the 1960s does tend to leave the strongest impression: it is only when one gets into the cable car rotunda and whirls up to the top of Table Mountain that the oceanside uniqueness of the place returns to view—and only then does it become easier to remember why this city is where it is, why the Dutch chose it as their rest stop and victualing harbor four centuries ago, and why, though it is so very different from New York, it remains every bit as much an Atlantic city as its counterpart, thousands of miles away at the far end of the long-sea diagonal.

For from the peak the ocean is everything and everywhere. It is only a moment’s walk to get away from the grind of the cable car’s engines and the jabber of the stall holders and into the windswept peace of the remoter corners of the cliff top, in the company of the eagles, buzzards, and warblers that soar hopefully and without cease in the thermals. The Atlantic lies to the south, where you can glimpse its rough windswept rollers smashing into the continent’s most southerly point, Cape Agulhas, and onto the crags of its most famous, the Cape of Good Hope. It lies to the north, up along a coastline that, after the peninsulas of Saldhana and St. Helen’s Bay, runs straight all the way to Namaqualand and the sand dunes of Namibia and the Skeleton Coast. And it lies down across the city below, to the west—a vast, empty, crawling sheet of hammered ocean steel, with the currents and tide rips of Table Bay, the furious eddies around Robben Island, and the faint white traces of great ships leaving for suitably great and mostly beautiful ports on the far side of the Atlantic world: Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Pernambuco, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Wilmington, Charleston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Halifax, and St. John’s.

Each one of them charming, each one of them old, most of them possessed of a stunning beauty, and all settled, like this very town in the south of Africa, with wharves and port authorities and dry docks and ornately grand buildings and immense railway terminals, each set down beside an ocean that each somehow celebrates, in looks and sound and style and smell and
feel.
Or that is how I think of these ports as I gaze enviously down at the vessels churning off through the ocean, westward.

The
Chamarel
is leaving, too: I can see her crawling gingerly between the harbor moles, white and sleek, with her twin funnels and her curiously bulbous cable-laying bat nose and the drums of fiber-optic cable lashed astern: she will be heading for Angola, where there was a radio report of trouble; and maybe she will look in at the cluster of Atlantic islands tucked into the armpit of West Africa—the Cape Verdes, perhaps, or São Tomé and Principe, all of them needing electronic connections to a world that might otherwise pass them by.

And then there is one other ship, a small, stubby blue and white vessel, by now well beyond the piers, heading to the northwest. She seems to be on a different track from the big cargo vessels, a track that somehow reminds me of the direction that the old Union Castle liners would once take, back when this port served as a destination for the last great passenger liners, which went, as regular as clockwork, up to England, to Southampton. At four o’clock sharp every Thursday, one liner would leave Table Bay while a sister ship would slip southbound out of the Solent. They would pass one another, saying a brief hello, somewhere off the coast of Senegal. “Seventeen Days!” the newspaper advertisements would cry: “Weekly Mail Service to South Africa. Inquire at No. 3 Fenchurch Street, London EC3.”

But this below me is no grand passenger vessel—no lavender-hulled
Pendennis Castle,
no
Stirling Castle,
no
Edinburgh Castle.
Besides, the very last of these ships, the
Windsor Castle,
had made the company’s final voyage back in 1977, leaving at four o’clock precisely on September 6, getting back to Southampton seventeen days later. She had many owners afterward, mostly Greek; and then she went to be scrapped in India but suffered the ignominy of a steering-gear failure in the Arabian Sea, so had to be towed to a scavengers’ feast in the Bombay breakers’ yards.

No, this was no Union Castle ship below. When I was finally able to borrow a sufficiently powerful pair of binoculars I was able to identify her, though barely, as she was vanishing into nothing in the afternoon haze. Her name was painted in white on her stern. Her port of registry was Jamestown: she was the 6,000-ton mixed cargo and passenger vessel the RMS
St. Helena,
the only surviving vessel still formally designated a Royal Mail Ship, and as such supposed to be accorded a degree of respect and precedence by all other ships in harbor and under way. She was heading north to dock in Portland, England, eventually; but she was due on her way to stop in a week’s time at the island for which she had been named and for whom she was now the only regular lifeline of supply.

The RMS
St. Helena
was this warm autumn afternoon heading out into the ocean on track for her port of registry, the town I still like to think is the most simply beautiful of all the Atlantic settlements. Jamestown, the capital of the crown colony where the British once exiled the defeated Emperor Napoléon, is a place which remains today preserved to perfection by what until very recently has been her almost total isolation. The island, forty-seven square miles of basalt and supporting an almost unvarying population of five thousand, was a good four days’ sailing off the coast of Angola, in the middle of a now-trackless wilderness of sea.