Atlantic (58 page)

Copyright

1
  This lighthouse-capped outcrop, best known today as the outer marker for a dangerous annual yachting race from southern England, is called "Ireland’s teardrop" by the sentimentally inclined, since it was invariably the last fragment of the motherland to be glimpsed by emigrants on their way to Ellis Island.

2
  My first liner enjoyed many second winds. She was reborn, for different owners and different purposes, as the
Queen Anna Maria,
the
Carnivale,
the
Fiesta Marina,
the
Olympic,
and the
Topaz
. Japanese owners employed her as a floating emissary for peace before finally having her towed to be broken up outside Mumbai, in 2008, fifty-three years after the queen launched her on the Clyde.

3
  Though the expression sounds modish and modern, it was in fact first used in 1612, and Victorian sailors would often refer to having
crossed the pond,
using the phrase in self-effacing understatement.

4
  The water weighs 1.3 billion billion tons, give or take—on a planet that is calculated to weigh 6,000 billion billion tons total.

5
  In 1965 I was part of an expedition to determine, by measuring fossil magnetism in basalts collected from nunataks high on the East Greenland ice cap, how much the island had drifted in the fifty million years since the rocks had been laid down. We found that Greenland had drifted about 15 degrees westward—an impeccable example of the kind of movement confirming the tectonic plate theory just then being advanced.

6
  Both islands are Norwegian possessions, giving Norway a unique perspective on the ridge from its ownership of both ends. Jan Mayen, fogbound and miserable, has an airstrip and a manned weather station; Bouvet, a jumble of cliffs and Southern Ocean ice, had its weather station destroyed by an avalanche, is uninhabited, and is classed as the most remote island in the world.

7
  Lower than today, because the glaciation had locked up so much of the ocean as polar ice.

8
  Attributed variously to Jonathan Swift, H. G. Wells, and G. K. Chesterton.

9
  His famously imagined quinquireme, homebound to Palestine in
Cargoes,
carried ivory, apes, peacocks, sweet white wine, and sandalwood, together with plenty of cedarwood, presumably as dunnage.

10
  In 1 Kings 22: “For the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.”

11
  With one caveat—a claim by Herodotus that in about 600
B.C.,
on the orders of the Egyptian pharaoh Necho II, a party of Phoenician sailors made
a three-year circumnavigation of Africa.
Necho—who built an early version of the Suez Canal—was an ambitious and imaginative leader, and may have ordered such an expedition, though there is much skepticism.

12
  A German-Austrian Jesuit priest, Josef Fischer, an expert on medieval cartography, is thought by some to have had the unique combination of opportunity, motive, and sufficient free time to create the map—to twit the Nazis in their belief in Nordic world supremacy. His rubric note referring to the Vinland visit of the papal legate supports a belief that the Catholic Church was involved in the transatlantic mission—something impossible to square with the Nazi ideal. Fischer died in 1944, long before the controversy broke.

13
  He made his fortune from inventing baking powder.

14
  There are a welter of unproven claims of others having been first across the ocean—based on the supposed finds of, among other things, bones of Portuguese fishermen in Canada, Greek amphorae in Brazil, Roman coins in Indiana, Hebrew lettering on an Indian burial mound in Tennessee, and the relics of the Welsh language spoken in Mobile Bay, Alabama, courtesy of one Prince Madoc, itinerant. Travelers going in the other direction get an opportunity, too: faint chemical traces of nicotine and coca were supposedly found on some ancient Egyptian mummies.

15
  A less impressive sum than it sounds: a maravedi—named for the Berber Almoravids, and so a subtle reminder of Atlantic coastal influences—was valued at just one thirty-fourth of a real, which itself was an eighth (hence “pieces of eight”) of a Spanish peso. Maravedi coins were to be the first minted in the New World, on Hispaniola from the start of the sixteenth century.

16
  This agreement, made in 1494, allowed Spain sovereignty over any newfound lands that lay west of a meridian drawn 370 leagues to the west of the Cape Verde Islands, and gave Portugal the rest. Since Brazil lies east of this meridian, it alone in Latin America fell under the rule of Lisbon.

17
  
Okeanos Aethiopikos
was the name given by the Greeks to that part of the Atlantic south of its narrow neck between Brazil and Liberia, and was still employed on some maps published as recently as Victorian times. Ethiopia itself is not on the ocean, but the name was once given to all Africa—in part perhaps because of the region’s perceived importance as the birthplace of humankind. The use of the word to describe the South Atlantic is thus a means of calling it the “African Ocean.”

18
  Hydrographers—“droggies” in the naval vernacular—are usually seagoing science types, by no means a patrician group. But in Monaco, thanks to Prince Albert’s munificence, they work cheek by jowl with those who are, or wish to be, patricians. Fellow academics at the local university, for instance, teach courses in such subjects as Wealth Management, Hedge Funds, Financial Engineering, and the Science of Luxury Goods and Services, while the droggies deal with lighthouses, buoys, and dredging.

19
  There are also some highly unfamiliar capes and headlands used to delineate certain of these seas, of which northern Russia’s Cape Vagina presents many sailors with particular frisson.

20
  Sands from the hammada around Bojador are blown as far away as Brazil, where they settle on and help fertilize the alluvial Amazon soils. The local soybean farmers are unaware of the debt they owe to the dunes of Morocco.

21
  However, there is statue of Eannes on the seafront in Lagos, the ancient town on the windward side of the Algarve where Prince Henry maintained his headquarters, and from where the Bojador expeditions set out.

22
  There is some slight evidence that John Cabot’s doughty little ship the
Matthew
was pushed along by the Gulf Stream between Ireland and Newfoundland, but Cabot didn’t seem to recognize it as such—he just accepted its north-bearing nudges as part of the deity’s eternal munificence.

23
  The Franklin stove, long popular in postcolonial American homes, enclosed the fire in a ventilated iron box. Its rival was the shallow, brick-lined Rumford fireplace, invented by a Anglo-German count who also created the coffee percolator, invented a nutritious soup for feeding the poor, gave Munich its biggest beer garden, and, fascinated by the complex physics of heat and cold, made the dessert that is known today as baked Alaska.

24
  The Fuegians were in a sense similar to Omai, the Tahitian boy brought to London on HMS
Adventure
sixty years before. Imported as an example of “the noble savage,” the courteous and affable youngster became the darling of London society and had his portrait painted by Joshua Reynolds. On his return to the Pacific he found it increasingly difficult to fit back into island society, and died unhappily, possibly violently.

25
  All five of the space shuttle fleet were named after pioneering surface ships, two of them American, three British.
Columbia
was named to honor the first American vessel to circumnavigate the world,
Atlantis
after a stalwart research vessel of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts (but now renamed and working for the Argentine coast guard).
Discovery
and
Endeavour
, the latter deliberately spelled in the English manner, both carried James Cook on his eighteenth-century global navigations; and
Challenger
was named after the ship of the 1872–76 voyages.

26
  In the nineteenth century, Argentina built a tiny lighthouse on the Isla de los Estados to help mariners navigate their way around the treacheries of Cape Horn: Jules Verne wrote a little-known action novel,
Lighthouse at the End of the World.
The light fell into disuse, but its cause was taken up by a wealthy Parisian enthusiast who had a facsimile built, and which still stands, powered by the fitful sun.

27
  Which Charles Kingsley used as home to the water babies and Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby in his 1863 fable.