Atlantic (59 page)

28
  His very Victorian rectitude also once prompted him to chide one of his officers for shooting a seal, a prime source of vitamin C, during Sunday service aboard one of his arctic ships, thereby interrupting the colloquy with the Divine. Nonetheless, the Nares name lives on in a harbor in the Admiralty Islands north of New Guinea, two capes in Canada, a mountain chain in Greenland, a peak in Antarctica, the seaway between Greenland and Canada, and a deep in the North Atlantic.

29
  It was scientists from Lamont-Doherty on their steel-hulled research yacht
Vema
(formerly belonging to the banker E. F. Hutton) who in the 1950s established the true nature of the vastly long and profoundly important Mid-Atlantic Ridge, leading to the 1965 theory of plate tectonics.

30
  Privilege of rank allowed Albert to win from the Vatican permission to divorce without church sanction his first wife, the daughter of the Duke of Hamilton, and by whom he had a son. This tough Scotswoman, despite being the victim of an annulment, later married a Hungarian noblemen. One of their great-grandchildren would be the fashion designer Egon von Fürstenberg, husband of Diane.

31
  At the time of this writing it was still unpublished, eight years after its completion. A dispute between Japan and Korea over whether to name the sea that separates them the Sea of Japan or the East Sea remains stubbornly intractable.

32
  Which was once owned by a French chocolatier, was nearly bought by Hitler, and now is home to a tiny community of lighthouse keepers.

33
  George Orwell wrote
1984
in a farm at the northern tip of Jura and reputedly nearly drowned himself by going too close to the ferocious streams and tide rips of the Corryvreckan whirlpool.

34
  Brueghel came from the Dutch city of Breda, famous a century after his birth for the treaty that swapped an obscure British fort in the East Indies for a Dutch-run island in America—Manhattan.

35
  Pompeii’s remains the biggest known.

36
  Prince Alfred, Victoria’s second son, tipped the inaugural truckload of riprap into South Africa’s first Atlantic docks in 1860. As the second Duke of Edinburgh he had already given his name to the tiny capital of Tristan da Cunha (the Atlantic’s, and the world’s, most isolated inhabited island), had survived an assassination attempt while having a picnic in Sydney (his Irish assailant was hanged for having dared try), and had married the daughter of the Russian czar, Marie, who still has a popular biscuit named after her.

37
  This can on occasion be a risky procedure: when a member of the royal family visited the island in the mid-1980s, the ruling governor, in his best uniform of crisply pressed white duck and a pith helmet topped by swan feathers, stepped carelessly from a pontoon and dropped straight into the ocean, vanishing from sight. Though he survived both the ducking and the ignominy, the Foreign Office hurriedly packed him off to the rather drier post—though still on the Atlantic—of Guyana, where there is (unlike St. Helena) an airport.

38
  There have been eight with the name
Northumberland,
most of which ended their days in the Atlantic—either off Ushant or in Biscay, and with the first having sunk during the Great Storm of 1703. I once came across the newest, a sleek Type 23 destroyer, as she was performing high-speed turns off the island of South Georgia. She nearly came to grief there, too: in a freak accident her sonar equipment was wrenched off, nearly breaching the hull, and she had to limp over to Brazil for temporary repairs and then be brought home to England for a costly refit.

39
  Even the names of the Stevensons’ best-known Atlantic lights have a poetry all of their own: the Bell Rock, Dhu Heartach, Eddystone, Muckle Flugga, Skerryvore! I once visited the light on the Alguada Reef, at the mouth of the Irrawaddy River in Burma. Its plans had been drawn up by Stevensons, it had been built by a Scotsman named Fraser, and the sole keeper kept all the brassware gleaming bright, in case, he said, of a s
udden inspection.
The rulers of today’s Burma have committed many crimes: one, I have long thought, was to close down the old Alguada Reef light.

40
  He said later that it had been the sound of his plantation workers in the distance singing their working songs that triggered his interest in the kind of evocative musical compositions for which he later became known. Previously, the older Delius, a Yorkshire wool merchant, had wanted his young Frederick to become either a sheep farmer or a citrus tycoon. Neither took.

41
  Though he saw no inconsistency in using the name Malvinas, which was given by early French settlers who came from the Breton port of St. Malo.

42
  The Danish fort that still stands in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, is both named and modeled after Christiansborg Castle in Copenhagen, where the Danish royal family lives to this day, in storied splendor; and the old fort at Elmina, built by the Portuguese, had lots of decorative crests and a big sundial. Cape Coast Castle, on the other hand, is almost entirely unadorned, has dungeons with walls fourteen feet thick, four enormous bastions, seventy seaward-facing cannons, and gardens for the resident officers—but until 1820 it did not even have a chapel and gave the appearance of being a place of an overwhelmingly gimcrack creation, offering the outbound slaves only the most wretched venue for their final African farewells.

43
  Scores of such buildings litter the African coast from the Sahara to the Cape—sixty of them in Ghana alone, so close packed that many lie within sight of one another.

44
  
Accounts & Paper/Session papers
,
Minutes of the Evidence taken before a Committee of the Whole House on Regulation of Slave Trade
, 1790, xxx (699), 122–24, 127.

45
  Under the title
Sufferings in Africa
, Riley’s famous book is back in print today.

46
  James Monroe, U.S. president at the time of Liberia’s creation, was to become memorialized in the name of its capital city, Monrovia. William Willshire was also to win his own memorial: a small town on the Indiana-Ohio border, with a population of fewer than five hundred, was laid out by Riley in his later days: Willshire, Ohio, a place once famous for its cheese and built close to a bog known as the Black Swamp.

47
  Prime among these oceanic shambles was the decimation of the Spanish Armada off the British coasts in 1588. In the context of this account the battles fought and the fireships launched are of less interest than the terrible navigation error made by the Spanish commanders as their defeated fleet rounded the northern coast of Scotland. Not knowing exactly where they were, and discounting the effect of the Gulf Stream, they turned south far too early and were set by the westerly storms onto rocky coasts that became a lee shore. Far more ships of the would-be invasion fleet were lost as wrecks on the Irish and Scottish coasts than in the earlier naval engagements; five thousand men died; only half the fleet managed to limp home to Spain.

48
  Naval battles traditionally have taken their name for the point of land closest to the engagement—engagements farther away being given as name the date on which they were fought. Calendrical ambiguities abound—and in this case the French call this battle (not that they often refer to it, since they lost) the
Bataille du 13 prairial an 2
, using the Napoleonic systems of months, of which only
thermidor
remains in use, as the name of a lobster dish.

49
  HMS
Victory
is the oldest commissioned ship in the world; but the USS
Constitution
, though launched thirty-two years later, in 1797, remains the oldest commissioned
floating
ship.
Victory
has been in dry dock since 1922.

50
  Nelson actually asked his signaler to send “England confides that every man will do his duty,” but the young lieutenant asked to substitute the word “expects,” since it already had a purpose-made flag in the signal vocabulary, while “confides” would have had to be spelled out. As would, very oddly, the word “duty,” which was not at the time in the naval vocabulary.

51
  The southern commanders had done more than simply weld steel plates around this six-year-old, Boston-built pride of the Union fleet. They had found her abandoned, burned to the waterline, and scuttled in the Norfolk Navy Yard—but were so desperate for ships that they raised her, pumped her dry, rebuilt her without sails, and only then welded on her armor and gave her a new name.

52
  Fisher would stage whirling dance jamborees on the poop decks of his battleships, insisting that all his officers attend and docking the leave of any who remained behind the wardroom. His decision to fuel all his ships with oil rather than coal led to the founding of the oil company that became BP—an irony, considering the pollution caused by the great BP accident of 2010.

53
  By chance the last survivor of the battle, Henry Allingham, died at age 113 in July 2009, while this chapter was being written. He had helped launch one of the aircraft used as spotters during the fight. The only surviving Jutland ship, the light cruiser HMS
Caroline
, is still in use as a training vessel in Northern Ireland.

54
  Halifax, until then little connected with twentieth-century conflict, had on December 6, 1917, been the scene of one of the Great War’s greatest catastrophes: in a congested part of the city harbor an inbound ammunition ship was struck by an outbound vessel, the MV
Imo
, taking relief cargo to Belgium. There was a fire, and the immense quantity of ammunition packed into the holds of the MV
Mont Blanc
exploded, leveling most of central Halifax and Dartmouth, killing more than two thousand people, leaving nine thousand homeless. Such was the size of the blast that Robert Oppenheimer later studied it as a model of what might happen with the first atom bomb.

55
  A legendary editor perhaps best remembered for his cautionary remark to his journalists that
comment is free but facts are sacred
.

56
  The word survives still in the name of the German national airline, Lufthansa.

57
  Made briefly famous by Winston Churchill in his 1945 speech in Fulton, Missouri, when he spoke of the new “iron curtain” then descending between “Stettin in the Baltic and Trieste in the Adriatic.” This former Hanseatic port is now Szczecin, and is in Poland.

58
  Though popular in southern Africa, few Britons still care for it, as a consequence of the importation of millions of tons of canned Atlantic snoek during the Second World War and a highly ineffectual campaign by the then Ministry of Food to persuade people to eat it. It was found to be oily, bony, and bad, and despite entreaties for cooks to prepare such dishes as
snoek piquante
(when it was clearly
piquante
enough already, once the can was opened), most remained unsold. In the 1950s the sudden appearance on shelves of similarly sized containers of cat food suggested its eventual fate.

59
  John Cabot, not as British as he sounds, was in fact a Venetian named Zuan Chabotto (or more generally, Giovani Caboto), who sailed from Bristol westward on commission from England’s King Henry VII. His eventual landings in Newfoundland and on the Labrador coast make him in all likelihood the first post-Viking European to reach North America—an achievement that was, of course, denied to Christopher Columbus.

60
  Baleen whales lack conventional teeth but have a series of filters in their (often enormous) mouths. The other division of cetaceans, the toothed whales, includes the sperm whales, the belugas, narwhals, porpoises, and dolphins—only a few of which, most notably the sperm whales, managed to excite the same degree of commercial interest that attended the baleens.

61
  Whale oil is also used in the quenching of steel, the dressing of leather, and the making of both nitroglycerine and soap.

62
  This may sound like a lot, but in the 1960s, when Russian and Japanese factory ships were operating at full bore, as many as twenty-five thousand sperm whales were taken from the North Pacific each year.

63
  Wars with France frustrated attempts at a more direct route.

64
  It was his observations of the many delays to the westbound Falmouth packet ships that led Franklin to his conclusions about the nature of the Gulf Stream.

65
  The contrary prevailing winds of the westbound passage prompted packet boat sailors to refer to it as the
uphill
route, whereas the services leaving America for Europe were quicker, and so
downhill
.

66
  It would not be until 1829, seventeen years after Marshall and Thompson began their business, that a steam locomotive ran on the tracks of the Baltimore & Ohio, America’s first freight railway.

67
  It counted William Makepeace Thackeray, the novelist, as an investor; Charles Dickens, on the other hand, displayed a Luddite hostility.