But Columbus was too far south to experience the power of the Gulf Stream. That happy discovery was left to his successor, Ponce de León,22 who found it in 1513 while on his quest for the fountain of youth—a search that eventually won him the ironic substitute of being the first European to find Florida. He was charting the topography of this new coast—thinking it to be a large island, the flowered one.
Ponce made rendezvous with two other ships coming north from Puerto Rico, and the three vessels set themselves to sailing farther south, keeping Florida just in sight on their starboard side. One afternoon, when they were perhaps thirty miles from shore, Ponce de León and his fellow sailors suddenly found themselves swept into and caught up in “a current such that, although they had a great wind, they could not proceed forward, but backward, and it seems that they were proceeding well; at the end it was known that the current was more powerful than the wind.” Whatever was the cause, this wide river of water, which he soon found swept northward and in time turned toward the east, had huge and unstoppable power. The Spaniard became swiftly aware of its commercial implications: that however difficult it might be for ships to beat their way westward across the middle reaches of the Atlantic, the power of this submarine river offered the guarantee that anyone who floated onto it would be taken home, in style and with considerable speed. Empty galleons might find the outbound passage a trial, but treasure-laden and stately, they could dip home from the Isthmus of Panama, pushed along by this newfound current, with a very welcome dispatch.
Riding the Gulf Stream home quickly became a kind of navigational sport. The traditional means of return to Spain—though it was barely a tradition, since the passage had only been first opened two decades before—was to use the winds alone, to take advantage of the westerlies that blew for most seasons in the middle latitudes of the ocean. But there was a risk inherent: on a voyage from the Main it was tempting to turn east, to turn for home, too early, and in doing so chance becoming becalmed in the fickle breezes of what is now known as the Bermuda High. Now that the Gulf Stream was known, the solution was simple—though, as with the sharp turn to sea made by Gil Eannes in rounding Cape Bojador, it was also counterintuitive. He headed west to go south; homebound Atlantic skippers needed to head north to go east.
Coming from the Isthmus they would tease out the Gulf Stream’s beginnings in the Caribbean and then more properly in the shallow waters off what is now known as Cape Hatteras. Once it was found, a homebound sailor would attempt to slot his ship neatly into the sixty-mile-wide band of its warm, fast-flowing waters, let the current carry him north at nearly six miles per hour, and then as it turned, head eastward with it too, following its warm blue stream for most of its two-thousand-mile curving, Europe-bound length.
When he was America’s first postmaster general, the fearsomely polymathic Benjamin Franklin heard packet-boat skippers tell of the power and extent of the Gulf Stream, and he drew a map of it. Crude though it may look, it is remarkable for its generally accurate depiction of the current’s size, shape, and direction.
Once this marvel had been discovered, and once its spread and its speed had been mapped and measured, the Gulf Stream swiftly became an object of widespread fascination. Its most resolute early champion was perhaps its most improbable: the polymathic American statesman and founding father Benjamin Franklin. In a most remarkable letter written on board a Falmouth, England–bound packet boat in the summer of 1785, he ruminated with precision and wisdom on Sundry Circumstances Relating to the Gulph Stream—a document of such intellectual richness that it is easy to see why this most unforgettable of men went on to invent such wonders as the lightning rod, bifocal lenses, lending libraries, a superior kind of fireplace,23 and the underlying principle behind the glass harmonica.
The letter, to a French academician and friend named Alphonsus le Roy, is quite stunning, fascinating at every line. The Gulf Stream does not appear until halfway through—and by the time of getting down to writing his thoughts about it, Franklin had already offered to his friend a meandering dissertation on the design of ships’ hulls, on the possible use of propellers to steer balloons, on the most common causes of accidents at sea, and on the kinds of foodstuffs best stowed for long ocean voyages (almonds, rusks, lemons, and “Jamaica spirits” foremost among them).
But then came the Gulf Stream moment, when Franklin reminded le Roy that a decade before, he had been America’s first postmaster general, and colonial postmaster before that, and that this was when he first fully apprehended the North Atlantic’s most unusual phenomenon of the time:
About the year 1769 or 70, there was an application made by the board of customs at Boston, to the lords of the treasury in London, complaining that the packets between Falmouth and New York, were generally a fortnight longer in their passages, than merchant ships from London to Rhode-Island. . . . There happened then to be in London, a Nantucket sea-captain of my acquaintance, to whom I communicated the affair. He told me the difference was that the Rhode-Island captains were acquainted with the gulf stream, which those of the English packets were not. We are well acquainted with that stream, says he, because in our pursuit of whales, which keep near the sides of it, but are not to be met with in it. . . . I then observed that it was a pity no notice was taken of this current upon the charts, and requested him to mark it out for me which he readily complied with, adding directions for avoiding it in sailing from Europe to North-America. I procured it to be engraved by order.
This stream is probably generated by the great accumulation of water on the eastern coast of America between the tropics, by the trade winds which constantly blow there. It is known that a large piece of water ten miles broad and generally only three feet deep, has by a strong wind had its waters driven to one side and sustained so as to become six feet deep, while the windward side was laid dry. Having since crossed this stream several times in passing between America and Europe, I have been attentive to sundry circumstances relating to it, by which to know when one is in it; and besides the gulf weed with which it is interspersed, I find that it is always warmer than the sea on each side of it, and that it does not sparkle in the night.
Franklin then helpfully drew a map—a map somewhat short on both accuracy and elegance, but one that heralded a new field of oceanic cartography and by extension helped inaugurate the entirely new science of oceanography.
4. WRITING THE SEA
This calling, as its curious name suggests—oceanography, the writing of the ocean—was at least in its early days something of a fugitive science: for how could it be possible to write of a body of water, especially deep water beyond land, an entity without visible coasts as reference points and no detectable seabed below? It was like trying to describe the invisible mass of air in a room—a task rather beyond the imaginative and descriptive powers of the time.
It’s not surprising that of the graphical sciences, oceanography was so late in being born. Geography and hydrography, the descriptive analyses of bodies of land and water, were disciplines both created in the sixteenth century; it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century, two hundred years later, that there was sufficient confidence within the academic community to name a similar study that would be called oceanography. Matters might have been simpler had the science been called oceanology, but it never was, and now only the Russians use the term.
On some levels the study of the sea had obvious features that were well worthy of study. There were the zoological aspects—the fish, swimming mammals, and seabirds and other animals both hugely exotic and vanishingly small to catch and record and classify. There were matters botanical: the existence of floating and sunken ocean plants—Sargasso weed in immense quantities in the center of the gyre of the North Atlantic, kelp banks around islands in the South, and a thousand other pelagic and benthic pieces of botany besides. There was a unique maritime meteorology, too: there were ocean winds in particular to record, in their variety and persistence—trades wafting steadily from the
northeast, westerly gales powering the fierce climatic tantrums of the north, and then the fitful and skittish baffling airs around the equator, which were given the name of the tantrums’ literal antithesis, the doldrums. There were the dangerous circulations of the wind, too—hurricanes, waterspouts, typhoons, cyclones. There was ice and snow, and floes and tabular icebergs. And there were maritime curiosities—St. Elmo’s fire, mermaids, the Bermuda Triangle, sea serpents, giant squids.
There was all of this—but each one turned out to be merely peripheral to the ocean itself, in much the same way that the discovery of a new land mammal would be considered peripheral to geography, and the realization of the ferocity of the harmattan wind incidental to the study of oasis formation in the Sahara. Oceans have their own very peculiar physical attributes—a list of inherences and essentials that at the very least would include such matters as the topography of the sea’s invisible underneath, the temperature and chemistry of the water, and the movement of the ocean’s currents and its tides. And early scientists did indeed notice and inquire: in the seventeenth century alone we had Robert Boyle writing on the sea’s salinity, Isaac Newton offering his views on the causation of tides, and Robert Hooke—the famously ill-tempered polymath and philosopher who is better known for establishing the principles of elasticity, inventing sash windows, championing microscopy, first seeing Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, and creating an elegant escapement mechanism for watches—designing a host of devices and methods that might be used for research into the deep seas.
• • •
So scientists did eventually begin to focus their attentions, to fathom the unfathomable, and they did begin to come to grips with the immensity of the challenge posed by such a vastness as the Atlantic. They did so especially in Victorian and Edwardian times, a period of both British and American history when the stupendously difficult often seemed unusually possible; this was a time when unraveling the immensity of an ocean looked only marginally more difficult than, say, the cataloging of all the earth’s creatures, or the corralling between hard book covers of all the words of the English language, or the building of a transcontinental railroad, or the construction of a canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Fame in the early days belonged to the explorers, those hunting for land and territory and tangible acquisitions, rather than to students of the ocean itself. Bold adventurers like James Cook, Sir John Ross, the Comte de la Pérouse, Robert Fitzroy, and the Chevalier de Bougainville are still remembered and memorialized in capes and straits and islands around the world—while the very earliest true oceanographers have largely faded from memory. Who now remembers James Rennell, for instance, a young sailor from Devon, England, who first came upon the Atlantic proper on a long-sea trick from military service in Bengal? There is today only his tomb, a scattering of long-forgotten books, and the name of a lecture theater at Britain’s National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. Yet he was a properly heroic figure, of the mold of Cook and la Pérouse, the kind of seaman who would do whatever was necessary in the pursuit of his calling. While leading a team in the survey of Bengal he had almost his entire arm sheared off at the shoulder during an attack by saber-wielding tribesmen, and then had his original maps of India stolen by pirates off Calcutta, yet persisted in acquiring new knowledge of the sea, in spite of it all.
Rennell’s oceanic achievements began in 1777 when he came home by sea—fathering a daughter who was to be born on the quintessentially Atlantic oceanic island of St. Helena, where Napoléon would later be exiled—and en route became captivated by the Atlantic currents that his vessel was compelled to cross, and then by ocean circulation generally. He then helped to survey portions of the deep ocean, and wrote papers on the Gulf Stream, on the North Atlantic Drift, and on the then mysterious current that somehow compelled transatlantic ships bound for the English Channel to head north of Cornwall and toward the Bristol Channel instead. And all the while he delved painstakingly into historical curiosities: the average speed of Saharan camels, the probable landing place in Britain of Julius Caesar, and the likely site of the shipwreck of St. Paul. He lived and worked until he was nearly ninety, and though he was distinguished enough to be buried alongside other national heroes under the nave of Westminster Abbey, he is otherwise widely overlooked.
5. PLUMBING THE DEEP
Comparing James Rennell’s interest in the ocean with Benjamin Franklin’s a few years before illustrates to some small degree the diverging European and American motivations behind the science that would tackle the strangely sinister world of the deep. Rennell’s fascination verged toward the academic and the conceptual; Franklin, whose interest in the Gulf Stream arose out of the reports that mail packets were being mysteriously delayed, had more of a commercial take on the subject. And for years this divergence continued: Britain looked at the sea as something of great theoretical interest, as well as an entranceway to its ever-expanding empire; America had its eye on the ocean as an obstacle over which mastery could be won only by practical means—by making ever more efficient the shipping lines, by laying and then expanding the use of submarine communications cables, by adroitly harvesting the sea of its edible and usable creatures.
It was the lobbying of powerful merchants in the East Coast ports that eventually persuaded the U.S. Congress to establish a coastal survey, yet at the very same time scientists in Britain, France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries were all looking to the ocean as the ultimate source, not of trade or funds or fortune, but of an endlessly diverting cavalcade of unknown animals and plants. To Europeans—the generalization may be as unfair as most, yet has enough truth to it to stand—to win knowledge of the Atlantic was to gain knowledge of the planet; to those on its far side in the nineteenth century, to know the Atlantic was to be the better equipped to make money.
Charles Darwin was among those early nineteenth-century Britons who sailed into the Atlantic for the pleasure of study alone. He was just twenty-two, newly graduated from Cambridge, when he was invited in 1831 to sail “to Tierra del Fuego and home by the East Indies” on the ninety-foot-long, ten-gun naval brig HMS Beagle. It was a journey that lasted an unexpected five years, and it was principally a survey mission—there were all manner of new devices on board, including accurate chronometers, lightning conductors, and anemometers specially calibrated to measure the newly created Beaufort wind scale. On the way south, Darwin saw and collected specimens from the Cape Verde Islands, the Peter and Paul Rocks, Brazil, Montevideo and Buenos Aires and the Falkland Islands, and on the way home three years later looked in on St. Helena and Ascension, too. But his interest was mainly in the geology or the wildlife of his various landfalls—the maritime aspects of the enterprise were largely left to the ship’s captain, Robert Fitzroy.
Perhaps the most memorable event so far as Darwin was concerned occurred as he was about to leave his home ocean and round the Horn into the Pacific: Fitzroy had aboard the ship three extremely large Fuegian natives, captured two years before as specimens24 and brought to London to be taught English, clothed, instructed in basic Christianity, and in other ways “civilized.” Now they were being taken back home. Despite their London tailoring, fine manners, and good knowledge of English, Darwin regarded them as little more elevated than animals, and was not entirely surprised when one of them, Jemmy Button (the others were a woman named Fuegia Basket and a man, York Minster; a fourth, who was named Boat Memory, had died of smallpox), reverted to his aboriginal state within days of being dropped near the Horn. Soon after being left, he was reencountered when the storm-savaged ship had to put back into harbor—and to the surprise of the ship’s company he appeared as shaggy-haired and near naked as when first found, two years before. He could not be persuaded, despite Darwin’s entreaties, to return to the ship and come back to London yet again. Though the finches of the Galapagos Islands would eventually reveal much more, these Patagonian unfortunates offered Darwin lessons for his eventual thoughts on evolution: he could say with some cer
tainty from his knowledge of Jemmy Button that the biblical story of human creation was uncertain, at best—for some kinds of clothed men could always revert to nakedness, whatever Genesis suggested took place in the Garden of Eden.
Two expeditions were landmarks in the winning of Atlantic knowledge: the first was conducted by a flotilla of American vessels that set out from Norfolk, Virginia, in the summer of 1838, and the second was the venture by a single Royal Navy vessel that started out from Portsmouth, Hampshire, in the winter of 1872. The former was known somewhat portentously as the United States Exploring Expedition, and in terms of Atlantic history was made more famous by the absence of one invited member who resigned shortly before sailing. The second expedition has come to be remembered, rather more economically, as simply the voyage of HMS Challenger. The convoluted fate of the first is still a matter of discussion to this day; but of the second—in more recent times one of the five American space shuttles was named in honor of the single British ship, which testifies to the success of that pioneering sea voyage undertaken almost exactly a century before.25
The American venture—known more familiarly at the time as the Ex-Ex—was an ill-timed, ill-organized, and ill-accomplished congressional attempt to divine the mysteries of America’s two neighbor oceans, especially the Pacific. Commerce was Capitol Hill’s driving force: the fast-growing American whaling and fur-sealing industries needed new hunting grounds to exploit, and landlubber traders needed new territories with which to do business. Congress offered funds, and then got itself into the most terrible pickle trying to mediate between competing claims of the scientists and the naval officers from which it had to choose to drive the venture out into the ocean. The figure who because of the endless rows chose not to go—but who would nonetheless become nineteenth-century America’s most celebrated oceanographer—was a young naval lieutenant named Matthew Fontaine Maury. His decision to pass on the expedition (he had been invited along as the official astronomer, but decided the organizing civil servant in charge was an “imbecile”) turned out to benefit his own reputation: few of those on this expedition would win much kudos.