Carol Zall, of the BBC/WGBH program The World, was very supportive of my travels. Cybele Tom, then of Oxford University Press in New York, gave me many useful pointers when I first conceived of this book, and its structure to a considerable degree reflects the wisdom of her words. And, as always, my indefatigable oldest son Rupert Winchester, in London, was on hand to help whenever I needed something looked up, or checked, or an errand performed: my debt to him for help with all of my recent work is immense.
If this book eventually merits any favorable attention—and of course, any errors or infelicities are entirely my own—then it will be due in large part to the irreplaceable skills of my New York editor, Henry Ferris. This is the third book on which we have collaborated, and though he is a decidedly tough editor, his thoughtfulness and courtesy have conspired to make this most necessary of processes much more than merely bearable. Traditionally in the creation of a book it is the research and the writing that are the fun parts, with the editing the time for payback. Not so with Henry: I find these days that I look forward to receiving his notes, however vividly stated and numerous his editorial suggestions may be. His tireless efforts result in the making of a much better book, and so if you like what you hold and read today, you should know who really deserves the credit.
He is also a genius at selecting assistants. Peter Hubbard, now deservedly promoted within HarperCollins, still offers pertinent and helpful comments; his successor, Danny Goldstein, has risen amply to the occasion, and dealt with all the trickiness of putting a book of this complexity together with adroitness, efficiency, and endless good cheer. In London I have also greatly enjoyed working with Martin Redfern, who has so skillfully guided the making of the British version of the book.
And finally, I raise a glass or two to my agents at William Morris Endeavor—in New York, the astonishingly energetic Suzanne Gluck, assisted first by Sarah Ceglarski and Elizabeth Tingue, and more recently by Caroline Donofrio and Mina Shaghaghi; and in London, the magically capable Eugenie Furniss. Bless you all, and thank you.
SW
Sandisfield, Massachusetts
July 2010
About the Author
SIMON WINCHESTER is the acclaimed author of many books, including The Professor and the Madman, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and Krakatoa. Those books were New York Times bestsellers and appeared on numerous best and notable lists. In 2006, Mr. Winchester was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty The Queen. He lives in Manhattan and in western Massachusetts.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Also by Simon Winchester
The Man Who Loved China
A Crack in the Edge of the World
The Meaning of Everything
Krakatoa
The Map That Changed the World
The Fracture Zone
The Professor and the Madman
In Holy Terror
American Heartbeat
Their Noble Lordships
Stones of Empire
Outposts
Prison Diary, Argentina
Hong Kong: Here Be Dragons
Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles
Pacific Rising
Small World
Pacific Nightmare
The River at the Center of the World
Maps and Illustrations
Map of the Atlantic Ocean: Political
Map of the Atlantic Ocean: Physical
The Empress of Britain
Fastnet Lighthouse
Roosevelt and Churchill aboard the HMS Prince of Wales
Mykines
Pangaea, 195 million years ago
Murex shell and 200-dirhan currency bill
Pinnacle Point Cave
Viking knarr
Norse hutments at L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland
Amerigo Vespucci
Atlantic Ocean: Routes of Explorers and Settlers
Gulf Stream map by Benjamin Franklin
Matthew Fontaine Maury
The Exeter Book
The ports of Cádiz, Liverpool, New York, and Jamestown, St. Helena
J. M. W. Turner’s The Wreck of the Minotaur
Pirate ship, wood engraving
Cape Coast Castle, Ghana
John Kimber engaging in corporal punishment
Horatio Nelson, Admiral of the White, and The Battle of Trafalgar by J. M. W. Turner
Battle of Jutland
Graf Spee
Hanseatic League warehouses, Bergen, Norway
A Nantucket whaler
The clipper ship Challenge
The transatlantic cable, engraving from Harper’s Weekly
Atlantic Ocean: Commerce and Communication
The Andrea Doria and Stockholm
The sinking of the Torrey Canyon
Aviators Jack Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown
Air routes across the ocean
Malcom McLean
Rachel Carson
Codfish
Patagonian toothfish
A NASA map of Arctic ice shrinking
Cape Verde hurricane
Prochlorococcus cyanobacterium
Tristan da Cunha
The end of the Atlantic, 250 million years into the future
The grave of Koraseb and Macintyre
Copyright
ATLANTIC. Copyright © 2010 by Simon Winchester. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Political, physical, exploration, and commerce maps that occur on pages viii, ix, 113, and 319 were created by Nick Springer/Springer Cartographics LLC.
Pangaea and Future Pangaea maps that occur on pages 41 and 446 were created by C. R. Scotese, PALEOMAP Project (www.scotese.com).
All interior photographs, unless otherwise noted, are from the author’s private collection. For those photographs and endpaper images that are the exception, grateful acknowledgment is made to the following: front and back endpapers: Fox Photos/Getty Images; page 3: Canadian Pacific Archives; page 6: photograph by Richard Webb; page 30: U.S. Naval and Heritage Command; page 58: photograph by Curis Marean, Institute of Human Origins; page 71: Andrew Vaughan/Associated Press; page 82: photograph by Gregory Howard; pages 94, 117, 129, 175 (New York), 231, 300, 308: courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; page 155: photograph by Kim Wilkins; page 175 (Liverpool): photograph by Chris Howells; page 175 (Cadíz): photograph by Daniel Sancho; page 175 (Jamestown): courtesy of Wikitravel; page 224: The Granger Collection, New York; page 229: Clement N’Taye/Associated Press; page 254: Associated Press; page 260: STR/Getty Images; page 279: George F. Mobley/Getty Images; page 294: Kean Collection/Getty Images; page 324 (Andrea Doria): U.S. Coast Guard/Associated Press; page 324 (Stockholm): Yale Joel/Getty Images; page 326: Keystone/Getty; page 336: Hulton Archive/Getty Images; page 339: Jani Patokallio/OpenFlights.org; page 354: Alfred Eisenstaedt/Getty Images; page 369: Haywood Magee/Getty Images; page 385: Reuters/Corbis; pages 400, 422: courtesy of NASA; page 429: photograph by William K. Li and Frédéric Partensky, Bedford Institute of Oceanography.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Charles Tomlinson for the poem on page 205.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN: 978-0-06-170258-7
EPub Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780062020109
10 11 12 13 14 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publish
er
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1 Auckland,
New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com
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 sp
ace 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.
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.