On the Broken Shore. James MacManus

       ONE

      This was the best time, the time before the tourists arrived in their hundreds of thousands, the time when the winter gales had stopped battering this bent arm of land thrust into the Atlantic, a time when Cape Cod allowed you to look back on the harpooners, sailors and fishermen who shaped its past while urging you to put your dollars down and book a whitewashed shingle house for the summer.

      May was always a good month on the Cape: buds breaking on the beech, birch, hemlock and maple trees, the old elms throwing a green tracery of young leaves against a spring sky, beach rose plants showing the first pink blooms; young birds on the wing along every stretch of shore – dunlin, sandpiper, yellow legs, oystercatchers, egrets; seal pups wearing big eyes and grey whiskers flopping on the sandbanks; and prices half what you were going to pay after Memorial Weekend at the end of the month.

      Leo Kemp dropped in on the Foodworks café in Falmouth for a breakfast of free-range scrambled eggs and a mug of fair-trade Colombian coffee: Foodworks was run by a bottletanned Californian princess who wore bright green eye shadow and a T-shirt that said Overnight Sensation on the back and You Are What You Eat on the front. Leo paid $12.35 including tip for breakfast. It would be a third more in ten days’ time, he thought.

      He had left Margot asleep in bed, lying on her back with Sam’s head nestling in the crook of her outstretched arm. Sam who at 16, half-woman, half-child, still burrowed into their bed at unreasonable hours of the morning. Two careless, sleeping faces framed by a tangle of fair hair.

      The old Saab 900 pretty much drove itself the four miles to the Coldharbor Institute for Marine Studies while Leo let his mind drift to his nine o’clock lecture with the new class. They were second-year marine biology postgraduate students. For those who persevered – and the dropout rate was high – their Ph.D. would lead to more postgrad studies, a year or two of fieldwork, a series of papers in academic journals, maybe a book, and then on to the lower rungs of academia, where they would begin their scramble up the ladder towards tenure.

      If you sat them down and asked them why they wanted to study oceanography, the answers would be variants on a single theme: climate change. Fair enough, thought Kemp: the oceans and the weather are inextricably linked; but the answer missed the real point.

      And if you asked them what they really, really wanted to do with their careers, the honest ones would admit that they would prefer to stay and work here at the Institute.

      And why not?

      Coldharbor, as Leo had tried to convince himself far too many times, was a great and beautiful place in which to learn and teach; a place in which to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle, raise a family and grow old gracefully.

      And it was true. The Institute dominated what had once been a little fishing village and was now the main terminal for the ferries that ploughed to and from Martha’s Vineyard, fourteen times a day in winter, eighteen times in the summer. Apart from a handful of restaurants, bars and tourist souvenir shops clustered around the terminal, and several hundred holiday homes for the yachting crowd, the Institute pretty much was Coldharbor.

      When the pilgrims first came to the Cape in the 1620s they found to their amazement that the local Wampanoag Indians were already expert whalers. Canoes made from birch branches and animal hide carried those fearless fishermen on hunting expeditions into the Atlantic armed only with stone-headed arrows and crude spears attached to short lines with wooden floats.

      The Coldharbor Institute saw its researchers and scientists as the intellectual equivalent of those daring early fishermen: seekers after the secrets of the seven great oceans of the world, rather than the oil and blubber of the mighty cetaceans that swam in them.

      Here the world’s leading marine biologists and scientists from every discipline of oceanography gathered to study the salinity and density of the oceans, the currents that swirled within their uncharted depths, the topography of the seabed, the effects of wind on the sea and wave on the shoreline.

      Coldharbor also concerned itself with the behaviour of sea mammals: whales, dolphins and seals, the warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing creatures that inhabit our oceans. But the stars of the Institute’s repertoire were the deep-sea submersibles, known more prosaically as autonomous underwater vehicles, which could descend to depths of 17,000 feet and which, with the ocean-going vessels that supported and launched them, all operated from this small harbour on the Cape.

      Leo Kemp was a part of this family of scientists with a solid body of published research to prove it. A family – that was how the Institute thought of itself: a community of researchers, educators and explorers, bound together by loyalty and a common cause – unravelling the secrets of the oceans and of the fish and the mammals that live in them.

      It had been a long, blustery winter, followed by an unusually warm spring. Crossing the quad, Leo felt the warmth of early summer on his back. He looked at the line of modern buildings, all steel, chrome and glass, functional but not inelegant, that stretched along the ridge overlooking Vineyard Sound. Research centres, laboratories, aquaria, offices, libraries, lecture rooms; all the academic infrastructure to drive the institute forward on its mission.

      And there was plenty of money to make it happen. The Institute’s president and chief executive, Tallulah Bonner, 55 years old and with a treacly Southern drawl that stretched all the way back to her home town of Atlanta, made sure of that. ‘Bonner’s bounty’, they called it.

      Chief Executive Bonner understood big money. She knew that for every big private donation there was always a payback.

      Every year at the annual financial review with the Board of Governors she made the same speech. Coldharbor was a private institute that received funds from government departments, especially the US Navy, she reminded them. But it relied mostly on private endowments from the wealthy.

      ‘Big donors are not putting a down payment on eternity when they give to us. Sure, they get their name up somewhere carved in wood or stone. And they’re not looking for gratitude, because the rich can buy that any day of the week. No, what they’re looking for is fulfilment. They want the assurance they’re making a contribution to the development of scientific knowledge on which the future of the human race depends. And, gentlemen, I make damn sure they understand that their generosity is critical to our mission.’

      And she did. She knew exactly how to make the superwealthy feel good about giving.

      ‘The rich are like you and me when it comes to dying. They want to look back and feel they’ve done something with their life.’

      At elegant fundraisers in New York and Boston, Tallulah Bonner knew better than to waffle on about the strategic importance of oceanography. Donors would always give for a good cause, and she gave them that cause through the simple but persuasive argument that the dawn of the space age should never detract from the study of marine science.

      Let NASA spend trillions proving that there was no life on Mars, but spare a few hundred million for the study of what really mattered, the oceans that covered four-fifths of the earth’s surface.

      Luckily the Pentagon had supported this thesis, or at least accepted that oceanography had an important if secondary role in mapping out future war scenarios. Submarines had proved themselves in the cold war era, and their