Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. Simon Winchester
me that the simple and most familiar route, the track from the major British ports to their major equivalents in eastern Canada or the United States, distils one aspect of what this book is about — humankind’s evolving attitude to and relationship with this enormous body of water.
And even in my lifetime, this is a relationship that has changed, and profoundly so.
In the early 1960s it was still something of a rarity to travel across the Atlantic by ship, or by any other means, for that matter. A scattering of the broke still went one-way, westbound, as migrants; a rather larger number of the wealthy and leisured travelled out and back on the great steamers with no care for time or cost. A handful of businessmen, not a few politicians, and clubby aggregations of diplomats went too, but most of them in propeller-driven aircraft rather than propeller-driven ships, for their crossings were said to be more urgent. For those who made the journey, it was still an adventure that could be daunting, exciting, memorable, suffused with romance, or cursed by the travails of mal de mer. What it most certainly was not was routine.
The same can hardly be said today. Yes, for a while it certainly was an excitement to cross the ocean by air — but for only a very short while. It must have been a considerable thrill, for instance, to take a Pan Am Clipper flying-boat service from the Solent to the Hudson, with stops in the harbours of such strange-sounding and long-forgotten coastal way stations as Foynes, Botwood, and Shediac. It must have seemed the height of style to stretch out in a bed on a double-decker Stratocruiser while the seas unrolled silently below. It was surely memorable — and foolhardy, given the plane’s dismal safety record - to fly aboard one of those first BOAC Comet services, and even in the smoky old Boeing 707s when Pan Am and TWA began to fly them non-stop. I remember well taking some of the early Concorde test flights, and being naïvely astonished at just how fast they were when, only halfway through the Arts section of the New York Times, I was told that we were decelerating over the Bristol Channel and would be in London directly and so would I return my tray table and seat to where they had been when I eased myself aboard just a few moments before. Air travel across the great ocean was for a brief time almost as romantic and memorable as travel by sea. But it all soon changed.
For me it was marked by a small semantic shift. It began some time in the 1980s, when the pilots of aircraft crossing between Heathrow and Kennedy would slip almost casually into their welcoming announcement that “our track today will take us over Iceland” — with a slight emphasis on the word today, as if yesterday the flight was much the same except that it had passed over Greenland, or the Faroes. Or else they told the passengers that “the 177” or whatever the flight number might be, and so sounding studiedly casual, would be passing “a little farther north than usual, due to strong headwinds, and we’ll make our landfall over Labrador and then head down over the state of Maine.”
It seemed to me a shame - as though the flight deck were telling its charges that there was nothing much to get excited about any more: today’s transit was much like yesterday’s, or last week’s, and the crossing of what had become called “the pond”3 (the terminology demoting the great ocean to a body of water almost without significance) would invariably be much as was generally expected at this time of year. Ho-hum, in other words.
And we passengers scarcely noticed. Having made good our nest of books and blankets, having made obligatory noises of good cheer to our stranger-neighbour, having glanced at the menu and wondered idly if it was too early to order a drink, we settled down and barely noticed a take-off that would perhaps have enthralled us twenty years before. The same was true when it came to our landing six or seven hours later. Maybe there was a little more curiosity - since home was close and one wanted to sense and maybe spot a hint of it. Generally speaking, though, whether we could see six miles beneath us the forests of Labrador or those on Anticosti Island, or whether our first solid encounter with North America was Cape Breton Island or the sand spits of Sandy Hook or Cape Cod, it made little difference: all we really cared about was that we got in on time, that the border formalities weren’t too irksome, and that we could get onto dry land and begin at once what we had journeyed to achieve. The grey-green vastness of undifferentiated ocean over which we had perforce to travel was really of no consequence whatever.
• • •
That for years was very much the case for me - until one recent summer’s afternoon, as I was crossing to New York on a British Airways 777, companionless, conversationless, and bored, pinioned uncomfortably into a starboard window seat. Lunch was long since finished. I had finished the paper and my only book. The entertainment was as much as I could bear. There were three more hours to run, and I was daydreaming. I looked idly out of the plexiglass porthole. It was quite cloudless, and miles below us was the sea, as deep blue as the sky, not smooth but vaguely crinkled, like dull aluminium foil, or pewter, or hammered steel, and seeming to inch its way slowly backwards from beneath the wing.
I had been gazing for maybe fifteen minutes at the blue sea emerging from beneath the grey flaps. Blue, blue, blue … and then as I gazed down, I fancied I saw the water surface unexpectedly and subtly change colour, becoming first rather paler, and within what can have been no more than a couple of moments, or miles, transmuting itself into a shade of light aquamarine. Seldom had I seen such a thing from this altitude: I supposed that if it was real, and not imagined, then it must have had something to do with the angle of the sun, which since I had taken a midday flight, was higher in the sky than usual.
I glanced at the sky map in the seatback in front. The chart was large-scale and poor, but the position it showed offered the obvious reason for the alteration: we had crossed the edge of the continental shelf. The deep mid-ocean abyss over which we had been passing since crossing the Porcupine Bank, which marks the western end of the European shelf and is usually reached about half an hour off the Irish coast, had now lifted itself up at last to become the faint submarine stirrings of the North American mainland.
Except that a few moments later, and even more unusually, the water became dark blue once again, though this time only for a brief interval, before lightening yet again. It was as though the aircraft had passed over a deep river in the ocean, a cleft between two high underwater plains. I squinted as far under the wing as my vision allowed: from where the plain resumed it appeared to stretch away to the west, uninterrupted. And then I remembered, from what I knew of the undersea geography of this part of the North Atlantic: I had long been fascinated by the geography of the Gulf Stream, and as I remembered, it flowed nearby. What I recalled suggested to me that the uninterrupted plain I could now see marked the beginning of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The dark blue underwater channel was known as Flemish Pass. And the first patch of green I had spotted was, I realised, the very place where we had stopped all those years before to rendezvous with the Canadian rescue plane: the well-remembered shallows known as the Flemish Cap.
• • •
Nearly half a century has gone by since I first saw the Flemish Cap and watched, captivated, as that Canadian Air Force plane swept in. Back then — I was still a youngster, to be sure, and more easily awed than today - I had savoured every detail of what seemed to me a fascinating small moment. And in the hours after our ship had started up and begun to move off westward, I had learned of other historical grace notes to the saga: a friendly deck officer on the Empress had told me that the emergency signals we had tapped out the night before had been picked up on Newfoundland by the American coast guard base in a place called Argentia - and they had taught us at school that it was at Argentia, back in 1941, that Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met aboard the battleship Prince of Wales and declared the Atlantic Charter, which so famously delineated the working of the post-war world. That I had just been hove-to, so far from all mankind, at the mercy of the sea - and yet linked by radio with so significant a piece of history: that made the moment even more special and helped burn the memory of this fragment of waterway ever more firmly into my mind.
Today that same piece of marine geography, spotted briefly from an overflying aircraft, had been no more than a faraway patch of mottled and discoloured water serving inconveniently to keep me from the timely arrival at my destination. How sad, I thought, that so vividly remembered a place should have so quickly transmuted itself into something little more