The Sea Inside

Murdoch took her title from the cry of the Greek warriors who finally saw the Black Sea after fighting against the Persian empire, a sight that heralded home. As a writer, she was criticised for her apparent belief in myth and monsters: in person, as in her work, her fierce intelligence contrasted with a faint naïveté. She ended her life losing her senses in public, suffering from dementia and yet being taken everywhere by her writer husband. I’d often see her at literary launches: a ghostly, silver-haired figure with flickering eyes and a fixed smile, lost in a corner of a room that might have been any room, anywhere, with anyone in it.

The sea sustains and threatens us, but it is also where we came from. Some consider that the relationship is closer than we think. Callum Roberts, among other scientists, has noted that the ratio of subcutaneous fat in humans is ten times that of other primates, nearer to that of a fin whale. From an evolutionary point of view, such human blubber would make little sense for a land hunter, but it would be eminently useful for an ‘aquatic ape’ which developed by the sea. Equally, we cannot fly or even run as fast as other animals, and we lack hair to keep our bodies warm, but we can swim and dive – skills which would not make sense, some say, unless we were made for or at least shaped by the water.

First proposed by Desmond Morris and subsequently explored by Elaine Morgan – who saw a certain prejudice in the way in which her ideas were rejected – the ‘aquatic ape’ theory is controversial, dismissed by scientists suspicious of its simplicity. Perhaps there is something a little too perfect about the notion that rather than descending from the trees to hunt on the savannah, we gravitated instead to the shore, not least because it argues against the idea that we are defined by our ability to kill. Yet new evidence suggests that a diet sourced from the ocean may have provided the fatty acids that enabled our brains to grow, and that we stood on two legs to wade as we scavenged for shellfish on the shores of our earliest home in sub-Saharan Africa. That we were, and are, intimately linked to the sea.

Other factors have been marshalled to support Morgan’s argument: that we are prone to dehydration in a manner which would not be helpful to savannah-dwelling animals, and that we exhibit an instinctual breath-holding reaction when we plunge into water: other terrestrial mammals cannot regulate their reflex breathing. Does this mean that we were once well used to entering the sea, perhaps sticking our heads in to search for food, or even spending longer periods there? The Belgian anthropologist Marc Verhagen and his colleagues believe it is possible, arguing that our wide shoulders are more suited to swimming than running, and that we might owe our long legs and long strides to forebears who foraged in the shallows.

Our vestigially webbed fingers have also been claimed as an amphibious refinement of this watery life – just as the seabird hunters of St Kilda developed broad feet from climbing the cliffs, and the sea gypsies of south-east Asia, used to diving in the shallow seas, have eyes that appear to focus as well, if not better, underwater. Even our organs contain a memory of the sea. Our kidneys evolved to deal with excess salt, to which our evolutionary ancestors were subject; being fifty per cent water, we all contain the sea inside us.

While many scientists dismiss the notion of an aquatic ape, the proposal is intriguing: that we owe our development and our dominion, our intelligence and even our souls, to the water, although we live out our lives on the land.

We cannot resist; we are all watergazers. And like so many others, my own, more recent ancestors also felt the urge to travel over the sea, in search of something new.

My great-great-great-uncle, James, the eldest of William Nind’s thirteen children (of whom at least three died in childhood), was born in Ashchurch, a hamlet near Tredington in Gloucestershire, in 1782. The Ninds had been farmers since at least the sixteenth century, living in the same small triangle of fertile land at the foot of the Cotswold hills, moving between villages such as Beckford, Walton Cardiff, Ashchurch and Alstone, near the towns of Tewkesbury and Cheltenham.

As the eldest son, James was expected to follow his father, working the land. But in the family tree she compiled in her fine handwriting, my aunt recorded the tradition that James left England for Ceylon to acquire a plantation (probably of coffee, rather than tea, which was not grown on the island until the mid-nineteenth century). He was also said to have been involved in another trade: human trafficking. Slavery had been banned by Britain in 1807, but continued in its colonies until 1838, and James was engaged in ‘blackbirding’, a kind of kidnap in which native people were lured onto ships and abducted, to be sold on as indentured labourers. As a result of his activities, James Nind amassed a fortune worth three hundred thousand pounds, only to die at sea, sailing from Ceylon on a ship called Breezy Horse.

Ever since I heard about it as a boy, I’ve imagined that scene: a storm-tossed vessel, my ancestor tipping over the gunwales in a flash of lightning. Or perhaps he went of his own accord, like Captain William Ostler of the Marquis of Hastings, who, on his way back from New South Wales and China in September 1827, ‘threw himself overboard in a fit of insanity off the Cape of Good Hope, on the night of the 9th September. A paper, containing the following words, was found lying on the table of his cabin in the morning: “A bad crew and bad chief-mate is the destruction of William Ostler.”’ Whatever the manner of James Nind’s death, it was certainly unforeseen: he left no will, and his relatives were unable to claim his money. A moral return, perhaps, for such immoral gains.

For years afterwards the Ninds tried to find out what had happened to James, and his fortune; there were no records of his estate, his ship, or his death to be found. Yet the rumours persisted, fed by the prospect of lost riches. In 1921, a syndicated story appeared in the American press under the headline ‘Unsolved Mysteries’. It speculated that James Nind had actually come to America, rather than Ceylon, along with his brother William, and had accrued his wealth in South America under an assumed name. ‘The theory is that James Nind after living in New York for some years went to one of the South America Republics … building up a fortune as so many adventurers from the Anglo-Saxon race have done in different parts of the world. In these countries the state of society is so unsettled that many obstacles might be thrown in the way of recovering the Nind fortune.’

None of this makes much sense – the report, in the Galveston Daily News of Texas, confuses more than it reveals – but the fact that it appeared in a newspaper gave credence to the story. With rumours of impostors turning up in Cotswold villages, only to disappear again, there were even hints of conspiracy: ‘It seems clear that someone is interested in the matter aside from the Nind heirs …’ Indeed, this family intrigue, with its echoes of a novel by Conrad or Dickens, would be strangely replayed in the next generation.

James’s nephew, also named James – my great-great-grandfather – was born one of nine children, to Isaac Nind, a gentleman farmer in Tredington, in 1824. As the eldest surviving son, he stood to inherit substantial property: his father owned two hundred acres and employed four labourers, as well as six domestic servants. Yet in 1850, aged twenty-five, this fair-haired, handsome young man followed in his uncle’s wake and left England. In his case, he definitely sailed to America, apparently drawn there by the promise of a better life.

But James had another reason to leave home. That summer, Sophia Clarke, a twenty-one-year-old woman from the neighbouring village of Gotherington, gave birth to their illegitimate daughter Rosa. The records claim, somewhat mysteriously, that Rosa was born at sea. Had Sophia travelled to America with James, and decided to return? When asked about her grandfather, my grandmother would only say, ‘There was a young man who was sent to America to make a fresh start.’

Although James already had family living in the United States – his aunts Dorcas and Judith had emigrated there some years before – it must have been an extraordinary contrast, to leave the lush confines of the Cotswolds for the vast and still largely unexplored continent. That may be why he settled in Lowville, in the foothills of the Adirondacks, New York State, a reminder of home: good farming country, like its neighbouring state, Massachusetts, where, in the year that James arrived, Melville was writing Moby-Dick. By 1859, when he was visited by his sister Mary Ann and her husband John Freeman, James was married with twin boys. But that year he announced his intention to go west to the goldfields of California, lured by reports such as one in a Buffalo newspaper which claimed that prospectors could turn fifty dollars into five thousand within twelve months. Mary Ann, initially keen to join him, decided not to go as she was about to give birth.

She had a lucky escape. James and his family were last heard of in Davenport, Iowa, from where they joined the wagon trail. From the 1840s to the 1860s, four hundred thousand travelled west, an unprecedented exodus of people from all around the world to the remote Pacific coast: Mormons, miners, farmers and families in search of fortunes or religious freedom or any kind of new life. The journey would take half a year and was fraught with danger. Wagons were towed by oxen across plains as yet unclaimed from Native Americans, through the desolate landscapes of the Great Salt Desert and over the mountain range where the Donner Party had resorted to cannibalism in their despair. This mass migration had its own power to alter the environment, not least in the hunting of bison, about to be driven to the verge of extinction.

Did James and his family make it as far as the Great Plains, travelling by prairie schooner, sailing through endless seas of grass? I once visited those same fields, without knowing that my ancestor might have passed that way. It was as far from the ocean as I’ve ever been, and I remember swimming in an open-air public pool on the outskirts of Red Cloud, Nebraska. It looked like a little piece of the sky fallen to earth. All I do know is that James wrote a letter to his sister, Mary Ann, sent back east, although it survives only in her report. ‘A wagon train can pass through the grassland seas,’ she wrote, ‘they had circled their wagons to camp and put the boys under the wagon.’ There, in an extraordinary, unbelievable stroke of bad luck, the boys were both bitten by a snake, and died. James also reported that his wife was ill. And that was all; except for his last words, left hanging in the air: ‘I don’t know.’

James never reached his destination. Perhaps he and his wife succumbed to disease. Cholera was rife among the migrants, ‘the destroyer … let loose upon our camp’, as one settler wrote. Or perhaps, as family tradition suggests, he was killed by Indians. It is not an entirely fanciful notion: such attacks were the second most common cause of death for the travellers moving in great numbers through Native American territories. James’s sandy hair would have made a fine scalp.

I can’t quite believe myself descended from these romantic ancestors, or imagine what they experienced, or inflicted. Their stories are beyond the reach of the brown-grey ghosts of the family album. They happened before the casual snaps in trellised gardens and on seaside promenades, and they suggest more than they tell. James’s sister Mary Ann, and their brother William, who followed them to America, would lead quieter lives, settling in small towns on the shores of Lake Erie, south of Buffalo and Niagara Falls. Yet for them too, leaving England was an adventure: Mary Ann would recall that on the voyage out from Liverpool, the ship on which she was sailing passed another vessel on fire, but their captain did not stop, although the law of the sea demanded that they should.

Back in Gloucestershire, Sophia went on to marry twice, each time to men from her own parish. A single image of her survives: a tintype photograph, corrupted with age, showing her in a patterned dress. Her face is strong, her cheekbones high, her stance determined. She looks like my mother, who had the same Titian red hair; it is not hard to read in her eyes what she had lived through. Sophia brought up her daughter, assisted by the Ninds, who acknowledged her as one of their own. In her teens, Rosa became a nursemaid to a naval family in Plymouth, before marrying and having her own family, among them my grandmother. She looks quite proper in her crinoline. But in every census record in which she appears, until her death in 1920, one year before my mother was born, she continued to state that she was born at sea, as if to obscure the shame of her illegitimacy.

My father’s family also crossed the sea; like my maternal ancestors, they too were caught up in an age of mass migration. My great-grandfather Patrick, named after the saint who had converted Ireland and driven the snakes from its shores, was born in Blanchardstown, a village outside Dublin, in 1856. The island was still suffering the after-effects of the Great Famine, a good enough reason for his departure for Liverpool sometime in the 1870s. Settling in Lichfield, he married an English girl, a servant in the same household in which he worked as a coachman. The pair then moved to the former whaling port of Whitby, where my grandfather was born in 1885, on a street at the end of which, in the previous century, James Cook’s Endeavour had been built.

His eldest son, my father, a dark-haired, good-looking young man, left the depressed streets of the north for a new life in Southampton in the 1930s. He had been born in the model mill town of Saltaire in 1915, but was brought up in Bradford. His journey south was the equivalent of the Ninds’ voyages, the result of greater events, of disaster and opportunity. Later he’d speak of the deprivation he had witnessed in his home town, of starving families fighting over food, of rats running down the street, and of a man found hanging in an outhouse on nearby wasteland.

Perhaps that’s why the rest of my father’s life was so resolutely ordinary and ordered. He worked for the same cable company for forty years in a redbrick factory built on reclaimed land between the docks and the walls of the old town, a hundred yards from the station where he had first arrived. Every day, at the same time, my mother waved him off. Every day, at the same time, he came back for tea. He might as well have been clocking in and out of his own home. What he did between his punctual departure and his prompt return was a mystery. He seldom spoke about his work, nor did we ask him about it.

In the summer after leaving school, I went to work in the same factory. I was a fitter’s mate, a position which required me to wear grey overalls and accompany my designated fitter on various jobs, in none of which did I perform any kind of useful function. As we set out for the day or came back to the workshop before going home, having smeared our clothes with grime to make it look as though we’d been busy, I’d look up into the glass box where my father worked above the factory floor and see him there with his colleagues. They wore bright white coats to distinguish themselves from us in our oily overalls, and they all seemed to wear spectacles, of a National Health design; anything else would have been an unwonted vanity.

Lit by the luminous shed over our heads, for a few, tantalising glimpses I saw my father as he was seen by others: as a person, rather than a dad, up there in the Test Department, with its graphs and dials and meters of resistance, dedicated to certifying six-inch cables which would be wound onto elephantine wooden drums, stencilled with yellow paint and unrolled under the ocean, anchoring England to America.

Now I see my father through the framed photographs that still stand in my mother’s bedroom, and I’m taken aback to realise how much like him I’ve become: from his shorts and the bag slung about his neck as he stands on a seaside cliff, to his love of the sea itself, which he would scan through his heavy binoculars, breathing in deeply as if to clear his lungs of Bradford soot. We share the same shape, the same bones that show through my skin; what I have been and what I may become. How could I have thought myself so different?

Recently I went back to Yorkshire. It was a long journey, each connection with its own story. The dawn suburban train, with workers’ eyes stuck with sleepy dust and toothpaste masking morning breath. The peak commuter train, full of furious notes on laptops and phones forever seeking attention. The midday train, relaxed with senior citizens, and students locked into their own, dreamier electronic worlds. And finally an afternoon shuttle explosive with children turned out of school, shouting and laughing and dodging the ticket collector as he came down the compartment, jumping off at the next halt, spilling onto the platform and vanishing as quickly as they’d appeared. As we were drawn to the north, to its wasteland and wealth, I was struck, as I watched through the window, how different it was, an abrupt view of smoke stacks, as evocative as any university’s spires to its alumni. For a few seconds I saw the town set in its sulphurous dip, its name taking me back to childhood visits – Bradford Interchange – as I sat in the modern carriage forty years later, listening to languages my father never heard.

I might have been the same person as him. As a child I never saw different people – unless in the mirror, when I dressed up as a Red Indian. Our family never went abroad; I travelled only in books, although I was born in a port. Our first fear is abandonment; our last, too. We all leave home to find home, at the risk of being forever lost.

2

The white sea

A raven alights

At God’s ear.

Tidings he brings

Of the battlefield.

W.G. SEBALD, ‘Time Signal at Twelve’

From the far side of the Solent, I look down on the slow-moving sea, four hundred feet below. At this altitude the water is abstract, no longer audible. The sheer chalk cliffs on which I stand are a dazzling end to England. They’re almost too bright to look at, bouncing the light up and down. Their reflected whiteness illuminates the sea from beneath, in the way Pre-Raphaelite canvases were underlit with white lead paint. And like one of those hyper-real scenes, this is a heady view. Every detail is heightened, as if it all weren’t quite believable. The grass is sown with wild flowers, pink, blue and yellow. Everything seems bleached and saturated at the same time. Pale-bodied gulls ride level with my eyes, studiously ignoring me.

I wasn’t meant to be here today. Playing truant on a weekday, I put my bike on the train, next to the others in the cycle compartment, a confraternity of machines grungy with oily chains and mud-spattered frames. Unfolding my much-creased map, I planned my ride to the sea – only to be informed of engineering works. Wondering what to do, I overheard a group of young German students discussing their trip to the Isle of Wight. So I bought the same ticket as them. At Brockenhurst I switched trains for the short ride through the forest, the bracken billowing by the side of the tracks. Ahead lay Lymington pier, and the ferry ready to cross the strait.

On a fine spring morning, it was busy with two-way traffic: expensive leisure craft setting out for the Solent; the first swallows of the season, returning from Africa. As the boat nudged out into the channel, I looked down on the salt marshes on either side. The birds were caught up in spring fever, feeding and courting. There was a sense of expectation, as if the day had opened up after a long, closed-down winter. I remembered childhood visits to the island, when my dad would joke about having our passports ready for the ferry ride. We’d stay in a railway carriage converted into a kind of chalet, set in a farmer’s field outside Cowes. It was like living in a tin can for two weeks, with narrow compartments for bedrooms, and a low curved ceiling. At night, moths gathered round the fragile gas mantles, and bats fluttered outside in the sort of darkness we never saw in suburbia.

There are many speculations about the island’s name. The Old English wīht may relate to the Germanic root, ‘little spirit’ or ‘little daughter’; it may also refer to ‘that which is raised over the sea’ – an echo of the island’s Roman incarnation as Vectis, or lever. Although none of these is certain, such names seem to express the physical separation of this fragment which rises out of the sea, the geological end – or beginning – of the soft spine of calcium carbonate which twists through England. The island was formed when the river Solent rose after the Ice Age; from its sea bed the bones of aurochs and woolly mammoths have been recovered, along with the stumps of petrified forests. Now the island stands between the mainland and the Continent as a last vestige of Englishness; in his eccentric essays on Desert Islands, Walter de la Mare saw it as a doormat ‘very dear to the eyes of an Englishman on his way home’. Although its megafauna have been replaced by cows and its megaliths by bungalows, its gentility is a mere veneer. Like all islands, this is a place defined by feral forces.

At Lymington, on the mainland, the island is at its closest, only three miles distant, although that narrowness causes the water to surge in a race enough to intimidate the most experienced sailor. From my blustery vantage point on the top deck of the ferry, where the wind whips my hood and forces me into fingerless gloves, I watch the western end of the island approach. Here it rises highest as it enters its final act of disintegration, sending bits of itself out to sea, rocky icebergs calved from a glacier of chalk.

As the ramp hits the hard at Yarmouth, I’m let loose like a sheep from a truck. I ride along the low river valley that almost entirely divides the extreme, prow-shaped tip of West Wight from the rest of the island. My 1950 Ward Lock guidebook – bound in red cloth and filled with airy advertisements for a place that has barely changed in sixty years – tells me that ‘in stormy weather the sea has been seen to break over the narrow ridge of separation and mingle its salt waves with the fresh waters of the river-head’. Far from seeking to bolster this slender bar, the islanders sought to increase the gap. In an earlier guide, published in 1856, William Davenport Adams, a former teacher, noted that the strand of shingle was ‘formerly … much less; so that the inhabitants of the island proposed in the reign of Edward I, to cut through the isthmus, and thus to form for themselves an almost impregnable retreat, when the island was invaded by hostile bands’. This insular wedge of land even aspired to its own status as the Isle of Freshwater, an island-within-an-island. But then, the Isle of Wight itself has always resisted attempts to link it to the rest of England; having long loosed its moorings, it prefers to float free.

I swim off Freshwater Bay, overlooked by the same Albion Hotel from where Adams began his tour. ‘Though the beach is pebbly and rocky, bathing is good, the sea being in calm weather remarkably clear,’ my 1950 guide informs me. ‘Boating under ordinary conditions is quite safe, but for trips of any length, a man who knows the coast should certainly be taken.’ The water is salty and buoyant. I’d been looking forward to it and dreading it at the same time. There’s no comforting land on the horizon, only the steely sea. Around me old plastic containers bob, tethered to lobster pots below. The cliffs rise as a backdrop, their soft chalk embedded with flints like nuts in a bar of nougat. Grey and white pebbles as big as tennis balls roll under my feet. The water is cold and my swim is brief, although it has the usual effect of washing my sins away.