ATLANTIC

A VAST OCEAN

OF A MILLION STORIES

Simon Winchester

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2010

Copyright © Simon Winchester

Maps by Nick Springer © 2010 Springer Cartographics LLC

Simon Winchester asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Political, physical, exploration, and commerce maps on pages viii, ix, 113, and 319 were created by Nick Springer / Springer Cartographics, LLC.

Pangea and Future Pangea maps on pages 41 and 446 were created by C. R. Scotese, PALEOMAP Project (www.scotese.com) Please note that the pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created.

Some images were unavailable for the electronic edition

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Source ISBN: 9780007341375

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2011 ISBN: 9780007341382

Version: 2018-08-22

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PREFACE THE LEAVING OF LIVERPOOL

PROLOGUE THE BEGINNINGS OF ITS GOINGS ON

Chapter One FROM THE PURPLE ISLES OF MOGADOR

Chapter Two ALL THE SHOALS AND DEEPS WITHIN

Chapter Three OH! THE BEAUTY AND THE MIGHT OF IT

Chapter Four HERE THE SEA OF PITY LIES

Chapter Five THEY THAT OCCUPY THEIR BUSINESS ON GREAT WATERS

Chapter Six CHANGE AND DECAY ALL AROUND THE SEA

Chapter Seven THE STORM SURGE CARRIES ALL BEFORE …

EPILOGUE FALLS THE SHADOW. FADES THE SEA.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GLOSSARY

INDEX

Keep Reading

Also By Simon Winchester

About the Publisher

THIS BOOK IS FOR

Setsuko

AND IN MEMORY OF

Angus Campbell Macintyre

FIRST MATE OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN HARBOUR BOARD TUG

THE SIR CHARLES ELLIOTT

WHO DIED IN 1942, TRYING TO SAVE LIVES

AND WHOSE BODY LIES

UNFOUND

SOMEWHERE IN THE ATLANTIC OCEAN

Men might as well project a voyage to the Moon, as attempt to employ steam navigation against the stormy North Atlantic Ocean.

DIONYSIUS LARDNER, IRISH SCIENTIFIC WRITER AND LECTURER, 1838

PREFACE: THE LEAVING OF LIVERPOOL

The ocean romance that lies at the heart of this book was primed for me by an unanticipated but unforgettable small incident. It was a clear cool dawn on Sunday, 5 May 1963, and I was eighteen years old. I was alone, on passage aboard a great ocean liner, the Empress of Britain, and we were unexpectedly stopped in a remote corner of the northern seas to the east of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. We were floating quietly above a small submarine plateau some miles off the first headlands of America, an area known to oceanographers and fishermen as the Flemish Cap.

It was there that something rather curious happened.

We were five days out from Liverpool. The voyage had begun on the previous Tuesday afternoon, a wild and blustery day that had sudden gusts chasing the River Mersey’s waters with filigrees of spindrift. This was when I first spotted the ship on which I would make this first-ever crossing of the Atlantic Ocean.

It was her flanks that were most noticeable, looming massive and blinding white—the Canadian Pacific’s three sister ships were known collectively as the White Empresses — at the end of the lanes running down to the Liverpool waterfront. She was fastened securely to the Pier Head, just beside the old Princes Dock, a dozen hemp ropes as thick as a man’s arm keeping her quite still, aloof to the weather. But from the bustle of last-minute activity around her and the smoke being torn urgently from her single yellow funnel, it was clear she was already straining at the leash: with her twenty-five thousand tons of staunchly riveted Clydeside steel, the Empress was readying herself to sail three thousand miles westward, across the Atlantic Ocean, and I had a ticket to board her.

It had taken six months for me to earn enough to buy it. I must have been on slave wages, because passage all the way to Canada had not cost much more than a hundred dollars, provided I was willing to settle for one of four bunks in a windowless cabin on a deck situated so far below the waterline one could almost hear the slopping in the bilges. But though it was to be an economical crossing, one step up from steerage, in the Canadian Pacific offices off Trafalgar Square - more cathedral than bureau, all teak, marble, and hush, and with scale models of famous ocean liners from the old days illuminated in the windows - even this most modest of transactions was handled with dignity and circumstance.

Maybe time and schoolboy memory have distorted things a little, but I like to fancy that the clerk who took my savings, in frock coat and pince-nez and wearing a company badge embossed with pine trees, polar bears, and beavers, had written out the ticket in longhand, dipping his pen into an inkwell and blotting it with a roller of pink paper. Liverpool to Montreal, Voyage No. 115, it had read, and I clearly do remember spending many subsequent moments turning this precious talisman over and over, examining the engravings, the intaglio, the watermarks. It came in a scarlet and white cardboard wallet, thick and stiff and with a pocket to hold luggage tags with waxed string ties, NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE stickers, immigration forms and customs guides, and vague suggestions as to the coming maritime routine — “11 A.M.: Bouillon on the Boat Deck” was the one that stuck most firmly in my mind.

I think I developed a rather unhealthy attachment to this ticket, freighted as it was with so much symbolism — freedom, the New World, adventure, the Atlantic Ocean — and when I handed it in at the top of the gangplank that spring afternoon and saw how the purser took it with only a studied casualness, I must have looked dismayed, for he smiled and handed it back to me. “First time?” he asked, in a kindly way. “Keep it, then. This is a very grand ocean — and you’re on a White Empress crossing her. Nothing finer! You should keep your first souvenir of going across.”

By sailing time a watery sun had appeared and was lowering itself towards the horizon. All ashore who’s going ashore! came the familiar announcement, on cue. The Tannoy speaker carried the call to “ease springs” (sailor-speak for “let go the ropes”); there was shouting from shore, the crackling of radios on the bridgewing and the foredeck — and one by one the heavy iron-bound nooses of the hawsers splashed into the oily gap between hull and pier, the oily gap began to widen, and the dripping ropes were hauled in slowly by capstans that growled at the strain. A pair of well-worn tugs appeared, yelping and snorting, nosing us out into the tidestream, and then turning us, nudging our bows to the northwest.

The famous George clock on the Royal Liver Building struck five. I could see my father down on the quayside checking his wristwatch. He and my mother pointed upward in relief — they had found me at last, among the crowds of passengers lining the taffrail — and as they waved there came the three departure blasts from our steam-horn, echoing and re-echoing along the ship-crowded waterfront. Our decks started to vibrate and rumble as the engines engaged and the propellers began to thrash the waters astern.

I checked my own watch: it was nine minutes past the hour, the moment when the voyage officially got under way. The tugs let go. The Empress of Britain was at last under her own power, free of her hawsers and bollards and tugs, free of the shore and free of England, beginning to steam firmly and unstoppably away, bound for the deep ocean and the promise of tomorrow. Some of the passengers, emigrants to Canada probably, looked briefly distraught, waving through tears. I was excited, apprehensive, nervous. I watched my parents as they started to walk back to our tiny tan Ford Prefect, their heads bowed.

Darkness began to fall swiftly, and soon the lights of Liverpool and Birkenhead became a loom of orange, like a damped-down fire astern. At the famous floating lighthouse known as the Bar Light Vessel, somewhere off Crosby, the pilot boat came alongside, and a middle-aged man in a brown pullover and a stained white cap stepped nimbly down onto its afterdeck: he waved up at us, and if he mouthed something like “Take care! Have a good crossing!” his words were whipped away by the breeze. Within the hour he and his wife, I thought, would be dozing in front of his television set, the cat asleep by the fire.

We spooled up the engines once he had cleared our wake, and soon the turbines were pushing us along at a good clip, twenty knots, maybe more, and what little rain was left stung the face like needles. Soon we were positively hissing over the sea, ignoring the waves from a storm that, to judge by that last glimpse of the sunset, was now dying away. I stayed on the foredeck to watch for other vessels: there was a bustle of Fleetwood trawlers scuttling home, an inbound freighter or two, and then the outline of what looked like a warship of some sort, maybe a destroyer heading north with us, but faster and quite silent.

Ocean Passages for the World, the long-haul mariners’ route-planning bible, seems frequently eccentric in its suggestions for scheming a voyage. A map will show the obvious: Montreal is some eight degrees of latitude south of Liverpool, and one would think the best way for a ship to travel to the Canadian city from Merseyside would be to turn southward past the coast of Wales, head down through the St. George’s Channel, and, keeping Cork and the light on Fastnet Rock¹ well off to starboard, enter the Atlantic on a direct heading for the St. Lawrence estuary. But the blue-backed bible says otherwise: vessels headed from Liverpool to Canadian ports in springtime, as we were, would find it much more navigationally prudent to make a heading not to the south of Ireland but to the north of it, and only after clearing the coast of Donegal near Bloody Foreland make a very much longer southward swoop for Canada. “Although heavy weather is frequently experienced,” Ocean Passages offers in its very detailed advice for sailing vessels, “the winds are generally more favourable and the currents from the Arctic assist in the latter part of the voyage.”

We were a large, very modern, steel-hulled, and well-found power vessel, with the strength to ignore such bagatelles as winds and storms and currents from the Arctic. Our schedule called for us to pick up additional passengers and freight from Greenock, on the Clyde - and so that evening we headed not south but north out of the Mersey into the Irish Sea. Around midnight we saw the flash of the light off the Calf of Man, and later still, spotted a flurry of lights on Galloway on our starboard side and the forbidding basalt cliffs of County Antrim to port.

As dawn came up - and it was raining and blowing again -we were passing Ailsa Craig, a tiny islet made of a fine-grained granite from which are fashioned the world’s best stones for use in the wintertime sport of curling. We passed to the east of the Isle of Arran — there was still late snow on the summit of Goat Fell — and by eleven, the promised bouillon time (though none was on offer that day), we were moored off Greenock. A flotilla of small craft brought out the scattering of passengers - two were children with measles, and there was some slight quarantine-related delay until our captain, an evidently compassionate man named Thorburn, decided to take them — and by lunchtime we were back on our way, making down the Clyde for the sea. As we emerged back into salt water, we altered our heading to starboard and set a westerly course to steer safely around the notoriously rough waters north of Rathlin Island.

Now, and at last, we were making steadily for the open ocean, and as we did so the Atlantic swells began steadily and dramatically to increase. Great rollers began to buffet the bows, big thudding monster waves driven by the springtime westerly gales that blew ceaselessly at the approaches to the British Isles.

Dinner, to no one’s surprise given the pitching of the ship, was a thinly attended affair. Those few of us about on that rain-soaked evening could see the tiny island of Inishtrahull through the scudding clouds, three miles off to port, and between it and us the tiny archipelago of the Tor Rocks, Ireland’s northernmost possessions. Inishtrahull — the Island of the Empty Beach - marks one of the beginnings, or one of the ends, of a North Atlantic crossing. Through glasses we could see dimly a scattering of ruined houses and untidy lines of old stone walls, and then the slender pencil of its famous lighthouse, already winking through the gathering gloom, and which has been flashing its welcomes and farewells to thousands of transatlantic vessels for almost two centuries.

From here onward the sea yawned open wide and featureless, and soon took on the character that is generally true of all great oceans-being unmarked, unclaimed, largely unknowable, and in very large measure unknown. Our track was designed to bring us in a great, slow curve almost two thousand miles to a waypoint that hinted at the land of the New World ahead - the notorious and shallowly submerged Virgin Rocks, off Newfoundland. I remembered the Virgins from English literature classes: Kipling had written about the fishing there in Captains Courageous - the cod in legions, he wrote, marching over the leathery kelp, and all usually easily visible in the shallows.

If all went according to plan, and if we kept to the cruising speed of twenty knots that our engines could supply with ease, we should make the Virgin Rocks by Monday night, should soon thereafter sight the lighthouse on Cape Race on the southern corner of Newfoundland, and after threading our way along the St. Lawrence River be safely landed in Canada on Tuesday in time for dinner ashore.

And so it turned out. For the men up on the bridge, Voyage No. 115 was basically just another routine crossing. For me, a rank newcomer to the ocean, the crossing was at first memorable simply for being a crossing of this great ocean. We had what for me were some nail-biting moments of great spectacle and storm; we spent our time almost entirely alone on the sea - encountering just one other vessel en route, despite being on a recognised shipping lane - and that sense of pressing solitude I found more than a little intimidating; and when we passed over the Virgin Rocks we did so in darkness and I never got to see the codfish. But there was nothing desperately unusual - until the single interruption, the one small moment that I remember more vividly than perhaps it deserves, and which took place while we were lying stopped in the shallow Atlantic waters off Flemish Cap.

• • •

It was just after dawn, and bitterly cold. The season still being early spring, this being Titanic waters and with the Arctic ice fields perilously close by, our crewmen were on alert for icebergs and growlers and other similar hazards. None had yet been seen: the voyage, so far as the navigating officers were concerned, had been entirely plain sailing. Nor were there any of the fogs for which this stretch of ocean is notorious: the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream collide softly and unseen near here, and the sudden blending of tropical and Arctic waters can thicken the air above into grey pea soup for days at a time. Not this day, however, for which many had reason to be thankful.

I had risen early and, muffled to the ears, was out before breakfast, strolling the length of the boat deck. All was normal: we were hissing along nicely, dawn behind us, darkness ahead. Suddenly, however, bells started to clang, crewmen started running up and down the companionways and the decks, the ship’s engines unexpectedly stopped churning, the vessel lost way, and then it swiftly fell silent. We drifted steadily to a halt, our smooth westbound progress replaced by a heavy and ungainly rolling. The gale of the previous night had now all but blown itself out, but a stiff westerly breeze was still whistling through the aerials and gantries up above. Before long, I thought, we would be blown backwards.

The ocean here, on the very outer edge of the American continental shelf, appeared quite empty, with not a bird or any marine life in sight. It was quite rough, and though the ship herself had become smothered by an overwhelming deadness, the sea was evidently very much alive, the waves and the swell slapping ferociously against the hull.

After a few moments, though, there came an unexpected sound, from directly ahead. At first it was just a low-frequency sigh, then a hum — then recognisable as the faint sound of a motor. An aeroplane engine. Up on the bridgewings, I could see the officers of the watch, acting as one, training their binoculars to westward, towards the direction of the sound, and peering anxiously into a still half-dark sky. Soon there came a cry — the aircraft had been spotted. A few minutes later we all saw it: first a single pinprick of light, then two, and finally the outline of a propeller plane, its nose glinting in the weak sun. As it approached us it came in low and fast, a large, two-engined machine that roared and smoked as it turned above us and dipped its wings, the roundels of the Royal Canadian Air Force clearly visible on the fuselage.

Events then began to happen fast. From near the stern of the boat deck came a clank of pivots and rusty levers, and then a hard splash as the ship’s motorboat was launched. It sped out onto the ocean and came to a stop a mile or so away from us. Once it was holding position the aircraft swooped and turned, opened its cargo doors, and slowed to pass directly over the tiny craft, as it did so dropping something that floated down onto the sea on a small orange parachute. A sailor from the boat’s crew swept-it up with a billhook and the steersman, giving a thumbs-up, headed the launch back home. The aircraft rose back up into the sky, dipped its wings again in farewell, and headed to its faraway base, becoming a smoke-trailed speck, then vanishing within moments.

The motorboat was winched up, the package - which turned out to be emergency medicine for an elderly woman passenger in distress in our liner’s hospital — was duly delivered, and within the hour our engines had throbbed back into life and we were heading back onto our original course once again.

A trivial maritime incident, occasioning no more than a negligible delay in our arrival in Montreal two days later. But it was an event that has remained with me ever since. There was something uncanny about the sudden silence, the emptiness, the realisation of the enormous depths below us and the limitless heights above, the universal greyness of the scene, the very evident and potentially terrifying power of the rough seas and the wind, and the fact that despite our puny human powerless-ness and insignificance, invisible radio beams and Morse code signals had summoned readily offered help from somewhere far away. It was an augury of sorts, I have come to think in the years since, that this entire small drama had taken place on the first voyage that I ever took across the seas.

The captain’s log for the closing moment of Voyage No. 115 is entirely laconic, almost dismissive: “Pilots exchanged at Three Rivers. Fine weather continued all the way up St. Lawrence. Clock tower passed at 1813hrs. Canted into berth with aid two tugs. All fast No. 8 shed at 1853hrs. Finished With Engines.” We had crossed the ocean in seven days, six hours, and seven minutes, and despite our mid-ocean rendezvous were just fifty-four minutes late. British railway trains of the day seldom did much better.

• • •

Unknown to all of us aboard that week, and quite by coincidence, forces unseen and unseemly were hard at work. They were the dark forces of economics. As it turned out the Empress of Britain was to make only eight more scheduled crossings of the Atlantic in her life. Just six months later, in October, a peremptory announcement was made that the barely seven-year-old flagship, launched with great fanfare by the Queen in 1955, had been withdrawn from Atlantic service and would be sold. Her new owners, Greeks from Piraeus, would instead steam holidaymakers gently around the Caribbean, in a hurry no more.

The economics of large passenger liners suddenly made no sense. BOAC and Pan American had both begun air service between London’s Heathrow and New York’s Idlewild (later JFK) airports five years before, in 1958. The first flights were obliged to make refuelling stops at Gander, in Newfoundland, but then as the planes became more powerful, both airlines began to cross the ocean non-stop, and scores of other carriers soon began to do the same. One by one the great passenger liners vanished from the ocean trade, and such ships as survived began to cruise instead, helping to inaugurate what would become an entirely different maritime industry.²

So it was tellingly symbolic that I came back from America six months later by air, and did so in what turned out to be the very same week that the stunned crew of the Empress was making its final voyage with the much-loved liner. Had I known of the droll coincidence I daresay I might have looked down and seen her ploughing her last white eastbound furrow home. But my flight had its distracting moments anyway: it was aboard a Lockheed Constellation, a four-engine, triple-tailed machine designed first as a long-range bomber and then a troop transport, and operated in this case by a somewhat dubious charter company known as Capitol Airways of Nashville, Tennessee. We took off from New York, landed four hours later at Gander, then (by the skin of our teeth, the pilot later confessed, as the fuel was alarmingly low) made Shannon in the west of Ireland, but proceeded to discover that for some technical and legal reason we had no permission to land in London and were diverted to Brussels instead. Eventually, and testily, I found a flight to Manchester and made the rest of my way home by rail.

• • •

Almost half a century has passed since I made those two crossings — fifty-odd years during which I must have traversed this particular body of water five hundred times, at least. And though I have ventured out from a variety of other ports in both the North and South Atlantic, to cross in other directions, by rhumb lines or diagonally or along the lines of longitude or in huge looping curves, or to make expeditions out to the various islands that are scattered across the sea, it seems to 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 than an incommoding parcel of distance.

But wait - was that not how the world at large had come to think of the ocean as a whole? Wasn’t the ocean just distance for most people these days? Didn’t we all now take for granted a body of water that, so relatively recently - no more than five hundred years before, at most—was viewed by mariners who had not yet dared attempt to cross it, with a mixture of awe, terror, and amazement? Had not a sea that had once seemed an impassable barrier to somewhere — to Japan? the Indies? the Spice Islands? the East? — transmuted itself with dispatch into a mere bridge of convenience to the wealth and miracles of the New World? Had our regard for this ocean not switched from the intimidation of the unknown and the frightening to the indifference with which we now greet the ordinary?

And yet had not this change taken place in some kind of inverse relation to the ocean’s ever-growing importance? For hadn’t the Atlantic become over the centuries much more than a mere bridge? It had surely also become a focal point, an axis, a fulcrum, around which the power and influence of the modern world has long been distributed. One might say that if the Mediterranean had long been the inland sea of the classical civilisation, then the Atlantic Ocean had in time replaced it by becoming the inland sea of Western civilisation. D. W. Meinig, the historical geographer, wrote in 1986 of this new perceived role of the Atlantic: the ocean, he wrote, was unique in having “the old seats of culture on the east, a great frontier for expansion on the west, and a long and integral African shore”. The Atlantic existed in equipoise between the blocs of power and cultural influence that have shaped the modern world. It is an entity that links them, unites them, and in some indescribable way also defines them.

It was Walter Lippmann, in 1917, who first advanced the notion of the Atlantic Community. In a famous essay in the New Republic, he wrote of it as the core of “the profound web of interest which joins together the western world.” And though today we recognise what this community is and whom it fully embraces (and even if we do not fully comprehend it), it is clear that despite the coming claims of India and China and Japan, it is a grouping of countries and civilisations that, for now at least, still manages to direct the principal doings of the planet.

It is a community of sorts, a kind of pan-Atlantic civilisation, if you will, that at its beginning involved simply the northern countries on the Atlantic shores, with the nations of Western Europe on the one hand and the United States and Canada on the other. More recently both Latin America and the nations of western and central Africa have been incorporated into the mix. Brazil and Botswana, Guyana and Liberia, Uruguay and Mauritania are now every bit as much in and of the Atlantic Community, just as for scores of years have been the peoples of more obviously Atlantic nations such as Iceland and Greenland, Nigeria, Portugal, Ireland, France, and Britain. The community is indeed much larger and more comprehensive than that, as what follows will explain.

And yet the body of water that ties these millions of people and myriad cultures and civilisations together - the S-shaped body of water covering 33 million square miles, which in the Western Hemisphere is called the Atlantic Ocean, and which on the eastern side of the world is generally known as the Great West Sea - suffers the fate of the overlooked. It is an ocean that can fairly be described as hidden in plain sight — something that is quite obviously there, but in so many ways is just not obvious at all.

It is undeniably very visible. “Even if we hang a satellite station in space,” wrote the American historian Leonard Outhwaite, in 1957, when the first Sputnik was launched, “or if we reach the moon, the Atlantic Ocean will still be the centre of the human world.”

• • •

Not all bodies of water are so very evidently alive as the Atlantic. Some inland seas that are large, topographically important, navigationally complex, and historically crucial manage somehow to seem strangely still, starved of any readily apparent vitality. The Black Sea, for one, has the feel of a rather moribund, lifeless body of water; the Red Sea also, bathed in its ochre fog of desert sand, seems perpetually half dead; even the Coral Sea and the Sea of Japan, beautiful and placid though they may be, are somehow stripped of any true kind of oceanic liveliness and come off as strangely dulled.

But the Atlantic Ocean is surely a living thing - furiously and demonstrably so. It is an ocean that moves, impressively and ceaselessly. It generates all kinds of noise - it is forever roaring, thundering, boiling, crashing, swelling, lapping. It is easy to imagine it trying to draw breath - perhaps not so noticeably out in mid-ocean, but where it encounters land, its waters sifting up and down a gravel beach, it mimics nearly perfectly the steady inspirations and exhalations of a living creature. It crawls with symbiotic existences, too: unimaginable quantities of monsters, minute and massive alike, churn within its depths in a kind of maritime harmony, giving to the waters a feeling of vibration, a kind of sub-oceanic pulse. And it has a psychology. It has moods: sometimes dour and sullen, on rare occasions cunning and playful; always it is pondering and powerful.

It also has a quite predictable span of life. Geologists believe that when all is done the Atlantic Ocean will have lived for a grand total of about 370 million years. It first split open and filled with water and started to achieve properly oceanic dimensions about 190 million years ago. Currently it is enjoying a sedate and rather settled middle age, growing just a little wider each year, and with a few volcanoes sputtering away in its mid-region, but generally not having to suffer any particularly trying geological convulsions. But in due course, these will come.

Before what geologists like to think is too much longer, the Atlantic will begin to change its aspect and size very dramatically. Eventually, as the continents around it shudder and slide off in different directions, it will start to change shape, its coasts (ac-cording to the currently most favoured scenario) will move inward and become welded together again, and the sea will eventually squeeze itself dry and vanish into itself. Planetary forecasters estimate this will take place in about 180 million years.

That is no mean life span. Assume for the sake of argument that the world’s total existence, from the postmolten Hadean to the cool meadows of today’s Holocene, encompasses some 4.6 billion years. Once tallied up, the Atlantic’s 370 million years of existence as a separate body of water within that world will have made up something like 8 per cent of the planet’s total life. Most other oceans that have come and gone have existed for rather shorter periods: so far as other competing claims for longevity are concerned the Atlantic will probably turn out to be one of the world’s longest-lived, a potential old-timer, a highly respectable record breaker.

It is both possible and reasonable, then, to tell the Atlantic Ocean’s story as biography. It is a living thing; it has a geological story of birth and expansion and evolution to its present middle-aged shape and size; and then it has a well-predicted end story of contraction, decay, and death. Distilled to its essence it is a rather simple tale to tell, a biography of a living entity with a definable beginning, a self-evident middle and a likely end.

But then there is very much more to the tale than that. For we cannot forget the human aspect of the story.

Humans have lived around the Atlantic’s peripheries and on its islands, and have crossed and recrossed it, plundered it and fought on it, seized it and surveyed it and despoiled it, and in doing so have made it quite central to our own evolving lives. That is a story, too - a story quite different from, and very much shorter than, that of the making and unmaking of the ocean itself, but one that is yet vastly more important to us as human beings.

Humans were not there when the ocean formed. We will not be there when it ceases to be. But for a definable period, poised almost in the midlife of the ocean itself, we humans arrived, we developed, and — or so we like to think — we promptly changed everything. Only by telling this second story, the kernel within the main shell of the first, can we recount in full the life of the Atlantic Ocean. The physical ocean’s history of opening and closing then becomes the context, the frame, for the history of humanity’s intimate involvement with and within it.

That human story began when man first settled on the Atlantic’s shores. As it happens, mankind spilled down to the sea most probably in southern Africa, and he did so quite possibly (and most fortunately for this account) very close to Africa’s southern Atlantic shores. What follows from that moment is every bit as complicated and multidimensional as one might imagine: the human story of the ocean swiftly becomes a saga of a mélange of peoples and parallels, of diverging languages and customs, of mixtures of acts and events, achievements and discoveries, of confusions and contests. It is a tricky tale to tell. Simple chronology might suit very well the story of the making of the physical sea itself - but the details of the human experience are scarcely so amenable.

For how would it be possible to knit together the experience of, say, a Liberian fisherman with that of an atomic submariner on patrol off Iceland? Or to link the life of an amethyst miner on the shores of Namibia with that of the American director of Man of Aran; to write of the captain of a British Airways Boeing and of an ice-patrol ship off the coast of South Georgia; or to connect the long-dead sea-painter Winslow Homer with a wide-eyed Guantanamo detainee from western China, swimming for the first time in the Atlantic Ocean off Bermuda? How best create a sensible structure from all this strange and multicoloured variety?

For a long time that remained a puzzle. I wanted so much to write the story of the ocean. But what and where was the structure? I was, as they say, all at sea.

Except that one day, gazing down at the rolling waters, I thought: if the ocean had a life, might not mankind’s relationship with it have some kind of a life about it also? After all, fossils and finds from digs show that this relationship had a particular moment of birth. It will have a likely moment of death, as well - even the most determined optimist will have to admit that an end to human existence is in sight, that in a few thousand, or maybe a few tens of thousands of years, humanity will be finished, and this aspect of the story will be over, too.

So yes, to corral the life of this human relationship with the sea, and place it within the context of the much more straightforward life of the ocean itself - this might indeed be possible as biography, too. But then there were the details, churning and daunting and devilish. The tide of human history was so filled with facts and incidents and characters and tones of subtle shading, that it might be near impossible to swim against it.

But in the end, and out of the blue, I was tossed a quite unexpected lifebelt - and by that most non-maritime of rescuers, William Shakespeare.

• • •

For many years I had carried with me on tedious plane journeys (and indeed had with me as we passed above the waters of Flem ish Cap that recent time) a well-thumbed copy of Seven Ages, an anthology of poetry that was assembled in the early 1990s by a former British foreign secretary, David Owen. He had arranged his chosen poems in seven discrete sections, to illustrate each of the seven stages of man’s life that are listed so famously in the “All the world’s a stage …” speech in As You Like It. And I was reading Owen’s book one day when I realised that this very same structure also happened to offer me just what I needed for this human aspect of the Atlantic story: a proper framework for the book I planned to write, a stage setting that would transmute all the themes of ocean life into players, progressing from infancy to senescence, so that all could be permitted to play their parts in turn.

The Ages are those we remember, if scantily, from childhood, and are listed in Jacques’s all too famously gloomy monologue:

At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms; And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel, And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lin’d, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side; His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Infant; School-boy; Lover; Soldier; Justice; Slipper’d Pantaloon; and Second Childishness. It seemed, all of a sudden, just about the ideal. Pinioned within these seven categories, the stages of our relationship with the ocean could be made quite manageable.

I could examine in the First Age, for example, the stirrings of humankind’s initial childlike interest in the sea. In the Second, I could examine how that initial curiosity evolved into the scholarly disciplines, of exploration, education, and learning - and in this as in all the other Ages I could explore the history of that learning, so that each Age would become a chronology in and of itself. I could then become captivated in the Third Age — that of the lover- by the story of humankind’s love affairs, by way of the art, poetry, architecture, or prose that this sea has inspired over the centuries.

In the Fourth Age - that of the soldier -1 could tell of the arguments and conflicts that have so often roiled the ocean, of how the force of arms over the years has compelled migration or fostered seaborne crime, of how national navies have reacted, how individual battles have been fought, and how Atlantic heroes have been born.

In the Fifth Age - that of the well-fed Justice -I could describe how the sea eventually became a sea of laws and commerce, and how tramp steamers and liners and submarine cables and jet aircraft then crossed and recrossed it in an infinite patchwork designed for the attainment of profit and comfort. In the Sixth Age, that dominated by the fatigue and tedium of the pantaloon, I could reflect upon the ways that man has recently wearied of the great sea, has come to take it for granted, to become careless of its special needs and to deal with it improvidently. And in the Seventh and final Age — the Age that ends with Shakespeare’s immemorial sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything — I could imagine the ways by which this much-overlooked and perhaps vengeful ocean might one day strike back, reverting to type, reverting to the primal nature of what it always was.

Alluring as this all might seem, however, there was something else. First I had to make the frame, to construct the proscenium arch, to attempt to place the long human drama within the very much longer physical context. Only when that had been achieved, and by leave of the enormous natural forces that had made the ocean in the first place, could I try to begin to unveil and recount the human stories. Only then could I attempt to tell something of the ocean’s hundreds of millions of years of life, and of the scores of thousands of its middle years during which the men and women who made up its community would eventually go out onstage, and by their own lights, each perform their unique, and uniquely Atlantic, roles.

First — just how was the ocean made? How did it all begin?

PROLOGUE: THE BEGINNINGS OF ITS GOINGS ON

All the world’s a stage And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.

A big ocean - and the Atlantic is a very big ocean indeed - has the appearance of a settled permanence. Stand anywhere beside it, and stare across its swells towards the distant horizon, and you are swiftly lulled into the belief that it has been there forever. All who like the sea - and surely there can be precious few who do not - have a favoured place in which to stand and stare: for me it has long been the Faroe Islands, up in the far north Atlantic, where all is cold and wet and bleak. In its own challenging way, it is entirely beautiful.

Eighteen islands, each one a sliver of black basalt frosted with gale-blown salt grass and tilted up alarmingly from east to west, make up this Atlantic outpost of the Kingdom of Denmark. Fifty-odd thousand Faroese fishermen and sheep farmers cling there in ancient and determined remoteness, like the Vikings from whom they descend and whose vestiges of language they still speak. Rain, wind and fog mark out these islanders’ days — although from time to time, and on almost every afternoon in high summer, the mists suddenly swirl away and are replaced by a sky of a clarity and blue brilliance that seems only to be known in the world’s high latitudes.

It was on just a day like this that I chose to sail, across a lumpy and capricious sea, to the westernmost member of the archipelago, the island of Mykines. It is an island much favoured by artists, who come for its wild solitude and its total subordination to the nature that so entirely surrounds it. And going there left a deep impression: in all my wanderings around the Atlantic, I can think of no place that ever gave me so great an impression of perching on the world’s edge, no better place to absorb and begin to comprehend the awful majesty of this enormous ocean.

The landing on Mykines was exceptionally tricky. The boat surfed in on the green breaking top of an ocean roller into the tiny harbour, its skipper tying up for just enough time to let me clamber out onto a cement quay lethal with slippery eelgrass. A staircase of rough stones rose up to the skyline, and I scrambled upwards, only too well aware of the deep chasm filled with boiling surf far below beside me. But I made it. Up on top there was a scattering of houses, a church, a shop and a tiny inn, its sitting room heavy with the smell of pipe smoke and warm wet sweater wool. A sudden furious blast of wind had driven away the morning fog, and the sun revealed a long steep slope of grass that stretched right up the island tilt, clear up to the western sky.

There was a grassy pathway leading up to this high horizon, and a skein of islanders was moving slowly up it, like a line of ants. I joined them, out of curiosity. To my great surprise most were dressed in Faroese finery - the men in dark blue and scarlet jackets, with high necks and rows of silver buttons, knee breeches and silver-buckled shoes; the women in wide-striped long skirts, blue vests fastened with an elaborate cat’s cradle of chains, and fringed scarves. And though a few men had anoraks with folded felt snoods, none wore hats: the incessant wind would have whipped them away. The children, dressed just as their parents, whooped and skirled and slid on the wet grass, their elders tutting them to keep their boots clean and to be careful not to fall.

It took thirty minutes to do the climb, and none of the islanders seemed to break a sweat. They all gathered at a site by the cliff top, where the grass was flattened. There was a memorial stone here, a basalt cross incised with the names, I was told, of the fishermen who had died in the Icelandic fishing grounds off to the west. The crowd, perhaps a hundred in all, arranged themselves beside the summit marker, a cairn of basalt boulders, waiting.

After a few minutes a white-haired man of sixty or so, puffing a little from exercise, appeared at the top of the path. He was dressed in a long black surplice with a ruffled high collar that made him look as if he had stepped from the pages of a medieval chapbook. He was a Lutheran pastor, from the Faroese capital town of Thorshavn. He proceeded to lead a service, helped by two churchwardens who played accordions and one island lad with a guitar. A pair of pretty young blond children handed around some damp hymn sheets, and the villagers’ high voices set to singing old Norse holy songs, the thin music instantly swept away to sea by the gale, as it was designed to be.

The islanders said the small religious ceremony was quite without precedent: in the past it had always been a visiting pastor from Denmark, a thousand miles south, who would come here to bless the islands’ long-drowned sailors; but today made history, it was explained, because for the first time ever the minister was Faroese. In its own gentle and respectful way the dedication service, with its prayers offered in the local tongue, offered an indication of just how these remote mid-ocean islands had drawn themselves steadily away from the benign invigilation of their European motherland. They had gone their own way at last: an island way, remarked one of the congregants. An Atlantic way.

After the service was finally over, I strolled behind the dispersing crowd — and without warning suddenly and terrifyingly reached the cliff edge. The grass cut off as with a blade, and in its place there was just a huge hollow emptiness of wind and space, the black wet walls of a hurtling precipice of basalt cliffs with, crawling almost half a mile below, the tides and currents and spume of the open sea. Hundreds of puffins stood in nooks in the cliff edge, some no more than an arm’s length away, and all quite careless of my presence. They looked like ridiculous, stubby creatures, with that mask-face, chubby cheeks, and a coloured bill that was usually crammed full with a clutch of tiny fish. But every so often one took to the air and soared off into the sky with an easy and contented grace, ridiculous no more.

I must have sat at the edge for a long, long time, staring, gazing, mesmerised. The gale had finally stopped its roaring, and the sun had come out and was edging its way into the afternoon. I was sitting on the cliff edge, my legs dangling over half a mile of emptiness. I was facing due west. Just below me were clouds of seabirds, the gannets and fulmars, kittiwakes and storm petrels, and beside me were the chattering congregations of puffins. Ahead of me there was just nothing - just an endless crawling sea, hammered like copper in the warm sunshine and stretching far, fifty miles, a hundred - from up this high I felt I could have been looking out on five hundred miles and more. There was an endless vacancy that at this latitude, 62 degrees north or so, I knew would be interrupted only by the basalt cliffs of Greenland, more than a thousand miles away. There were no ships’ wakes on the sea, no aircraft trails on the sky - just the cool incessant wind, the cries of the birds, and the imagined edge of the known world set down somewhere, far beyond my range of sight.

And it is very much the same on any Atlantic headland, whether in Africa or the Americas, in the Arctic or from the dozens of other oceanic islands like these, places from where the views are limitless, the horizons finely curved with distance. The view is enough to give the viewer pause: it is just so stupefying, so haunting, the impressions welling up, one after another.

How eternal the ocean appears, and how immense. It is anything but trite to keep reminding oneself how incalculably large the Atlantic happens to be. The big seas are so big that after just a little contemplation of this ocean you understand why it was once perfectly fitting of someone — in this case Arthur C. Clarke, who knew a thing or two about immensity - to remark on how inappropriate it is to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Sea.

Then again, above all the dominant colour of this ocean is grey. It is grey, and it is slow-moving, and it is heavy with a steady heaving. The Atlantic is in most places not at all like the Pacific or the Indian oceans — it is not dominated by the colour blue, nor is it overwhelmingly fringed with leaning palm trees and coral reefs. It is a grey and heaving sea, not infrequently storm-bound, ponderous with swells, a sea that in the mind’s eye is thick with trawlers lurching, bows up, then crashing down through great white curtains of spume, tankers wallowing across the swells, its weather so often on the verge of gales, and all the while its waters moving with an air of settled purpose, simultaneously displaying incalculable power, and inspiring by this display perpetual admiration, respect, caution, and fear.

The Atlantic is the classic ocean of our imaginings, an industrial ocean of cold and iron and salt, a purposeful ocean of sea-lanes and docksides and fisheries, an ocean alive with squadrons of steadily moving ships above, with unimaginable volumes of mysterious marine abundance below. It is also an entity that seems to be somehow interminable. Year in and year out, night and day, warm and cold, century after century, the ocean is always there, an eternal presence in the collective minds of those who live beside it. Derek Walcott, the Nobel laureate poet, wrote in his famous epic work Omeros of his fisherman-hero Achilles walking finally and wearily up the shingled slope of an Atlantic beach. He has turned his back on the sea at last, but he knows that even without him seeing it, it is behind him all the while and simply, ponderously, magnificently, ominously, continuing to be the sea. The Ocean is, quite simply, “still going on”.

Three thousand years ago Homer introduced the poetic idea of Oceanus — the son of Uranus and of Gaia, the husband of Tethys and father of a score of river gods. The word itself signified a vast globe-encircling river, which the ancients imagined to be rimmed by both the Elysian fields and by Hades. To Homer the ocean was a river that rose far away where the sun sets. It was something totally daunting for Mediterranean sailors who spied its great greyness crashing and storming outside the Pillars of Hercules, at the Strait of Gibraltar. It was known as the Great Outer Sea, and it was a thing hugely to be feared, a world of crashing waters inhabited by terror-inspiring monsters like Gorgons and Hecatonchires, or by bizarrely unfamiliar humans like Cimmerians, Ethiopians, and pygmies. And forever, always going on.

This poetic notion of the sea’s ceaseless activity is one that manages to be at once familiar, comforting, and mildly unsettling. One has a sense that the sea, whatever else it may be, however grey or immense or distempered or powerful, is a permanent presence in the world, whether it is rumbling or calm, storming or drowning. We think of it as an immutable living being, ceaselessly occupied in its unfinishable business of washing and waiting.

Yet strictly speaking, this is hardly true at all. Oceans have their beginnings and their endings, too. Not in the human imagination, perhaps, but in a physical sense, most certainly. Oceans are born, and oceans die. And the Atlantic, the once much-feared Great Outer Sea, the most carefully studied and considered of them all, was not always there, and it will not remain either where it is, or what it is.

For an ocean to begin, a planet must have two elemental essentials. One is water. The other is land. The enormous tonnage of water⁴ that presently exists has not always been there, of course - but recent research suggests that it came into existence fairly soon after the earth was first coalesced out of clouds of space- borne planetesimals, almost five billion years ago. Studies of zircon crystals found near an iron ore mine in Western Australia indicate that liquid water was on earth just a few hundred million years after the planet was formed. It was extremely hot water, and it had all manner of noxious and corrosive dissolved gases in it; but it was liquid, it sloshed about, it could (and did) erode things that it poured over, and most important of all, it was the undeniable aqueous ancestor material of all of our present seas.

The ocean I gazed down on from the puffin cliffs of Mykines is in essence the selfsame water that was created all those years ago; the principal difference is that while the Hadean sea was hot and acid and incapable of supporting anything but the most primitive of thermophilic cyanobacteria, the Faroese Sea was cold and clean, had been purified and well salted by millions of years of evaporation and condensation and recycling, was rich in chemical ions from all over, and was vibrant with life of great complexity and beauty. In all other respects the frigid waters off the North Atlantic islands and the steaming acid waters of our early and territorially undifferentiated planet of long ago were more or less the same.

Territorially undifferentiated though that early planet may have been, it would not remain so for long. Solid, habitable earth was being manufactured in the cooling planet at about the same time, too.

At first this land was represented by little more than the appearance of countless huge supervolcanoes, each separated from the other so that their clusterings might have looked from the air like the chimneys of a planet-sized industrial complex, giant marine mountains that belched out choking clouds of smoke and spewed thousand-mile-long puddles of thick black lava. Eventually these isolated volcanoes managed to vomit out so much new rock that they started to coalesce, and some of these coagulating masses became more or less stable, such that they could be thought of in aggregate as landmasses. Some long while later, these landmasses formed into even larger bodies of land that could fairly be described as protocontinents. And thus did the defining present-day characteristic of our planet — an entity formed of continents and seas - have its beginnings, although the process of reaching a configuration that looked anything like today’s world was infinitely slow and involved a fantastic complexity. The making and unmaking of a multidimensional topography is only now beginning to be understood.

The earth in its early days may have been both water and land, but it was a scalding and wretched place. It spun on its axis much more rapidly than today: once every five hours the sun would rise, though had any inhabitants been around they would probably not have seen it through the vast clouds of ash and smoke and fire and noxious gas. If the skies ever cleared, the planet below would have been scourged by unfiltered pulses of ultraviolet radiation and gamma rays, making the surface hostile to almost everything. And the newly made moon was still so close that each time it swept around in orbit, it raised great acid tides that would inundate and further corrode such continents as existed.

But some continents most certainly did exist. Today’s geological record contains the relicts of half a dozen or so identifiable former bodies mighty enough to be continents. Their remains have been dispersed by billions of years of planetary restlessness: no longer is any one of these early bodies intact. All that is left is a collection of stratal shards and sunderings that can be dated from at least three billion years ago, and which are now scattered to places as otherwise unconnected as present-day Australia (where parts of this earliest of continents are to be found) and Madagascar, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Antarctica, and India.

The detective work needed to piece together the original continents is prodigiously difficult. Yet it has become possible, by looking carefully at the ages and structures of such rocks, to come up with at least an approximate sequence of events that led to the formation of today’s Atlantic Ocean and the continents that now border it.

It is a sequence featuring the dozen or so continents and seas that have come into existence, briefly or for aeons, over the planet’s life. The lineage commences with the arrival of the world’s first continental body: a mighty, two-thousand-mile long land-mass shaped much like the silhouette of a monstrous albatross, which formed itself and hoisted itself above the boiling seas some three billion years ago. Today’s geological community has given it a suitably sonorous and memorable name: it is known, in honour of the Chaldean birthplace of Abraham, as the supercontinent of Ur.

The remains of other ancient continents have been discovered since the finding of Ur, and they have been given names reflecting either the national pride of those living where they lie, the classical education of the explorers who discovered them, or the realities of modern global politics. They are names mostly unfamiliar beyond the sodalities of geology: Vaalbara, Kenorland, Arctica, Nena, Baltica, Rodinia, Pannotia, Laurentia. They are names that define bodies either as small as present-day Greenland, or as immense as present-day Asia. They were bodies constantly in motion, constantly changing their shape, topography, and position.

Over immense stretches of time, during periods of scourging heat and colossal physical forces, they all shifted themselves slowly and in stately fashion around the surface skin of the planet. Sometime they collided with one another, creating what are now ancient and much-flattened mountain chains. More often than not, they broke apart in a series of slow-motion explosions, events that took millions of years to play out. The shards of their ruin then banged and ricocheted their way around the earth, reordering themselves and occasionally recombining with one another, as though the planet’s surface were covered with the pieces of some enormous jigsaw puzzle that was being operated by an unseen and none-too-bright giant. And all the while, the spaces between the continental bodies were filled with the seas — being constantly shape-shifted and divided up and redivided and configured into bodies of water that were each recognisable, from about one billion years ago, as true and proper oceans.

By Cambrian times, some 540 million years ago, one of these oceans was starting to have a familiar look to it. When it first appeared, its shape was inconsequential - it was merely very big. But during the Ordovician period, it started to become fairly narrow, vaguely sinuous, no more than a thousand miles wide, like a great river coursing across the world from north-east to south-west. That is to say - it was in appearance not altogether unlike the North-Atlantic-to-be.

And because it washed the shores of what would in time become the east of North America and the northwest of Europe, so this supposed Ordovician sea was given the name that it should by rights bear. It was called lapetus, for the mythical figure known by the ancient Greeks as the father of Atlas. The lapetus Ocean, long since dry, and now seen at its spectacular best in the sandstones and deepwater grey limestones in northern Newfoundland that memorialise its existence, was the precursor, the father or mother, of the true and eventual Atlantic Ocean.

• • •

The modern and recognisable world began to come about some 250 million years later - 250 million years ago, indeed - during the end of the Permian and the beginning of the Triassic eras. It was a process that got under way when four of the original protocontinental jigsaw pieces collided and formed themselves into the one supercontinent that has since managed to achieve wide familiarity: the great body known as Pangaea. This vast entity contained every piece of Permian real estate that then existed on the globe. Its name alone says this was one land that comprised all of the world’s land, and it was surrounded by one sea - Panthalassa - that was all of the world’s sea.

Out of these two bodies - one water, the other land - today’s Atlantic Ocean would be made. The process began with a long era of spectacular volcanic violence, one of the planet’s most violent episodes in its entire recent history. Soon thereafter there was a mass extinction of life forms, both at sea and on the land; and then finally Pangaea started to break apart, and the new ocean started to form. The extent to which these three events were connected has been debated at length - especially over whether the vigorous volcanic activity caused both the extinction and the breakup — but these events did occur, and within relatively short order.

The volcanic period was so comprehensively and terrifyingly violent, so generous in its extent and so profound in its consequences that it must have felt as though the entire world were ripping itself apart. A gigantic series of explosions started to cannonade around the central core of Pangaea. Thousands of mighty volcanoes, first thousands of Heclas, and then in time thousands of Krakatoas, or Etnas or Strombolis or Popocate-petls, pushed themselves up and out of the countryside and started to spew fire and magma thousands of feet into the air. A ceaseless round of unbearably huge earthquakes began to shake and shatter the planet, trending along a roughly delineated line that ran for hundreds of miles northwards and southwards, and splintering and smashing the earth for scores of miles downwards into the crust.

Even if the immense universal continent of Pangaea had not yet broken up, it certainly had started to weaken and groan with the weight and weariness of its own long existence. The world was witnessing the beginnings of a brief and yet merciless series of spasms of tectonic mayhem that started tearing the world’s one stretch of land into pieces, from end to end.

And water began to seep into the growing gap between the two halves of Pangaea that were beginning to form. The tiny weasel-tongue of water that laid down sediments that are found in today’s Greece turned into an almighty spigot: trillions upon trillions of tonnes of seawater started to rush inward from it and from the feeder-waters of the surrounding Panthalassan Ocean. In doing so - by beginning the process of prising apart, levering open, wielding a tectonic crowbar — this potent combination of volcanoes, earthquakes, and lots and lots of water started the making of a brand new ocean. It only opened up a crack, like a door cautiously ajar: but it was a process that would continue, and then accelerate and proceed without let-up, for scores of millions of years, right up to the present day. The resulting ocean had been paternally prefigured by the lapetus two hundred million years before. This tiny filigree of seawater that was fast rising between the newly made volcanic cliffs of what are now Nova Scotia and Morocco was the first small-scale indication of the coming birth of the Atlantic.

• • •

The volcanoes lasted for only a few-score thousand years (though some say as much as two million) but their pulses were so violent and the amount of magma they disgorged was so prodigious that the cliffs and mountain ranges that today stand as memorial are awesomely impressive.

I took a family holiday in 1975 on the Canadian island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, a short distance from where Roosevelt took his summer’s ease on Campobello. We spent happy afternoons investigating the tide pools at Southwest Head, a high cape from where only the Atlantic could be seen, misty and cold, endlessly stretching to the south. Afterwards we walked home to watch the huge Fundy tides at Seal Cove, and on the way passed by a curious assortment of pure white boulders that sat incongruously at the top of a cliff composed of sheer columns of a dark brown rock. The boulders, deposited by glaciers, were called the Flock of Sheep. But it was the brown rock below them, a columnar basalt, that has most intrigued geologists -ever since, in the late 1980s, it was realised that they were quite similar in appearance and probable age to another huge pile of basalts, in a mountain range in Morocco.

I went to these mountains, the High Atlas, when I was researching a different aspect of this book. I had no idea then of their connection with the Grand Manan rocks, nor did I know until I started to ask around. For although Morocco is known for its Palaeozoic as well as its Jurassic and Cretaceous fossils, the Atlas mountains have large outcrops of basalt, too - layers of volcanic rocks sandwiched between the sedimentary rocks, which, it was realised by researchers in 1988, were of exactly the same age as the rocks in places like Grand Manan, in eastern Canada. This discovery, which I was told about while sitting sunning myself in a rooftop bar in the coastal town of Essaouira, led geologists on a huge Easter egg hunt around other Atlantic coastal countries for more basalts of the same antiquity. A series of expeditions in the 1990s found scores of outcrops - sills, dykes, flood basalt sequences - all in enormous abundance, which showed almost certainly just what had been going on a little over two hundred million years ago.

The outcrops were all over — four million square miles of lavas, covering parts of what in time would become four continents: in North America they ranged along the Appalachians from Alabama to Maine, and then well beyond up into Canada and along the shores of the Bay of Fundy; in South America they were found in Guyana, Surinam, French Guiana, and, most impressively, throughout the Amazon basin of Brazil; in southern Europe they were detected in France; and in Africa there were swarms of sills and dykes found not only in Morocco but in Algeria, Mauritania, Guinea, and Liberia. And all these puzzle pieces had alignments and ages and proximities that positively shouted their intimate geological connections and their probable common origin.

The average age of their deposition eventually came in with some accuracy: most of the basalts had been laid down or extruded or blown into the sky 201.27 million years ago, a figure computed with an error either way of only perhaps three hundred thousand years. Some discrepancy exists between the age of the basalts on what would be the eastern side of the region — in North Africa, especially — and those in what would become North America: the American basalts seem older. This discrepancy has led to an impassioned debate over whether the volcanoes led to the extinction of so much of the flora and fauna, since that massive wiping-out - when huge numbers of amphibian species vanished, leaving environmental niches perfectly suited for the arrival of scores of Jurassic dinosaur types - occurred around 199.6 million years ago. Would volcanoes, however almighty, have their principal biological effect almost two million years later? It seems a little improbable — but some laboratories are still trying to link the two events, not least because it makes for a more dramatic, and anthropomorphically comprehensible, story.

The great continent unzipped, though not like a fly on a pair of trousers. It was an inelegant, jerky process, rather like watching a camel getting to its feet, with one part of the ocean opening, then another far away, then a portion of the middle, then another section in the distance, and then back to the middle again. The first waves of water washed the shores of eastern Canada and northwest Africa as they pushed apart from each other, almost at the very beginning of the Jurassic, 195 million years ago. This was the first true moment of the Atlantic Ocean’s life.

Twenty million years on, the process of sea-floor spreading got under way in earnest, in the middle of the sea — like two unrolling carpets, or two unspooling conveyor belts running away from each other from a vague submarine midpoint. The bottom of the sea started to split open, and its two halves began to diverge, the continents on either side shifting steadily apart. West Africa shifted itself about three hundred miles away from South Carolina; Mali moved a couple of hundred miles off Florida; there was a large stretch of wide-open ocean around where the Windward Islands would eventually be, and then a gap of almost a thousand miles opened between Liberia and Venezuela. In this midsection a body of seawater as large as today’s Mediterranean was created, and yet unlike the rather stable-sized Mediterranean, this body only continued to get bigger.

By 150 million years ago, continuing a Canaveral-style countdown, Greenland⁵ had begun to pull away from Norway, and Iceland began to be built up from deep down in the sea. (The spectacular eruption that began in the spring of 2010 from Ey-jafjoll, an Icelandic volcano that had been quiet for the previous two centuries, and which disrupted air traffic across northern Europe with its immense swathes of high-altitude volcanic dust, is part of the process of building up. Surtsey, an entirely new island born just a few miles away in 1963, may have provided somewhat clearer evidence of the steady swelling of Iceland, but Eyjafjoll produced much more lava, even if most of it was blasted high into the sky.)

At the same time the shallow waters off the northern parts of the British Isles had deepened, and serious wave-tossed oceanic expanses now separated Ireland from Labrador. By ten million years later, Guinea, the Gambia, Senegal, and Sierra Leone had pulled relentlessly away from the coastlines of the putative Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana, which would occupy a similar dependent position in South America. Hitherto they had been in the same place: five hundred miles of ocean now separated them.

By the early Cretaceous, 120 million years back in time, the conveyor-belt-unrolling-carpet mechanism that was now evidently driving the entire process — for there was to be no further dramatic volcanism to complicate matters - had an apparent source: the Mid-Atlantic Ridge had been formed. This linear bulge in the seabed, its centre fissured and faulted and alive with submarine volcanoes, would play a vital role for the rest of the ocean’s history. It was the place where new crustal material would be belched out of the inner earth, where the ocean floor to the east and the west of it would spread out and away, and where islands — a long string of them, the Azores, the Canaries, St. Helena, Fernando do Noronha, Tristan da Cunha, a jagged line stretching from Jan Mayen in the far north to Bouvet Island, 9,200 sea miles away to the south⁶ - occasionally poked their peaks above water level, only to be pushed away in their turn to end up, remote and mostly unpeopled, in the new ocean’s farther reaches.

And still the opening went on. Fifty million years more, and the north and middle portions now began to create and separate the southern coasts of Africa and South America. There was at first another sudden outbreak of volcanic activity - flood plains of basalt poured from numberless vents. But then separation began down here, too, though it is still not clear if this was connected with the volcanic spasm. And here the process did indeed look like the unzipping of a fly, and it was accomplished with similar speed. It was an opening up that rippled southwards, one coastline following hard on another. Nigeria stripped itself away from Brazil. The valleys that would one day house the Congo on one side and the Amazon on the other snapped apart. The flood basalts of the southern edge of Pangaea separated into two: on one side the enormous Etendeka Traps, which would come to lie in southern Africa — and over the edge of which the Victoria Falls now cascade - and on the other the Paraná basalts of Argentina, currently home to the sprawling spray curtains of the falls the Guarani called big waters, the Iguazu.

And then in a final protracted frenzy of tearing, all of eastern Patagonia wrenched itself away from Angola, and the flatlands that were then off Cape Horn freed themselves from their geological embrace of what is now Namibia and the South African cape, and swept away to become the foothills of the southern Andes.

This was all accomplished at a remarkable speed, for though in the north matters unfolded in a somewhat leisurely fashion, down south they raced almost breathlessly. The Atlantic coastlines that had once been welded together between the bulge of Brazil and the armpit of Africa - the apparently natural fit that led nineteenth century figures like Alfred Wegener to think out loud that continents might once have moved apart, thoughts that condemned him to live in near-universal and near-perpetual ridicule - had managed in a scant forty million years to spring five thousand miles apart from one another. The sea in these parts must have opened up at rather more than four inches a year - infinitely more rapidly than the separation that took place up in the brisk waters of the North Atlantic, and more than three times the rate at which the ocean continues to spread wider today.

And that movement has never ended. The outline of the Atlantic Ocean that we know today was fixed perhaps ten million years ago, and though to us and our cartographers it appears to have retained its boundaries, its coastlines, and its “look” ever since the days of Columbus and Vespucci and the great German map of Martin Waldseemüller that first defined it, it has been changing, subtly and slightly, all the time. Coastlines in the east continue to advance, those in the west to retreat. Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge continues to disgorge untold tonnages of new ocean floor; some of it appears above the water’s surface and creates new islands and reefs. And the islands that do exist continue to move, slowly and slightly, away from the sea’s centre.

By ten million years ago the great split was done, and the Atlantic was fully born. At some time in the distant future — but not the unknown future, as we shall see — the rocks that opened will close and the sea will be forced to go elsewhere, and it will find another home. The vast earth-ocean, with its essentially and eternally constant volume of seawater, will be obliged by continental movement to reconfigure itself, and in time other shapes and sizes of its constituent water bodies will appear. The Atlantic that was born will in due course also die.

But that will not be for a very long while. In the meantime, the Atlantic Ocean, Mare Atlanticus, the Great West Sea, is like an enormous stage set. It was ten million years ago just as it is today: a sinuous snakelike river of an ocean, stretching thousands of miles from the Stygian fogs of the north to the Roaring Forties in the south, riven with deeps in its western chasms, dangerous with shallows in eastern plains, a place of cod and flying fish, of basking sharks and blue-finned tuna, of gyres of Sargasso weed and gyres of unborn hurricanes, a place of icebergs and tides, whirlpools and sandbanks, submarine canyons and deep-sea black smokers and ridges and seamounts, of capes and rises and fracture zones, of currents hot, cold, torrential, and languorous, of underwater volcanoes and earthquakes, of stromatolites and cyanobacteria and horseshoe crabs, of seabird colonies, of penguins and polar bears and manta rays, of giant squid and jellyfish and their slow-and-steady southern majesties, the great and glorious wandering albatrosses.

The stage, now so amply furnished with all this magic and mystery, has been prepared for a very long while. The supporting cast of players, all the beasts and plants, have now mostly made their entrances. The Atlantic Ocean is open wide, its physical condition fully set, and all is ready for the appearance on stage of the creature that will give full force to the human idea of the great sea.

For what promises or threatens to be in relative time just the briefest moment only, the central character is set to step into the light. Mankind is finally about to confront the grey-heaving reality of all these mighty waters. To see, at last, just what is going on.

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