Atlantic (21 page)

Now trackless because the Union Castle liners used to call at Jamestown but long since abandoned the route. The final call was made by the northbound
Windsor Castle
in the autumn of 1977. The service then stopped dead, and when I first went there the journey was a little less easy to organize: no
4
P.M.
every Thursday
anymore.

Long ago I had been sent to the island to write a story about the curious case of a local man—a
Saint,
as they are still known—who had been convicted of a none-too-heinous type of murder (there had been a fight in a pub, so this was by no means premeditated slaughter) and was to be brought back to England to serve out his sentence.

There were seldom crimes of any seriousness on the island, I had been told—in fact, most islanders were so well mutually disposed that there was an alarming abundance of bastard children, known when they turned up at weddings as “spares.” I was also told the local policemen had very little to do and were known as “the toys”; and that the Jamestown jail was so small and made so stuffy by the equatorial heat that inmates were let out each afternoon to go swimming in the Atlantic.

This, I decided one gloomy afternoon in London, was just the kind of place that had to be seen: a mid-ocean colonial possession of great antiquity where life, it seemed from afar, was lived with less gravity than in most places elsewhere. After much trial and error, I managed to get myself aboard the 1980s version of the RMS
St. Helena
—a smaller, stubbier, and bright red predecessor of the blue one I had watched sailed past Robben Island. After some delays and ditherings we lumbered out from the Western Approaches and proceeded to steam south at no more than ten knots past the Canaries and the Cape Verdes, through to the warming, flying-fish-filled tropical seas.

There was an interlude when we hove to briefly at another of the Atlantic Ocean’s remote colonial outposts, the expired-volcano island of Ascension, where there is an airstrip and a lot of expensive communications equipment (some for broadcasting, some for spying) and a patch of well-watered grass at the summit where there used to be a herd of cows administered from London, for complicated reasons, by an obscure department of the BBC. We had called in to collect a detachment of Saints who worked for the contractors on an island that mostly looks like a slag heap, or
Hell with the Fire Put Out,
as some of the more disgruntled have it. But Ascension wages are good wages, and there is little to spend them on, so back then not a few Saints were happy to work there on yearlong contracts.

But they were never so happy as when they finally got back home, which our passengers did after a further two days’ sailing. The eventual arrival at Jamestown had a sweetness all its own, as seaport returns so often do—with the unions of spouses long missed, children much grown, and then all the news and the gossip unheard. But here, although the substance of the afternoon—we dropped anchor a couple of hours before dusk—was mostly dominated by the delights of reunion, for me it was a revelation of quite another kind. Jamestown, seen both from afar and upon close contact, turned out to be a tiny Atlantic-side city unlike any other, and in scale and style and manner just exquisite. Jamestown truly is a work of art, and Atlantic Ocean art at that.

The town, which generally has around fifteen hundred inhabitants, a third of the island’s total, lies in a steep valley on the island’s north shore, and like Cape Town is wholly encircled by hills. But there is no dock of useful size, and vessels of any consequence have to lie at anchor in James Bay, with all passengers and cargoes transferred to shore by lighter.
³⁷
The legendary Atlantic swells,
born in storms as far away as Newfoundland,
the islanders like to tease, can make this tricky, the waits often inconveniently lengthy. But the panorama as the launch chugs in toward the crowded little pierhead seems lifted straight from an eighteenth-century print, with nothing changed or edited. There is a small and perfectly formed white-painted castle on the left, with tiny inner courtyards and cobbled squares; there is a small wooden drawbridge, and a castellated wall a dozen feet thick, built to shield the town beyond from any seaborne hostility, and this is pierced by a gateway with a portcullis and the arms of the Honourable East India Company carved and painted in red, white, and silver above it. There is a microscopic church (the cathedral, St. Paul’s, is a ways inland), a town square with a bench for old-timers set in the shade of a pipal tree brought in from India, a minute police station with its aforementioned tiny prison, and then, at the beginning of a single main street that rises gently toward the brown flax-covered hills, there are two rows of Regency houses, each brightly painted and with iron trelliswork and sash windows, which look patiently across at each other as they have for centuries.

It is a town that is, as they say,
all of a piece.
There is the Consulate Hotel, with a gleaming brass plate outside. There is Jacob’s Ladder, an iron-railed stairway of 699 stone steps that rises at a vertiginous angle up the valley side, and which was built to help supply a garrison of sentries placed on the cliffs to ensure that any would-be rescuers of Napoléon were seen, and then seen off. There is a public park, with a zigzag path among the jacarandas and bamboo fronds, and reserved, originally, for Ladies. There is a bustling covered market where the floors are wet with seawater and crowded with baskets of dripping fish. And once in a while the crowds part for a Jaguar, flag flying from the hood and a crown instead of a license plate, bearing His Excellency down from his mansion, Plantation House (the gardens of which have giant tortoises that were there at the time of Napoléon), to his offices in the castle.

The Atlantic eases itself into every conversation, every thought. The weather, of course, is made by it—the morning mists, the evening winds, the slapping swells that set the dockside pontoons swaying and creaking. The timetables of the ships are set by it—there is no airfield still, and many islanders suppose never will be, and the RMS in its many incarnations is still the only way to leave and to return. The daily tuna catch comes from the Atlantic; and such economy as survives on the island—for once they grew watercress for the Royal Navy, and they harvested and scutched flax for rope and string, but when the British Post Office decided to tie its parcels with plastic twine, all production ended—now depends almost entirely on the sea. The French
drapeau tricolore
still flies defiantly over Longwood House, where the island’s most infamous Atlantic visitor was compelled to live out his final, post-Waterloo years, having been landed there from Plymouth aboard one of the ocean’s better-known naval vessels, HMS
Northumberland.
³⁸
Even the island’s address—
St. Helena, South Atlantic Ocean
(and with an island postal code, STHL 1ZZ, said to be recognized by the sorting computers in London)—displays a formal and official bond between the island and the sea, unique in all the world.

Of course there are nobler architectural confections around the Atlantic; there are many places of greater oceanside charm; and there many places of equal inconsequence ranged up and down the ocean, between Thorshavn in the Faroes up north, to Stanley in the Falklands down south. There is no lighthouse on St. Helena—so no opportunity for one of the great lighthouse builders, like the Stevensons of Edinburgh (Robert Louis among them), who created some of the greatest, most beautiful, and most technically challenging of all Atlantic structures.
³⁹
That single lapse aside, however, it is tempting to list St. Helena high among the great visual triumphs of the ocean sea.

As a place, pure and simple, the island is perhaps best corralled alongside the odd and the eccentric corners of the Atlantic, with such places as Puerto Madryn in Argentina, where a number of the locals (descendants of indentured Cardiganshire railway workers) still speak Welsh; or with Axim in Ghana, where there is a magnificent Dutch-built castle; or with Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana (where Captain Dreyfus was sent from Paris, to be held in solitary confinement). But I have always thought this tiny colonial outpost was deserving of something more. Without being too fanciful, I have long felt that in the architecture that defines both her and her exquisite little capital city, the island of St. Helena somehow represents, somehow stands for, somehow has become the essence of the ocean. That she somehow
is
a period of the Atlantic’s human history, unaltered, untinkered with, and preserved for posterity in fine old Regency stucco and well-wrought imported English iron.

7. SOUNDS OF THE WATERS

The ocean is also represented, with equal vigor, in more contemporary writing, in painting, in music. The terror that the great sea stimulated in early times has been long assuaged; the formality with which the sea was represented in her newly crossed years in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been long reversed; in modern times the Atlantic has become an entity to be recorded in all of her moods, in part for the obvious reasons of her drama, her beauty, her spectacular violence. But it also happens that she has come to be on very much more intimate terms with today’s humankind—and that, it seems, has much to do with the present state of shore-bound civilization, a condition of existence to which the ocean is now seen as the very antithesis. Many nowadays think of the ocean admiringly, as a place of refuge from the numberless cares and wants of the landlubber. With the trials of modernity the sea has come to be regarded as refuge, as a place without the crowds, the dirt, or the want, without the slums of a vast modern city: as a place well beyond the pullulations of industry, money, and greed.

Of course, the Atlantic is a body of water that still needs to be crossed and navigated through, for reasons of commerce and curiosity and as we shall soon see, for reasons of war. But it is also a body of water that has come to be seen—and if one has to hazard a date, it began to be so from about the beginnings of the nineteenth century—as an entity for more pleasant purposes, of which human recreation, quite literally the re-creation of the human spirit, was one. It was still an illimitably large and powerful body of water, true, but so far as humankind was concerned it was now also something pure, something clean and uncongested, with a certain nobility about it sorely lacking in the slums of industrialized cities.

The ocean—and the ocean best known to nineteenth-century sophisticates was still the Atlantic—was thus something to be envied, an entity well deserving of our respect and admiration. This was a major shift in emphasis—and the art, writing, and music of more recent years has been quick to reflect it, to undergo what can without apology be called a real and very apparent
sea change.

•  •  •

In music, it was the growing size of nineteenth-century orchestras that helped this change along, since for the first time it had become possible for the composer to reflect to the full extent the sheer complexity of the sea. Eighteenth-century music had an intellectual rationalism about it, limited by the kind of instruments available and the numbers of players that could be marshaled to employ them. The Romantic movement of Victorian music, on the other hand, vastly expanded both the kinds and the numbers of playable instruments—and so the ocean, with its sudden and sweeping changes of mood and color, suddenly seemed a highly appropriate subject for composers to tackle.

Beethoven, to take an early example, adapted in 1815 two short poems by Goethe to create the little-known cantata
Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage,
which has as its theme the contrast between the quiet solemnity of a ship becalmed and the furious enthusiasm of the wild winds that would later drive her skipper home to port. Mendelssohn was much influenced by this little work and twenty years later produced a longer orchestral overture with the same title (one of Goethe’s poems is devoted to the tedium of calms, the second to wind and prosperity). The overture begins with the quiet of the calm sea, then a flute trills to indicate a sighting of a patch of blue sky and the burning away of the sea mist, after which comes a cascade of the strings swelling with the rising winds, and finally a lone cello, in one of the most languorous and beautiful of all Mendelssohn’s melodies, and which celebrates the vessel’s arrival home safe and sound. This was not a work that could have been composed or performed a hundred years before, back in those times when the ocean was not fully known: there was neither the orchestra nor perhaps the necessary musical confidence of any composer then living.

Not surprisingly, nineteenth-century Italian composers tended to favor the Mediterranean for their seaborne excursions—as with Verdi, for example, in both
Simon Boccanegra
and
Otello.
Their northern colleagues, on the other hand, were more deeply inspired by the Atlantic: Wagner’s
Flying Dutchman,
for instance, dealt with the legend of the spectral ship said to be haunting the tidal races around the Cape of Good Hope, and
Tristan und Isolde
had its doomed protagonists shuttling across a patch of that same sea between Ireland and Cornwall. Gilbert and Sullivan took both the mystique and inanities of British seaborne life as a motif for three of their light operas—
HMS Pinafore
,
The Pirates of Penzance,
and
Ruddigore.
And more modern composers still—Edward Elgar, Benjamin Britten, William Walton, and Ralph Vaughan Williams—all took turns with the ocean, and in a flurry of marine musicality dealt respectively with its majesty (Elgar’s
Sea Pictures
), its tragedies (Britten’s own
Peter Grimes
and his adaptation of Herman Melville’s
Billy Budd
), the bacchanalian habits of its sailors (Walton’s
Portsmouth Point
), and the ocean’s endless capacity for elegiac melancholy (as with Vaughan Williams’s
Sea Symphony,
a seventy-minute choral epic with Walt Whitman’s poetical work, much of it Long Island based and Atlantic related, from
Leaves of Grass,
providing the libretto).