Long thought to be eternal, omnipotent, and ultimately untouched
by humankind, the world’s oceans are now threatened by pollution, overfishing,
and climate chaos.
This essay will appear in “The Sea,” the Summer 2013 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. This slightly adapted version was originally
posted at Tom Dispatch.
In heavy fog on
the night of October 7, 1936, the SS Ohioan
ran aground three miles south and west of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge,
and by noon on October 8th, I was among a crowd of spectators come to pay its
respects to the no small terror of the sea. I was two years old, hoisted on the
shoulders of my father, for whom the view to windward was neither openly nor
latently sublime. The stranded vessel, an 8,046-ton freighter laden with a
cargo valued at $450,000, was owned by the family steamship company of which my
father one day was to become the president, and he would have been counting
costs instead of looking to the consolations of philosophy. No lives had been
lost — Coast Guard boats had rescued the captain and the crew — but the first
assessments of the damaged hull pegged the hopes of salvage in the vicinity of
few and none.
Happily aloft
in the vicinity of my father’s hat, and the weather having cleared since the Ohioan missed its compass heading, I
was free to form my earliest impression of the sea at a safe and sunny
distance, lulled by the sound of waves breaking on the beach, delighting in the
drift of gulls in a bright blue sky.
The injured
ship never regained consciousness. All attempts at righting it were to no
avail, and in the summer of 1937, the removable planking and machinery having
been sold for scrap, the Ohioan
was declared a total loss, the hull abandoned to the drumming of the surf and
the shifting of the sand. The prolonged and unhappy ending of the story my
father regarded as a useful lesson, and over the course of the next three years
as I was moving up in age from two to five, he often walked me by the hand
along the cliff above the wreck to behold the work of its destruction.
To foster my acquaintance with the family’s history and changing fortunes,
he spoke of distant ancestors sailing from the port
of Boston and the Gulf of Maine
in the early-nineteenth-century China
trade, of my great-grandfather’s organizing the American-Hawaiian Steamship
Company in 1899 not because of the money in the business but because of the
romance. My father’s turn of mind was literary, and he was fond of
strengthening his narratives with lengthy quotations from William Shakespeare’s
plays and extensive recitations from Joseph Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands and Herman
Melville’s Moby Dick.
Setting Sail
Floor-to-ceiling
windows in my parents’ house on Fillmore Street faced the broad expanse of San
Francisco Bay, as instructive a sight in sun or fog as any that exists in
nature, but it was in the room without a view, in my father’s library among the
stories told in books, that I learned to look upon the enchantment of the sea.
By the time the Ohioan had
been reduced to a fragment of the bow in the summer of 1938, it had become a
fading memory, and I was on the lookout for pirates on the Spanish Main, for
typhoons in the Sunda
Strait.
Almost as soon
as I could read I began with Ishmael’s setting foot aboard the Pequod and with the searching in an
atlas for the track of the great white whale. My father patiently untied the
knots of metaphor in Melville’s prose, discussed the virtues of Queequeg and
Tashtego, appended footnotes about ill-fated ancestors lost in their attempts
to round Cape Horn, steered my further reading toward Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, to the voyages of Walter Raleigh and Francis
Drake. Meanwhile, at grammar school in grades five, six, and seven, I was
moving up from the Greek gods and heroes, among them Odysseus and his
wide-wandering on the wine-dark sea, to the various discoveries of America by Viking seafarers, Christopher
Columbus, and the Mayflower,
in eighth grade to the battles of Actium and
Trafalgar.
Conrad says the
love of the sea is in fact the love of ships, the thought coming to him in 1905
as an affectionate memory of the New South Dock as it was to be seen in the
1880s, “fifty hulls, at least, molded on lines of beauty and speed,” square-rigged
and metal-plated, “moored all in a row, stem to quay, as if assembled there for
an exhibition not of a great industry but of a great art,” such a sight as “no
man’s eye shall behold again.” So, too, the sight of the United States Navy in San Francisco Bay between 1942 and 1945, its fleets
assembled for war in the sublime and treacherous Pacific.
Seventy years
have come and gone, but I still can see ships of every then-known tonnage,
armament, and design — aircraft carriers, destroyers, oil tankers, submarines,
light and heavy cruisers, trawlers, minesweepers, PT boats — lying at anchor
or getting underway on the turn of a morning’s tide. I didn’t know how to step
a mast, or tell the difference between a sandbar and a reef, but I knew that
the Battle of Midway was fought somewhere in the same degree of longitude that
had seen the end of Captain Ahab, and I contrived to picture myself as somehow
engaged in mankind’s age-old struggle with the mystery and power of the sea.
The conceit was
not that far-fetched. At the beginning of the war in 1939, the U.S. government
requisitioned the American-Hawaiian’s fleet of 38 cargo vessels, most of them
eventually pressed into service with the North Atlantic convoys bringing food
and munitions to Britain and to Russia; 11 of them were torpedoed by German
U-boats, another three scuttled to make the Mulberry harbors supplying the
invasion of France; my father (an executive of a shipping line no longer
possessed of ships) had been put in charge of the military port of embarkation
forwarding the freight of men and weapons to every theater of operations south
and west of the Golden Gate Bridge. In 1944, my grandfather was elected mayor
of San Francisco, and when he was called upon to
convey the city’s compliments to a victorious admiral returning from the Coral
or the Philippine sea, he sometimes took me
with him in the captain’s barge to be piped aboard the deck of a flagship
dressed with men in uniform.
My teenage
hopes of joining the Navy fell afoul of the physical examination administered
by the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps program to applicants in the
freshman class at Yale
College in the autumn of
1952. I proved to be blind to the distinction between the colors red and green,
willing to steer for the Guerrière
and glory but unable to read the signal flags. To correct the course of my
disappointment my father called in a favor from the National Maritime Union in New York that allowed my
temporary rating as an ordinary seaman aboard one of the family’s last surviving
freighters during the summer between my sophomore and junior years at college.
The SS Mount Whitney
sailed from Mobile, Alabama, to load iron ore from a mine on the Orinoco River
in Venezuela, and when it slipped loose of tugboats and dropped the harbor
pilot at the entrance to the bay, I was astonished by a sense of complete and
boundless freedom, a casting off of all the troubles lurking in the hearts and onshore
schemes of men. The poet Langston Hughes evidently felt similarly. At the age
of 21, he quit the island
of Manhattan to “find a
vessel that was moving” and to escape “the feeling of always being controlled
by others — by parents, by employers, by some outer necessity not your own.”
Among the
miseries to be left behind, Hughes mentions “the stupidities of color
prejudice”; my own miseries were self-inflicted and of a lesser magnitude. I
joined the ship on the night before it sailed, and several members of the crew,
amused by the arrival in their midst of an Ivy League college kid from
somewhere in an uptight, fancy neighborhood, undertook to acquaint me with the
conduct becoming in a sailor. On learning that I’d never yet kept carnal
company with a woman, they insisted on arranging the rite of passage in a
waterfront brothel where they bet shots of bourbon and rounds of beer against
the chances of my making the change from boy to man with each of the five girls
on offer. To everybody’s surprise, not least my own, I did so.
Having been
imprisoned for four years within the walls of a puritanical boarding school,
another two years in a New England college not
yet molested by the 1960s sexual revolution, I rejoiced in the discovery of a
new and far, far better world. The next morning I was burdened with a heaviness
of spirit and the fear of divine retribution in the form of a venereal disease,
but as soon as the ship was moving, I knew that I would be making good my
escape from the stain of sin, outward-bound to the state of grace that is the
freedom of the open sea.
The Restless Sea
Which is the
age-old promise that the sea is by no means bound to keep. Life at sea is of
necessity the being controlled by others, by the captain of the ship or the
regulation of the watch, by the motion of the waves and the direction of the
wind. The point had not been lost on Conrad, who in his youth had served 20
years fore and aft the mast before going ashore to London in 1894 to become an author. He knew
the sea to be “impenetrable and heartless,” giving “nothing of itself to the
suitors for its precarious favors… its fickleness is to be held true to men’s
purposes only by an undaunted resolution, and by a sleepless, armed, jealous
vigilance, in which, perhaps, there has always been more hate than love.” The
philosopher Immanuel Kant had reached much the same conclusion in 1790 without
having gone to sea: “To call the ocean sublime we must regard it as poets do,
merely by what strikes the eye; if it is at rest, as a clear mirror of water
only bounded by the heaven; if it is restless, as an abyss threatening to
overwhelm everything.”
As seen from
the deck of the Mount Whitney
in the summer of 1954, the sea was poetically at rest, as it was for Lafcadio
Hearn in 1856, “sometimes smooth and gray yet flickering with the morning
gold,” the horizon tinted with “opaline colors of milk and fire,” flying fish
glimmering in “the liquid eternity” of infinite blue; the romance of that first
voyage into the Caribbean didn’t stow aboard the second, nine years later under
contract to the Saturday Evening Post,
as a wide-wandering journalist.
The sea was in
a restless mood, the control by others incompetent and violent. The editorial
direction of the Post in 1963
had fallen into the hands of a publisher fond of staging publicity stunts, and
in the summer of that year, the magazine was intent upon salvaging the wreck of
a Spanish treasure fleet believed to have been lost somewhere off the coast of Honduras in
1605. Seven galleons in transit from Cartagena, Colombia, to Havana, all of them burdened with shipments
of silver coin and gold plate.
Three hours out
of Key West, on a heading for the Yucatán Channel, the Sea Hunter, a chartered shrimp boat
65-feet long with a round bottom and a shallow draft, rolled uncomfortably in a
moderate sea while I listened to Robert F. Marx explain that upon our arrival
at the Serranilla Bank we would be bringing up “the heavy stuff” in potato
sacks. Listed on the Post‘s
masthead as its “Adventure Editor,” Marx was a handsome man in his late
twenties, tall and deeply tanned, his gestures brave and bold, his eyes shaded
by a wary, far-off squint. He cleaned his fingernails with a fish knife while
discussing the venture that he had conceived, organized, and funded as a
picture striking to the eye of a poetic magazine publisher. “I’ve been on lots
of treasure hunts,” he said, “and this is the most scientific treasure hunt
ever seen… the best equipment, and guys who really know what they’re doing.”
The on-board
accumulation of diving gear together with state-of-the-art electronic devices
and aerial photographs of the Serranilla Bank prompted a temporary willing
suspension of disbelief; so did the credits of the other gentlemen on the
manifest, among them a soon-to-be-retired commander in the U.S. Navy; from
Bermuda, the “foremost treasure diver in the world”; from Annapolis, a champion
waterskier and proud owner of a pet shark named Horace.
West of Grand
Cayman, the Sea Hunter encountered
heavy seas and winds gusting up to 50 miles an hour in a storm not unlike the
one in which Columbus
found himself “dreadfully buffeted” in 1502. For three days the boat was near
foundering, monstrous seas breaking over the stern, the hull rolling through
angles of between 30 and 40 degrees. All the navigational systems failed; the
Navy commander, not knowing what else to do, turned to drink, and for three
days I held fast to the cabin table, unable to think or speak. Columbus in his letter to Ferdinand and
Isabella describes his crew as “weak and humbled in spirit” by the tempest,
“many of them promising to lead a religious life.” I gladly would have done the
same, had I known the prayers.
The storm
passed on the afternoon of the fourth day, and according to our course setting
from Grand Cayman we should have been at the
southwest end of the Serranilla Bank by dawn. We arrived at noon, well off to
the northeast. There was no evidence or sign of any wreck, Jamaican turtle
schooner, or Spanish galleon — nothing but a few seabirds in a forlorn and
empty sky. We remained in the anchorage for the better part of a week; sporadic
plunges into the perils and the secrets of the deep resulted in the recovery of
three iron spikes, six nails, eighteen ballast stones, 235 seashells of
assorted sizes and colors, two empty gin bottles both of British manufacture,
one shapeless metal object identified by Marx as pewter, by the Bermudan as pig
iron.
The Ocean as Desert
The voyage of
discovery aboard the Sea Hunter
brought with it recognition of the sea as a murderous abyss, also a reminder of
the last days of the Ohioan,
but it didn’t lead me to abandon the idea of the sea as apostrophized by Lord
Byron as the “deep and dark blue ocean” unmarked by the ruin that mortal men
visit upon the green but shallow earth. By the mid-1970s, married and with
children, I was an editor in New York City who
vacationed in the summer at Newport,
Rhode Island, where metaphors for
the sublime were not hard to come by. As the days of sail gave way to the age
of steam, Newport had become one of the first points on the American map at
which oceanfront property was seen to be desirable, the value added by the
nineteenth century’s fishing out from the mighty ocean the existence of seaside
resorts like the one described by Charles Dickens in 1851 as a quiet beach that
“becomes indeed a blessed spot” with fancy shops, bric-a-brac, picturesque
fishermen. “We have a fine sea, wholesome for all people; profitable for the
body, profitable for the mind.”
Certainly so it
seemed during the years when I was content to watch children build sandcastles
on the shore of Narragansett Bay, to make the hard choices between the smoked
salmon and the broiled lobster, to wonder whether the pretty sailboats in the
offing were setting course for Martha’s Vineyard or Kennebunkport. During those
same years, in my capacity as a magazine editor in search of intrepid
investigations, I sent writers on voyages that I was no longer at liberty to
undertake — to the Galapagos Islands and Australia’s
Great Barrier Reef, to the Gulf of Alaska, the northwest Mediterranean.
In place of storybook romance, they returned with reports of missing whales and
seabirds soaked in oil, of corals dead as stone, and shorelines blanketed in algal
slime, but I was reluctant to draw apocalyptic conclusions.
Surely the sea
was eternal, going on forever, its vast prodigious bulk 71% of the earth’s
surface, not to be contained within the frame of history or chained to the oars
of death and time. So it had been in the creation myths constructed in the
languages of both art and science — the Sumerian goddess Nammu giving birth to
heaven and earth, Homer’s “Ocean, who is the source of all,” Christendom
emerging with Noah from the Flood, evolutionary theory evolving from the
primordial, undifferentiated flux. So I thought it still was, T. S. Eliot’s
“groundswell, that is and was from the beginning,” right there where it was
supposed to be every summer, in sun or fog, 20 yards over the horizon of the beach
club’s beach umbrellas.
Except it
wasn’t, and it isn’t. The poetics stand corrected by the science. Contrary to
the belief that man cannot mark the sea with ruin, it turns out that he has
been doing so for the last two thousand years. If I had been slow to
acknowledge the unwelcome fact, I was in distinguished company. Henry David
Thoreau in the 1850s did not “associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean,
nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was
equally wild and unfathomable always.”
Rachel Carson,
the perceptive and far-seeing naturalist, in 1951 assured the readers of The Sea Around Us that mankind “cannot
control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy on earth, he has subdued
and plundered the continents.” She subsequently revised the opinion, remarking
in one of her later notebooks, “Even in the vast and mysterious reaches of the
sea we are brought back to the fundamental truth that nothing lives to itself.”
By the turn of
the millennium, I understood that the melting of the Arctic ice was warming the
temperatures in the sea, that fish stocks were declining, that large sectors of
the ocean were awash in nonbiodegradable refuse — cathode-ray tubes, traffic
cones, and polypropylene fishing nets — but I didn’t fully grasp the
connection between marine ecosystem and human settlement until January 2013,
when I came across W. Jeffrey Bolster’s book The Mortal Sea.
Bolster derives
the title and its assertion from an extended history of the fisheries in the
North American Atlantic between Cape Cod and Newfoundland. To the by-now-familiar story
of the various depletions of species over the last 500 years (the haddock by
1930, the cod by 1992), Bolster, a professor of history at the University of
New Hampshire, adds the dimension of events taking place on land — political
and economic, cultural and demographic. Drawing together in the same net the
two sets of datapoints (from the human maritime community and the
marine-biological community), Bolster shows the ocean to be subject not only to
the changes occurring over the course of evolutionary and geological time, but
also, and ever more rapidly, to those imposed on it by the hand and mind of
man.
We needn’t call
upon an angry god to make the sea an object of no small terror. Every year we
withdraw from it 160 million tons of fish, deposit in it 7 million tons of
garbage. Poisonous chemicals in the Gulf of Mexico have formed a pool of dead
water equivalent in size to the state of New
Jersey; among the several hundred dead zones
elsewhere in the world, one encircles the Chinese coastline.
If the sea
levels continue to rise at their current rate, the day is not far off when Miami and Atlantic
City become beds for oysters. The fishing in the sea
that was once near the surface now is done by trawls the length of locomotives
dropped to the depth of a mile and dragged across the bottom, reducing many
thousands of square miles of the ocean floor to barren deserts no longer giving
birth to the tiny organisms from which emerge the great chains of being that
sustain the life of the planet.
Nothing in the
sea lives by itself, nothing either on the earth or in the air or in the minds
of men. To know the sea is mortal is to know that we are not apart from it. Man
is nature creatively refashioning itself. The abyss is human, not divine, a
work in progress, whether made with a poet’s metaphor or with a vast prodigious
bulk of Styrofoam.
Lewis H. Lapham is editor of Lapham’s
Quarterly and a TomDispatch regular. Formerly editor of Harper’s
Magazine, he is the author of numerous
books, including Money and Class in America, Theater of War, Gag
Rule, and, most recently, Pretensions to Empire.
The New York Times has
likened him to H.L. Mencken; Vanity Fair has suggested a strong resemblance to Mark Twain; and Tom Wolfe has
compared him to Montaigne. This essay, slightly adapted for TomDispatch,
introduces “The Sea,” the Summer 2013 issue of Lapham’s
Quarterly, soon to be released at that
website.
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Copyright 2013
Lewis Lapham
Image by Vladislav Bezrukov,
licensed under Creative
Commons.
