Joy McCann - Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean

For my family

WILD SEA

A HISTORY OF THE SOUTHERN OCEAN

JOY MCCANN

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2018 Joy McCann

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-62238-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-62241-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226622415.001.0001

An earlier version of the work was first published in Australia by NewSouth, an imprint of UNSW Press Ltd., 2018.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: McCann, Joy, 1954 author.

Title: Wild sea : a history of the Southern Ocean / Joy McCann.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | An earlier version of this work was first published in Australia by NewSouth, an imprint of UNSW Press Ltd., 2018.Title page verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018043684 | ISBN 9780226622385 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226622415 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Antarctic Ocean. | Antarctic OceanDiscovery and exploration.

Classification: LCC GC461 .M33 2019 | DDC 910.9167dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043684

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

MAPS

The Southern Ocean surrounds Antarctica, but its northern limits have eluded precise definition and remain contested

PRELUDE

It is not possible to measure the full extent of that sea except with the eye of fantasy. No one will ever delve to the bottom of that sea except by plunging into the waves of his wildest dreams.

Muammad Rab ibn Muammad Ibrhm, The Ship of Sulaimn, 1685

The Southern Ocean is a wild and elusive place, an ocean like no other. With its waters lying between the Antarctic continent and the southern coastlines of Australia, New Zealand, South America and South Africa, it is the most remote and inaccessible part of the planetary ocean, the only part that flows completely around Earth unimpeded by any landmass. It is notorious amongst sailors for its tempestuous winds and hazardous fog and ice. Yet it is a difficult ocean to pin down. Its southern boundary, defined by the icy continent of Antarctica, is constantly moving in a seasonal dance of freeze and thaw. To the north, with no continental landmasses to interrupt their flow, its waters meet and mingle with those of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans along a fluid boundary that defies the neat lines of a cartographer. Even the oceans name is uncertain; it has been known by many: Antarctic Ocean, Antarctic Circumpolar Ocean, Great Southern Ocean, Southern Icy Ocean, Grand Ocean, South Polar Ocean, Austral Ocean and simply the South Atlantic, South Indian and South Pacific oceans. I have chosen to use Southern Ocean in the following pages, based on the common acceptance of the term in the Southern Hemisphere.

My earliest memories are of the Southern Ocean. I remember learning to swim in its shallows on the South Australian coast near Adelaide during the 1960s, imagining that the huge waves that crashed onto the long white beaches had travelled all the way from Antarctica. I would strain my eyes to the horizon, picturing floating ice on those sweltering Adelaide summer days. I was never much of a swimmer, but the Southern Ocean always held a peculiar fascination for me. My family had crossed that ocean to Australia on an ageing migrant ship. Much later, as a historian interested in Australian landscapes and environments, I made the unsettling discovery that those responsible for defining the boundaries of oceans and seas had erased the Southern Ocean from world maps sometime before I was born. It seems that no one thought to tell the good people of Adelaide, since its waters still surged onto their local beaches, bringing gleaming ribbons of kelp and other riches from its depths. I was intrigued, and so began my own journey into that wild ocean. In the following pages I continue that voyage, navigating back and forth not only across the physical ocean but also through its history, and through humankinds shifting political, scientific and cultural relationships with it.

In Western cultures people have found a myriad of ways to create meaning and order in the oceanic realm. Atlantic (from the Greek Atlantikos, referring to Atlas, the Titan of Greek mythology)

When European explorers navigated their way into the uncharted waters of the high southern latitudes in the eighteenth century in search of new territory, resources and geographical knowledge, they encountered vast barriers of sea ice and strange winds and currents. Such early expeditions were motivated by the prospect of finding new trade routes. The British navigator James Cook was instructed by the British Admiralty to undertake three voyages of exploration to the region. He did so between 1768 and 1779, first to the Pacific Ocean to observe the transit of Venus and search for a continent thought to lie across the South Pacific below latitude 40 South. On his second voyage he crossed the Antarctic Circle for the first time but saw only ice.

Over the following two centuries larger sailing vessels and improved navigation techniques ushered in a new era of long-distance voyaging to the Southern Hemisphere. The ocean at the southernmost end of Earth began to take shape on nautical maps and charts, but sailing over such vast distances was not for the faint-hearted and shipwrecks were common. The idea of a Great Southern Land persisted until mariners venturing into the high southern latitudes mapped two great lands of desert and ice separated by a stormy, tempestuous ocean. Along the way they found rich whaling grounds in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, where the southern whales migrated along ancestral pathways.

The prospect of a new frontier at the South Pole fuelled epic voyages of science and exploration, and nations sought to impose order on the wild ocean that surrounded it by mapping its surface features and condensing the ceaseless motions of current and wind and ice into lines on charts. Maritime explorers, natural philosophers and scientists also sought to unravel the Southern Oceans mysteries. Living organisms were captured and preserved in the archives of natural history museums, the artworks of galleries and the records of research institutions. A combination of developments in undersea surveillance technology after World War II, which made new tools and methods available to the oceanographic and biological sciences, together with the decline of whaling and rise of a new ecological consciousness opened windows to the deep sea and created the conditions for the transformation of the stormy moat encircling Antarctica into a global field laboratory. Scientists examined the interplay of ocean and atmosphere, Earths two great bodies of water. Satellite and sonar technologies plotted more accurately the shifting contours of current and air and mapped the invisible pathways linking this polar region to the rest of the planet. Over the centuries, each voyage, each chart, each satellite image added another fragment to Western knowledge, a process that continues to this day.