Simon Winchester - Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms,and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

THIS BOOK IS FOR

Setsuko

AND IN MEMORY OF

Angus Campbell Macintyre

FIRST MATE OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN HARBOUR BOARD TUG

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

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, May 5, 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 Merseys 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 whitethe Canadian Pacifics three sister ships were known collectively as the White Empressesat 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 mans 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 Squaremore cathedral than bureau, all teak, marble, and hush, and with scale models of famous ocean liners from the old days illuminated in the windowseven 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, N OT W ANTED ON V OYAGE stickers, immigration forms and customs guides, and vague suggestions as to the coming maritime routine11 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 symbolismfreedom, the New World, adventure, the Atlantic Oceanand 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 oceanand youre on a White Empress crossing her. Nothing finer! You should keep your first souvenir of going across.

This 26,000-ton liner, the third to carry the name , was launched on the Clyde by Queen Elizabeth in 1955. It was one of the three White Empress warhorses that took passengers between Liverpool and Montreal until 1963, when competition from airlines forced her from service.

By sailing time a watery sun had appeared and was lowering itself toward the horizon. All ashore whos going ashore! came the familiar announcement, on cue. The Tannoy speaker carried the call to ease springs (sailorspeak for let go the ropes); there was shouting from shore, the crackling of radios on the bridgewing and the foredeckand one by one the heavy ironbound 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 reliefthey had found me at last, among the crowds of passengers lining the taffrailand 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.