Table Of Content

the sea The Earth series traces the historical significance and cultural history of natural phenomena. Written by experts who are passionate about their subject, titles in the series bring together science, art, literature, mythology, religion and popular culture, exploring and explaining the planet we inhabit in new and exciting ways. Series editor: Daniel Allen In the same series Air Peter Adey Meteorite Maria Golia Cave Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher Moon Edgar Williams Clouds Richard Hamblyn Mountain Veronica della Dora Coal Ralph Crane North Pole Michael Bravo Comets P. Andrew Karam Rainbows Daniel MacCannell Desert Roslynn D. Haynes The Sea Richard Hamblyn Earthquake Andrew Robinson Silver Lindsay Shen Fire Stephen J. Pyne South Pole Elizabeth Leane Flood John Withington Storm John Withington Glacier Peter G. Knight Swamp Anthony Wilson Gold Rebecca Zorach Tsunami Richard Hamblyn and Michael W. Phillips Jr Volcano James Hamilton Ice Klaus Dodds Water Veronica Strang Islands Stephen A. Royle Waterfall Brian J. Hudson Lightning Derek M. Elsom The Sea Richard Hamblyn reaktion books For Ben and Jessie Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2021 Copyright © Richard Hamblyn 2021 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78914 487 1 Contents Introduction: ‘The Sea Is Like Music’ 7 1 Shorelines 19 2 The Science of the Sea 47 3 Sea Life 79 4 Exploration 112 5 The Sea in Art and Music 152 Afterword: Future Seas 189 timeline 207 references 211 select bibliography 225 associations and websites 229 Acknowledgements 231 Photo Acknowledgements 232 Index 235 Introduction: ‘The Sea Is Like Music’ In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up. Michel Foucault, Heterotopias (1967) In late August 1909 Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung crossed the Atlantic together in a steamship as the invited guests of a recently founded American university. The six-day crossing from the port of Bremen had a particular impact on the 34-year-old Jung, who declared in his journal that ‘the sea is like music: it has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over.’1 The pair was entranced – ‘the beauty and grandeur of the sea consists in our being forced down into the fruitful bottom- lands of our own psyches’ – and at the end of the lecture tour, they were impatient for the return journey: ‘I am looking for- ward enormously to getting back to the sea again,’ wrote Jung, ‘where the overstimulated psyche can recover in the presence of that infinite peace and spaciousness.’ The voyage home, though it proved far from peaceful, did not disappoint: Yesterday there was a storm that lasted all day until nearly midnight. Most of the day I stood up front, under the bridge, on a protected and elevated spot, and admired the Claude Monet, Cabin magnificent spectacle as the mountainous waves rolled up of the Customs Watch, 1882, oil on canvas, an and poured a whirling cloud of foam over the ship. The ship image about the act began to roll fearfully, and several times we were soaked by a of looking out to sea, salty shower. It turned cold, and we went in for a cup of tea.2 about keeping watch, an activity for which a large proportion of For the rest of his life, the sea remained the Swiss-born Jung’s coastal infrastructure foremost symbol for the deep unconscious, a site of fascination was built over the centuries. and fear, of grandeur and dread, a threshold that can never be 7 the sea lightly crossed. ‘Of all the jumbles of matter in the world the sea is the most indivisible and the most profound,’ observed Victor Hugo, in a statement that expresses one of the ruling ideas of this book, although a volume as short as this can only hope to touch the surface of such a vast and unfathomable subject.3 The sea is in all ways immense – physically it covers more than 70 per cent of Earth’s surface, while conceptually it overwhelms the human imagination – and it would be impossible for a book on this scale to offer more than the briefest historical outline of the sea and its multiple meanings. The chapters that follow seek to trace a cultural and geographical journey from estuary to abyss, beginning with the topographies of the shoreline and ending with the likely futures of our maritime environments. Along the way they will consider the sea as a site of work and endurance, of song and story, of language, leisure and longing, of peace and war. The sea has always acted as a conduit for culture, from the early Pacific voyagers in their outrigger canoes to the Renaissance circum- navigators of the world, and on into our own time, where the seas remain global trade routes, with 90 per cent of the world’s Winslow Homer, The Beach, Late Afternoon, commercial goods transported on container ships that cross c. 1870, oil on wood. A from port to port via unregulated waters, far beyond national contemplative view of borders, amid the forgotten spaces of the ocean.4 a Massachusetts beach, painted shortly after ‘Seas’, ‘waters’, ‘oceans’: some definitions are called for. ‘Seas’ the artist’s return from are distinct from ‘oceans’, being the complex regions where land France. 8 Introduction: ‘The Sea Is Like Music’ and ocean interact. Seas thus behave (and are experienced and understood) in different ways from oceans; to borrow Captain W. H. Smyth’s definition, from his Sailor’s Word-Book (1867), ‘strictly speaking, sea is the next large division of water after ocean, but in its special sense signifies only any large portion of the great mass of waters almost surrounded by land, as the Black, the White, the Baltic, the China, and the Mediterranean seas, and in a general sense in contradistinction to land.’5 The world’s five oceans, by contrast (Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic and Southern) really join up as one vast saltwater body, the singular surrounding Ocean, in the margins of which the seas are located, both geographically and figuratively. Seas tend to be thought of in the plural, as in the phrase ‘the seven seas’, which derived from Mesopotamian and early Greek geographers’ familiarity with the Aegean, Adriatic, Mediterranean, Black, Red and Caspian seas, plus the Persian/Arabian Gulf. By medieval times, the phrase referred to the North Sea, Baltic, Atlantic, Mediterranean, Black, Red and Arabian seas, while in the centuries following the Age of Exploration the seven seas became identified globally with the Arctic, Atlantic, Indian, Pacific, Mediterranean and Caribbean seas, along with the Gulf of Mexico. This is not the whole linguistic story, of course, and the International Hydrographic Organization currently recog- nizes more than seventy bodies of water with the word ‘sea’ in their names, a list that does not include inland salt lakes such as the Aral Sea, Caspian Sea, Dead Sea or Salton Sea, or freshwater lakes such as the Sea of Galilee, none of which are classified as divisions of the World Ocean.6 Such geographical semantics can have far-reaching impli- cations. In the case of the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water, the fact that it is not officially designated a sea has long complicated the political relationship between the five nations that share its coastline, along with the wealth of oil and natural gas beneath its waters. As a lake, the Caspian’s resources are shared proportionally among its bordering countries – Azer- baijan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran – but as a sea it would be governed by the United Nations Convention on the 9