The highest truth, the half-known life: biography of an ocean

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick – one of my favourite novels and surely one of the most sprawling works of literature ever created – often reads like a paean to the great water-bodies of the world. Time and again, we are reminded of the unfathomable majesty of the ocean. “Yea, foolish mortals,” says the narrator Ishmael at one point, “Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two-thirds of the fair world it yet covers.” (Echoing these words more than a century later, Arthur C Clarke would say it was inappropriate to call the planet Earth, when clearly it was Sea.)

Elsewhere, Ishmael makes the case for an honourable death at sea: “In landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!” And yet, when he uses the ocean as a metaphor for the dark and unknowable aspects of the human soul and of life itself, he cautions his fellow creatures to stay land-bound:

Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began. Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle and docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!

There are many ways of reading the phrase “the horrors of the half-known life”, especially today, when we know more about our planet and about our own origins than the people of Melville’s time did. The terror of oceanic exploration as expressed in the above passage – the urge to stay tethered to a small and insular world, even while enthralled by the thought of what lies beyond – can be likened to the fear of knowledge itself; the fear that the more we discover, the less comfort it might bring.

Moby-Dick was published at a time when the world was a larger place than it is today, and when it would have been ludicrous to suggest that a flying machine might one day cross an ocean in a few hours. And yet, even in the 21st century, the great waters have lost none of their splendour. You can feel the awe on practically every page of Simon Winchester’s Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, which is a journalistic history of – and a wide-ranging tribute to – the Atlantic Ocean.

Winchester begins his story with the earliest days of the planet, millions of years before life of any sort had arisen (or could arise), and takes us through the geological churnings that very slowly led to the creation of the continents and oceans we know today. From there, it’s a relatively quick forward track to the recorded history of the past few millennia, including the realisation – with the discovery of the Americas in the late 15th century – that the Atlantic was in fact a discrete body of water with boundaries; and the subsequent role played by the ocean in trade, commerce, discovery, warfare and, essentially, the building of the world as we know it today.

The result is a book that – much like Moby-Dick – lurches restlessly from one topic to another, covering highly disparate material in the process (a short list: the ocean as inspiration for writers, painters and musicians; the ocean as the seat of the first parliaments; the building of the first undersea cables; the birth and development of the mighty Atlantic cities), and inevitably having to skim over some of it. But then, to paraphrase Melville, “A mighty subject requires a mighty book”. The Atlantic certainly deserves an epic - though Winchester might consider collecting his unused material for a new, multi-volume edition.

[Did a version of this for my Sunday Guardian books column. The paper’s Guardian20 supplement is finally online, by the way, though it’s slightly distressing that the cover story of the current issue includes a negative review of my Jaane bhi do Yaaro book!]