Seven-Tenths (18 page)

The common fantasy of the sea’s withdrawing or vanishing to reveal the naked ocean floor shows its involvement with loss. From this derive an especial melancholy and a power to haunt. Among the sea’s attributes are a capacity to conceal, the ability to stand for time, and the quality of erasure.

The ocean’s capacity to conceal does not extend only to things one might lose overboard, or to the people, ships and cargoes it has always swallowed up. Its deeps may hide the unknown and the monstrous but they can also veil from sight places which have never been lost but for which some are always searching: Atlantis and those far-off worlds whose presence is less a cartographer’s fiction than a fact of desire. This is not to disparage the imaginative space they occupy but to wonder if the future identification of a particular lump of seabed with the fabled land, the Happy Isles or Mayda itself might, after the initial euphoria of vindication, not please its supporters as much as they thought and even mean their having to find something else on which to fix their search.

There is a need for the myth of the lost land which so often has utopian or golden significance. Interest in a submarine Atlantis grew as increasing exploration and travel removed areas of dry land which might plausibly still conceal Golden Khersonese, Ophir, El Dorado and the sundry lost cities of higher civilisations. (At the turn of the twentieth century Krupps of Essen spent half a million dollars looking for El Dorado in the Mato Grosso, while in 1925 Lt. Col. Percy Fawcett was murdered in the Brazilian jungle by Calapalo Indians while looking for the ruins of Atlantis or one of its sister cities.
*
As for
Conan Doyle’s
The Lost World
(1912), it is significant that he visualised it as an island, a raised plateau surrounded by a great escarpment of practically unscalable cliffs.

The loss of the
Titanic
was not a myth, yet both she and the search for her have taken on something of a mythic status, combining semi-archaeology with the qualities of a quest. Since this is a secular age, sacred relics will no longer do as quest objects (the demotion of the Shroud of Turin from holy trophy to medieval forgery ought to have dealt the final blow to the sacred-object industry). Things swallowed by the sea will do excellently in their place, however, especially if there are TV rights to their finding. Dr Robert Ballard’s search for the
Titanic
was on his own admission obsessive, and such things arouse wide interest. ‘My lifelong dream was to find this great ship, and during the past 13 years the quest for her had dominated my life.’
*
It had also cost huge sums of money. Yet the ideal thing about this quest was that it could be rationalised by turning it into a research project. In the 1970s, the Woods Hole Oceanographical Institution decided to increase the depth range of its deep-sea submersible,
Alvin
, from 6,000 to 13,000 feet. Since 13,000 feet was roughly the depth at which
Titanic
was supposed to lie, searching for it would be the perfect way to test the improved submersible and a new generation of robotic vehicles which could be deployed from
Alvin
on cables and guided by remote control. These in turn would be prototypes of the entirely free-diving robotic sleds which are intended eventually to replace manned submersibles altogether. The enterprise was further legitimated by first being put to military use. The Woods Hole research vessel
Knorr
, needing to try out the
Argo/Jason
equipment Ballard had helped develop, made a practice run over the wreck of the US nuclear submarine
Scorpion
which was lost with all hands in 1968. The wreck was comprehensively filmed though the pictures are still classified and have not been released. Thus exonerated, Ballard could turn his attention to the
Titanic
and later that same year, 1985, did indeed find her.

It is a happy man who can spend other people’s money and indulge his own ingenuity to fulfil a lifetime’s ambition. The
triumph of Heinrich Schliemann when he discovered Troy stood for Freud as the perfect image of happiness, but it also begged questions about what exactly was being satisfied. The problem of Troy was that it had disappeared to the extent that people wondered if it were mythical, or maybe a composite like Homer himself. To have proved it existed and to have stood in its ruins must have been even more exciting than finding Tutankhamun’s tomb was for Howard Carter. Troy had been legendary for 3,000 years whereas the young king was a footnote in dynastic history. Carter had only dangled his name in front of his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, to induce him to let him have a last dig in the Valley of the Kings, which by then had been turned practically upside down in the search for dead pharaohs.

Dr Ballard’s quest was like neither of these, precisely, in that it was not an act of archaeology. Everybody knew the
Titanic
’s fate; it was no legend. Nor was there any mystery about how she had sunk, as in the case of
Affray
and
Scorpion
. Bland reasonableness (‘It’s down there somewhere and I’m going to find it’) is always unsatisfactory as an explanation for a life’s dream and thirteen years of searching. When in such cases the search is described as being more important than finding the object one is entitled to ask what is really being looked for. Such avidness is normally reserved for things of great personal significance that one has lost oneself, and soon gives way to resignation. What private thing, in short, did the
Titanic
stand for? The question must be left unanswered, but it should be asked. What can be said of such ventures is that they seldom stop there.

Dr Ballard did indeed go on to find the
Bismarck
and, no doubt, much else besides. In the long sequence of searchings and findings, searchings and findings such men undertake, success is a temporary setback, a resting place on a much larger and grander journey to find the one thing that will satisfy a loss which can never be specified. The sea is the perfect place for it since whatever it hides beneath its dark leagues of surrogate tears it makes timeless. One might announce one was looking for a lost submarine but a thick, wounded shadow dimly glimpsed at the edge of a monitor screen would seem a thing immeasurably ancient in its melancholy, weeping ‘rustsicles’ from its iron plates, and the thrill of discovery would always carry with it the
minor guilt of intrusion.
*
It would also be imbued with the knowledge that what one finds never fits the cavity which the search hollows out. ‘In a way,’ said Dr Ballard of the
Titanic
, ‘I am sad we found her.’ Such hulks will always feel privately significant to their finder. At first they may appear to be playing a game with him, being deliberately, almost flirtatiously, elusive. Later they become in their stately woe repositories for his own unassuageable loss. So it was that Dr Ballard identified with the object of his quest to the extent of expressing anger at the teredo worms which had devoured her woodwork. ‘After years of gluttony the creatures starved and dropped dead at the table. I have no sympathy for them …’
†

In the circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that so much emphasis should be laid on
not touching
. This perpetually lost object cannot be touched because at that instant it will turn into something else: an ordinary ship, an ordinary battleship, which sank, which has a salvage value, which will attract looters. Not to touch leaves it exclusive, an object of vision, in some sense still not wholly found, while heightened as the public myth. The underwater camera records the details, the mystery remains intact. How could one not sympathise with a man who dreads to think his adroitly publicised private quest might merely stimulate greed rather than a proper solemn wonder? It would be as if Sir Percival were to learn that his companions on the Quest only wanted to find the Holy Grail so they could melt it down.
‡
Given the sea’s power to swallow and erase it is not surprising that it should have been seen as the lair of malignant spirits. The British sailor’s personification of these was Davy Jones, to whose locker the drowned were consigned. He is thought by some to derive from ‘the Devil Jonah’. Jonah was thrown overboard as a sacrifice by his shipmates to pacify the storm for which they held him responsible since he had angered God by disobeying orders to go to Nineveh and remonstrate about its sinfulness. Jonah, preferring a quiet life, had slipped away to Joppa instead, where he found a boat bound for Tarshish at entirely the other end of the Mediterranean. His locker turned out to be the stomach of a whale. The idea of sacrificing somebody to a storm god was no doubt ancient. What is curious is that the practice has lingered for so long, commuted to the passive form of refusing to save the drowning or to touch the drowned. Bryce, the pedlar in Sir Walter Scott’s
The Pirate
, observed ‘To fling a drowning man a plank may be the part of a Christian; but I say, keep hands off him, if ye wad live and thrive free frae his danger.’ This is not quite the spirit of Grace Darling.
*
Several widely separated cultures have been recorded as sharing the refusal of certain Scots villagers to pick up a drowned body for fear of meeting the same fate. A description of such behaviour can be found in a nineteenth-century account of a ramble in Austria. It is true that the incident concerns the River Danube rather than the sea, but the principle is undoubtedly the same: 

The author goes on to explain that despite his jocular reference to the Lorelei, local superstition was not concerned with legends of water nymphs beckoning sailors to join them in ravishing underwater kingdoms. Indeed, the boatmen seemed fatalistic rather than superstitious. They simply believed that the river required at least one human sacrifice a year and attributed this directly to an ordinance of heaven.

Such things testify to yet another unfixable boundary, that which the sea mediates between life and death, between air and water. It is not always clear at what point this is finally crossed. For some cultures and at some periods it seems that merely falling into water is enough to show a victim he has been ‘earmarked’, that from then on he belongs elsewhere. In other places and at other times people are heroically snatched from beyond this flexible threshold and laboriously brought back to life. Timid swimmers may experience the boundary acutely, their upper halves in air and light, their lower in water and feeling the pull of black depths. It is a common enough description: ‘I feel as though I am being dragged down,’ as though a great magnet on the seabed were tugging at them, or as if they had entered the gravitational field of a private fate. Others, at home in the water, can hardly swim down far enough for their own delight.

Once, on an island in the South China Sea, I was taken to visit a
mangkukulam
, a sorcerer, who lived inland in an isolated hut by a stream. I was told he had captured a sea devil which was responsible for drowning several local fishermen. It was dead now, they said, but I was on no account to touch it because it still had some of its old power and anyone who touched it ran the risk of being dragged down. Only the sorcerer himself was safe because his power was greater and anyway he hardly ever went near the sea. This man, who turned out to be no more than thirty, produced a flattish bundle of purple cloth
with a faintly ecclesiastical look to it, something like the material Filipinos use to make the stiff little copes and robes for their Santo Niño images. As he unwrapped it my companions edged backwards out of the hut into the daylight, peering through the open doorway. Just before lifting off the last fold of cloth the sorcerer muttered a little chant, then exposed a horror I was only half prepared for.

It was grotesque, about 20 inches long and not quite as wide, black, wizened, and with a terrible face. The mouth was a greedy smile, like a child’s drawing or the segment of an orange, while the eyes slanted malevolently and shone dull red. It had four limbs like flippers, a miniature manatee’s, slightly curled as if it had died trying to grasp something perhaps the size of a swimmer’s leg. So imperceptibly can one take in, over the months, a small community’s terms of living that it actually looked to me like a devil, just for an instant, before I saw it was the deformed body of a male stingray. The sorcerer had cut it, moulded it,
sculpted
it, setting the gill slits with glass beads and creating from the claspers pseudo-limbs so that the underside – which was on display – became a single nightmarish face. It was, in fact, an excellent example of a Jenny Haniver, a class of grotesques modelled from the bodies of real animals so as to resemble some legendary or imaginary creature. They were very popular in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and many a mermaid was formed (like that which relatively recently was still on display in a museum in Alexandria) from the doctored body of a dugong with long tresses of bleached horsehair and fake pudendum. It was the first I had seen and I was not surprised at the fear it aroused. Even the sorcerer himself seemed in awe of his own creation as he covered its potent eyes with cloth and wrapped it hurriedly up again.

It is not easy to say precisely what it is about the sea which so swiftly and powerfully puts things on a mortal footing. Sometimes drowning can seem the least of its lethalities. Even people who live by it and work on it all their lives will occasionally glance up and feel their thoughts and preoccupations momentarily effaced, swept by a bleak melancholy which they sense does something at once banal and radical, like resetting the poles of their existence. It is over in a flash; but the seething waters of the middle distance have something
wordless and unpitying to say to the dullest of minds. It is as if the ocean, in certain lights and weathers, were the lair not of monsters or malevolent downward-dragging spirits, but of the fat blank which squats beneath all happiness, flicking out its tongue.