Seven-Tenths (6 page)

This cruise is unusually short, a mere fortnight at sea. It has been timed so people will be able to fly home for Christmas. The mosaics of the GLORIA and air-gun prints grow on the chart table. The sweet, hot-blanket smell of popcorn drifts from the other end of the lab where a machine is anchored by Velcro strips near the swaying gravimeter. Katie stands her watch in the bay which houses the electronics for the two midships sonars. Or rather, she mostly sits. Only occasionally does she need to get up and jot some figures with a felt-tip pen on the printouts inching their way from the plotters. She clicks a switch or two, changes a stylus, checks the course, goes back to her book.

It is pleasing to think that most of the ocean bed never will be seen directly by mortal eye. In comparison to that vast area the ground which might be covered (at such prodigious expense) by manned submersibles is virtually nil. One might compare it to travelling across Asia by oil-lit hansom cab with the conditions of a Dickensian fog outside and then claiming to have seen the world. At the same time, sitting in
Farnella
’s lab and looking at the banks of instruments, computers, screens, laser printers, plotters, popcorn poppers and their umbilical harness of cables, all of it sailing steadily along a
knife-edge course 5 kilometres above the Late Cretaceous seabed, one cannot help reflecting on
Homo
’s fierce if limited intelligence. The remorseless taxonomy of a century ago, using primitive but ingenious measuring devices as well as guns and nets and killing bottles, seems far distant now; yet even that distance is as nothing compared with the exponentially opening gap which separates
Homo
from the rest of Earth’s organisms.

Katie is doing her watch early because 18 December is her birthday. Since she is known to be fond of rabbits there are celebrations tonight with rabbits as the theme. We have already signed a joint card and are encouraged to cut loose with the fancy dress. ‘Rabbits, you guys. Anything goes. Raid the hold.’ Not for the first time a deep current of hysteria is apparent and in these final three days of the cruise becomes a good deal closer to the surface. Katie’s colleague Sue is for this trip the scientist nominally in charge of representing the US government’s interests. Despite the protestations of power-sharing, democracy and cooperation, somehow or other it is Sue’s judgements alone which have been prevailing this last week. She has a career and a CV to think of. A failure to complete a geophysical survey for which she was responsible will be remembered, if not held against her. Unknown to the rest of us she has taken a chance. Despite the weather and
Farnella
’s reduced speed. Sue has insisted we complete our allotted task even if it means cutting things fine.

At tea next evening the news reaches us from the bridge. There is now no way the ship can arrive back in Honolulu on the Friday morning as planned. Indeed, if the weather gets any worse we could be anything up to twenty-four hours late. Suddenly, there is a possibility that everyone may miss their flights home. Christmas Day is on the following Tuesday and the flights had anyway been hard enough to book. Over peaches and custard and the remains of Katie’s birthday cake all pretence of the cool, scientific approach evaporates. Hard words are spoken about stubborn and cocksure youngsters whose inexperience jeopardises decent folks’ family lives. The scientist who so recently stood her GLORIA watch, slightly the worse for drink and wearing a long pair of cardboard rabbit ears, puts down her spoonful of custard and stares at her plate, cheeks
crimson. It is pure boarding school. Then the US government’s geologist bursts into tears and runs from the room.

‘Huh,’ says a heartless Brit, ‘we’d all like to be able to do that, wouldn’t we? Do
we
feel any better about missing our Christmas?’ And looks round rhetorically for assent. A deputation of girls plods off to the lab to comfort Sue, who has taken refuge among the charts and plotters of her disgrace. ‘Right, then. I’m off to the bridge to kick ass. Anyone coming?’

Presumably each expedition becomes characterised by its own catchphrase. This cruise has acquired two, one of them written up on the lab’s steel bulkhead in bar magnets, ‘Yee Haa!’: a cowboy’s yell which flew one night out of the drunken Oily-Boily Bar. The other phrase is ‘Kickin’ ass’, which has recurred on surely every one of the video movies we have sat through this last fortnight – movies about cops and cops and cops, winsome black cops and shitty white ones, Marine sergeants and top gunners – so that suddenly the whole of American culture seems embodied in a catastrophic anger. It is with these furious heroes we are supposed to identify, these men with their scratched biceps and bared chests and 400-word vocabularies; so that a mild geologist from Godalming, put out because he may not make Honolulu on time and hence his flight back to England for Christmas with the family, says ‘I’m off to the bridge to kick ass.’

During the next day, though, things look up. With all the equipment safely back on board the
Farnella
is able to pick up speed. The chief engineer, himself due in New Zealand for Christmas, is coaxing every last revolution out of the engines. (‘All right for him,’ says his junior. ‘He’s retiring after this trip. I’m the poor bugger’s got to put in new piston rings over the holiday.’)

In the event we dock at 6 pm on Friday after all and nobody misses their flight. Sue is back to being one of the boys. GLORIA is back in its cradle. The rolls of printout, the reels of computer tape which are the only tangible evidence of the invisible seabed we have been criss-crossing for the past two weeks are safely packed up. It has all been a great success, is the verdict. No equipment lost, nobody swept overboard, unlike the luckless oceanographer who had disappeared recently one stormy night in the Bristol Channel. In fact, a
cushy number all round. Even the sea has a satisfied look to it as it mulls around the pilings of Honolulu harbour. It has so simply kept all the secrets it had which were worth keeping.

Cabs arrive on the quay to take the scientists on a last-minute shopping spree before their flights next morning.

‘Off to Hilo Hattie’s to get a really
crucial
pair of shorts,’ is Roger’s valediction. They vanish in a cloud of exhaust. Stuart appears at the rail next to me, slightly mournful in shore kit.

‘Do you know Rosalyn Tureck’s performance of the “Forty-Eight?” What do you think? Total contrast with Gould’s reading, I guess. Some of his tempos seem downright crazy but God, I remember when his first Goldberg came out in the 50s. We’d never heard Bach playing like it. Nobody had. The energy! Everyone thought the Goldberg was dead, academic, cerebral stuff, you know? But it wasn’t. It was
alive
.’

He stares down at the crack of water between wharf and hull. His voice is more animated than at any time in the past fortnight.

Immediately to the north of Hawaii, scattered across the Murray Fracture Zone, lie the Musicians Seamounts. They stretch for maybe 200 miles, from Strauss in the north to Mendelssohn in the south. There is a Bach Ridge and a Beethoven Ridge. There is also Mozart, a considerable mountain rising from the abyssal plain 5 kilometres below to within 900 metres of the surface. Mount Mozart, while a fairly minor affair by suboceanic standards, is therefore slightly taller than Mount Fuji, although of nowhere near such classic proportions.

The presence of this random clutch of composers
engloutis
in the middle of Pacific wastes is a reminder of how much of the physical world belongs in its taxonomy, description and name to the Western nations. It is also a reminder that in a sense things do not exist until they are named. Before that, everything partakes of a state of undifferentiated chaos which is never a neutral matter to human beings but carries a degree of menace. To name something is to take control of it. It could be argued that the Old Testament story of Genesis was less a matter of creation than of naming, of God taking control of chaos. Whereas before, the pre-Universe consisted of a kind of primordial babble, God-grammarian sorted out its constituent parts and uttered some solid nouns – dualities, mainly: crude oppositions such as light/dark, heaven/earth, sea/land. How he had entertained himself before this basic act of intelligence is open to speculation, but if he was anything like the humans he created (and according to Scripture he was) he was bored, repelled and finally menaced by a universe which was still a state rather than an infinite collection of objects. Ever since,
Homo
has felt the same and travellers have gone about the globe as adventurers, conquerors, sightseers, nomads and scientists, naming its parts and often bestowing on them their own proper names as well as those of their
friends and sponsors. In his short story ‘Colomba' (1840) Prosper Mérimée's English heroine, Lydia Nevil, takes pleasure in learning the names of places on the Corsican coast as she passes in a schooner, for ‘nothing is more tedious than a landscape without names'. Many a sea captain found his spirits insupportably lowered by a coast such as that of Africa, when whole days might go by without sight of a single named feature. It would presumably have made little difference knowing the local tribespeople had their own names for the hills and capes and rivers. Being illiterate, they would have been ineligible to bestow valid names because unable to write them on a map. Only cartography can remove names from merely local usage and bring places into international being.

The desire to tame a threatening landscape by subjecting it to the control of language can be seen in the old Greek name for the notoriously treacherous Black Sea: the Euxine, or hospitable. An extension of this may result in the temporary renaming of already well-known places. In World War I when British troops were mired into the static and murderous wastelands of trench warfare, micro-maps were devised for the tiny localities which bounded their lives. London place names were wistfully bestowed on slivers of Belgian and French farm-land. What a year or two earlier had been ‘Quineau's acre' or ‘Drownedcow bottom' were now Haymarket and Leicester Square. This yearning domestication of threatening foreign places is a common enough trope in wartime (‘Hamburger Hill') and came equally naturally to Pincher Martin, William Golding's wrecked sailor. Almost his first act on being able physically to patrol the Rockall-like Atlantic islet on which he was washed up was to give its features familiar names like Prospect Cliff, High Street and Piccadilly. This was in recognition that, unnamed, the place of his marooning would have remained inimical to him as well as invisible to rescuers, being quite literally off the map.

A Mozart Seamount does, however, seem particularly arbitrary in the subtropical latitudes around Hawaii. Odder still, it is equally close to Gluck and Puccini Seamounts, just as Haydn is to Mussorgsky and Beethoven Ridges. Clearly it is useless to look for any correlation between the physical proximity of these seabed features and the chronology of their namesakes. Somebody must have thought ‘We've
done poets, now let's do composers,' much as local councils name the roads of new housing estates. It is only since the invention of a technology powerful enough to map the deep seabed that the finding of names has become a pressing issue. By the early years of the twentieth century most of the planet's territorial features had been mapped and named, with the exception of the remotest hinterlands like Antarctica and the Amazon jungle. Sidescanning sonar is now revealing ever more details which for geologists, if for nobody else, need to be identifiable by name. As far as the military is concerned the situation remains equivocal. Strategic seabeds like that beneath the Arctic ice cap have been extensively mapped by NATO and Russian submarines, but their charts remain classified. There are projects for civil mapping and geological surveys of North Polar waters, but they remain projects until somebody donates a nuclear submarine to an oceanographic institute.

In order to cope with the need for new names on new charts there are various regulatory bodies which amount to a more or less official international committee on names. There is, for example, BGN/ACUF: the US Board on Geographic Names, Advisory Committee on Undersea Features. There is also the Monaco-based GEBCO: General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, an organisation founded at the beginning of the twentieth century. These bureaucracies are constantly turning out documents, indexes, guidelines, lists of eligible names and the like. Very occasionally a lone human voice cuts through it all, like Robert L. Fisher's in his ‘Proposal for Modesty'. In this he inveighs against

The Musicians Seamounts are an example of bureaucratically approved naming. It was likewise decreed that a group of submarine features off the south-west tip of Ireland should be named after Tolkien characters, which explains the Gollum Channel. The bureaucrats do not have it all their own way, however. Now and then the working names which pioneering geologists assign their discoveries stick, in all their whimsicality. A few years ago Quentin Huggett and his IOS colleagues were mapping some seabed fields of manganese nodules with GLORIA when they found a series of hills which they needed to be able to identify as they worked. One became Nod Hill, a second (felicitously named on Christmas Day) Yule. A third hill became Mango while the fourth – unfortunately never discovered – would inevitably have been Knees. Nod, Yule and Mango Hills remain to this day and probably always will, long after they have been stripped of the asset which gave them their name, like the Gold and Ivory Coasts.

A more famous and no less whimsical example is of an area of Atlantic seabed to the west of Spain which celebrates British biscuits. This centres around the Peake Deep, modestly named after himself by the ship's captain who discovered it. A later expedition from Cambridge found a long, shallow depression in the same area which they loyally named King's Trough. Then they discovered a second deep near Peake Deep and called it Freane [
sic
] Deep. Further surveying disclosed two ridges between these features which became respectively Huntley and Palmer Ridges. Finally, the trip was completed with the identification of Crumb Seamount.

In the late 1980s, while mapping the 200-mile EEZ around Alaska, GLORIA at the end of one of its turns revealed an unknown volcano beneath Soviet waters. Quentin Huggett, interested in pre-Soviet Russian anarchist movements, reported its existence to the Soviet Academy of Sciences with the customary apology for unintentionally having ‘spied' into Soviet waters and suggested it should be called Kropotkin Seamount in honour of Peter Kropotkin, the celebrated geologist and anarchist. It so happened that Kropotkin's nephew, himself a geologist, was on the panel of Academicians considering the suggestion and reportedly the proposal raised a laugh in the relaxed
climate of
perestroika
. A certain edge to the laughter might have come from the knowledge that Peter Kropotkin had been distantly related to the Romanovs and his nephew is considered by some today to be the Russian citizen nearest in succession to the Russian throne. In this particular case, and beneath the international exchange of jocularities, curious games are perhaps being played. For while the implication of the story – heard from the Western side – is that scientists with superior technology could tell a country things it does not know about its own territory and would happily do so for a price, the story from the Russian side might be quite different. With military security it is never quite certain what is known. The Bering Strait must after all be one of the areas most familiar to Cold War submariners, and it would seem likely that this seamount was already known to the Russians, who might have declined to submit it themselves for international naming in order to disguise the extent of their own knowledge.