Atlantic (18 page)

The painting was enormous, commissioned to hang in the great Hall of Audiences at the Casa de Contratación, the agency that, from its headquarters in the Alcázar in Seville, directed all official Spanish exploration and imperial expansion. It was there to serve as inspiration for the explorers who would go out in the wake of Columbus and Vespucci; it was to serve as the centerpiece of an altar when divine blessing was sought for another trying voyage out west, or else it was there to offer thanksgiving for a homebound journey successfully accomplished.

The Atlantic Ocean was now seen, by the Spanish at least, as having been placed under the eternal, and eternally maternal, invigilation of the mother of God. It was an ocean divinely designed for the use of man, and such paintings as followed would offer it honor and respect in equal measure. Maps and charts, altarpieces and altar cloths, and hangings for ecclesiastical walls all around Europe and in the far possessions were soon emblazoned with formal imagery of what, with no intended pun, might justly be called the Holy Sea.

And then, all of a sudden, the sea was everywhere. Or rather the ships were, and with the sea beneath, beside, and beyond them, and in an endless variety of moods. It was a swift and sudden upsurge of interest beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century, and it had much to do with national pride. The sight of a cog or a carrack or galleon in full sail, or in later years a ship of the line firing a broadside into a rival mass of broken spars and shredded sails, seemed always to send a shiver of pride through the national mood. The British, the Spanish, and the Portuguese certainly all produced an abundance of paintings in this era; yet it was the Dutch who, from the mid-sixteenth century onward, seemed to hold a brief monopoly on the artistic depiction of the ocean.

If any region can be said to have invented Atlantic art, it is the Netherlands, and an artistic holy trinity of the ship portrait, the port view, and the tempest by the rocks provided the dominant themes of paintings by such men as the Flemish painter and printmaker Pieter Brueghel the Elder;
³⁴
the father and son who were both named Willem van de Velde and who emigrated to England to improve their craft by winning a slew of royally patronized marine panoramas; and the man who essentially invented the craft, and who was known for creating the finest of all battle scenes, and with painstaking attention to the most gory details, the Haarlem maritime painter genius Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom.

Even now, nearly five centuries on, these are paintings that grab the attention: invariably there is the hungry sea, its waves translucent green and white-capped, the troughs between them deep and dangerous and all providing a savage contrast to the distant comforts of cow-grazed meadows and church steeples. The foreground waters are alive with a bustle of lighters and painters and churning ferryboats—and then, front and center and gleaming white in a single shaft of watery sunlight, are the sails of an enormous Hollander merchantman, leaning over in the wind and bearing away for some faraway destination, the waters beginning to churn under her mighty oak bows as the breeze catches her canvas and she begins to power offstage and out of view.

There were subtle differences in the manner in which the Europeans treated the sea in their art. The Dutch favored a draftsman-like accuracy in their depiction of the complexity of great ships, with thousands of details crammed into the immense space of an expensively commissioned canvas, and with tautly composed and harmonious settings in estuaries or beneath impressive headlands. The British, less formally, liked to paint their seaports, the more majestic vessels of the Royal Navy, and the triumphantly messy moments of the more complex naval engagements. The French, on the other hand, did rather little with their Atlantic coast, and little is known except for the works of Claude Lorrain (who in any case worked in Italy) and Claude Vernet, who turned out thirteen magnificent paintings of French Atlantic seaports, Boulogne to Biarritz (together with Marseille, on the Mediterranean) for a royal commission from Louis XV.

Canaletto famously concentrated his maritime mind on the canals of Venice, and the Russians (who had no real exposure to the Atlantic, other than nearby White Sea ports of Murmansk and Archangel) did their best to show interest—and though Catherine the Great persuaded a German artist based in Naples to do most of the kind of seascapes that she liked, when he asked for ideas for painting action-packed battle scenes she sent a squadron of her warships down to Leghorn and had one of them blown up so he could get the general idea.

5. THE LYRICAL TRANSITION

It took the poets some time to catch up with the painters, however.

Europe’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painters may have come swiftly to terms with the ocean, seeing its expanses more in terms of trade than terror; but the poets were still not entirely convinced. For example, while Dutchmen were busy recording the new glamour of sail and sea and Sir Walter Raleigh was busy exploring the New World (and composing poetry that is curiously almost entirely devoid of marine references), his good friend Edmund Spenser was composing the highly nautical and highly fanciful epic
The Faerie Queen.
Spenser’s take on the nature of the ocean in this work’s myriad books and cantos was nothing like that depicted in Dutch painting, was anything but glamorous, in the sense that according to Spenser it was filled with

Most ugly shapes, and horrible aspects,

Such as Dame Nature selfe mote feare to see,

Or shame, that ever should so fowle defects

From her most cunning hand escaped bee;

All dreadfull pourtraicts of deformitee:

Spring-headed Hydraes, and sea-shouldring Whales,

Great whirlpooles, which all fishes make to flee,

Bright Scolopendraes, arm’d with silver scales,

Mighty Monoceroses, with immeasured tayles.

Nor was Shakespeare—whose references to the sea are innumerable, though many so wreathed in fantasy as to reinforce the doubt he ever actually saw it—very much more cheerful. The nightmare of ocean drowning still intrudes spectacularly in his plays, as here with the soliloquy of Clarence, imprisoned in the Tower on the order of his brother, the soon-to-be King Richard III.

O Lord! methought what pain it was to drown!

What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!

What sights of ugly death within mine eyes!

Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wracks;

A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon;

Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,

Inestimable stones, unvaluèd jewels,

All scatt’red in the bottom of the sea:

Some lay in dead men’s skulls, and in the holes

Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept

(As ’twere in scorn of eyes) reflecting gems,

That wooed the slimy bottom of the deep

And mocked the dead bones that lay scatt’red by.

And John Donne similarly found Atlantic water a horror, as in “The Storm,” written in the form of a letter in 1597:

The south and west winds join’d, and, as they blew,

Waves like a rolling trench before them threw.

Sooner than you read this line, did the gale,

Like shot, not fear’d till felt, our sails assail;

And what at first was call’d a gust, the same

Hath now a storm’s, anon a tempest’s name.

Jonas, I pity thee, and curse those men

Who, when the storm raged most, did wake thee then.

Sleep is pain’s easiest salve, and doth fulfil

All offices of death, except to kill.

But then came the beginning of the Enlightenment, and with it the triumph of reason, the age of Descartes, Newton, and very early on, John Milton. He turned out to be one of the first English poets who would at last strike a more sanguine note about the sea generally. In the seventh book of
Paradise Lost,
for instance, he displays his admiration—perhaps not still entirely rational; this was after all only the very beginnings of a new and less superstitious time—for what he saw as the god-created deeps:

Over all the face of the earth

Main ocean flow’d, not idle but with warm

Prolific humour soft’ning all her globe

Fermented the great mother to conceive

Satiate with genial moisture, when God said,

Be gather’d now, ye waters under heaven

Into one place. . .

. . . the great receptacle

Of congregated waters He call’d Seas.

It would be some while yet before the sea became, as it is today, a thing of great romance—the archetype of the sublime, that philosophical quality of natural creations that manages to combine the magnificent and the horrific at the same time. Mountain chains, with their jaggedly vicious peaks and sheer cliffs, and the dangers of rockfalls and avalanches and lashing storms, are classic exemplars of the sublime, presenting an aesthetic that inspires awe and reverence. The sea eventually came to be seen as much the same—a thing possessed of an awesome mightiness, a lethal beauty, of which one might be fearful and respectful and overcome by, all at the same instant. Come the end of the eighteenth century and the sea—and this, to most Europeans, meant the Atlantic Ocean that washed their shores—was no longer a mere inconvenience to be overlooked in life, in art, in literature, in any creative endeavor. It was a thing to be honored and even embraced, though always warily, for the sea could always strike back, and with irresistible force and power.

6. STONES OF THE OCEANSIDE

At the same time as the Dutch were painting the Atlantic Ocean as something of ineluctable grandeur, so the builders of the European empires were beginning to create and expand suitably grand cities around its periphery. And while it would never do to suggest that those who designed the cities or the buildings were purposefully offering any kind of homage to the ocean, today many of them have an architectural legacy that has a certain splendid uniqueness to it. There can be no doubt that because of the history of colonization and the passage of wealth between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, no other of the world’s ocean and seas currently possesses such a concentration of urban magnificence: five centuries’ worth of creativity in stone have left an indelible stamp on the Atlantic, as valuable a record of man’s dealing with her vastness as is the art and literature that she inspired.

The sheer number of oceanside cities could threaten to make any account seem more like a catalog. From Hammerfest to Cape Town on the eastern side, from St. John’s to Comodoro Rivadavia on the west, and aside from the great and the obvious like New York and Rotterdam, Liverpool and Rio, there are places such as Esbjerg, Vigo, Takoradi, Walvis Bay, Puerto Madryn, Wilmington, and Halifax—a sampling of the scores of ports and settlements that have come into existence solely because of their closeness to the ocean. Any selection based on the appearance of the homage each of these seems to offer or of a legacy that seems unique is certain to be contentious, forced, and false.

It is, however, possible to offer up a number of the most distinctive cities in unrelated pairs, with the one on the Atlantic’s older eastern side matched in a somewhat logical manner to a partner on the younger, newer, western side. Not for purposes of direct comparison, perhaps, and not necessarily because they enjoy any kind of formal historical linkage—as with the cities of Merseyside and the sugar ports of the Caribbean, for example, or the European migrant centers and the wharves of Ellis Island. The pairs offer simply some indication of the range of urban ambition that the Atlantic Ocean has stimulated. Some Atlantic cities are most notable for their antiquity, some for their beauty or drama or their fading magnificence; some are remarkable for their energy, some for their sheer economic or political importance. And happily, to display each of these qualities there appears by sheer happenstance to be a city on each coast. There is also, moreover, at least one city, and maybe two, that are situated not on a continental coast but in the very center of the ocean, and which also have that same quality—that peculiarly Atlantic identity—that is unique and unforgettable.

•  •  •

Athens is by most reckonings the oldest major city in Europe; Cádiz in Spain is among the oldest of those on the continent’s Atlantic coast. There is a claim that Cádiz was founded in 1104
B.C.,
a date noted in a diary by a prominent Roman historian. But even the proudest of today’s citizenry think this improbable, and are content to use the ninth century
B.C.
as the city’s birth date, at a time when the Phoenicians used Cádiz as a trading base for their later journeys to southwest Britain and to northwest Africa.

And while there has never been a Parthenon or an Acropolis found in Cádiz, by chance what would soon afterward come to be recognized as the most ancient of the city’s surviving buildings—a Roman ruin—happened to be discovered on the very occasion that I stayed there, on my first-ever visit to Cádiz, in the early 1980s.

I was on a reporting assignment, journeying between the Atlantic Ocean side of Spain to the Mediterranean by walking fifty miles or so along the cliff tops and through the cork forests of southern Andalusia. My starting point was Cádiz, my destination the British outpost of Gibraltar.

Before leaving from London for the walk, I had supposed the high point of this modest expedition would be the stop at Tarifa, Europe’s most southerly town, from where I should be able to see the snow-covered cliff tops of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. It somehow seemed barely conceivable to me—I was in my mid-thirties, and still wide-eyed in my wanderings—that from the quayside of a small southern European town there could possibly be a view of
Africa,
that unimaginably distant and unutterably different continent of lions and giraffes and Moors and bushmen and Mount Kilimanjaro.