Atlantic (31 page)

That autumn, schoolchildren all over England were asked to collect horse chestnuts, which they normally gathered for their ritual games of “conkers,” and thousands of tons of these soft nuts were brought to the gin factory and thrown into the hoppers and vats and stills. Within days pure acetone began to drip, then stream, then cascade, and finally gush into the carboys. Long tanker trains would take the acetone down to the Royal Navy’s top-secret cordite factory on the Dorset coast, and before long, boxes of the sticky high explosive of which it was so critical a component would be delivered to the naval dockyards, the ships’ guns would start firing once more, and the tide of the Great War’s Battle of the Atlantic would very slowly but surely begin to turn in Britain’s favor.

Storytelling and mischief-making, handmaidens to much in history, have since made a series of intriguing connections from the bare bones of this story. An oft-repeated yarn begins with British government circles deciding that Chaim Weizmann should be given an official honor for his role in so profoundly changing the direction of the Atlantic war. Lloyd George, by then prime minister, demanded that his foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, be asked to suggest the honor to Weizmann, who after all was not a Briton but a White Russian. Crucially, he also happened to be the leader of the British Zionist league, and a prominent figure in the worldwide movement to create a state for the world’s stateless Jews.

Weizmann was said to be delighted by the successful outcome of his chemical experiments, but desired no official British recognition. The Israeli Foreign Ministry, in its official history, then picks up the story of what followed:

Weizmann’s [achievements] opened doors for him in British government circles, where he continued to serve as an eloquent spokesman for Zionism. . . . Lord Balfour commented dryly that “Dr. Weizmann could charm a bird off a tree.” . . .

When Lloyd George, then minister of munitions, was appointed prime minister and Arthur Balfour became foreign secretary, years of persistent persuasion and “sensitization” to Zionism played a decisive role in the decision of Great Britain to issue the Balfour Declaration. A rare constellation of British and Jewish strategic interests, together with personal empathy for Dr. Weizmann and his cause—the fruit of eight years of what today would be considered “networking”— culminated in this document, approved by the British cabinet on November 2, 1917, that proclaimed the sympathy of the British government for Zionist aims in Palestine. . . .

Informing Weizmann of the decision, Lord Mark Sykes, secretary of the war cabinet, declared: “Dr. Weizmann—It’s a boy.” Indeed, the landmark document . . . was a crucial step towards the birth of a Jewish State, and is considered Chaim Weizmann’s most outstanding achievement.

Whether there is a true and direct link between C. P. Scott, Chaim Weizmann, his freshly minted acetone, and the eventual formation of the state of Israel is a matter still open to scholarly debate. But if it truly is the case, then it is not too mischievous to say that present-day Israel is a state that was conceived amid the trials of the Atlantic Ocean. Such a connection, entirely unanticipated, offers a further clear reminder of the central role that the ocean has played and still plays in the workings, great and small, natural and manmade, of the intricate machinery of the planet.

Chapter Five
They That Occupy Their Business on Great Waters

And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part.

1. LAWS AND ORDER

The far north Atlantic is where parliaments began. The first lawmaking assemblies were founded there in the tenth century, and soon thereafter some kind of justice and order began to settle, not just on the lands where assemblies convened and laws were first made, but also on the seas between.

The first true parliament is reckoned by most to have assembled in Iceland—and somewhat symbolically, in the curiously fashioned valley in the west of the country known as Thingvellir, where the world’s American and Eurasian plates are still tugging apart from one another and new ocean floor is being created.

There is a large basalt slab protruding upward from the western wall of the valley, and it was here beneath it that more than a thousand years ago farmers and peasants and priests and merchants passing through the valley would agree to stop and camp and meet each year to hammer out in some fashion the manner in which they thought their island nation should be run. The assembly was eventually called the
Althing
, and once it had a formal structure—the date generally agreed for this formation being 930
A.D.
—it became the sole body charged with fashioning Iceland’s laws. The rock, from which the Icelandic flag flies still, day and night, is today without doubt the most revered monument in the Atlantic north: the Rock of Laws, which set the patterns for the governance of much of the rest of the world.

Soon afterward the processes and customs of the Icelandic
thing
—and yes, it is the very word that today signifies an object or a concept—were mimicked by men who made laws in the Faroe Islands nearby, and later on in Norway and Sweden and Denmark, too. It was also mimicked on that British half-possession the Isle of the Man, where the assembly was and still is known as the Tynwald. It first met in 979
A.D.
, and since it has gathered without interruption in all the years since (unlike the Icelandic Althing, which was suspended for many years when the country dissolved itself into anarchy), it lays claim to being the oldest continuously and regularly meeting democratic institution in the world.

There are many other competing contenders for primacy among the various parliamentary assemblies dotted around the Nordic world, and there is little value in delving into their arguments. But accepting that the idea born in Iceland did spread, rapidly and over large distances, one overarching truth appears: that in a large quadrant of the world’s northern nations—and all of them nations that happen to have been intimately involved with the Atlantic Ocean—there was from the tenth century onward both a popularly established means of creating codes of laws of sorts, and popularly elected or otherwise assembled bodies that were established and designed to promulgate and administer those laws.

No such institutions were created this early in Russia, say, nor in China, nor even in Greece, despite the ancient Athenian origins of a rather different kind of popular governance. Parliamentary democracy, as it is understood in today’s world, was very much an Atlantic creation—a further reminder, if one were needed, that while the Mediterranean Sea was clearly central to the makings of the classical world, the North Atlantic and many of the countries bordering it were witness to the construction of many of the foundations, ties, and crossbeams of what we now know as the modern world.

2. THE RULES OF TRADE

It is entirely axiomatic that any outward-looking society that agrees to run itself according to a body of homegrown laws will eventually make contact with neighbor nations whose legal customs may be quite different. This is nowhere more obvious than in the matter of trade. If Icelandic merchants do business with their kin in Norway, what law applies? The laws of the Thingvellir Althing, or the laws of the parliament in Oslo? Such differences in law may never have been immense—but for greater efficiency and ease of doing business, it was realized by merchants early on, these legal systems needed to be somehow synchronized, made to mesh neatly, one system with another. And so during the eleventh and twelfth centuries the ships, the trades, the explorations of the neighbor nations, and the relations they enjoyed with one another and with countries beyond slowly and steadily began to be organized and regulated by a catalog of über-laws, by sets of agreements that once might have been rooted in the domestic laws of each trading country, but which—in the matter of the management of ships and the seas across which they sailed—were somehow transformed into something greater, more all-encompassing.

The ocean that lay next door to these newly democratic nations of Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea steadily became in consequence something of a regulated entity. An Atlantic that had once been no more than a confused and terrifying body of water, full of storm and monsters and mystery, started to succumb to order and discipline. To the ultimate advantage of all, the ocean became, first in its northeast, and then slowly across a broader area as more and more of it was found and mapped and settled, a titanic expanse of customs, habits, regulations, timetables, and tariffs—and rules.

•  •  •

Exploration, settlement, war, pilgrimage, fishing, and trade had always been the main impulses behind maritime adventuring; and though exploration started to diminish when all had been found, and though migration slowed down when faraway places became full, though wars would end with treaties signed and fealty agreed, and though pilgrims ceased to travel when sufficient of the convertible had become converts—two oceanic things survived above all: the seas as a source of food and the seas as a passageway for trade. In all history neither of these two ever diminished, ever would, and ever will.

From the times when the Phoenicians traded purple murex dye between Mogador and Tyre, to today’s container ships that rumble between the Chesapeake and the Mersey, trade across and by way of the Atlantic has been ceaseless, the fortunes involved in the process almost beyond imagining.

Initially maritime trade was run purely as freelance operations—the concept of true international trade, now a nearly essential component of all modern economies, was virtually unknown. Sporadic commercial expeditions were born as the mood took or the opportunity was presented: a group of wharfside financiers would give their backing to a ship and its master, would order him to proceed with a cargo of trinkets or bullion to some distant possible source of wealth, would trust that any foul weather, pirates, and local resistance might be minimal, would wait for a safe return and then divide any spoils the vessel managed to procure. The risks of such ventures were huge, the competition unpredictable, the profits uncertain: a means to fortune for some, but a source of ruin to most.

It eventually fell to a group of thirteenth-century merchants in northern Germany to construct a better and more organized way of conducting oceanic business—and they did so initially to protect their trade in salt fish, which were harvested mostly in the Baltic and the North Sea.

The city of Lübeck, in northern Schleswig-Holstein close to the mouth of the Baltic, south of Copenhagen, is generally supposed to be where the merchants, forming themselves into what they called a Hanse—after the Latin term
hansa
⁵⁶
for a military troop or company—decided around 1241 to create an association of like-minded (and initially, nearly always German) merchants in other nearby cities, and to organize maritime trading among themselves. The Hanseatic League was thus formed, and for the next four hundred years it evolved into a heavily protected—and on occasion, heavily armed—monopoly of traders who directed almost all the seaborne trade between Bergen and London in the west, and Danzig, Riga, and the Russian city of Novgorod in the east. The Hansa was a truly formidable organization, and its influences—cultural, architectural, even linguistic (Scandinavian and German words were spread into the lexicons of England and as far away as Spain and Portugal)—are still felt to this day.

Generally speaking the Hanseatic merchants set up a two-way trade along an essentially east-west axis. The Hansa ships—in the early days of the League small flat-bottomed vessels called
cogs
, but often with armed protective escorts following discreetly in their wake—brought raw materials—furs, wax, grain, wood, pitch, tar, flax, and beer—in from the rural east of the Hansa zone. Then, in the various ports the merchants constructed specifically for the purpose—in towns like Rostock, Stettin,
⁵⁷
Riga, Königsberg—they traded these for the manufactured or more rare or sophisticated goods—wool and linen cloth, processed furs and skins, wines, salt, knives, swords, and cooking utensils—that their vessels had brought in from Western Europe, where there were also Hanseatic offices.

London was one such western outpost of the League—with a countinghouse or
Kontor
, with its own warehouses and houses for the merchants. The Britons who did business with the Hansa found them trustworthy and reliable. According to many lexical authorities, the word that Londoners used for traders from the Hanseatic eastern cities—
easterlings
—became shortened and incorporated into the English language as the word
sterling
, with its implied meaning of solid reliability. The city of Bruges was another major Hansa city; and as the need for dried or smoked fish—cheap, health-giving, and transportable—grew almost exponentially with the rising population and prosperity of Europe, the merchants expanded their influence farther and farther north, eventually creating a Hansa outpost as far as the port of Bergen in Norway.

The Bryggen were the wharfside warehouses of the
Hanseatic League
outpost on the Atlantic coast of Norway. From the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, furs, timber, ore, cod, and herring were dispatched south to other league members, while cloth and manufactured goods came up from England and Germany in return.

The Bergen outpost remains today, with a creaking warehouse or two, a rabbit warren of laneways still scented with the smell of tar and wet hemp, and down below, beyond the slippery cobbles, the sea lapping ice-cold against the massive granite walls of the jetties. Cruise ships tie up there now, and small shops and cafés cluster where the portly Hansa merchants would make their deals on a handshake and over a shared pipe. Seen from the hills above the railway station, the little German ghetto still stands apart, visibly different from the rest of this bustling little seaport, just as it was when Baltic order was brought to bear on the legendary waywardness of Viking seafaring, and the Atlantic started to settle down.

The men of the Hansa oversaw many practical improvements to the conduct of North Atlantic maritime trade: they made sure that channels into their ports were properly dredged, they constructed lighthouses to warn of shoals and reefs, they mounted campaigns against piracy, they became powerful enough to stand up to the despotism of the occasional monarch. But for all that, the Hansa were solely concerned with what mariners still call the short sea—the coastal trade, the crossing of bights, the transit of estuaries, the quick passage between neighbors, and with most voyages conducted in the visibly comforting presence of nearby land.

3. SEAFOOD, CANDLES, AND CORSETS

It would be some centuries before the ocean was fully crossed, east to west—notwithstanding the eleventh-century Vikings, who visited Labrador and settled in Newfoundland—and long-sea trade began. Until then, major voyages into the ocean were performed not in pursuit of trade but so men of great courage and daring could exploit the one resource with which all the world’s seas, and most especially the North Atlantic, were once replete: fish.

It was the Hanseatic League that established a proper footing for commercial fishing in the North Atlantic. The popularity of the highly nutritious and economical cold-water fish prompted the Hansa merchants to order the construction of two fleets of vessels to exploit the massive shoals of fish in two quite distinct Atlantic fishing grounds: the so-called Scania waters off southern Sweden, where there were plenty of herring; and the Lofoten Islands, above the Arctic Circle in northern Norway, where there were unimaginably large stocks of
Gadus morhua
, the Atlantic cod.

The importance of this remarkable white-fleshed, protein-rich, almost fat-free fish in the Atlantic’s history can hardly be gainsaid. It dominated the trade of the Hansa; it stimulated the transoceanic adventuring of the Basques; it provided hundreds of thousands of Britons with work and tens of millions of Britons with food; and for decades it formed the central plank of the economics of all of maritime Canada and the coastal states of New England.

Cod is a demersal fish, meaning that it likes to swim close to the seabed in shallowish waters—a fondness it shares with flatfish like sole, flounder, plaice, and halibut and with other fellow five-finned gadiforms like haddock, pollock, hake, and whiting. (The second broad division into which oceanic fish are divided is that of the pelagic types, which swim in the surface waters or the middle depths: the herring is a pelagic fish, as is the sardine, the anchovy, the mackerel, the infamous South African snoek,
⁵⁸
and the currently endangered bluefin tuna.) Cod was also once very numerous (Alexandre Dumas joked that the female was so fertile that if all cod eggs survived and hatched, within three years one could walk clear across the Atlantic by standing on the fishes’ backs), and until recent times most of the adult fish caught were large and muscular with dozens of pounds of white, motherly, nourishing flesh.