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THE COMMO N WE AL TH
American president saying that the Old World and the New World are now one, we are now united. Hackney: Of all the natural phenomena in the ocean, do you have a favorite? Winchester: I think the dominant thing is the Gulf Stream, which Ben Franklin drew the first map of. He was intrigued
“Once people realized it was not full of monsters, we started to have a much more lyrical appreciation of the
sea.”
by the mail boats, because he was the first U.S. postmaster general and was a colonial postmaster. He wanted to know why the mail packets going from Falmouth to Halifax were battling against the sea in a way that the ships coming back were not, and how it was that a ship coming eastbound would go much more quickly if it were taken north. So he plotted a map of this great big 60-mile-wide current that came from Florida, warm water coming all the way to Scotland. I used to live in Scotland, and you’re way up at 58 degrees north latitude, when at 58 degrees in this part of the world it’s bitterly cold, but we’re growing palm trees at the bottom of our garden, because the water that washes at the bottom of the house I used to have comes from Florida,
feb r ua ry/mar ch 2011
courtesy of the Gulf Stream. In fact, 30 or so years ago, when I was a small boy, someone experimented by dumping many tons of perfume into the Gulf Stream off Orlando, and sure enough, two weeks later people in Scotland were saying, “What’s that dreadful smell?” It was the perfume. [The discovery changed navigation] by enabling sailors to choose prudent routes to go most quickly across the ocean. This brought on board the mapmakers. So learning about the currents was crucially important to navigation. Hackney: What’s the state of the Atlantic Ocean today? Winchester: It’s not in good shape. At the same time that we’re flying across the ocean and being bored with it, it’s the Pond. We disrespect it. The British government has tons of radioactive material that it just dumped off Cornwall and Scotland because they think it’s big enough, it’ll absorb it. Not at all. There’s tons of radioactivity in the eastern Atlantic. There’s mercury, of course, in tuna. You should never, never eat bluefin tuna. It’s an endangered fish. It’s also very dangerous to eat. My wife, who’s Japanese, gets very cross with me, because, like most Japanese, she likes sushi. But not bluefin tuna sushi, please. But I thought one of the most sad examples of human greed and politics is what happened to the codfish off Newfoundland, off the Grand Banks. People used to say – Rudyard Kipling in Captains Courageous – that you could almost walk to Newfoundland on the backs of these magnificent, silvery fish; there were so many of them. But now, thanks to some appallingly bad decisions made largely by the Canadian government in the 1990s, pandering to the voters in Newfoundland, there are no cod left. They are a completely cod-free part of the world. Whereas down in the other end of the ocean, there’s a fish called the Patagonian toothfish, which we know on our restaurant menus as the Chilean sea bass, because no one is going to eat something called Patagonian toothfish. That is in good shape, because the governments down there have administered that fishery very well. But codfish is a great maritime tragedy. Ω This program was made possible by the generous support of The Bernard Osher Foundation.
Illustration by Steven Fromtling
the news of the Atlantic Ocean must have reached Europe somehow. Did people suddenly, or gradually, become aware that there was this ocean lying out there [in the] west, and were they gripped by the idea of this vast body of water? Winchester: Well, at first they were terrified, because they didn’t know if it had an end, they didn’t know there was another side. If you look at their poetry and art, it all reflects the idea that [the ocean] was full of monsters. There was one extraordinary monster called Naglfar, which was a ship made of the toe and fingernail clippings of dead seamen. People had really strange imaginations of the kind of thing that went on in the Atlantic Ocean. The poetry reflected that. But then slowly, once people began to get a handle on the ocean and realized it was full of dangers, it needed to be respected, but was not full of monsters, then we started to have a much more lyrical appreciation of the sea, and this appears in, for instance, paintings. Like Winslow Homer, one of the greatest marine artists of all time. [Or] J.M.W. Turner, of course. So it’s an interesting evolution, to see how our love affair with the sea has grown in concert with our commercial use of it. Hackney: It was literally a conduit for conveying information. If you and I were around in 1820 and wanted to get word that I had bought a pair of shoes in New York, how long would it have taken word of that to get to London? Winchester: Well, I can certainly tell you that in 1865, when Lincoln was assassinated, it took 12 days. The news was conveyed essentially up to Nova Scotia and was put on a boat, taken across the ocean to Ireland, and then eventually horses and so forth took the news to London. So it was a long time. But then suddenly, this man Cyrus Field, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, came up with the idea that the telegraph, which had been recently invented, could be, if made with properly constructed cables, allowed to run under the ocean. They tried and failed many, many times until someone had the bright idea of putting about 2,000 miles of cable on one ship and 2,000 miles of cable on another, the two ships meeting in the middle of the Atlantic and splicing the two ends of cable together. The queen sent a message to the