the Fifth Age - that of the well-fed Justice -I could describe how the sea eventually became a sea of laws and commerce, and how tramp steamers and liners and submarine cables and jet aircraft then crossed and recrossed it in an infinite patchwork designed for the attainment of profit and comfort. In the Sixth Age, that dominated by the fatigue and tedium of the pantaloon, I could reflect upon the ways that man has recently wearied of the great sea, has come to take it for granted, to become careless of its special needs and to deal with it improvidently. And in the Seventh and final Age — the Age that ends with Shakespeare’s immemorial sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything — I could imagine the ways by which this much-overlooked and perhaps vengeful ocean might one day strike back, reverting to type, reverting to the primal nature of what it always was.
Alluring as this all might seem, however, there was something else. First I had to make the frame, to construct the proscenium arch, to attempt to place the long human drama within the very much longer physical context. Only when that had been achieved, and by leave of the enormous natural forces that had made the ocean in the first place, could I try to begin to unveil and recount the human stories. Only then could I attempt to tell something of the ocean’s hundreds of millions of years of life, and of the scores of thousands of its middle years during which the men and women who made up its community would eventually go out onstage, and by their own lights, each perform their unique, and uniquely Atlantic, roles.
First — just how was the ocean made? How did it all begin?
PROLOGUE: THE BEGINNINGS OF ITS GOINGS ON
All the world’s a stage And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.
A big ocean - and the Atlantic is a very big ocean indeed - has the appearance of a settled permanence. Stand anywhere beside it, and stare across its swells towards the distant horizon, and you are swiftly lulled into the belief that it has been there forever. All who like the sea - and surely there can be precious few who do not - have a favoured place in which to stand and stare: for me it has long been the Faroe Islands, up in the far north Atlantic, where all is cold and wet and bleak. In its own challenging way, it is entirely beautiful.
Eighteen islands, each one a sliver of black basalt frosted with gale-blown salt grass and tilted up alarmingly from east to west, make up this Atlantic outpost of the Kingdom of Denmark. Fifty-odd thousand Faroese fishermen and sheep farmers cling there in ancient and determined remoteness, like the Vikings from whom they descend and whose vestiges of language they still speak. Rain, wind and fog mark out these islanders’ days — although from time to time, and on almost every afternoon in high summer, the mists suddenly swirl away and are replaced by a sky of a clarity and blue brilliance that seems only to be known in the world’s high latitudes.
It was on just a day like this that I chose to sail, across a lumpy and capricious sea, to the westernmost member of the archipelago, the island of Mykines. It is an island much favoured by artists, who come for its wild solitude and its total subordination to the nature that so entirely surrounds it. And going there left a deep impression: in all my wanderings around the Atlantic, I can think of no place that ever gave me so great an impression of perching on the world’s edge, no better place to absorb and begin to comprehend the awful majesty of this enormous ocean.
The landing on Mykines was exceptionally tricky. The boat surfed in on the green breaking top of an ocean roller into the tiny harbour, its skipper tying up for just enough time to let me clamber out onto a cement quay lethal with slippery eelgrass. A staircase of rough stones rose up to the skyline, and I scrambled upwards, only too well aware of the deep chasm filled with boiling surf far below beside me. But I made it. Up on top there was a scattering of houses, a church, a shop and a tiny inn, its sitting room heavy with the smell of pipe smoke and warm wet sweater wool. A sudden furious blast of wind had driven away the morning fog, and the sun revealed a long steep slope of grass that stretched right up the island tilt, clear up to the western sky.
There was a grassy pathway leading up to this high horizon, and a skein of islanders was moving slowly up it, like a line of ants. I joined them, out of curiosity. To my great surprise most were dressed in Faroese finery - the men in dark blue and scarlet jackets, with high necks and rows of silver buttons, knee breeches and silver-buckled shoes; the women in wide-striped long skirts, blue vests fastened with an elaborate cat’s cradle of chains, and fringed scarves. And though a few men had anoraks with folded felt snoods, none wore hats: the incessant wind would have whipped them away. The children, dressed just as their parents, whooped and skirled and slid on the wet grass, their elders tutting them to keep their boots clean and to be careful not to fall.
It took thirty minutes to do the climb, and none of the islanders seemed to break a sweat. They all gathered at a site by the cliff top, where the grass was flattened. There was a memorial stone here, a basalt cross incised with the names, I was told, of the fishermen who had died in the Icelandic fishing grounds off to the west. The crowd, perhaps a hundred in all, arranged themselves beside the summit marker, a cairn of basalt boulders, waiting.
After a few minutes a white-haired man of sixty or so, puffing a little from exercise, appeared at the top of the path. He was dressed in a long black surplice with a ruffled high collar that made him look as if he had stepped from the pages of a medieval chapbook. He was a Lutheran pastor, from the Faroese capital town of Thorshavn. He proceeded to lead a service, helped by two churchwardens who played accordions and one island lad with a guitar. A pair of pretty young blond children handed around some damp hymn sheets, and the villagers’ high voices set to singing old Norse holy songs, the thin music instantly swept away to sea by the gale, as it was designed to be.
The islanders said the small religious ceremony was quite without precedent: in the past it had always been a visiting pastor from Denmark, a thousand miles south, who would come here to bless the islands’ long-drowned sailors; but today made history, it was explained, because for the first time ever the minister was Faroese. In its own gentle and respectful way the dedication service, with its prayers offered in the local tongue, offered an indication of just how these remote mid-ocean islands had drawn themselves steadily away from the benign invigilation of their European motherland. They had gone their own way at last: an island way, remarked one of the congregants. An Atlantic way.
After the service was finally over, I strolled behind the dispersing crowd — and without warning suddenly and terrifyingly reached the cliff edge. The grass cut off as with a blade, and in its place there was just a huge hollow emptiness of wind and space, the black wet walls of a hurtling precipice of basalt cliffs with, crawling almost half a mile below, the tides and currents and spume of the open sea. Hundreds of puffins stood in nooks in the cliff edge, some no more than an arm’s length away, and all quite careless of my presence. They looked like ridiculous, stubby creatures, with that mask-face, chubby cheeks, and a coloured bill that was usually crammed full with a clutch of tiny fish. But every so often one took to the air and soared off into the sky with an easy and contented grace, ridiculous no more.
I must have sat at the edge for a long, long time, staring, gazing, mesmerised. The gale had finally stopped its roaring, and the sun had come out and was edging its way into the afternoon. I was sitting on the cliff edge, my legs dangling over half a mile of emptiness. I was facing due west. Just below me were clouds of seabirds, the gannets and fulmars, kittiwakes and storm petrels, and beside me were the chattering congregations of puffins. Ahead of me there was just nothing - just an endless crawling sea, hammered like copper in the warm sunshine and stretching far, fifty miles, a hundred - from up this high I felt I could have been looking out on five hundred miles and more. There was an endless vacancy that at this latitude, 62 degrees north or so, I knew would be interrupted only by the basalt cliffs
