The Human Shore by John R. Gillis

Author:John R. Gillis [Gillis, John R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, United States, Nature
ISBN: 9780226324296
Google: TvglEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-11-17T16:04:37+00:00

5

THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF THE SEA

The sea is one of the most “universal” symbols in literature; it is certainly the most protean.

JONATHAN RABAN1

The oceans have been discovered twice over. In the first Age of Discovery, seas were explored and charted as a means to reach distant lands, but little attention was paid to the waters themselves. It has been said that “the deep sea made hardly an impression. . . . Even ocean-going explorers were more land than ocean oriented; they used the sea merely as a highway to get to the next landfall.” This was a discovery more by sea than of the sea. Early modern science knew much more about the heavens than about the oceans, and more attention was paid to extracting the wealth of the seas, namely fish, than to the waters themselves. All that lay beneath the surface—the Deep—was thought to be an unfathomable abyss, impenetrable and unknowable, a dark dead zone that trapped all that sank below the surface, never revealing its secrets. Until the nineteenth century, notes James Hamilton-Paterson, our understanding of the sea was “literally superficial, . . . a navigable surface, obviously, above the abyss.”2

The second discovery of the sea, beginning in the nineteenth century, produced a vast expansion of knowledge of the sea itself, now as a three-dimensional living thing with a history and geography all its own. Modern times accomplished what no other era had even attempted: the discovery of the deep sea. At the same time it brought about another discovery, this one as much literary and artistic as scientific, a metaphorical rather than physical reconnaissance that has had equal, if not greater, consequences for popular culture in the modern era.

Since ancient times, the oceans had been considered utterly alien to humankind. One went to sea out of necessity rather than desire. The voyage was a “necessary evil, a crossing of that which separates and estranges,” writes W. H. Auden. It was fate, not choice, that took Odysseus offshore. During the entire voyage it was nostos, homecoming, not the sea, that was at the forefront of his consciousness. For medieval Christians, the sea was comparable to the desert that had inspired the first generation of churchmen. St. Brendan launched his boat upon its vast emptiness in the hope of finding God there. His voyage was that of a peregrinato, an ordeal meant as a test of faith under the most adverse conditions.3

Erasmus warned that it was “folly to trust in the sea,” and John Donne wrote in 1619 that “the sea is no place of habitation, but a passage to our habitations.” That was the way William Bradford understood the Mayflower’s ordeal. For him the voyage was a “sea of troubles,” but it is significant that he reserves the description “hideous and desolate wilderness” for the land that was the Pilgrims’ destination. For these Christians, the voyage was an encounter not with nature but with the supernatural. The voyage to America was itself an act of faith in

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