Atlantic Britain Read Online Free Page B

the Bishop swept out across the open expanses of the Atlantic. These names were like the constellations of the sea.
    I was well that night, happy to be out here in the cold. Seasickness, as George had said to me, is a kind of fear, and like any fear can be held at bay and suppressed, can be told to get down like a dog. You can feel seasickness coming on and, as George had taught me, you can deny it. I tried it that night and although from time to time I was still being sick over the side, watching the supper I had eaten spewing out among the phosphorescence below the lee rail, it was not the sort of seasickness I had before. It didn’t make me think I was about to die or my character a waste of shame. I was simply being sick every hour or so, in the way that exhaust comes out of the back of a car. Nelson was seasick until the year he died. The fear it represents doesn’t need to send you to hell. And I wasn’t in hell; I was in a sort of cold windy heaven.
    The course for Scilly was 280 magnetic, the wind just behind the beam. One by one the quartering seaskicked under us, picking up the
Auk
first at the stern, travelling the length of her, and then dropping the bow in the trough behind. As each one came under, I held the helm against it, a door pressed shut, as George had told me, against the beast pressing in from the other side; and then, as the beast relaxed, I relaxed, taking the pressure off the wheel and waiting for the beast to try his luck again. It was a long, twice-a-minute rhythm, on and off, on and off, the wide, strong
Auk
surging into the dark.
    At times like this, alone in a wide dark sea, with your companion asleep below, you can feel the wonder of a boat. Of course a boat is not a natural thing. She is the most cultural of things, the way she works dependent on a line of thought that goes back to the Bronze Age: the form of the hull and the weighted keel; the lift and drive given by a sail; the way four sails like ours can be trimmed to lead each other on; the ingenuity of blocks and tackles, strops, sheets, halyards and warps, the sheer cleverness of knots. The knowledge that is gathered in a boat is a great human inheritance, especially valuable because it is not material but intangible, a legacy made only of understanding.
    You can see the boat, in other words, as our great symbol, the embodiment of what we might be. In her fineness, strength, and robustness; in the many intricate, interlocking details of her overall scheme; even in the bowing to nature of her wing-like sails and the auk- or seal-like curves of her body: in all this, she is a great act of civility. The sea is an ‘it’, the boat a ‘she’, and the courage of that confrontation is why people love the boats they know. Boats are us against it, what we can do despite the world. Each sailing hull is a precious thought, buoyant, purposeful, moving on, afloat in the sea that cares nothing for it. From the deck of a boat, out of sight of land, as Auden wrote in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’, his great poem on art and consciousness, ‘All we are not stares back at what we are.’
    There is another side to that. It is no coincidence that some of the earliest known depictions of sails, from Bronze Age Crete nearly 4,000 years ago, are exactly contemporary with the story of Icarus and Daedalus. Daedalus is the great designer of intricacies, the father of all boatwrights, the man who ‘fettles’ and fiddles and makes perfect an arrangement of rope and timber, who is entranced with the mimicking of natureby machine. The wings he makes for Icarus are feathered sails. When their wax fixings melt in the sun, it is a step too far, and the boy falls to his death, as the story says, in the sea. This is, at heart, not an air story but a sea story, fuelled by the recognition that the beautiful, made thing, which the winged creature of a boat represents, can fail too and bring sea-disaster on those who have trusted it. Daedalus was still in the yard at