The Sea Inside. Philip Hoare

three thousand miles in six weeks, they’re long-haul flyers, built to purpose with compact bodies, sturdy ringed necks and neat dark heads. I hear their rolling honk as they pick their moment to settle, their voices eliding and trilling like the chorus from a minimalist opera. Even their name sounds northern: ‘brant’ is Norse for burnt. As the tide flows, they will ride the surf like little ships, proud of their survival, joining the herring and black-headed gulls hunkering to the swell; at this time of year, the air is colder than the sea.

      This international, modest gathering of birds – constant and ever-changing, unremarkable and exquisite – are united only in their search for sustenance. I have to remind myself that they’re not here for my entertainment. They choose this part of the shore because it is a fertile patch, fed by a freshwater stream that oozes from the woods, turning brackish in a holding pond before running clear to the sea, and with it the nutrients that feed whatever the birds feed on.

      They’re always waiting for the tide to go out; I’m always waiting for it to come in. Time may move faster for them – a day to them is a month to me; they live ten lives to mine – but they’ve been here for generations. This is their refuge. They feel safe here, despite the bait-diggers who disturb their foraging and the heavy metals and organochlorines that pollute their food and threaten their fertility. They remain loyal to these blackened flats; northern animals, like me; philopatric-, home lovers. They were here before Jane Austen came to visit the abbey’s ruins, and before the Romans rowed up the river to establish their own colony.

      We should pay attention to birds, says Caspar Henderson; ‘being mindful of them, is being mindful of life itself’. They have always surrounded us; our movements mirror theirs. For humans, this too is a place of migration and emigration: from the tribes who came here when the sea was still a river, to the post-war ‘ten-pound Poms’ sailing for Australia – among them my school friends, never to be seen again – to the Filipinos, Poles and Bangladeshis who constitute the city’s latest arrivals.

      What if all the vessels that ever sailed this water rose up from this much-dredged ditch? Celtic coracle, Roman galley, Norse longship, Tudor barge, Victorian merchantman, interwar liner, twenty-first-century ferry, all tumbled together like Paul Nash’s painting of dumped war planes, Totes Meer, Dead Sea. Sometimes the trawlers spit out fragments. I’ve found rusting revolvers brought back by wartime troops and chucked overboard when they were forbidden to import their souvenirs. Two thousand years before, their Celtic counterparts cast offerings to the water gods, and Roman centurions tossed tokens to Ancasta, the river deity who lived in this estuary. It all lies there, entire worlds of marine archaeology awaiting excavation; crockery and weapons and bones piled in a watery midden.

      Out of the calm there’s a sudden surge as if some invisible vessel had passed by, followed by a reluctant riffling, running over stones as waves first set in motion thousands of miles away spend themselves on the shore. The sea plays its own tricks here. For two hours or more, its height and weight is suspended in a delayed action produced by the Atlantic pulse, although I must admit that the logistics of this mechanism somewhat mystify me.

      If I understand it correctly, the tide runs from west to east and back again, courtesy of the pull of the moon, rocking up and down the Channel like a seesaw. Set at its midpoint, Southampton’s tide bounces back up its estuary. But added to this are local complications. The stopper of the Isle of Wight creates further oscillations, as the water enters and leaves from either side. The result is a unique selling point for the port. For centuries this double tide has been a boon to marine traffic, making Southampton ‘a seaport without the sea’s terrors, an ocean approach within the threshold of the land’, according to one nineteenth-century account. Its downside is what it leaves behind, an intractable stretch of mud, scattered with debris.

      This is a place with its own rules. Its performers enter and leave the stage left and right, from wading birds pecking at the mud to slow-moving tankers pulling into the refinery to be suckled dry of their tarry cargo, and flat barges bearing turbine blades on their backs like sleek grey cetaceans. But they’re all dwarfed by the estuary’s most evident yet oddly ignored actors: container ships and car carriers.

      Registered in Kobe, Panama or Monrovia, their names aspire to a Western status – Lake Michigan, Austria, Heritage Leader – while their sides are proprietarily stamped Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, Wallenius Wilhelmsen, or with the anonymous initials – nyk, eucc, cma–cga – of commercial states. Apart from the fact that they float, there’s little to associate these giants with the romantic notion of a vessel. Rather than roaming the seas, they’re locked into rigid routes. They accomplish in days journeys that James Cook took years to traverse. They’re standardised to the width of the Panama Canal: ships made to fit a world made to fit them. They might as well have been chopped off the production line. Their cantilevered prows look down on everything else, but their square sterns appear wrinkled, as if they were papered-over hardboard.

      No one rhapsodises over these maritime pantechnicons as they come and go on their migrations. No one celebrates their arrival after heroic journeys to and from the other side of the world. They are filled. They are emptied. They move in between. No one stands on the quayside to wave them off. There are no Royal Marine bands to see them on their way. No bunting, no ceremony, no joy or sadness, just a slipping away. They embody a shrinking world. Half as big again as Titanic, they sail down the same waterway with bland indifference, lateral tower blocks so huge that, as one waterside inhabitant tells me, they cut off all electronic signals as they pass by. Their sides dribble with rust; the sea will get them in the end. They are ghost ships, devoid of life, save for shadowy figures seen through letterbox slots let into their flanks.

      A life at sea? Their ill-paid crews might as well have signed up to a sweatshop. Since the decks are too dangerous to walk, the men remain within the metal hulks, themselves contained. Yet these ships carry almost everything we consume. Top-heavy, stacked with blocks like toy bricks, fifteen thousand tonnes of steel, four hundred metres long, sixty metres above the surface and another ten below, they ride high in times of unequal exchange. As one captain says, ‘We take air to the East.’ In better circumstances they sit lower in the sea, a plimsoll line of the global economy. At the end of their journey they will be unloaded by bestriding cranes onto railway trucks. In turn, others take on shiny new vehicles shelved in multi-storey stacks like factory-farmed chickens, from which they are driven into the bellies of the floating car parks and out the other side to Singapore.

      But then, this is a city of the sea, built on reclaimed land; even its railway station platform is composed of cement and shingle embedded with shells. Meanwhile those same ships bring back invasive species on befouled hulls or in their ballast, Japanese seaweeds and Manila clams; to marine biologists, this is probably the most ‘alien’ estuary in Britain, with new organisms arriving every year.

      In the nearby National Oceanographic Centre – an oddly industrial-looking complex itself, mounted with telecommunication masts, and flanked by long refrigerated sheds that contain sample cores of the earth’s archival depths, every three metres representing one hundred million years – I study the Admiralty Navigation Charts of these commercial waters. Pulling great plasticised sheets from chest-high cabinets, I pore over maps that have turned the world around to show the importance of the sea to the land, rather than the other way about. Atlases display the waters around our coast as blank blue expanses, but here all the contours and depths are laid out, along with their utility to men and women at sea.

      The shore from which I swim, for instance, is labelled, unappealingly, ‘East Mud’. Nearby is a ‘Swinging Ground’, along with a ‘Hovercraft Testing Area’ and ‘M.O.D. Moorings’. Buildings, houses and roads have vanished, to be replaced by sites selected only for their relevance to the sea. Church spires and ‘Tall Buildings’ become landmarks, identified by bald details: ‘House (red roof)’. Through Southampton Water and into the Solent and the Channel beyond, a martial arena is mapped out: from the benign ‘Dolphin Bank’ to the treacherous shallows of ‘The Shingles’; from ‘Radar Scanning’ and ‘Foul Area’ to ‘Firing Practice Area’, ‘Submarine Exercise Area’, ‘Explosives Dumping Area’, and ‘US Base’; the reverberations of seismic global conflict brought to placid inshore waters. They are designated training grounds for the