Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. Simon Winchester

Phoenicians’ now-proven aptitude for sailing the North African coast was to be the key that unlocked the Atlantic for all time. The fear of the great unknown waters beyond the Pillars of Hercules swiftly dissipated. Before long a viewer perched high on the limestone crags of Gibraltar or Jebel Musa would be able spy other craft, from other nations, European or North African or Levantine, passing from the still blue waters of the Mediterranean into the grey waves of the Atlantic — timidly at first maybe, but soon bold and undaunted, just as the Phoenicians had been.

      “Multi pertransibunt, et augebitur scientia” was a phrase from the Book of Daniel that would be inscribed beneath a fanciful illustration, engraved on the title page of a book by Sir Francis Bacon, of a galleon passing outbound, between the Pillars, shattering the comforts and securities of old. “Many will pass through, and their knowledge will become ever greater,” it is probably best translated - and it was thanks to the purple-veined gastropods and the Phoenicians who were brave enough to seek them out, that such a sentiment, with its implication that learning only comes from the taking of chances and risk, would become steadily more true. It was a sentiment born at the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean.

      6. WESTERINGS

      The Phoenicians eventually vanished from the scene in the fourth century BC, vanquished in battle, their country absorbed by neighbours and plunderers. And as their own powers waned, so other mariners in other parts of the world would begin to press the challenge of the new-found Atlantic ever more firmly. There was Himilco the Carthaginian (who lost the Second Punic War to the Romans, despite his fleet of forty quinquiremes), and there was Pytheas from Marseilles (who sailed up to and circumnavigated Britain, and gave it its name, then pressed on up to Norway, encountered ice floes, gave us the name Thule, and found the Baltic).

      Then came the Romans - a martial people never especially maritime in their mindset, and perhaps as a consequence somewhat nervous sailors at the beginning. According to the Roman historian Cassius Dio, some of the legionnaires involved in the Claudian invasion of Britain in AD 43 were so terrified at having to cross even so mild a body of Atlantic water as the Strait of Dover that they rebelled, sat on their spears, and refused to march, protesting that crossing the sea was “as if they had to fight beyond the inhabited earth”. In the end they did embark on their warships, and they did allow themselves to be transported to the beaches of Kent, and the empire did expand - but even at its greatest extent in AD 117, it was an empire firmly bounded by the Atlantic coast, from the Solway Firth in the north to the old Phoenician city of Lixus in Morocco to the south. They may have cast off and kept to the shallows for coastal trade, but otherwise the Romans kept a respectful distance from the real Atlantic, never to be as bold as their predecessors.

      Nor as bold as their eventual successors. For after a lengthy and puzzling period of mid-Atlantic coastal inactivity, the Arabs — sailing in the eighth century from their newly acquired fiefdom in Andalusia — and later the Genoese from northern Italy began trading in the North African Atlantic. Records show that they went as far south as the coast off Wadi Nun, close to the former Spanish possession (and a philatelists’ favourite) of Ifni, where the sailors met desert caravans from Nigeria and Senegal laden with all manner of African exotica to be hurried back to customers in Barcelona and the cities of Liguria.

      Yet navigational advancement and casual fearlessness were not to be a monopoly of the Mediterranean sailors. Long before the voyages of the Arabs and the Genoese - though long after the Phoenicians, whose efforts trumped those of everyone else — northern men had launched their boats into the much colder and rougher waters of the northern Atlantic. Their motives were different: curiosity, rather than commerce, tended to drive the northerners out into the oceans. Curiosity, and to a lesser extent, Empire and God. Two groups of sailors dominated, at least in the first millennium: the Vikings most famously, but initially and often half forgotten in the fog of history, the Irish.

      There could hardly be vessels more different than the products of the first millennium’s Scandinavian and Irish boatyards. The Vikings, men who to this day are renowned as having essentially conceived the tradition of freebooting violence, and who kept mostly to the coast, sailed out in their famous longships, bent on pillage and sack; the Norsemen, which is today’s preferred name for the more congenial and numerous of the early Atlantic’s Scandinavian traders and explorers, used slightly chubbier, more stolid vessels known in the plural as knarrer.

      Both were clinker-built wooden craft, high-prowed and in the case of the more menacing longships, more than a hundred feet from bow to stern, made of oak and with a figure high on the bow. Both kinds of craft had an enormous square sail, maybe thirty feet across, and weighing tons, and they needed a crew of at least twenty-five who, with a following wind, could manage fifteen knots on a smooth sea.

      The Irish, by contrast, sailed into the wild waters of their western seas in boats they still insist on calling, with typical Celtic self-deprecation, canoes. A curragh, the proper Gaelic name for today’s still-used descendant, is a small and stubby boat, round and squat where the longship and the knarr were sleek and fast. It required few crew, had a single sail and a single steering oar, and was made of a cage of ashwood laths covered with ox leather that had been soaked in a solution of oak bark and marinated in lanolin; the whole was stitched together with flax thread and leather thongs. Tim Severin, the noted Irish sailor-explorer who would later construct and sail one, asked a curragh maker from County Cork if such a tiny and fragile-looking craft could make it all the way to America.

      “Well now,” the builder replied, “the boat will do, just so long as the crew’s good enough.”

      …

      Legend has it that the wandering Irish abbot, St Brendan, was the first to make a sustained journey through the waters of the North Atlantic. Whether he was guided on the voyage by much more than blind faith in what he supposed to be a kindly god is unknown. Most imagine he carried with him the only Atlantic map then known - not that it would have been much use: it was an illustration — drawn in the first century, in Egypt, from Ptolemy’s biblically authoritative book, Geographica, which in later copied versions had the Atlantic as a mere sliver on the western edge of the sheet, and had named it either Oceanus Occidentalis or, more ominously to the north, Mare Glaciale.

      The beginning of the great Irish-Scottish missionary expeditions, all bent on exporting Christianity to the more remote nooks of the northern world, is generally dated with some precision at AD 563, the year that St Columba brought knowledge of the Trinity to lona, in Argyll. According to the rollicking yarns found in the medieval Navigatio Sancti Brendanis Abbatis, Brendan’s voyage was taken somewhat before this time; together with perhaps as many as sixty brother monks, he sailed from a small estuary on the Dingle peninsula of far southwestern Ireland, first north to the Hebrides, then on farther to the Faroe Islands and Iceland, and finally westward, maybe even to Newfoundland, the Promised Land of the Saints.

      …

      It is unknown who brought Christianity to the Faroes, but its legacy survives and is still in robust good health. When Brendan and his monastic brethren landed, after beating their way up through two hundred miles of gale-racked waters from Barra Head, the northern tip of the Hebrides, they were impressed by the islands’ innumerable sheep, by the extraordinary number and variety of seabirds and an almost equally abundant variety of fish, as well as by the rain, the sheer and eternally dripping rock faces and the deep green of the omnipresent tussock grass.

      Little has changed in almost fifteen hundred years. It was on a blustery spring day that I first sailed in the Faroes, and just as St Brendan is supposed to have done, crossing the strait between the two most westerly Faroese islands of Vagar and Mykines. I was in a little boat that bounced merrily across the swells, passing under basalt cliffs that were sheer and black and so high that they quite vanished into the swirling clouds above.

      But on close inspection the cliffs were not entirely black. Blotches of green grass stood out, edged by cascades of running water after each blustery shower passed through; and on each patch of grass, which must have been angled 70, 80 degrees, such that a man could not stand upright for fear of falling hundreds of feet down into the a bottomless sea of the purest indigo, were sheep.