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

southern regions that is inhabited by more numerous peoples than in our Europe, Asia or Africa, and in addition I found a more pleasant and temperate climate than in any other region known to us….” He had found a new continent - or, more precisely, he had identified the land that he had found as a new continent, something that Columbus, some years before, had been entirely disinclined to do. To Columbus it was - and it wrongly was — an already existing continent: Asia. To Vespucci it was — and it correctly was — a totally new continent, and at the very outset it was a continent without a name.

      It fell to the Freiburg mapmakers to give it one. At the time the pair happened to be working in an academic community in the Vosges mountains of eastern France - and it was here that they got finally to christen this great body of land, and to offer it an identity it would then have for all time. Both of the mapmakers had read the Mundus Novus; both had read and were taken in by the more evidently forged Soderini Letter. Both agreed that in the preparation of an enormous new world map that had been commissioned from them, they would give, at least to the thinly sinuous southern part of the new continent that would be drawn on their masterpiece, a name. They would give it the feminine form of the Latinized version of Amerigo Vespucci’s Christian name: the properly feminine place-nouns of Africa, Asia and Europa would now be joined, quite simply, by a brand-new entity that they would name America.

      And so, in 1507, when the new map was published, and with images of the two giants of Ptolemy and Vespucci presiding in profile over an entirely fresh cartographic representation of the planet (but with neither Leif Eriksson nor Christopher Columbus in illustrated evidence anywhere), in large letters across the southern half of the southern continental discovery, just where Uruguay is situated today, was this single word. America. It was written in majuscule script, a tiny bit crooked, curiously out of scale and looking a little last-minute and just a little tentative — but nevertheless and incontrovertibly, there.

      The name caught on. A globe published in Paris in 1515 has the word written on both segments of the continent, north and south. It was published in a Spanish book in 1520; another from Strasbourg five years later listed “America” as one of the world’s regions; and finally, in 1538, Mercator, the new arbiter of the planet’s geography, placed the phrasal titles “North America” and “South America” squarely on the two halves of the fourth continent. With that the name was fully secure; and it would never be changed.

      And with a new continent in place, so the sea that lay between it and the Old World continents of Europe and Africa - the sea that had variously been named the Ocean Sea, the Ethiopian¹⁷ Ocean, Oceanus Occidentalis, the Great West Sea, the Western Ocean, Mare Glaciale, and by Herodotus in The Histories in the fifth century BC, the Atlantic - became, at last and with certainty, a discrete and bordered ocean, too.

      It was no longer appended to any other sea. It was no longer a part of some larger and more amorphous worldwide body of water. It was a thing — a vast and, back then, almost unimaginable thing, true - but it was a thing nonetheless, with borders, edges, coastlines, a rim, a margin, a fringe, a brink, and a northern, a southern, a western, and an eastern limit.

      From a simply inexplicable green-grey immensity that stretched without apparent cease beyond the Pinnacle Point tide pools, to an even more frightening turbulence of waves and winds raging beyond the Pillars of Hercules, to a warm sea stained with purple dye or a cold sea choked with ice, and to a body of little self-importance and which was supposedly conjoined with other seas that lay far beyond, the Atlantic Ocean now at last, and from the moment of being given the early-sixteenth-century imprimatur of Mercator, had a proper identity, all of its own.

      It remained now to find out just what that identity was, and to set this new-found ocean in its rightful place on the world stage.

      The Atlantic had been found. Now it demanded to be known.

       Chapter Two ALL THE SHOALS AND DEEPS WITHIN

       Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel,

       And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school.

       1. THE DEFINING AUTHORITY

      The Principality of Monaco, that sunny haven for shady cash on the French Riviera, is not a place sufficiently blessed by a noble history to be littered with an abundance of grand public statues. The parks and plazas naturally have plenty of marble representations of members of the Grimaldi family, the Genoese notables who have run the place since the thirteenth century. There is a kindly sculpted bust of Hector Berlioz, who is remembered for once falling over near the Opera House, and there is a dull bronze rendering of the Argentine speed demon Juan Manuel Fangio, standing beside the Formula One Mercedes in which he won so many of his local car races.

      But those monuments aside, there is little other statuary of interest - except in the entrance to a rather anonymous-looking modern office building on the Quai Antoine the First, beside a harbour that is permanently jammed gunwale-to-gunwale with large cruising craft. There stands a striking and rather magnificent statue in polished teak, of the great Greek god of the Sea, Poseidon. He stands there decently naked, full-bearded, and wielding his trident in the stance of a guardian outside the little-known office that, since 1921, has defined, delineated, and approved the official names of all the many oceans and seas, bays and inlets on the surface of the planet.

      The International Hydrographic Office has been in Monaco since 1921, invited to this improbable setting¹⁸ by the then ruler, Prince Albert I, a man who collected charts and portolans and had a fleet of research vessels, and held great admiration for and great knowledge of the deep-sea fish and marine mammals for which he went exploring. The organisation he helped create has as members almost all the oceanside states of the world — Algeria to Venezuela, by way of Jamaica, Tonga, and Ukraine, and with all the obvious big-sea countries among the founders.

      One of its principal mandates is to define - in a de facto rather than a de jure sense - the boundaries of the world’s oceans and seas. This turns out to be a most contentious matter. Right from the start there was argument: “Your proposed western limit of the Mediterranean,” huffed a Moroccan delegate in the 1920s, when comments about the first proposed boundaries were invited, “makes Tangier a Mediterranean port, which it certainly is not.”

      The original architects had thought fit to make the boundary of the North Atlantic Ocean pass on the outside of the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, a decision that appeared to unsettle everyone. So on instructions from the senior brass, the clerk promptly erased his first boundary line and drew in a second, a mile to the east of Tangier — elevating it at a stroke to the status of an Atlantic Ocean city, and not a mere Mediterranean port - and all were reported to be happy.

      The IHO’s other important, practical remit is to ensure that all the world’s navigation charts look more or less the same. This is not quite as dull as it sounds. It stems from a conference held in Washington, D.C., in 1889, at which grim stories were told about ships’ captains who were compelled to use charts made by countries poorly skilled in chartmaking and so came to sudden grief on unmarked shoals or on the approaches to ill-drawn harbours. The only way such marine misadventures could be prevented, said the conferees, was for all charts and all navigational aids to be the same, and for all sailors’ maps, whether made in Britain or Burma, the United States or Uruguay, to adhere to exactly the same high standards.

      At a navigation conference held in St Petersburg, just before the Great War, the world’s navies and merchant mariners promptly urged that an international commission be set up to study such problems. Finally in 1921, once the European dust had settled, Monaco’s well-regarded Serene Prince offered room and board and a clutch of Monégasque typists (together with one charmingly styled “boy-attendant’) to help establish the IHO, which was then formally constituted and guarded by