The Paradoxal Compass Read online

  So by all means, in other words, invite TV crews out on boats. Get all the air-time you can. But in the thick of all this awareness-raising, how do we deepen that awareness? Or if we are reluctant to do that deepening, then what are we really aiming for? And if the culture of news is not up to this on its own, then we need to supplement it with some other culture that is.

  It is often pointed out that a five-year electoral cycle leaves democratically elected politicians trapped in the short-term, unable to respond to or even see something like climate change. Its corollary is less often pointed out: that the telling of longer stories then becomes the responsibility of those who can see.

  Our attitude towards whaling, for example, has certainly been transformed over the past fifty years but the change goes back further than that. When William Scoresby moved to Torquay in the 1840s he already had an astonishing career behind him. He had first visited the Arctic in 1799, aged ten, on board his father’s whaling ship. Father and son alike were much preoccupied by the search for the North-West Passage and together in 1806 had reached latitude 81˚12´ N, a record northing at the time.

  Scoresby later trained as a scientist and his Account of the Arctic Regions (1820) included detailed studies of the bowhead and other cetaceans which were drawn upon by Herman Melville as he wrote Moby Dick. Scoresby was the first to argue in a scientific context for the bowhead’s great longevity – an insight confirmed by later research. He also studied the earth’s magnetism, the structure of snow crystals and water temperature in the Arctic.

  Though a native of Yorkshire, it was in a town overlooking Lyme Bay that he chose to end his days, having taken holy orders. There could surely be no more fitting tribute to his life’s work – and to the changes in our outlook it helped to bring about – than a dolphin sanctuary in the waters off Torquay.

  In campaigns like this one for the white-beaked dolphins, the usual appeal is to science, and rightly so. But this begs an important question. Science may take the measure of things more accurately than any other form of truth. Researchers rightly feel a duty to speak out when they see the life-support systems on which we all depend under threat. The science is quite indispensable but can it on its own generate the values which promote acceptance of its authority? Its claim to stand above the fray in which values are contested might seem to disqualify it for this role. Its virtues may but do not always have mass appeal, especially when its message is unwelcome.

  That is why scientists who understand the gravity of this know we have to tell a richer, better story. About how the dredgers were excluded from Lyme Bay in 2008 and the sea-bed’s recovery since? Certainly. But about Aelfric and his whales and about the ‘incredible Number of fish’ Daniel Defoe watched being hauled ashore at West Bay, too. About the ‘school of mackerel twinkling in the afternoon light’, which Thomas Hardy once noticed from Portland Bill. About those whalers drinking ‘the owner’s health’ at Lympstone and the ‘bankers’ departing each spring for the Newfounde lands and their ‘infinite store’ of cod. About John Davis setting out from Lyme Bay, with his Paradoxal Compass, in search of a way to China. And about seals deep under the ice, in the waters that still bear his name, collecting data for us as they do so. All of these could and should form part of our case for longer-range thinking and a more deeply considered relationship with the sea.

  – Epilogue –

  Lyme Bay was always more than just a fishing-ground. When George Somers sailed his Sea Venture out of Lyme Regis in 1609, he can have had little idea of what he was setting in motion. His ship was wrecked on Bermuda, then a deserted island, where the crew lived for most of a year before building themselves new boats and completing the journey to America. One of the investors in that voyage was, of course, one William Shakespeare, who read an account of their adventures on the island and knew what to do with it.

  Before he directed his film version of The Tempest, Derek Jarman wrote the screenplay for a fantastical road movie in which Queen Elizabeth and John Dee drive around the English countryside in an old car. Some of the dialogue from this was re-used in his Jubilee (1978) but in the original screenplay there was a scene where the Queen and her Arch-Conjuror rest a while on Chesil Beach. ‘My heart rejoiceth in the roar of the surf and the shingle,’ the Queen says. ‘Yea, a great elixir is the sea-shore,’ Dee replies.

  And so it is. A place of transformative understanding. People have set out across this bay, reimagining humankind’s place in the world as they went. And through efforts like the Marine Protected Area we are doing so again, emulating that ‘sea-change’ of which Ariel sang. Only last year, Lyme Regis raised its first statue to George Somers. I’m not sure we need to set up new statues, or tear down the old ones, Drake’s, Somers’, or anyone else’s. I would rather that the old ones put us in mind of something new: that a vision of the ocean as, before all else, an opportunity to enrich ourselves has failed. But let us recall, also, that this vision was contested from the start. And even the explorers who shared in that vision – to the extent they did – could not then have known what its consequences would be. It is for us, who do know, to reinterpret this legacy in the light of our knowledge.

  Four centuries and more is enough gloating over the Golden Hinde’s treasure-laden return. It is time we directed our thoughts to those twenty hours it spent snagged on a reef, about which the official versions are so strikingly reticent. A crew on the brink of panic, further from home than any of them had ever been. A terrible mistake, at one stroke, has thrown the fate and purpose of the entire venture into question. All eyes are on the ship’s boat now, as its crew tries and tries to fathom the trouble they are in.

  FURTHER READING

  Richard Carnac Temple (ed.), The World Encompassed, The Argonaut Press, 1926 (includes Fletcher’s notes with other narratives and memoranda of the Famous Voyage

  Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations of the English Nation, 1907 (for Stephen and William Borough and John Davis see vols. 1, 2 & 5 respectively)

  Philip Hoare, Leviathan or, The Whale, Fourth Estate, 2008

  Clements R. Markham, A Life of John Davis, George Philip & Son, 1889

  Kit Mayers, North-East Passage to Muscovy, Stephen Borough and the First Tudor Explorations, Sutton, 2005

  Kasper van Ommen (ed.), The Exotic World of Carolus Clusius, Leiden University Library, 2009

  Glyn Parry, The Arch-Conjuror of England: John Dee, Yale, 2013

  Jan Patočka, Essais Hérétiques, Éditions Verdier, 1999

  Stephen Pumphrey, Latitude and the Magnetic Earth, Icon Books, 2002 (an introduction to William Gilbert)

  Callum Roberts The Unnatural History of the Sea, Gaia, 2007

  Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo, University of Chicago Press, 1956

  John Sugden, Sir Francis Drake, Pimlico, 2006

  D. W. Waters, The Art of Navigation in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times, Hollis & Carter, 1958

  You can find out more about Portland’s Save Our Strip campaign at https://portsocsfq.wordpress.com.

  Read more about the campaign for a Marine Protected Area for dolphins at www.devonwildlifetrust.org/devon-dolphins.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Kim Kremer, Charles Wild, Lucy Goodison, John Siddorn, Julian Andrews, Florike Egmond, Peter Mason, Ellie Jones, Tom Brereton, Dave Sales, Carlotta Molfese, Roger Furniss, Philip Hoare, Kit Mayers, Charles Bircham, Peter Jones, Marilyn Northcott, Adam Mars-Jones, Debbie Parnall, Christopher Pidsley, Devon Archives and Local Studies Service, the Dorset and Devon Wildlife Trusts, the Archive of the British Film Institute, The Caird Library, The Bodleian Library, everybody at No. 10 in Bridport.

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  Copyright

  Published in 2017

  by Notting Hill Editions Ltd

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  Copyright © 2017 by Horatio Morpurgo

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