The Paradoxal Compass Read online

  The way he took their disappearance so personally both impressed and baffled me. To each generation its own diffuse sense of guilt. I could tell he always thought I was judging him. But I envied his egg-collecting far more than I judged it. Not for any freedom to vandalise that he may have enjoyed, but for his experience of a time ‘before’, when such wildlife could be taken for granted. For the assurance he had grown up with that it would always be there.

  He could see, now, that he’d taken it too much for granted. He had used a dieldrin-based sheep-dip for years and in unguarded moments still marvelled at how well it had worked. Then he learnt, or chose to learn, too late, what the stuff was doing to river wildlife. But learning it, even too late, had changed him.

  No subsidy ever tempted John to tear out his hedges. Not that he looked after them either. Riddled with rabbit-diggings, they had been broken down everywhere by his roving bands of extremely astute and half-wild sheep, famous for miles around. His hedges were, here and there, ineffectually patched with strands of barbed wire, bits of old iron bedstead or sheets of tin roofing, each marking the attempt to appease some irate neighbour. Years after everyone else had cleared them away, his farm was still crowded with elm skeletons – John left the wind to fell them in its own time. The wind was in no hurry.

  I saw at the time what I wanted to see – namely, a nature reserve on my door-step. I can see now an ageing farmer with nobody to help. This amazing abundance of wildlife, which I welcomed as a bit of excellent luck, had much to do with tragic family circumstances. But what of that? Woodpeckers fluttered among the dead branches of the elms, feasting on all the grubs and larvae they went on supplying, year after year.

  His fields lacked the queer emerald brilliance that had, with nitrate fertilisers, come over the pastures of his neighbours. He was not going to repeat his mistake with dieldrin. He had read about the effects of such fertiliser in the water system and so bought in slag from Welsh steel plants instead. He didn’t buy in the new, faster-growing breeds of cattle, but kept the Devon reds he’d always reared.

  He and his sisters arranged for me to give slide shows about local wildlife in the village hall, all proceeds to the church roof repairs. His being Church Warden was definitely a part of this. I know that biblically inflected sentimentalism about nature is as much out of fashion now as it was once in, and I know the reasons, but I am, indirectly, in its debt and should acknowledge that. It may have been assumed or hoped that I would eventually draw appropriate conclusions about a beneficent Creator.

  People associate the countryside with nostalgia or escapism and it’s true, past and present are jumbled up differently there. But to me it always felt like a place where the real questions are much harder to dodge. Why had his brother done it? If this was a place where the older, better values had clung on, then what was it about those values that made people do something like that? I tried not to think about it every time I walked past that overgrown orchard. Or again, if pollution was killing off the rivers, that wasn’t just some news item here. It meant derelict fishing huts where the anglers used to keep their rods. It meant hotel staff needing another job. Or it was something your slightly eccentric neighbour still could not forgive himself for.

  I was sitting at a bend in the river one morning when out of nowhere came the wavering, whirring point of light, the orange glow and the inflammatory blue re-entering the river’s atmosphere after their long absence. Skimming low over the pebbles and the water, they announced a restoration of the old plenty, in a voice all made up of dots and dashes and exclamation marks.

  And I saw in a flash what the fuss, what those eggs and stories, had been about. Kingfishers were soon reestablished and a regular sight once more. The warming trend of which this return was a symptom was not exactly what I took it for at the time. I saw what I wanted to: this improved weather was a ‘correction’ of what had gone before. So much for what we all imagined back then. But they were back: I had time to watch more carefully and they had time to start resembling more closely what I was familiar with from bird books. It took me a year or two to think of some way to mark their reappearance.

  I’d bought a camera meanwhile. Where an alder torn out of the bank had become lodged in the riverbed, it lay on its side and went on sprouting leaves as floods piled a shingly island around it. More than once, I’d spied a kingfisher gleaming among those branches laid horizontally over the water. I asked John if I could set up my canvas hide on his river-bank. I didn’t tell him exactly why. I needed a measure of secrecy to contact these creatures for myself.

  Having set the hide up I left it empty for a day or two. I had no sooner occupied it than I realised that the fallen tree I had taken for their ‘fishing-post’ was really just a perch from which the parents glanced around before the final dash to the nest-burrow. I actually had to see an adult bird dive head-first into the sandy river-bank and disappear completely before I got it. It had never even crossed my mind that this could happen on my own little stretch of river. I wondered if this was the very river-bank from which the two brothers had removed kingfisher eggs forty years before? By now they were a protected species: to set up my hide this close to a nest was not, in the eyes of the law, that much better than digging out its contents.

  But I was in no hurry to take it down and I soon realised something else too, or rather the birds did. My hide had made their previous look-out superfluous and was quickly adopted as a better alternative. So instead of having them perch a few convenient feet away, I would hear wings and then that piercing whistle very very close. The stretched green canvas would tremble, then tighten fractionally and I knew that a kingfisher was sitting an inch or two from my head.

  To peer out at the passing river and know myself in such brilliant company might be its own reward but I was holding out for that photograph. In even moderately fine weather, I happily half-suffocated that summer away in my green canvas cube. And eventually four fledglings, one hazy afternoon, fluttered down to a ledge above the water. They practised hawking after the pond-skaters which gathered where the current ran sluggishly along the bank.

  One of the young birds did eventually take up position on the perch I had arranged for them. That was the photograph I gave John in a frame as a Christmas card. The old abundance is back, was what I meant by it. Whether he knew, or would have agreed, I can’t say. The next time he invited me in it was on his mantelpiece. Did it allay that conscience of his? I never asked.

  Meanwhile I had taken my course of free lessons in motionless river-watching, given by a pair of resident kingfishers. I’d watched how the young ones dashed clumsily at the water, too, plunging and dunking, madly rushing in at the wrong angle, again and again, crash-landing and bobbing back up. Time after time I watched the way they shook themselves off after each attempt, then fluttered back to the ledge and went straight back to darting after those hapless pond-skaters, pursuing them this way and that. They weren’t bad teachers, either.

  I took fewer and fewer photographs after this and I’m still not sure about most of what passes for ‘wildlife photography’. I don’t only mean that it is so much easier to collect such images now. I mean it feels symptomatic to me of how impersonal our relations with the natural world have become.

  Even as we close down so much of what these creatures depend on, so our images of them multiply. And wildlife photography is, essentially, a rolling advertisement for this state of affairs. So much crisp focus, so many perfectly framed shots. How rarely it even aims to communicate some developing relationship with the creature. Still more rarely does it speak of a relationship which more than one person might share with a given creature over time, or of how a wild creature, even by disappearing for a while, can mediate between people and between generations, too.

  THE PARADOXAL COMPASS

  1580 May 17th, at the Moscovy house for the Cathay voyage. June 3rd, Mr A.Gilbert and J. Davys rod homeward into Devonshire.

  – from John Dee’s Diary

  My
second year at university was over but I did not ride homeward into Devonshire. I was fine where I was. In a small room at the end of a complicated corridor I stayed on as the college switched from organising its annual May Ball to catering for conference delegates. The trees and fields where the colleges back onto the river belonged to tourism again. Only a few days into the vacation, it was as if the magnums and marquees and ball gowns had never been.

  Social Cambridge was an enigma and remained so to the end. The ‘social side’ to college life was, in the mid-late Eighties, triumphalist. I tended to get on better with foreign students. Or maybe I protest too much. Perhaps growing up down a lane was ideal for watching kingfishers or herons and good for reading too, but turned out not to be much of a preparation for the ‘social side’.

  For whatever reason it felt unaccountably good to be here, alone, thinking and reading. I was going to Rome for the first time later in the summer and that room was the best place I could think of to prepare for it. The college also gave each second-year student £40 to buy any books they liked. I’ve often thought since what a good idea that was.

  None of the titles I’d chosen had much to do with coursework. But I had gone on reading about the explorers and one of the books I chose was partially to do with that. What interested me now, more than their adventures in themselves, were the motives of those who sent them out. Why they went. So I’d bought a biography of the Renaissance polymath, and founding fellow of my college, John Dee.

  Dee was mathematical adviser to the Muscovy Company and as such the instructor of both John Davis and Stephen Borough. His home in Mortlake, on the banks of the Thames, operated as a kind of independent research institute. Indeed, John Davis seems to have spent some part of his upbringing there. This hospitali philosophorum peregrinatum, or ‘hostelry for wandering philosophers’, housed ‘4 or 5 rooms full of books’ (then the largest library in the country) as well as globes, quadrants, and three ‘laboratories’.

  Nobody agrees about anything to do with Dee, which is part of what recommended him to me. To some historians he is little more than a delusional magician, a meddling peripheral. To others he is the outstanding teacher of his age. It’s certainly true that many of the most distinguished mathematicians of the following generation had been his pupils, John Harriot and Thomas Digges among them.

  Dee is the perfect introduction to just how strange the English Renaissance was. Court-intriguer, Greek scholar and metallurgical adviser to the government. A lawyer and an authority on all things Welsh, an all-purpose political advisor and a necromancer. Read about Dee and it soon becomes clear the purpose of these voyages was as complicated as the age in which he lived. But every subsequent generation has had to discover that purpose afresh. What was manifestly heroic to Kingsley was manifestly tawdry and grasping a century later.

  Above all, Dee was ardent in the cause of what he himself called ‘this British discovery and recovery enterprise’. One of his proudest achievements – he was still boasting about it twenty years later – was the ‘Paradoxal Compass’, which he designed in the year of Stephen Borough’s first voyage to the Arctic. The ‘Compass’ itself has not survived and there is more than one theory about what it was. He was unable to raise enough money to publish the book which contained his own explanation and the manuscript is now lost.

  It was probably a circumpolar chart rather than an actual ‘compass’, offering a view of the earth with the North Pole at its centre. This would have distorted the shapes of countries in higher latitudes less than the Mercator projection. He may have called it a ‘compass’ because, unlike most charts, it was round, with meridians radiating from its centre, like the lines on a compass. It was ‘paradoxal’ because a course which would have been drawn as a straight line on a plane chart appeared as a spiral on this new kind of chart.

  It attempted, in other words, to translate the earth’s curved surface onto a flat chart as this had never been attempted before. He had found the way to represent a world about which people suddenly knew both more and less than ever before. Its invention may well have been prompted by studying one of the globes which he is known to have brought back to Cambridge from Louvain in 1547. They, too, have since been lost but perhaps some trace of them haunts those buildings yet. Perhaps that was why I felt so well reading about them in that little room at the end of a complicated corridor.

  The Paradoxal Compass would have accompanied Borough on his first and on subsequent journeys. Was its invention a purely technical feat? Dee would have denied it. It was a ‘law of nature’, he wrote, which offered his contemporaries ‘the whole Ball & Sphericall frame of the erth & water.’ But this ‘law’ required in return that they ‘be to the Omnipotent Creator, sincerely thankfull & to the humayn society, friendly & comfortable.’ We might be inclined to dismiss that as pious window-dressing, particularly in view of what actually then happened, but are we justified in reading that kind of cynicism about religious language into 16th-century motives?

  From the original of Shakespeare’s Prospero to Derek Jarman’s punk magus to Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographical super-phantom, from the arch-conjuror of Glynn Parry’s biography to Damon Albarn’s recent rock opera, Dee goes on and on. If something about him continues to appeal, perhaps it’s the way he struggled to integrate the traumatic changes his society was undergoing. The way he marshalled every possible language – scientific, economic, religious, alchemical, political – at a time when none of these was fully distinct from any of the others, in his efforts to forge a new coherence.

  As Stephen Borough guided England’s search for a route to China, it was Dee’s ‘law of Nature’ he applied, following that Arctic shoreline in the Searchthrift. John Davis in his turn applied the same, from Scilly to Greenland and back again. The English navigators seeking a way to Asia via the far north were certainly following the money. They were also seeking to avoid competition with Spanish and Portuguese rivals. But to reduce what they were doing to its economic and strategic aspects is certainly to misrepresent it.

  By navigation, Dee had written in his Preface to Euclid (1570), ‘might growe Commoditye, to this land chiefly, and to the rest of the Christen Common wealth, farre passing all riches and earthly Threasure.’ A commodity far passing all riches and earthly treasure. This enigmatic phrase has given rise to much speculation. It may be a coded reference to the elixir of life, which alchemical tradition had long claimed was to be found in China. T’ang Dynasty magicians did indeed claim to have found the recipe.

  Whatever Dee’s mysterious ‘commodity’ is a reference to, the navigators were certainly sent out for many reasons other than the collapsing price of woollen cloth and a weakening currency. The earliest mention of Davis anywhere is in John Dee’s diary. But the diary remains silent on the exact purpose of his visit, as it does with the vast majority of other such visits. Dee had cast the Queen’s horoscope: the explorers and their backers were as likely to have been consulting him on an astrologically favourable date for their expeditions as for advice on navigation. Generally, we have no way of knowing which, or whether it was both or something else entirely. Such was the nature of the age.

  But when Davis refers to Dee’s Paradoxal Compass as one of the instruments ‘necessary for a skilfull Seaman’, he is clearly referring to its practical usefulness. It permitted sea captains to sail in high latitudes with greater confidence than ever before. There were several reasons why greater confidence was needed, why navigation in the far north presented new difficulties.

  Quite aside from the quantity of ice they found in their way, attempting to reach China by a northern route forced the English to deal with magnetic variation. This is the difference between the magnetic ‘north’, which a compass-needle points to, and polar north, the fixed point on a map. That this difference exists had been noticed by Columbus, and by the Chinese long before that, but it has relatively little effect in lower latitudes.

  In higher latitudes understanding how variation works is essent
ial because the effect is so much larger. Variation was explained in different ways. Some thought the compass needle was controlled by a celestial body – a star in the tail of Ursa Major was one suggestion. Others assumed a magnetic mountain must be responsible, or a magnetic island, perhaps, somewhere north of Siberia.

  The people who knew most about this problem in 16th-century England were either people who had been on that first expedition to the Arctic or had been associated with it. One of the first books dedicated to the subject was written by William Borough, another pupil of John Dee’s, also of Borough Farm, Northam, who had, aged seventeen, accompanied his elder brother Stephen on that first voyage to Russia.

  William’s Discours of the Variation appeared in 1581, bound together with a book by his compass-maker, Robert Norman. Borough wrote as an experienced navigator, not a cosmologist. It is a thoroughly practical account of the question that he gives. Only by repeated observation, by the methodical logging and comparison of data, could earlier faults be identified and corrected. It is in such writings that we can see a new view of the world emerging.

  And a new kind of pride with it. The inaccurate charting of a coast was a sign of ‘unskilful sea-men’, a mark of national slovenliness. Any mariner deserving the name should be able to chart ‘the banks, rocks and sholds in the sea, with the depths & other necessary notes obserued in his owne trauails [travels]’ and do so ‘according vnto the truth (which is the chiefest part required in a perfect mariner.)’

  William instructed other mariners in the use of the Paradoxal Compass and rose to high office in the Navy Board, also succeeding his older brother as Chief Pilot to the Muscovy Company. He is credited with having discovered the log and line method of measuring a ship’s progress and once declared bullishly that he needed nothing more to sail around the world than a compass and a plain chart. Yet he was a meticulous master of the new navigational art. His determination to record variation as precisely as possible, would have, as we shall see, consequences far beyond anything he could have anticipated.