At Sea
Shortly before teatime today we left the Roaring Forties behind. They weren’t roaring at the time—there was just a long and heavy swell and the slight press of a tailwind—and so the transition was hardly dramatic. But the crossing of the fabled latitude-line today marked, as it always does, a symbolic rite of passage—the exact point when a northbound ship passes from cold to warm, from storm to comparative serenity, from a place of waves and ice and fogs where epics are born, and into an ocean that is, in a sense, the routine sea.
The change allows a moment of respite, for everyone. From everywhere on the ship there is a collective exhalation of relief. Up on the bridge the officers change into shorts and sunglasses. Hitherto unseen engineers from below, men who have put off the more challenging of chores for fearing of getting hit by swinging pieces of iron, can be heard happily welding and hammering once again. Were this a naval vessel one could imagine sailors now being sent out into the sun, down on their knees holystoning the decks to a blinding whiteness.
Picnic tables are set out aft. Passengers put away their crimson windcheaters and settle down instead to hear talks that make penguins and icebergs suddenly seems farther away than they truly are—lessons on how to make ravioli, how to take pictures of magnolia trees, of how best to write about favorite places—the California mountains, the Iguacu Falls, Venice. If anyone thinks of South Georgia as a favorite place—as I suspect they will—it will be later on, when a momentary sound, or image, or memory, suddenly conjures the magic of the place once more. For now, though, we are all looking forward to what may be; the past is long ago, slipping backwards into memory at an unyielding fourteen knots.
The first indication of what may be lies presently right underneath us. For at almost the exact moment that we crossed the line from Forties to Thirties, so the seabed rose swiftly up to meet us. No longer are we slicing through waters three miles deep: the bottom now is but six thousand feet down, and we are at last above the southerly beginnings of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Here the two sides of the ocean are breaking slowly asunder and moving slowly apart—two or three centimeters a year only, but enough to create volcanic stirrings below, and a scattering of volcanic islands above. One of them, Gough Island, lies a few hundred miles away on our starboard beam; three more of them are less than a day’s sailing ahead. Not yet on the radar, but at the end of ever-shortening penciled tracks made by the navigators on their Admiralty charts. These are Inaccessible, Nightingale and Tristan—our destination for tomorrow.
And though they are heroically remote—the loneliest inhabited islands in the world, they claim—these tiny British relic possessions offer us what we haven’t seen in a long while: land creatures, houses, habitation, and people. Small wonder some of our thoughts are turning to such quotidian matters as the making of ravioli and the planning of holidays in Venice. For after some long while at the extreme edge, civilization is reappearing once again. For good, or of course, for ill.
