Fresh look at life on the ocean wave as Atlantic reveals its hidden depths

FOR thousands of years, the Atlantic was seen by mariners as a monstrous barrier, beyond which lay... who knew what. Today we cross between continents high above it with scarcely a downward glance.

Simon Winchester believes man's desire to tame the ocean, and the achievement of that ambition, mean we no longer treat it with the awe and respect it deserves. We should still tip our hats to its importance in history.

A pioneer of the now-ubiquitous gap year, the journalist and author of 20-odd books first travelled to North America in 1963 aboard the passenger liner Empress of Britain, in between leaving school and going to Oxford to study geology. Last year, 46 years later, he was approached by a woman at a book festival who said: "I've been looking for you for years! I found my diary from that voyage, which describes meeting 'a young man called Simon Winchester during a lifeboat drill... He was going to explore America before university.'"

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In the early 1960s, the crossing of the Atlantic was a seven-day voyage during which passengers were under no illusion about the combined power of the ocean and the elements. Early one morning as the ship neared the "Titanic" waters close to Newfoundland, Winchester was out alone on deck when the thrum of the engines was silenced without explanation and the ship was left surrounded by eerie silence, save crashing of the grey Atlantic waves against its hull. Shortly afterwards a small aircraft hove into view, the motorboat was launched, and emergency medicine for a sick passenger was winched down to the boat. Soon The Empress of Britain was on her way again, arriving in Montreal only 54 minutes late. British Rail trains often fared much worse.

Not long after his momentous first crossing of the ocean, the economics of ocean passenger shipping versus the burgeoning mass air industry and improvements in jet engines meant the seven-year-old Empress of Britain was decomissioned. Young Simon's homeward journey was made in a Lockheed Constellation.

Having grown up in south-west England with a love of the ocean, and having spent a career criss-crossing the Pond to cover events as momentous as the Watergate Scandal and the Falklands War (some of which he spent in a Patagonian prison) for national newspapers, Winchester now lives between New York and Massachussetts, again close to the Atlantic. He's spent the last two years researching and writing a monumental love letter to the Atlantic which, he says, he loves for its storminess and drama. He has gathered stories about its people, its shores, its history and its importance to humankind, travelling from the Faroe Islands to Tristan de Cunha to fill Atlantic – A Vast Ocean Of A Million Stories.

We think of the oceans as having always been there – and the late Arthur C Clarke had a point when he said "How inappropriate it is to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is a sea" – but the Atlantic only came into existence as a separate entity 190 million years ago when the supercontinent Pangaea started to split apart. Today the ocean is widening at a rate of about an inch a year, and this means that one day it may well disappear as a new and vast continent is born due to shifting tectonic plates. But that is all an estimated 180 million years away, so Winchester tells the tale of the ocean up to early middle age.

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For many centuries, man crept around the coastline of his own territory, terrified to venture out of sight of land. The Mediterranean was considered to be the big sea at the centre of civilisation. But all that changed in the 15th century with development of full-rigged ships and the closing off of the old lucrative trade routes to the East by the Turks.

New routes had to be found, and the Portuguese, Spanish, English and French battled for mastery of the sea. Winchester calls the ocean "the inland sea of Western Civilisation"..."the wellspring of the Atlantic community that has dominated most of the last four centuries...", such is its importance to how our nations have been shaped.

It is a story that is awash with rivalries, greed, wars over land and mineral wealth, tales of slavery, piracy, technological experimentation and environmental destruction. The narrative of the Atlantic is full of large – and not always likeable – characters. It's hard to fathom why America celebrates Columbus Day, honouring a man who had the tongues of insubordinates cut out and dished out cruelty to native populations.

Columbus, though a skilled sailor whose third voyage did take him to the American mainland in Venezuela in 1498, was not even the first to cross the Atlantic. His voyages introduced Europe to the idea of a new universe across the sea, but Columbus did not twig that the Atlantic and Pacific were two different oceans, just as Leif Eriksson had not back in the 11th century. In 1957 a hitherto unknown map of "Vilanda" was verified as authentic, and it showed a large island west of Greenland. Vinlanda – later established to be in North America – had been visited in the 11th century (1001 AD) by the Icelandic-born Eriksson.

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Amerigo Vespucci, the colourful Italian explorer and sorcerer, appears to have been the first to claim from his own navigational evidence that the "great body of land in the west" was a separate continent or "the fourth part of the world".

There was much argument about Eriksson's map, but other Norse charts from that era were later found, and in 1960 Norse ruins from the time were discovered in Newfoundland. Columbus was blown out of the water. "Columbus was an unsavoury man, a bully and a slaver, and so much about him is erased by the popular version of the man," says Simon Winchester. "Much of the early history of Europe's crossing of the ocean and exploition of America is chequered with terrible stories. The way African slaves were cooped up like rats on ships to the way they were made to work on plantations is shameful. We all benefited, in one way or another, as the commercial ships were leaving every week from Liverpool and Bristol, picking up slaves in Africa, emptying their human cargo in America, then bringing back sugar, rum and all sorts of goodies for us to enjoy. Each spoonful of sugar symbolised the back-breaking work of ill-treated slaves thousands of miles away."

Maybe there aren't quite a million of them, but Winchester tells thousands of ripping yarns about the lands and peoples that surround the Atlantic, but also the creatures that inhabit its depths. Maybe 70 per cent of the planet's total oxygen comes from seaborne organisms, and a new one called Prochlorococcus was first discovered in the Atlantic's Sargasso Sea in 1986. It's thought to be the planet's most abundant living creature, supplying as much as a fifth of the world's atmospheric oxygen.

Winchester says he feels it was almost his duty to spell out the wonders of the Atlantic's rich past and present to a world that largely ignores it. "We should not give up on it. It's a treasure and an important part of who we are. If the Pacific is the ocean of the future, the Atlantic is the ocean of history."

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Atlantic – A Vast Ocean Of A Million Stories by Simon Winchester, is published by HarperPress, 25.

To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or go to www.yorkshirepostbook shop.co.uk Postage costs 2.75