THE BOUNDING MAIN

The Bounding Main is the world’s oceans, the dark, stayless waters from which we squirmed to our society. Still largely elusive to the applications of logic, this tremendous entity of floods finds its own politics in complex systems of circulation and partition that remain too dynamic for the models of men. Bodies of water quieten and enliven, clash and uncouple; they harden in conversation with the air, whimpering salt into the depths, changing the nature of the deep waters below. They exist in our minds boundlessly as the protean imagination of humanity, and in the wombs of women vestigially as the aquatic waters from which we birth. The strange layers of the ocean find parallel in the secret divisions that carve the human mind, the frontiers of doubt or superiority, the fringes of identity and ego.

In early English poems, the sea was termed as waelweg, the whale’s way, resounding in the word for foreigner – wealas. Warmongering and plague swept in from its faithless horizons, anchoring to the misery of the shores. Not only was the sea entrenching on the landscape but empowering the successive waves of tribal invasion that wounded and swelled the English tongue to its beautiful tangle. For this reason, the English tongue flows to the seas, and to speak it is to summon the history of the tidewaters by which it has travelled and been challenged. In many ways, Extinction, the book that I will write from my voyage to Antarctica, is this oceanic history.

Spirit breaks from the body’s chest
To the sea’s acres; over earth’s breadth
And whale’s range roams the mind now…‘The Seafarer,’ Anon, 800 AD

On 23 October, the British Antarctic Survey flew me to the Falkland Islands, where I boarded their research vessel, James Clark Ross, to enter the treacherous Southern Ocean. ‘At sea at last,’ I wrote in my journal on 28 October, ‘in my bunk, the storm barriers in place, the chattering metal and bitching architecture announcing our new displacement. I saw my first albatross! A black-browed albatross, as flawless against the air as a carving knife. And a giant petrel, like a touch of night, bringing on the darkness.’

BAS scientists receive international praise for their research into the importance of the Southern Ocean for global climate. Nerilie Abram, Robert Mulvaney, Eric Wolff, and Manfred Mudelsee have recently published their evaluation into the Weddell Sea region of Antarctica, and it is projects like this that will be undertaken while I am south for this season, particularly as it is International Polar Year. Much of the science focuses on the dynamics that occur at boundaries such as ocean fronts, where astounding, fickle features such as meanders and eddies develop, and frontal systems galvanise the air at the transitional regions between ice-covered and ice-free waters.

One legendary front, and the psychological pistol-shot for the start of my voyage, is the Antarctic Convergence. Along its edges, warmer, subantarctic waters touch against the cold polar waters of Antarctica. Superstition and a sudden chill accompanies any crossing of its mist-blurred, particoloured bounding line as the water temperature drops by around four degrees.

We made our crossing on 29 October. In my journal, I write, ‘It is wild outside, and the metalwork keens as the ship reels from side to side. I watch the white arrowheads of the snow-squall dart through the ship’s beams like a million migrating geese, migrating souls. Where the beams illumine the ocean, there is a tiny arena wherein the storm contends against the water’s inconstancy. Only hours earlier, there had been sun and unworried seas in which fur seals hooped alongside the ship, their forms so inelegant on land now unbound in their element, lone dynamites of flesh against the multitude of waters, hundreds of miles from shore.’

The following morning dawned to a day in which the US Senate debated the possible ratification of the Laws of the Sea, a unique document constructed upon assumptions of boundary.

‘Possibly the most significant legal instrument of this century.’ was how the United Nations Secretary-General described the Treaty after its signing in 1982. Much of its ongoing development depends on defining the line separating national and international waters. With Senate ratification, the US would join 155 nations that are party to common rules on navigation, fishing, and economic development of the open seas.

The US didn’t previously adopt the laws as President Reagan deemed the deep sea mining specifics as working against the best interests of the country.

I lend my name, and a great deal of my admiration to the British research vessel HMS Challenger, which was the first major oceanographic expedition of modern times and launched oceanography as a science. On 13 March 1874, in the depths beyond Hawaii, the crew of HMS Challenger lugged aboard the first known deposits of manganese nodules, immensely valuable sources of nickel, copper and cobalt ore.

‘Man marks the earth with ruin,’ Byron says in his poem, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.’ ‘His control stops with the shore.’ Although the United Nations General Assembly declared the resources of the seabed beyond national shores to be the common heritage of mankind, there are no bounds to greed. Mark my words, as our landlocked resources begin to diminish and our mines reach to extinction, the imperialising of the oceans will intensify and Byron’s verses curdle to credulity.

‘Thy shores are empires,’ Byron once warned.

Adrift on these unbroken, enigmatic waters, I beg only that we do not map similar ruin and vested interest across our oceans.