The Naked Shore Read online

  THE NAKED SHORE

  THE NAKED SHORE

  Of the North Sea

  Tom Blass

  For my parents

  Contents

  Map

  1A North Sea Crossing

  2In Defence of the Estuary

  3The Question of the Scheldt

  4With Ensor and Octopussies in Ostend

  5Shapes and Shingle on the Naked Shore

  6Last Resorts – Being Beside the Seaside

  7Mare Frisium, Fris Non Canta

  8Myths of Origin – a Land Beneath the Sea

  9A Postcard from Atlantis

  10A North Sea Outrage

  11In the Halligen or an Axolotl in the Almost-Islands

  12Where Two Seas Meet

  13The Fishing Game

  14Radiant Star of Shetland

  15New Sea, New Chapters

  Further Wading

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  1

  A North Sea Crossing

  A grey green expanse of smudgy waters grinning angrily at one with white foam-ridges and over all a cheerless unglowing canopy, apparently made of wet blotting paper . . .

  Joseph Conrad, Mirror of the Sea

  Swaddled in jumpers, jackets and gloves I looked down from the deck of a freight ship upon a fairy-tale city of lights stretching along the south bank of the River Humber. The tide was still in flood, and the freighter, the MV Longstone, bound for the Swedish city of Gothenburg on the far side of the North Sea, had yet to slip its moorings. But it hummed and throbbed in anticipation of doing so. Dock-workers in bright boiler suits spread out along the dark quay, and even against the deep rumbling of the ship’s engines snatches of their conversation rose up like handkerchiefs to where I tried to catch them, though they were easily lost in the autumn night breeze. In the warm-looking bridge, to whose occupants I had not yet dared to introduce myself, screens and instrument panels flickered and glowed.

  I’d passed through a confusion of checkpoints and transit zones on the way to boarding the ship, donning hard hat and dayglo jerkin and signing a disclaimer to show I entered the dock at my own peril. More than half a dozen unchaperoned footsteps beyond its gates were verboten – and rightly so, given my own clumsiness and the profusion of strange vehicles threading their way between ever-changing canyon walls of shipping containers. (One, in particular I thought, a trunk-less towering pair of legs on wheels, its cabin some twenty feet above the ground, smacked both of Georges Braque and Hieronymus Bosch.) Far safer, I was told, to be passed along a chain of clipboard-toting men until safely delivered into the vessel’s cavernous, echoing hull.

  At mid-afternoon the colour-scape had been muted and utilitarian. But just before sunset the windscreens of a thousand factory-fresh estate cars glinted like the shields of warriors at some hot and distant battle between ancients. One hour after, with the sun banished to the west, a quite different luminescence, unearthly flashes of halide orange, magnesium white and peridot, cut through the gloom, silent and rhythm-less drumbeats beating off the night. Just before midnight, everything came together. The engines hummed deeper, and the Longstone tugged free of the quayside to canter out into the dark channel.

  For a good hour the fantastical lights strung out to starboard remained etched bright in the darkness, while to port the river, widening to the sea, loomed, black, brooding and intransigent.

  I slept in a spare but large and comfortable cabin on the other side of the corridor to the (steaming, odorous) galley. Scattered in the mess were relics of those who had travelled before me – well-thumbed back copies of Truckstop magazine and other reading matter. Patrick the first mate (in loco parentis for me but uncertain as to the reason for my presence) apologised for the lack of travelling companions. At weekends, he said, the ship was full to the gunwales with Irish truckers taking sides of beef to Sweden. I assured him that my own company would suffice.

  In the morning I woke slowly, gazing through the porthole at a disc of grey before heading up to the bridge, where I cradled a coffee mug and watched the freighter’s great hull beating down on spry but pliant waves.

  The measures of progress are painfully infrequent at sea and the general train of events unfolds slowly. Only Patrick, the second mate Steve and I were on the bridge, watching the horizon and the dipping gulls. The captain was in his cabin, where he’d stay for most of the day. Patrick told me that this would be a good crossing. He had spent most of the last year on the Falklands run, three weeks each way, arriving in Port Stanley feeling numb and listless through over-consumption of DVDs and lack of conversational stimulus. This trip was like a bus journey, a mere four-day round trip from the river mouth to Gothenburg a thousand miles distant on the coast of the Skagerrak.

  ‘Skayraak’, it’s pronounced, like the rasping of a crow.

  In earlier centuries the ships on this route, so much smaller and more fragile, made the same journey laden with bolts of wool and bundles of petticoats, returning with warm pelts from the deep north, ancient amber and timber. We were taking car parts and cat food to Sweden, and the boat would return with Volvos and Christmas trees.

  This had become the regular beat of the Longstone, which, named after the lighthouse, rekindled the memory of an expedition to the Farne Island of the same name, where beneath the gaze of the candy-striped column of Portland stone that had once been home to the lighthouse keeper’s daughter, Grace Darling, my son had startled a seal cub, and the cub had startled him. Both retreated to watch each other, the one peeking out from behind me, the other seeking sanctuary in a rock pool, eyes and twitching whiskers just visible above the dark but limpid waters.

  That was at the height of a glorious day when ancient rocks daubed with yolk-coloured lichen showed a kind of rough-textured mirror to the sun, and the surface of the sea was so unruffled as to seem dormant. We had eaten ice creams and counted guillemots wearing T-shirts and sunglasses. By the autumn the Farnes would be murderously inhospitable. In early times even September’s equinoctial gales drove ships into safe harbours, where they would remain until the spring. But there is no such let-up for a modern vessel like the Longstone, which treads and retreads the seaways in almost any weather, out of the Humber, steering south of the Dogger Bank as prudent skippers always have when there’s a chance of a northerly wind.

  In a day we would come close to the necklace of the Frisian Islands – Sylt (pronounced ‘Zoolt’), Amrun, Terschelling, Schiermonnikoog – and head north towards Heligoland and the Halligen – half-islands – on the way passing a forest of oil rigs sucking up the slick pools of what once were ancient trees, the flared gas like distant match flames. Only a generation old, these are among the North Sea’s newest accretions. But other features of the scar-impervious sea hold their course through all its moods – the grey-green smudginess Conrad described and the water’s angry grin, the gloomy sky above. The Phoenicians and Romans, he pondered, ‘had experienced days like this, so different in the wintry quality of the light from anything they had ever known in their native Mediterranean’.

  Sea journeys are waymarked by mealtimes. At noon a call to the bridge scratched through an intercom from the galley. ‘Tell the passenger his lunch is ready,’ was the message from Lewis the Liverpudlian cook, grey-skinned with a scalp as smooth as an eel’s, who on introduction had fixed me with a skew-eyed stare and asked, ‘D’ye speak English?’ Moved to muteness, I could only nod, thus failing to convince him.

  At the galley door he handed me a glistening hubcap of an omelette and urged me in the direction of the lonely mess room, where I ate a morsel, bolting it down with a nugget from the letters page of the Meat Trades Journal.

  As the Longstone lurched and yawed, I took pleasure in the few birds studding the m
audlin expanse. Gulls were in abundance. Scarcer and more thrilling was the sight of an occasional kittiwake or swarm of tiny black petrels skirting the wave tops with giddying audacity. (On 17 September 1798, aboard a German-bound packet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, leaving England for the first time, observed, ‘A single solitary wild duck – You cannot conceive how interesting a thing it looked in that round objectless desert of waters.’)

  At sea every vessel within eyeshot becomes worthy of remark, as one might discuss the features of passing strangers on a lonely country walk. First, a handful of trawlers, then an improbably top-heavy container ship, and next another ‘roll-on, roll-off’ vessel or ‘ro-ro’, a direct competitor of ours, heading back from Gothenburg. Our mate knew its mate, and he regaled me with an impenetrable tale of commercial rivalries, undercutting shipping companies and not-to-be-trusted employment agencies, lest I should be duped into the misperception that the freight business was as simple as transferring goods from place to place. The ships recalibrated the horizon, lending scale to the near-eternity of interminable wave tops.

  It was easy to be lulled into forgetting why I found myself aboard the Longstone, mesmerised by her slow roll, the passing of hours, the cups of tea. But the endless churning mass of water was the very reason. I had set out to write a book about this sea and its world, too often snubbed by writers, derided for its moody lugubriousness, its inclination towards inclemency, damp chilly sands and a decidedly utilitarian aspect when glanced at from a certain angle. But both the sea and the shores it beats upon possess their own allure. Just as the sparkle of the Mediterranean out-twinkles a multitude of vices, do not the mists, miasmas and surliness of the North Sea cloak a multitude of gems?

  True, the sea so deftly erases the clues to its own history. Already many of the coastal defences built during the last world war have crumbled into oblivion. Relics from previous centuries and millennia are more elusive still.

  Early inhabitants of the North Sea basin, the Chauci and the Frisians, constructed terpen – earth mounds that rose above the floodplain upon which they built their homes, granaries, livestock stores and places for growing crops. Such structures yielded to the temper fits and ill-humoured sorties of the waves, which seldom left lasting damage. The move to build dykes – pushing back the chaos of the sea – coincided with the spread of Christianity. Surely, archaeologists have suggested, there is some parallel between the reclamation of the land and the saving of the pagan soul?

  It took classical minds born of warmer waters to name the sea and its parts and preserve their observations for posterity. These early voyagers felt out of their depth in all sorts of ways. The tides were a perennial puzzle. In 325 BC a Greek, Pytheas of Marseille, described their rising and falling as ‘the lungs of the sea’ when he encountered them off the coast of the Netherlands. Pliny the Elder, on being told of the twice-daily transformation of the mudflats of the Frisian Islands, was uncertain as to whether they should be regarded as belonging to land or sea, challenging, as so often the North Sea continues to, the long-held axiom that the one is not the other. Pliny called the sea adjacent to Britain the Oceanus Britannicus, and that adjoining the German coast the Mare Germanicum.

  Both were tricky places for the Romans. Partly on account of those treacherous tides, but also because they were not the masters of these waters. It was the Frisians and other tribes that possessed the upper hand, and the Pax Romana applied less readily out of reach of land. In AD 69 Roman vessels fought a pitched naval battle with a cohort of mutinous Germans who had had the audacity to steal twenty-four of Caesar’s finest galleys. A century on and the Picts were the most assiduous of the piratical tribes. Later it was the Franks and the Saxons. The last straw was a maritime assault on Roman Britain and northern Gaul in AD 367. Described as a barbarica conspiratio, this was a hellish combination of Picts, Scots, Saxons, Franks and even the Attacotti, elusive British barbarians, possibly cannibals.

  As Roman influence waned, so the North Sea frothed and swirled with new, turbulent movements. Picts swooped down the coast from Scotland, while Saxons flew fast and light across the Mare Germanicum, the vacuum left in the wake of the legions drawing traders and invaders (the distinction was blurred), their undoubtedly well-earned reputations for rapine and pillage, but also new words and phrases to contribute to the creation of England and the English.

  In Whitby once, among the stones of the ‘Dracula’ abbey, I was struck by the starkness of the difference between the accents of a visiting family from Newcastle and that of the natives. Geordie’s origins lies with the Teutonic Angles, hence ‘gan’ – as in ‘gan doon toon’, from the German gehen for ‘go’, while their Yorkshire hosts’ linguistic ancestry lay further north (arse, bairn, dollop and flit all have Norse heritage). Some fifteen hundred years after their arrival, fifty miles of English coast still reflect ancient ethnic diferences, the origins of which lie on the far side of the North Sea.

  History dwells on the sacking of monasteries and the clash between the one god and the many. But in that aperçu between empires the North Sea lands were alive with a prolixity of tongues and the deities they prayed to. Mediterranean invaders had brought wine, olive oil, marble and underfloor heating, shipping out skins, salt, gold and hunting dogs, but exotic tastes outlived them (and were never uniquely theirs).

  Among the treasures unearthed from the seventh-century burial mound at Sutton Hoo were Merovingian coins, silver from Byzantium and amber from the Baltic. The peoples of the North Sea were spreading their wings and their sailcloth. Ships not only reached distant shores, but represented sacred spaces conjoining the realms of the living with eternity. Vikings, Saxons and other maritime people buried their queens, warriors and shamans in, beneath or above them, sacrificing entourages of handmaidens, concubines, horses and gaming sets to accompany the deceased on the great sea voyage to the land of the dead.

  The Oseberg ship, discovered beneath an earthen mound in 1914, contained fifteen decapitated horses, a cart and a sleigh. Other sites have yielded chess sets, dog harnesses, swords and drinking vessels. No archaeologist has ever wholly penetrated the mind of a Saxon or Viking undertaker, and the symbolism of the boat is only hazily apprehended. An academic called Martin Carver has described the Sutton Hoo burial as a poem drawing ‘on the time and space of the imagination, creating not a direct statement but a palimpsest of allusions’, and in so doing outlined the parameters of our understanding of an event so dark, so bright and so distant. Another, Robert Van de Noort, argues that the souls possessed by the ships accompanied the deceased, but a ship burial might also have made another statement, affixing a community’s sense of belonging to the sea.

  Perhaps because the tonsured, peaceable monks ultimately found themselves both on the winning side of history and with a free hand to write it, their former tormentors have been sidelined within the European narrative, dismissed as part of its misspent youth. Proper, respectable, history begins with the payment of taxes and tithes and the consolidation of the power of the Church. These changes transformed the North Sea as a political space, and the Scandinavian kings and warlords were pushed to the fringes of a Europe whose centre of gravity now lay further to the south. Trade flourished as burgeoning cities inland demanded more in the way of goods from overseas.

  Naval architecture responded in kind. In middle age, the once sharp-prowed longboat, so well suited to slipping (viciously, inquisitively, lustfully) in and out of estuaries, lost its sleekness. The fat capacious cog, its successor, was sluggish and portly in contrast with the svelte beauty it replaced, but suited the purposes of a general trading ship, with sufficient bulk to carry cargoes of grain, timber, wool and leather. This too would become outmoded, supplanted by the smaller, faster but still beamy fluyt better serving the need of merchants of the times – for the reason that it was less of a catastrophe to lose a small boat than a large one. Boat design reflected the topography of the coast, the needs of trade and contemporary perils, whether tides, pirates or jealous r
ivals.

  And over time, taller, straighter dykes and sea walls and ever more efficient means of bleeding the land of the polluting sea sapped away the ambiguity of the shoreline. The very identity of the sea altered. Once a proving ground for warriors, it acquired a new role as a hinterland, serving the interests of elites whose greater concern was the possession of estates and castles than mastery of the waves. Soon the sea would fall into the purview of scientists and navigators, their new mathematical arts enhancing and supplanting the ancient art of reckoning by ‘cloud formations and the colour of the water, marine creatures and birds, iceblink, currents, driftwood and weed, the feel of a wind’, as the writer David Hay put it. In the first century of the second millennium the chronicler Adam of Bremen coined the term Nachtsprung, ‘to leap in the night’, to describe the practice of steering a ship in such a way that the Pole Star remained visible above the same part of the masthead at all times when sailing on the same tack.

  No less illuminating than the stars above were the mud and shingle below. Many sailors forsook the astrolabe and compass, which were fiddly, expensive and prone to error, but no ship would leave port without lead and line, a hollow lead bell filled with tallow at the end of a long rope. By lowering the bell to the bottom of the sea and retrieving it, a captain knew both the depth of the water beneath him and the constitution of the sea-bed. Given the ephemeral appearance of the surface, these gave a more reliable indication of location than any other available clues.

  By the late seventeenth century, the navigator Captain John Hammond was able to give the ‘Directions To Be Observed Going and Coming From Norway’ in around a dozen sentences, half of one of which follows.

  On ye North edge of Well Bank, if you have 28 fathoms of water, stony ground, without you be Easterly, the SW part ye same and 12 and 13 fathom, but on ye middle of this bank, 17 or 18 or more depth, sometimes fine sand and other times coarse and black specks, ye soundings on this Bank being Variable but Steering East you deepen your water and sometimes meet with coarse ground and 27 and 28 fathoms water and then less before you fall off your east side between the Well Bank and white water, where you’ll find at 24 and 25 fathoms nothing on the lead . . .