*

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*AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1991

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M 1205- 9109 36,00 F

?up

_lencounters We invite readers to send us photographs to be considered

for publication in this feature. Your photo should show

a painting, a sculpture, piece of architecture or any othersubject which seems to be an example of cross-fertilization

between cultures. Alternatively, you could send us picturesof two works from different cultural backgrounds in whichyou see some striking connection or resemblance.

Please add a short caption to all photographs.

Untitled

1989, tapestry cartoon (50 x 50 cm) by Raymond Pichaud

In Western art a cartoon was originally a full-sized drawing done on pasteboard and used as a model

for a tapestry, a fresco painting, a mosaic or a stained glass design. In its purity of lineand geometric tension, this cartoon by the contemporary French artist Raymond Pichaud seems

to be the fruit of an encounter between this Western tradition and the spirit of African art.

r

AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1991 CONTENTS

4Interview with

TAHARBENJELLOUN

Thel Inesco^COURIER

44th YEAR

Published monthly In 35 languages end in Braille

"The Governments of the States

parties to this Constitution on behalf

of their peoples declare,

"that since wars begin in the minds

of men, It Is in the minds of men

that the defences of peace must beconstructed...

"that a peace based exclusively

upon the political and economic

arrangements of governments

would not be a peace which could

secure the unanimous, lasting and

sincere support of the peoples of

the world, and that the peace must

therefore be founded, If It Is not to

fail, upon the Intellectual and moral

solidarity of mankind.

"For these reasons, the States

parties ... are agreed and

determined to develop and to

Increase the means of

communication between their

peoples and to employ these means

for the purposes of mutual

understanding and a truer

and more perfect knowledge ofeach other's lives..."

Extract from the Preamble to the

Constitution of UNESCO,

London, 16 November 1945

11

SEA FEVER

Fragments for a private iconographyof the sea

by Edouard J. Maunick 12

TIME AND TIDE

The wondrous deepby Rachid Sabbaghi

The legacy of Confuciusby W. E. Cheong

16

20

In the wake of Ulyssesby André Kédros

Pacific pioneersby Tipene O'Regan

24

28

VOICES FROM THE SEA

Music of the waves

by Georges Moustaki

Yemanja, goddess of the seaby Mario de Aratanha

Night watch, aloneby Arthur Gillette

32

34

37

STORIES AND SYMBOLS

The shipwrecked sailor's story 40ta Taro

43The strange destiny of Urashima Taroby Ninomiya Masayuki

Moby Dick, monster of the forbidden seasby A. Robert Lee 46

Reflections on the ocean

by Elisabeth Mann Borgese 50

Sailor beware!

by Pier Giovanni d'Ayala 54

71IN BRIEF...

72UNESCO IN ACTION

ENVIRONMENT

The Blue Plan

for the Mediterranean

by Michel Bâtisse

75UNESCO IN ACTION

WORLD HERITAGE

An ecological Eldorado:Peru's ManuNational Park

by José Serra- Vega

78UNESCO IN ACTION

THE SILK ROADSThe returnof the Fulk al-Salamah

by François-Bernard Huyghe

81UNESCO IN ACTION

News from UNESCO

82LISTENINGRecent records

Cover:

sea-wave and sunset.

THE LAST FRONTIER Back cover:

A scientist looks at the seaearly 16th-century miniature

by Don Walsh 5«

The ghost ship of the Arcticby David Gunston 63 Special consultant

The four pillars of Neptune's temple for this issue:

by Jacques Ferrier 66 LUC CUYVERS

The diver's lonely world 7Z

TAH AR

BEN JELLOUNTahar Ben Jelloun is a Moroccan poet and

novelist who spans two cultures, Arab and

French. In 1987 he became the first Arab

writer to win France's most prestigious

literary prize when his novel La Nuit sacrée

was awarded the Prix Goncourt.

An English translation of La Nuit sacrée

appeared in 1989 under the title The

Sacred Night, and several of his other

works have been published in English,

including The Sand Child (1987) and Silent

Day in Tangier (1991).

Alert to the hopes and sufferings of Arab

men and women and to the stirrings of

freedom in the world at large, Tahar Ben

Jelloun here talks about his work and the

commitment to truth and justice from

which it springs.

Let's start at the beginning. You are anArab writer who writes in French. Why?

I belong to a specific category of writers,those who speak and write in a languagedifferent from that of their parents. I am aMoroccan, an Arab. My culture is Arab,Islamic, but it was in French, the language ofthe former colonial power, that I spontane¬ously expressed myself when I began to write.This is a paradox which stems from a histor¬ical situation. Morocco, which was a French

Protectorate from 1912 to 1956, managed tobe receptive to French culture without losingany part of its identity. I don't feel guilty

about expressing myself in French; nor do Ifeel that I am continuing the work of thecolonizers. Actually, what I express in Frenchcould very well be expressed in any otherlanguage.

All the same, the fact that I do not use the

language of my people perhaps means that Ican take liberties with certain themes which

the Arabic language, the language of theQur'anwhich naturally intimidates mewould not allow me to take. On the one hand

there are taboos and prohibitions; on the otherthere is my own sense of propriety. It isdifficult for us to ill-treat the Arabic language.

For me poetry is a situationa state of being,

a way offacing life and facing history.

Do you mean that the language of tradi¬tion, of unchanging values, is your mothertongue, whereas to break new ground andexplore other directions, you need to expressyourself in a foreign language?

Yes, it helps and liberates the imagination.For many people, poetry is working withwords, with language. It is hard to imagine apoet who expresses himself in a language otherthan that of his people. But there is anotherconception of poetry, which is, for me, abroader and more accommodating one. Forme poetry is a situationa state of being, away of facing life and facing history. Poetryis not only a set of words which are chosento relate to each other, it is something whichgoes much further than that to provide aglimpse of our vision of the world. It does thisthrough images, through a musical universe.And this universe can very well be expressedin words and syllables which are not those ofone's mother tongue.

I am a guest of the French language. Mypoems in French are born of my interactionwith the French language, which is not thesame as that of a French poet.

Precisely. What kind of adaptation hasthere been between the French language andyour universe and between your universe andthe French language?

There has been no adaptation, but rathera marriage, a kind of cohabitation that I haveentered into with French and which means

that I give this rather Cartesian languageanother feel, another memory. I introduce itinto a world to which it could never other¬

wise have been admitted. If you send a Frenchsociologist, researcher or journalist toMorocco, he will not see the kind of thingsthat I see as a result of my deep involvementas an Arab and a Moroccan. The French

investigator will not see these things or be ableto express them.

In a sense, we Arab writers who write in

French are the ones who offer hospitality tothe French language! Not only do we adoptit, we invite it home, we transform it, we take

it to places where it is not accustomed to go.Sometimes it gets lost, but so much the bettersince it's a language which is somewhat toorigid except when it is taken in hand by greatpoets like Mallarmé, Baudelaire or Rimbaud.Jean Genet transformed Freneh4nto a beau¬tiful rebel princess. But few French poets havedone with the language what poets like KatebYacine or Aimé Césaire, two great franco¬phone poets, have done. These are writerswho have gone very far creatively, experimen¬tally, and as craftsmen of the language.

Different images? Different sounds?Above all a different manner. Poetry is a

form of mathematics, a highly rigorous rela¬tionship with words. The genius of an AiméCésaire is to know how to choose words with

fantastic precision and to marry them in sucha way that they produce unexpected images.By doing this he creates new insights intomeaning which are surprising and sublime.This is beauty, something that cannot beexplained away technically. Beauty is first andforemost an emotion. When I read Aimé

Césaire's Cahiers d'un retour au pays natal forthe first time, I was spellbound. The samething when I discovered Kateb Yacine'sNedjma. Perhaps my sensibility steers metowards these writers who are out on their

own.

For writers like you and them, has writingin French madefor a bigger or smaller reader¬ship in the countries where you were born?

It may seem odd, but writing and pub

lishing in France has enabled me to commu¬nicate with a pretty wide public, even in theMaghreb. And this public reads me just as wellin French as in Arabic. Those who read me

in French are more numerous, perhapsbecause they want to go to the original. ButI must say that Arab publishing is in such amess today that so far I haven't found mypublic in the Arab world. Piracy or unautho¬rized reproduction is doing terrible harm. Thepirates not only steal translations, they tamperwith them so that your work is distorted andyour relationship with the public is perverted.Not to mention countries where books are

purely and simply banned because of an occa¬sional erotic or political allusion, for example.

I think that on the whole publishing inthe Arab world is in a bad way. What is pub¬lished there is not always subjected to seriousstandards of criticism. Vast quantities of stuffget into print. Some of it is good, but muchof it is bad. There is a confusion which reflects

a general situation.

In what sense?

The Arab world as a whole has been in the

grip of a serious crisis for forty-odd years. Isay "grip" because the crisis has become a stateof being which takes hold of people and steri¬lizes them, paralyzing their creative impulse.As if the Arab world had not experiencedsufficient pain to produce great writers suchas Dostoevsky or Kafka, who were born ofsuffering and humiliation. Perhaps we havenot yet reached the bottom of the pit.

We do not have many intellectuals whocan speak out for us internationally. We haveno writers who are recognized, respected andloved outside the Arab world. The rest of the

world only seems to have become aware ofthe existence of Naguib Mahfouz since he wonthe Nobel Prize two years ago. Basically

people are only interested in the Arab world Iwhen there is trouble. Who in Europe knows Ithe work of Yusuf Idris, Edouard Kharrat and IChaker Essayab? Mahmoud Darwish is only Iknown in Europe to supporters of the Pales- ]tinian cause, and not even to all of them.

You are not sticking to the point. . . .If we have no Arab intellectuals of interna- 1

tional stature, it is because, on the one hand, jwe live in a state of generalized mediocrity, Iwe are suspended in the pit without touching 'the bottom, as I said just now, and on theother because the world does not look to us

out of a healthy desire for knowledge. Thetwo reasons are complementary, I think.

Let's examine the first reason a little moreclosely. What stands in the way of creativethinking? The position occupied by theintellectual?

For me the intellectual, the man of thought,doubt and analysis, should by definition givethe best of himself. He may find himself inone of two distinct situations: he lives either

in a country where freedom prevailsrealfreedom not sham freedomor in a countrywhere repression provokes him to make somekind of an outburst because he can no longerendure humiliation, fear and silence. In eachof these two cases, he can create.

But the intellectual may also find himselfin a nebulous, ill-defined, equivocal situation.This is often our case. What have we achieved

since the end of the Second World War? We

have established, or more exactly we haveallowed to be established, petty bourgeoisregimes in which everything is average, medi¬ocre. In this situation of "averageness", whichI would prefer to call mediocrity, intellectualstry to keep going. But their situation is verydifficult. Those who have had the courage to

voice their opposition have often paid a veryhigh price. We should pay tribute to them.

Is there not also a habit of "thinkingtogether", a fear ofbeing noticed, ofstandingout from the community at large? People feelsafer, finally, in this average situation.

There is a constant, something which youfind everywhere. The individual, as a uniqueentity, as a singular human being, is not really,fully recognized. What is recognized, eventoday, and whatever people may say, is whatlies behind the individual: the clan, the family,the tribe, the district or the village, but notthe expression of the individual's uniqueness.However, a modern civilization is only pos¬sible when it is accepted that singular beingsexist and express themselves freely.

In our societies, when a person expressesdisagreement with the general consensus,when he or she is no longer at one with therest of the tribe, then that person is rejected.An individual voice can be heard in a choir

that otherwise sings in unison. This is some¬thing that is not excused.

Of course, there are also degrees, nuances,and steps forward. Egypt, for instance, seemsto me to be in process of breaking up this pat¬tern, perhaps because it is a country steepedin history and because its experience of

modern democracy goes back to 1923. . . .Egypt has a head start, historically speaking,it has had the time to train minds for the exer¬

cise of citizenship. It is the country which hassuffered more ordeals than the others to getwhere it is. . . .

To be fair, we should cite particular break¬throughs in other Arab countries. But whatis certain is that a long road lies ahead. Sub¬jectivity is still generally frowned on. Peopledo not understand that a writer or a film¬

maker explores his subjectivity and expressesit in public.

Take the great Egyptian singer UrnKalsum. When she sang she tugged at theheartstrings of tens of millions of Arabs. . .Is that subjectivity or not?

It is somewhere between subjectivity andwidely shared values. She played on a key¬board of emotions, but these emotions were

attuned to archetypes, rather conventional sty¬lized sentiments. We are rarely shown any¬thing of a private world. Her songs are rootedmuch more in what you might call a "collec¬tive subjectivity".

You naturally compare Western societieswith Arab societies. If intellectuals aren'toften portrayed in a good light in the Arab

world, why is this so and what can be doneabout it? Intellectuals and writers have

played a big part in bringing change to theWest.

For the moment I don't see change comingabout through the intellectuals, for the simple,terrible reason that there is a gulf between theArab peoples and Arab intellectuals.

Were the ties all that close between Voltaire

and the French peasantry in the eighteenthcentury?

There has always been, everywhere, apolemical, sometimes even violent relationshipbetween intellectuals and the people. But theimportant thing is that there should be a rela¬tionship of some kind. In the Arab world,since the cultural disruptions caused by coloni¬zation, there is no longer a link between thecultural habits of peoples and the ways ofthinking and creating of modern intellectuals.They are two separate worlds. The onlyexample which comes to mind, in recent years,of a marked congruence between the peopleand the intellectuals, is the case of the musi¬

cian Sheikh Imam and the performer-poetFuad Nagm in Egypt. And even then, theirmessage was transmitted through the mediumof popular song on cassettes. If they had beenwriters in an ivory tower that symbiosiswould not have existed.

I would add that although they were verypopular, it was popularity within an intellec¬tual, militant stream of opinion. They gotthrough not to the peasant masses but to theintelligentsia in the broadest sense of the term.Not only the intellectuals, the thinkers, butthe hundreds of thousands of people who canread a newspaper, who watch the television,who live in the cities, who travel perhaps . . .who are, in any case, influenced by the cinema,the radio, and television.

There has always

been, everywhere, a

polemical, sometimes

even violent

relationship between

intellectuals and the

people. But the

important thing is that

there should be a

relationship of some

kind.

If the circumstances are propitious,writers, painters, sculptors and poets can makean impact on those groups. But they cannotreach the masses, above all the peasants.Perhaps they could do so gradually, if themedia tried to make them known and helpedthem to get their message across to the greatestnumber. But as a rule the media are open tothose whose material is undemanding,inoffensiveactors and singers.

All day long they broadcast soap operaswhich propagate a lowbrow ideology. Todaypeople watch only this kind of stuff. As aresult, most intellectuals worth their salt have

no option but to get quietly on with theirwork, far from the limelight. Myself, I don'tthink there's anything wrong in taking thatdecision, hoping that future generations willdiscover one's work and like it.

Ifyou think that little can be expected ofthe intellectuals for the moment, where willchange come from?

Let's take the example of Europe. Untilvery recently there were three powerful dic¬tatorships in Europe: Spain, Portugal andGreece. The future for these countries seemed

totally blocked, it was impossible to see whatthey could do. And yet they have been reborn,initially because of a new-found politicallegitimacy. Finally they accepted the verysimple idea that to lead a country, you mustperiodically hold a national consultation inwhich people representing differentprogrammes can make a bid for power.

It all starts when power is desacralized andpoliticians become vested with it, not becausethey have bought the best machine-guns orchosen the best moment to overthrow their

comrades, but because they have a vision ofthe future, a programme for which they haveobtained a majority which trusts them.

But aren't you putting the cart before thehorse?

Yes of course. That's what intellectuals do.

It's a long hard job, and it's not by producingcommitted, ideological literature that you canget the message across. There are two levels:specifically political work and creative work.In general the two are quite distinct, otherwiseyou have art or literature which is disem¬bodied, sterile.

How can intellectuals prepare the groundfor progress?

They must get people used to the existenceof doubt, of criticism, of disagreement, praisethe courage involved in opposition, insist onthe right to say no, to be alone, to stand outfrom the herd. Creative artists can say all thisin their own way and in their own field, byhard, rigorous work.

Two attitudes are possible. Creative artistscan do their own thing, try to satisfy them¬selves without bothering whether their coun¬trymen understand them or not. Or elsethey can try to invest the strongholds of massculture. Unfortunately it is impossible todisregard such an important medium astelevision, for example. We should knowhow to use it, learn to work in it and expressnew values in it. And of course we must

fight for that. New ideas should confrontold ideas, as they do everywhere. We mustrefer again to the example of Europe. Peoplehave fought to make Europe what it is today.Freedom is not something that is served upon a plate, like breakfast. It has to be earned.Be vigilant, for nothing one achieves lastsfor ever.

But how should an intellectual approachthis task?

Freedom is not

something that is

served up on a plate,

like breakfast.

It has to be earned.

Be vigilant, for

nothing one achieves

lasts forever.

First and foremost through self-expression.But what is happening today? There seems tobe a kind of sound-proof barrier. The intellec¬tuals cannot be heard. Are they expressingthemselves but we can't hear them? Perhaps.Perhaps they are shouting their heads off andwe can't hear them.

Isn't one big problem that of being ableto communicate freely with the rest of theworld? Keeping abreast of what's going onelsewhere, ofwhat otherpeople are thinking?

Yes, there isn't enough information and noattempt is made to encourage people to knowwhat's going on. But there is always rumour,the weapon of the poor. Rumour, humour,ironythey can be very effective but of coursethey're not enough.

Who in your opinion, in the novel, art orliterature, have prepared or are preparing away to the future? You mentioned NaguibMahfouz.

Yes, Mahfouz is our national monument.

But don't forget Taha Hussein before him. Orthe Iraqi writer Al Sayyab, who died inKuweit in 1962. To my mind he is a very greatpoet. Modern, ahead of his time, he broke newground in Arab poetry. He had a vision of theworld that was universalist and at the same

time deeply rooted in his native country. Andgreat rigour in the use of Arabic.

Adonis has brought new life to Arabic,but in a way which does not seem to meentirely successful. His poetry is highly tech¬nical, highly cerebral. Mahmoud Darwish isquite the opposite. He is a poet of verbalgenerosity, who has a sense of imagery, abroad perception, and writes for a massaudience. The ideal would be a mixture of

Adonis and Darwish. A poet like that would

8

be the greatest poet of the Arab world. . . .But we don't have such a poet. . . . There arevery few great poets in the world anyway.

What about short story writers?Some of them have produced very good

work. First of all there is Yusuf Idris, a veryfine writer whom I would rank with William

Faulkner. In a few pages he can express thepreoccupations of a whole society. Bydescribing a seemingly trivial incident orcharacter, he leaves traces which endure. Idris

is a great writer.

Painters?

The painters I like are abstract painters. Forme the greatest of them is the Moroccanpainter Ahmed Charkawi, who died in 1967at the age of thirty-six. He is a painter whoinspires strong feelings. He uses the basiccolours and signs of our conscious or uncons¬cious universe, our universe as Arabs andAfricans.

Working in depth with language, signs andimages is one way ofpreparing the groundfor modernity, preparing peoplefor detachedthinking, for freedom. Does it lead to disin¬tegration or to synthesis? Is it a search for com¬promise between what is inside and what isoutside, between old and new, or is it a source

of great tension which destroys all sense ofcontinuity?

Initially, to my mind, we have to talk interms of making a clean break. We must dothis to shock people and make them think.Later we must try to look for commonground. Above all we must stop posing asvictims of the West and behaving negativelytowards the West. We must participate withthe West on an equal footing in the reconstruc-

^/

tion of the world. We must have our say, notthrough violence, aggression or fear. We mustspeak out calmly and forcefully. We shall onlybe able to enter the new world era if we agreeto engage in dialogue with the other side. Itis through accepting other people in our owncountries that we shall come to respect ourneighbours and be respected in our turn. Thenwe shall be able to imagine our commonfuture together. If we want the state to respectand guarantee human rights, we must respectone another first. The newborn child must see

men showing respect for women, for example,and vice versa.

Is your own work an attempt to breakthings apart or to see things whole?

I came to poetry through the urgent needto denounce injustice, exploitation, humilia¬tion. I know that's not enough to change theworld. But to remain silent would have been

a kind of intolerable complicity.The break is there: a break with the litany

of silences. Uttering in poetry the desire fora more human world, while recognizing thelimits of literature. And yet one must write,even and above all if human beings are notparticularly good or decent.

Which characters and which themes in

your work are most representative of yourattitude?

My characters are often driven by a pas¬sionate desire for justice. They are rebelliousand incorruptible. I would cite two of them,a woman, Harrouda, and a man, Moha. Each

of them, in different books, bears witness to

the wounds of the peoples of the Maghreb.Perhaps they are marginal, but they forcefullyexpress a passion for truth and dignity. WhenI think about my work with a certain detach¬ment, I realize that I have written about the

dispossessed, the condition of immigrants, thecondition of women who do not enjoy thesame legal rights as men, the Palestinians whoare deprived of their land and condemned toexile and despair. Even in the short book Iwrote about the sculptor Giacometti I deve¬loped these main themes, themes of solitudeand anguish.

I who love life in spite of all that mars it,I who love friendship, jokes and laughter, actu¬ally write about wounds, the eternal treasonsof life. It's not very funny but it's sincere. Mycommitment is to sincerity.

Dutch ships In a Chinese harbour. Detail from a Chinese Coromandel lacquer screen (18th century).

SEA FEVER

'IF they but knew, almost all men in their degree, some time sea increased rapidly. New and valuable mineral and energy

or other, cherish very nearly the same feeling toward the ocean resources were discovered, and later recovered, from the sea

with me," says Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville's great floor. Marine transportation methods were revolutionized. New

novel Moby Dick. Melville was alluding to a universal bond uses of the ocean were proposed and studied: obtaining clean

between people and their ocean, though he readily admitted energy from the difference in temperature between warm sur-

many of his contemporaries were unaware of it. face layers and cold deep waters, for instance, or from tides and

What are the reasons for this bond? Some scientists believe waves; recovering new and promising drugs from a variety of

that our reactions may have something to do with the sound marine organisms; or disposing of certain wastes, safely and

waves emitted by water. Others feel there is a connection with effectively, in the ocean environment,

the visual appeal of water. Water is playful and refreshing. For But soon this sense of optimism was marred by a number

most of us it is an essential ingredient of natural beauty. of incidents. Just over thirty years ago the Minamata incident

Our feelings for the sea seem to reflect intuitively the impor- shocked the world. People living in or near the Japanese town

tance of water to life. Water made life possible on Earth, of that name were poisoned, killed or crippled for life by indus-

Without it there would have been no atmosphere, and condi- trial pollutants discharged into the sea and returned to them

tions on the planet would have been too extreme to make life through the marine food chain. Shortly thereafter, other inci-

possible. Life probably originated in water, and we still carry dents occurred, seemingly with increasing frequency. There wastraces of these origins. The blood that runs through our veins concern over radioactive contamination caused by the falloutis similar in the composition of its salts to sea water. So is the from nuclear tests. Pesticides such as DDT began to affect theamniotic fluid in which the human embryo floats for the dura- coastal environment. Valuable fish stocks disappeared, fished

tion of its gestation period. No wonder then that babies appear to near-ruin by increasingly effective fishing methods. Massiveto thoroughly enjoy a warm bath, as though it were a return oil spills, from platforms as well as vessel accidents, smotheredto the maternal womb. beaches and birds, causing a public outcry and providing visible

Some scientists believe that there may even have been an evidence for the first time that there were limits to human

aquatic phase in our evolution. In their view, our ancestors may domination of the sea. No matter how much we may thinkhave spent a good deal of their time in the balmy waters of we control the sea, it has many ways of reminding us that it

tropical seas rather than in trees or on grass flats. The theory will always have the last word.

is by no means universally accepted, but it would help explain The development of mass communications, especially ofour attraction to the sea and our kinship with dolphins and television, has greatly affected our perception of the sea to the

whales, mammals that joined the migration to the sea but stayed extent that we no longer need to be at sea, or even see it in

there and readapted to fish-like forms and habits. person, to experience its mysteries. As a result of television

If any of the above is true, our feelings toward the ocean today's generation knows more about the sea than any before,should be universal. And that is what this issue of the UNESCO although the information is not necessarily based on first-hand

Courier seeks to explore. By examining the role of the ocean experience; nor is it always of high quality,

in the human imagination, it looks for similarities in the ways Today the ocean is perceived less as a place of danger and

in which people in different parts of the world have sought to menace than as a beautiful, romantic place where it is possibleexpress their feelings about the sea. Are there themes common to live and relax. In it live creatures not like Moby Dick, theto sea stories of the distant past and their modern equivalents? threatening monster that sank Captain Ahab's ship, but gentle,What about cultural divisions? Are there, for instance, similar- singing whales. In an age when sea travel has become far saferities between the attitudes towards the sea of the Polynesians, than it once was, we relive the fear of shipwreck in the com-

who have always been surrounded by water, and the Chinese? fort of our living rooms. We feel more comfortable and familiarIn the last few decades there have been dramatic changes with the sea, and yet at the same time we want it to remain

in our uses of the sea. Driven by a need for more space and mysterious. What lurks beneath the surface, in the eternalresources, we built machinery to explore and exploit the sea, darkness of the abyss? L.C.

even to its deepest reaches. We apportioned and reapportioned

it, and SOUght tO live or relax along its shores in ever growing LUC CUYVERS is a Belgian writer and film producer who specializes in marinenumbers. And finally we acquired the ability to affect and even and maritime affairs. He is president of the Mare Nostrum Foundation, a non-

i profit educational organization created to inform the general public about oceanresource issues. He is the author of 4 books and numerous articles on the ocean,

Much Of this was, at least initially, accompanied by a Sense and recendy completed an 8.pan international television series on man's rela-of optimism. During the 1960s, the annual food yield from the tionship with the sea, entitled The Blue Revolution. 1 1

Fragments for a privateby Edouard /. Maunick

JL RAGMENTS and not extracts. Identifiable bits and pieces, notnecessarily regular. Spaces of the imagination rather than tidy

parcellings. Here the sea broke against the land of the livingand the dead in accordance with the unchanging law of the tides.

But it receded and did not carry off all that it had brought. Inthe live salt and the dead seaweed, it left fragments, odds and

ends, flotsam and jetsam, over which the tides no longer haveany power or rights. On the rocks and along the shorelines they

came to rest; and there, wishing to use them in various ways,maybe for the purposes of some mysterious spell, coasters andinlanders out on a stroll picked them up, these remnants afloat

in the stream of time, these shreds like impalpable scrolls.Iconography and not album. Images on the loose and not

portraits confined to a page. A tale told by the sea, but not

in writing. The other side of the ephemeral. No longer the fas¬cinating yet oh so fleeting calligraphy of foam, but instead theindelible imprints of the memorable: events, mere circum¬

stances, occurrences. All that the sea utters, all that it murmurs

and mouths in its unending ebb and flow.

A private iconography, like a private collection. It belongsto J.M.D. Solitude, sixty years old, hailing from an island inthe Indian Ocean, in love with words. It was in his house with

its back turned to the sea, open on the dirt tracks and wounded

grasses, that I found, the morning after a terrible cyclone, ahandsome notebook with stitched, clothbound pages of the kindthat can be bought in stationers' shops in London, Melbourne

EDOUARD J. MAUNICK, Mauritian poet and writer, is the author of a number

of books including Ensoleillé vif (Apollinaire Prize, 1976), Anthologies* _ personnelles (1984) and Paroles pour solder la mer (1989). He is currently1 a¿ director of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works.

j<^

Jg*

íH^r

and Vancouver; a thing of such beauty it seemed that wind andrain had not dared damage it. For years I refrained from opening

it, from cutting the thick paper band around it, girding it like

a precious wad, frightened that I might be betraying a friend¬ship so close that it had made us alike, J.M.D. Solitude and

myself, and so much so that we might have issued from thesame womb.

iconography of the sea An islander dreams

of distant shores

When I told my friend, who like myself was always travel¬ling, that I had only just managed to rescue his diary from the

storm, he answered that I should keep it, "as one more secret

between us". But recently a letter from him was forwarded to

me in which he mysteriously announced that he was "goingaway for ever". "Not dead", he explained, "just somewhere

else". Further on he added: "I am counting on you and on all

that lies between us not to let anyone try to find out where

I am. Let's say that my exile is now total. . . . I'm no longer

the same man. ... It has gone on too long. . . . Leave me to

my wanderings. ..." A postscript mentioned the rescued note¬

book, giving me leave to do whatever I liked with it.I opened it with the feeling that I was going to find in it

things I already knew. I repeat, J.M.D. Solitude and I have 13

the same past and the same present. What I found in the note¬

book resembled my own memory: a leitmotiv of the sea as set

down in a private iconography. From it I reproduce three

fragments at random.

14

III. Looking at the sea . . .

When one is seventeen years old and comes from the Masca-

rene Islands, strewn like pieces of rock or lava off the southeast

coast of Africa, one fast feels all but cursed, as though doomedto go round in circles for ever. Distances are not distances but

a number of spans. After closing books and magazines, and espe¬

cially the big illustrated encyclopaedia with reproductions,

maps, names of countries and words never seen beforeat ship

alone: binnacle and bobstay, crossjack and garboard, jibboom

and sheer strake, spanker gaff, stanchion on coming out of

the cinema, after seeing Gerónimo, Mutiny on the Bounty, Pepe

leMoko and The Count ofMonte-Cristo and a ragbag of westerns,

both silents and talkies, Indian films and Egyptian films, which

carry you off to worlds and lands and great ports open to every

fantasy, where you are attacked by the most malignant formof inanition there isthat hungering after departure whichpounds in your head, in your heart, in your gutsyou end up

inventing "solitudes crowded with loneliness", to quote the

poignant title of a book by the Black American beat poet, BobKaufman.

And so, to ward off ill fortune, you go down to the sea.

You choose twilight because of the sun dipping behind thehorizon to drink, leaving behind it long minutes of a light sospecial that, in describing it, one is unsure whether to compareit with flames or ambers. Then, when evening rises from thecalm waters of the harbour, the merchant ships and the occa¬

sional ocean liners, berthed or anchored off shore, light up oneafter the other. The world catches fire. Fascination increases.

Imagination runs wild. Dreams become a kind of madness. You

go on board; you embark for Genoa, Marseilles, Lisbon,

Southampton, Amsterdam. ... At last you're going to knowthe big ports. You'll be Christopher Columbus, Magellan,Vasco da Gama, Amerigo Vespucci, Diego Cao On deck,you look back to give a last wave to your friends left behind

on the pier. Once in your cabin, you touch the bulkheads with

the flat of your hands and the iron rivets with your fingers tomake sure that you're really on your way and you take onelast look through the porthole: how small the island is! You

tell yourself that you're no longer cursed because you're goingto see what's on the other side of the water. . . . You repeatit to yourself in creóle: lote koté dilo. . . .

But this is how it is: at each twilight, the other side of the

water is a sheer sky wall against which the ship runs aground.Now is still not time to leave. You'll have to come back

tomorrow . . . and come back again . . . and yet again.

One day I, J.M.D. Solitude, will no longer go back to lookat the sea; the boot will be on the other foot. The curse will

no longer spring from the cramped feeling of the island but

from the gigantism of metropolises visited all too many times,

from an immensity in which something vital will be lacking:a patch of land, a garden at the end of the ocean. . . .

VII. Golgotha amid the waves

I see the Sacred Hill as the crest of an Atlantic wave. The cross

carried by a man crowned with thorns is a slave ship advancingbeneath the exertions of men chained naked to their oars. The

cries of the crowd are beats struck on a huge bilge drum to

set the stroke. Flagellation is matched by whipping. That one

was sold for thirty pieces of silver, this one for thirty pennies,

perhaps less. One was crucified, the other flayed or burned alive.

Christ was called Jesus, the slave was called nobody. One was

denied, the other was negation in person. And more than one

Pontius Pilate still washes his hands today before other Passions.

Whenever I think of this, my mind goes back to those lines

by René-Guy Cadou, dead at the age of thirty and buried in

the humble cemetery of Louisfert, in Brittany:

"If they could do that to the King of the Jews

What wouldn't they do to a poor nigger. . . ."

and it occurs to me that those who most desecrated the seaways

were not pirates and that Gorée isn't so far from Gethsemane.

IX. The bird from the sea

At noon, on the Senegalese coast, at Cayar, near Dakar, I walk

side by side with Jacques Howlett. We have deserted a talking

shop on négritude, organized on the occasion of the First World

Festival of Negro Arts. Wrongly or rightly, we thought it more

profitable to come and listen to the sea than to have our minds

plugged with critical comment. He tells me about the latest

manuscripts received at Présence Africaine of which he has long

been a pillar. But very soon we realize how beside the pointit is to be talking about literature when the sea is there in all

its splendour beneath the raw sun.Silence! . . .

We walk, dazzled by the glare from the white sand. Onlythe sight of the worm-eaten wood of a few abandoned boats,

too old to be any use, their colours high and dry, offers some

relief to our eyes. It'll be a long time yet before the return of

those that went out at first light to cast their nets offshore.

They'll be back at the end of the day. To our great regret, we

shan't be witnessing their noisy, turbulent ritual as they comethrough the channel. A fight with the waves just a few yards

away from the shore. Each time, the blessed insolence of the

boatmen, cocking a snook at the swell. No, we shan't be seeing

any of that.

But a strange voice interrupts the silence. A sort of muted

chanting. Jacques and I start searching between the skeletons

of the boats and discover an old man sitting on a stone, a chisel

in his hand, working away at a piece of wood clamped between

his knobbly knees. He accompanies each of his movements,

each incision in the wood, with a guttural threnody, mournful,

slow or animated according to how gently or violently the tool

penetrates the heart of the wood.

He goes on working for a few moments as though not

aware that we are watching him. Then, slowly, he lifts his headand with a movement of the chin acknowledges our presence.

He then goes back to his sculpture. Our attention is focusedmainly on his chant, trying to understand its meaning. It grows

in intensity as, beneath his carvings, a bird's head emerges from

the block of wood. We no longer care about time slipping by,

transported as we are by the rite unfolding before our eyes.Now the hornbill's features can clearly be seen. The old

man puts down his tool in order to take a closer look at his

work. His eyes dwell on every angle. Then with his skinny

fingers he strokes every detail, staring straight ahead now atthe sea. He seems elsewhere. ... He gets up, about to leave.

I can no longer restrain myself. I call him:

"Tell me, grandad, what were those words you werechanting just now?"

"I was just calling to the bird hidden in the piece of wood.Without words, son, you can dig away as much as you like

with the chisel. Nothing will come if you don't call, especially

when you're working before the sea. . . ."

Saying this, he went off, carrying with him at arm's lengththe bird's head, surely destined to become the first piece of a

weather vane fixed on the prow of a boat to indicate the direc¬tion of the wind.

I didn't like to ask him why "especially before the sea".15

AND TIDEThe wonirws deep

The sea has always inspired a sense

of awe. Some peoples have

responded eagerly to its call, while

others have remained firmly attached

to the land. For desert peoples like

the Arabs it was a source of fear and

wonder; the Chinese, for all the

glorious chapters in their maritime

history, pursued their destiny

essentially on land. Many of the

world's cultures have risen from the

waves: Polynesian civilization was

propagated by some of the most

intrepid and skilful seafarers ever

known. The Greek sailors who ply

the seven seas today continue a

tradition which can be traced back to

Homeric times.

In classical times the seas of Islam representedanother world and, for the Arabs, who were thesons of nomads and had lived on the land since

time immemorial, it was a dual world. At once

close and familiar when seen from the shore, itbecame an object of terror when on all sides therewas nothing but water extending to the horizon.Subject to laws beyond good and evil, the marineworld was considered to be situated at the veryedge of the habitable universe. There membersof the same species and indeed of the same familytore one another to pieces and pursued each othermercilessly. The Dadjal (the Antichrist) beat hisdrums in the suffocating heat of bewitchedislands. Satan was not far. Perhaps, when all wassaid and done, it was he who ruled beneath thewaters.

The earliest references to the sea in Arab

poetry reflect this hostile world, beyond thecompass of the human mind. The poet AlMuhalhil issued a warning which was to becomethe leitmotiv of relations between the Arab imagi¬nation and the sea: "Setting sail on the seawithout taking care/Is a sure way of courtingdisaster."

For the early Arab poets the sea was also thesupreme symbol of strength and power. The pre-Islamic poet Malik Ibn Nuweyra describes anattack made by his tribe against an enemy campin the following terms: "They saw us arrive withthe first dawn rays/More ruinous yet than thefoaming seas". And Antara Ibn Shaddadrecounting a battle enjoins: "Question them asto my valour/When the tribes of Kalb, of Ghaniyand Amir/Came crashing down like waves. . . ."

The advent of Islam hardly affected the Arabimage of the sea. It is often described in theQur'an as an emblem of divine power or benevo¬lence and the sea in fury is seen as denoting theApocalypse: "When heaven is split open, whenthe stars are scattered, when the seas swarm

over. . . ." (Surat 82, verses 1 to 3); "When thesun shall be darkened, when the stars shall bethrown down . . . when the seas shall be set

boiling. . . ." (Surat 81, verses 1, 2 and 5).The waves (Mawdj, Amwadj) are an image

of extreme danger. The Arabic root "M.W.DJ."covers a semantic field dominated by ideas ofimbalance, upheaval, agitation, turmoil andstorm. The term crops up many times in theQur'an: "And when waves cover them likeshadows, they call upon God . . ." (Surat 31, verse32); "And waves come on them from every side,

by Rachid kbbaghi

Detail from a map by thePersian scholar al-lstakhrl.

and they think they are encompassed; they callupon God ... : 'If Thou deliverest us from these,surely we shall be among the thankful' " (Surat10, verse 22).

The Hadith (the words of the Prophet) soundthe same note: "He who takes to the sea in

stormy weather has only himself to blame".

TRAVELLERS AND

STORYTELLERS

The Arabs were not seafarers, even though theirearly traditions reveal some familiarity with theworld of the sea and the Qur'an evokes thedangers and riches of the ocean to illustrate thepower and bounteousness of God. The Prophet's

tribe, the Quraysh, no doubt already had sea linkswith Abyssinia via the Red Sea. But, as scholarssuch as W. Barthold and G. Hourani have shown,there appears to be little doubt that they did nothave any ships of their own. They were, forexample, incapable of going after fugitives whotook to the sea. When the Empire was founded,the Arabs had to rely on the knowledge of theEgyptian Copts to establish their first naval fleetin the Mediterranean.

However, until the Ottomans came to powerthe Mediterranean was considered to be of onlymarginal interest and held by the Caliphate tobe not directly relevant to its ambitions. TheArabs had their first real experience of the seain the Great Eastern Sea (AI Bahr Sharqui AlKabir), that part of the Indian Ocean whichextends from the coast of India to East Africa,

including its two branches formed by the Gulfand the Red Sea. The most notable contribution

made by Arab navigators and geographers relatedto knowledge of this sea.

The Arabs had from very early times actedas middlemen in the far-flung trade between theEast (India, China, Ceylon, Java) and the West(Egypt, Syria, Rome). However, after Baghdadhad been founded (762 AD) and the ports of Basraand Siraf had been developed, they started totrade on their own account, from Hang-chou inthe Far East to Sofala on the east coast of Africa.

Those who first taught the Arabs seamanshipwere doubtless the Persians who under the

Sasanids had formed a true maritime aristocracyall around the western part of that same GreatEastern Sea.

By the ninth century, when the Abbasidswere at the height of their power, the Arabs hadfully mastered and perhaps progressed beyond theavailable stock of knowledge about the sea. Theirnavigators had by then acquired a fairly rigorousunderstanding of monsoons and winds. They nolonger made do with plying up and down thecoast but sailed directly from the Arabian coastto the confines of the Indian peninsula; the straitslying between the Gulf and the China Sea werewell known to them. Similarly, black Africa wasno longer altogether a terra incognita; their shipssailed from Aden in East Africa all the way toSofala (or Sofalat al Zindj as it was known toArab geographers). They also plied the Red Sea,the Mediterranean, the Caspian Sea, the Black Seaand a number of navigable rivers like the Nileand the Indus. 17

The Roc bird saves a

shipwrecked sailor.

Illustration from a

16th-century manuscript ofthe Booh of Wonders, by the

great 13th-century Islamicscholar al-Tusl.

18

The widespread use of nautical charts (Rah-manis) and manuals (Dafatirs) dates from thisperiod. In his The Meadows ofGold and Mines ofGems, Mas'udi, the great tenth-century ency¬clopaedist and traveller, gives the names of a largenumber of Nakhuda (ship captains) and specialistson the Indian Ocean with whom he was per¬sonally acquainted. It was also a golden age forsea literature, travellers' tales and descriptions ofwondrous things ("Mirabilia") in which the seahad a central part. Few have survived. One of theearliest travellers' tales is that attributed to the

merchant Suleyman, who made several journeysto India and China and described his impressionsof the countries he visited and the peoples heencountered in his Akhbar Al-Sin wa Al Hind

(Account of China and India).Another interesting author of that period is

Buzurg ibn Shahriyar. Himself a ship captain, inaround 953 AD he compiled an anthology of talesof the sea entitled Kitab Adja'ib Al Hind which

contains several curious stories about the adven¬

tures of sailors in the East Indies and other partsof the Indian Ocean. Intended for the common

reader, mingling actual experience and fiction,Buzurg's tales largely belong to the genre knownas "Adj'aib" ("Mirabilia") which was much invogue at the time.

The Thousand and One Nights, the first com¬pilations of which, according to the specialists,date from the ninth century, contain a numberof tales centring on the sea, including the famous"Adventures of Sindbad the Sailor". The Egyp¬tian oceanographer and man of letters HusseinFawzi has shown, in a splendidly erudite book(Le discours de Sindbad l'ancien, 1942), the distinc¬tively Arab qualities of this story and its inter-textual references to contemporary Arab mari¬time literature, making it a kind of bible of nau¬tical knowledge for that period.

THE WAY OF WONDERS

What were Muslim Arab navigators and traderslooking for in such far-off lands as Japan andMadagascar? The "wondrous" merchandise withwhich, according to travellers and geographers,those countries abounded, ranging from silk inChina to ebony in the Wak-Wak islands (Borneo, .the Philippines), from topazes and rubies inSirandib (Ceylon) to tin in the peninsula ofMalacca. As commonplace as such goods mayseem today, for travellers at that time they werefabulous treasures, full of enchantment and magic.

Many passages in the Thousand and OneNights bear witness to this. But Sindbad alsotravels in quest of knowledge, roused by the callof distant lands, the lure of the unknown, themystery of otherness.

The Indian Ocean which was the doorwayto these lands of plenty was also swarming withBawaridj, the pirate ships that plied its waters,and its islands were inhabited by cannibals. Weare told by the author of the Summary of Wondersthat "To the right of the island of Kalah lies theisland of Balus. Its inhabitants eat human flesh",while in the words of al-Idrisi, "The denizens of

this island (Bakus) are black and go naked. . . .Should a foreigner chance upon them, they hanghim up by the feet, cut him into pieces and eathim. . . . Their speech is incomprehensible".

The skies above this sea are sometimes dar¬

kened by the open wings of huge birds knownas Rukh or Anka (Pheng to the Chinese andSimorg to the Persians). According to al-Kazwini,"The Anka is the largest bird there is. It huntselephants, whales and dragons. When it flies, itswings make a noise like a torrent. When it spreadsits wings, the sun is hidden and the sky isdarkened".

Travellers of the period tell us of other seamonsters that infested the depths of the GreatEastern Sea. Some were so big that "from headto tail is a four-month voyage". From afar the

giant turtles resembled islands. A merchant leftthe following eye-witness account: "We found inthe middle of the sea an island on which grassgrew protruding from the water. We landed andprepared to eat. The island started to move. Thesailors shouted 'Back to the ship! Back to the ship!It's a turtle, awakened by the fire for the meal.. . . Back to the ship before it plunges beneaththe water!'

On the Wak-Wak islands strange trees weresaid to grow whose fruit took the form of womenwhich died a few hours after being picked butnot before providing the famished traveller withintense and mysterious pleasures: "On theseislands there are trees which bear as their fruit

The talking tree on the

enchanted Island. Miniature

from a manuscript of the

Shah-Nama ("Book of Kings"),a masterpiece of Persianliterature.

women hanging by the hair. . . . Some travellershave seen very beautiful ones. If they are pickedby cutting properly the roots of their hairattaching them to the tree, they can live forseveral days. The travellers experienced in theirarms a happiness that can be compared with noother". Such is the description given of the Wak-Wak islands by Ibn al Wardi in his Book ofWonders. Other strange phenomena were reportedby travellers and geographers of the period:dwarfs that would come out of the sea, climb on

board ships, spend the night there and then gooff without saying or doing anything, which forsailors at the time meant that the most terrible

of the sea winds, the Khub, was impending: the

RACHID SABBAGHI,

Moroccan writer and journalist,

is the author of an essay on

20th-century French

philosophy which will shortly

be published in Arabic. He is

also preparing a study on

French travellers in Morocco,

which will appear (in French) in1992.

19

famous white cloud which, on coming into con¬tact with the waves, caused them to boil and roarlike a tornado; the hole in the sea, known as

Durdur, which carried ships away into the abyss;and magnetic mountains that drew boats towards'them and broke them to pieces. . . .

A source of profit and of fear, able to pro¬vide man with fabulous riches and to inspire inhim unspeakable terror, dispensing life and death,the sea is unfathomable. Man barely scratches itsimmeasurable surface. But, like everything thatexists, it is subject to divine lawthe ultimateguarantee that the world has a meaning, and itwas this law that travellers, geographers and cos-mographers always thought they were obeyingwhen they embarked on their journeys. In sodoing, they were bringing their intelligence tobear on the visible signs of creation, trusting inthe benevolence of God to take care of everythingthat exceeded the bounds set by Him upon thatintelligence.

20

Sindbad's maiden voyage

One day when we were under sail we foundourselves becalmed before a small island lyingjust above the water and covered withverdure like a meadow. The captain had thesails lowered and informed the members ofthe crew that those who wished to go ashorecould do so. I was one of those who availedthemselves of the opportunity. However, justas we were pleasantly engaged in eating anddrinking and resting our weary limbs, theisland suddenly shook all over and made usreel. . . .

. . . The shudder that passed through theisland was not unnoticed on the boat; from itcries arose telling us to go back on board atonce lest we perish; that what we had takenfor an island was the back of a whale. Thequickest on their feet made off in the rowingboat, others went swimming away. I for mypart was still on the island, or rather on thewhale, when it plunged into the sea, and Ijust had time to seize hold of a piece of woodthat been brought from the boat to make afire. However, the captain, after taking onboard those who were in the rowing boat andrescuing some of those who were swimming,wanted to take advantage of the favourablefresh wind that had started up; he had thesails raised and in so doing robbed me ofany hope ofgetting back to the boat.

So I remained at the mercy of the waves,driven first one way then another; I foughtwith them for my life for the rest of the dayand the following night. The next day I nolonger had any strength and was giving upall hope of avoiding death when happily awave cast me upon an island.

The Thousand and One Nights

The legacy of

i ~

&rtlMClENT China was a landlocked state and its

expansion to the coast opened a new chapter inChinese history. Rule of the sea was achievedunder the T'ang dynasty (618-906 AD) and mar¬itime expansion continued under the Sung(960-1279 AD). Sung seamanship became abyword for excellence in the Asian maritimeworld, but Chinese technological superiorityendured many challenges both on land and at sea,and the Mongol conquest of the Southern Sungushered in the Yuan dynasty and brought the firsthint of a naval threat that eventually reducedChina to almost semi-colonial status.

During the early Ming dynasty (1368-1644AD), the Chinese state sponsored epic maritimeexpeditions which took hundreds of ships andtens of thousands of men to countries as far awayas East Africa. Chinese emissaries played the roleof arbitrators in Ceylon and Sumatra, and inreturn over sixty embassies visited China withina short space of time, many bearing gifts of

Confucius tyKöw?

- -

strange animals, plants and jewels. This granddesign, which depended so heavily on statepatronage, leadership and finance, lost its staun-chest and most energetic patron when the Yung-lo emperor died in 1423, although voyages con¬tinued under Hsiian-te. No royal patron, courtofficial or private adventurer ever emerged toresume or indeed to finance such expeditionsagain.

Instead of going on to develop the maritimeempire that had seemed to lie within its reach,China now turned its back to the sea. The reasons

for this were historical, ideological and perhapseven temperamental. One reason may have beenan intrinsic lack of interest in the sea on the partof the Chinese, for never again in Chinese his¬tory were such proclivities for maritime expan¬sion to be revealed. Another may be found in theConfucian ethos which held trade and mercan¬

tile concerns in low esteem. The Chinese never

considered trade to be a source of the state's

**?*«

domestic power, and merchants were neverthought worthy of a leading role in state-building.A partnership between the state and the mer¬chants in an overseas adventure for national gloryor profit would have meant turning the wholeChinese social order and value system upsidedown.

A COUNTRY WITH ITS BACK

TO THE SEA

As it turned away from the sea and concentratedon the defence of its land frontiers and the reor¬

ganization of its finances, China lost the initia¬tive in the East Asian maritime world. In the six¬

teenth and seventeenth centuries, a new maritime

order developed in the region. Led by theJapanese and closely followed by the Europeans,it was driven by the profit motive. The new Euro¬pean masters of the Asian seas were soonclamouring for concessions at the gates of China.

Above, Confucius

(C.552-C.479 BC) as depicted

on a stele in Xi'an, the capital

of Shaanxi.

Above left, junks in the bay ofMacao.

21

22

The Ming government, already predisposedtowards a defensive maritime policy, closed themajor ports and evacuated the coastal populationinland.

For the next 200 years, the coast of Chinabecame a shady world, peopled by fidalgos (Por¬tuguese noblemen), burghers, Wakoes (Japanesepirates), marauders and conniving merchants andofficials, with in their midst perhaps a few honesttraders and people earning a living from the sea.It was a world of romancé, terror, treachery andillicit gain, dominated by the so-called "merchantprinces" who amassed fortunes from the inter-Asian carrying trade, thereby building up polit¬ical power and becoming virtually the paymastersof local officials.

The new rulers of China after 1644, theManchus at the head of the Ch'ing dynasty, werewithout experience of the sea and had inheriteda maritime world which the late Ming had aban¬doned to private trade and local autonomy. Theytook forty years to pacify the south, but whenthis was done they returned the people to thecoast and repealed the prohibition againstoverseas navigation. At the same time theyadopted an open-door policy by opening fourports to foreign trade.

THE CHINA TRADE

By the late seventeenth century, the Dutch andSpanish had been driven from the trading stationsthey had established on the China coast and theirplaces taken by the English (from the 1670s) andthe French (after 1699). In the 1720s came theOstenders, who were later followed by Dutch,Danes, Swedes and others, under the flags of theirEast India Companies. As European trade withChina developed, it was brought under semi¬official management by a system of controls andregulations, the most intense period of legislationbeing from 1740 to 1760.

European trade with China between 1684 andthe First Opium War in 1839 marked a revolu¬tion in the maritime history of China. After abreak of 250 years the Chinese state was againturning its attention to the sea. This was the greatera of trade in China tea, which displaced spices,pepper and Chinese silk as Europe's leadingimport from East Asia. A distinctive hybridbetween "official trade" and "private trade" wasdevised by the Ch'ing to meet importunateWestern demands, to safeguard the livelihood ofChinese coastal peoples and to maintain the secu¬rity of the coast. The relationship between

Above, Europeans welcoming

a Chinese ship in a Dutch or

Portuguese settlement on the

Chinese coast. 18th-century

painting on paper.

Right, a "tower boat" of the

Sul dynasty (6th-7th century).

This article is based on

material contained in a longer

study by W.E. CHEONG,

Reader in history at the

University of Hong Kong. Dr.

Cheong is the author ofarticles and two books on the

history of East-West trade in

Asia. One of the books, Opium

Agencies in China in the

1820s, won the Imperial

History prize of the Royal

Commonwealth Society. His

forthcoming The HongMerchants of Canton,

1684-1798, is a history ofofficial Chinese merchants in

the European trade.

Chinese merchants and the Europeans during thislong period was generally peaceful for, despitetheir diametrically opposed views about the placeof trade and merchants in society, both Europeanmercantilism and Chinese Confucianism advo¬

cated active state intervention and a monopolisticsystem as the means of attaining their ends.

From the beginning, the Ch'ing correctlyjudged the maritime frontier to be the most likelysource of their major domestic and foreign policydifficulties and acted accordingly. But as timewent by they found security in a conservativeorthodoxy, and when China was exposed by seato all that was new and changing in the late eight¬eenth century, they failed to respond to thestimulus and missed the chance to join the newworld order.

The traditional world order was challengedby the new. After 1826 a rapid increase in importsinto China, first cotton and opium and later

..

industrial goods and equipment and, most damag-ingly, consumer goods, served to highlight theimportance of merchants, industry and trade tothe national wealth of Western countries, whereas

industrial development was a concept that did notexist in the Ch'ing official vocabulary. Finally,China had not realized that it was necessary tomaintain her technologyshe was humiliated inthe nineteenth century by a few gunboatsdespatched to her shores by "barbarians" fromoutside.

The dockyard at Foochow that produced out¬dated warships, some of which sank on goingdown the slipway, the fleet that remained idle atone port while another fleet was being destroyedelsewhere on the coast, and several unsuccessful

major industrial enterprises symbolized the failureof a country that had once been technologicallyadvanced to make up for more than five centuriesof neglect. Foreign warships, merchant ships, pas¬senger and freight steamers frequented Chineseports and sailed upriver at will. Finally, the totaldefeat of China at sea in the Sino-Japanese War of1894-1895 raised the key question of whether eco¬nomic and military reforms can be achievedwithout political and institutional reforms.

How merchants travel

Upon a vessel four decks are built. The vesselis fitted out with rooms, cabins and saloonsfor merchants. Several of the cabins containprivate rooms and conveniences. There arekeys for the cabins, which are locked by theirowners. The merchants bring theirconcubines and wives along with them.Often there will be one person in his cabinwithout any other person on board knowingthat he is there, and it is not until theyarrive at their destination that people findthat they have been voyaging together.

The sailors have their children living inthese cabins; they plant pot herbs, vegetablesand ginger in wooden tubs. The ship'ssteward has the appearance of a great emir;when he goes ashore, archers and Abyssinianswalk before him with javelins, swords,kettledrums, horns and trumpets. Upon his

arriving at the inn where he is to be lodged,they plant their lances on either side of thedoor and continue to behave in this manner

throughout his stay. Among the inhabitantsof China there are some who own manyships on which they send their message-bearers abroad. The Chinese are the richest

people in the world.

Ibn Battuta (1304-1368/1377)Arab traveller

{The travels of Ibn Battuta)

23

In the wak of Ulyssesby André ledros

The ship of the Argonauts.

Detail from the Ficoronl urn, a

richly engraved cylindricalcontainer from Praeneste

(4th-3rd century BC), Italy.

I HERE are some 2,000 Greek islands. Most ofthem are barren rocks. Some lack fresh water and

are uninhabited. But ever since the earliest times

Greeks have lived in the largest and most beau¬tiful of them and Greek civilization has flourished

there. A people with so many islands is boundto have special links with the sea.

The Greeks were bold seafarers long beforethe Phoenicians came on the scene. Like the wan¬

derings of Ulysses, the mythical expedition ofJason and the Argonauts, the heroes who sailedaboard the Argo to recover the Golden Fleece,is inspired by early Greek exploration of theMediterranean. We owe a late account of this

expedition to Apollonius of Rhodes, who wasborn around 295 BC. We can be sure that Homer,who is thought to have lived five centuries before,

knew an earlier version of the exploits of theArgonauts. The sorceress Circe living on theisland of Aeaea, the dangerous strait of Scylla andCharybdis, and the Sirens, all feature in the

Odyssey but also appear in the voyage of theArgonauts, which was recorded long before.

24

The small sailboats of Antiquity and rowingvessels like the longship Argo were sturdily built.Greek sailors trusted them implicitly. They knewall about the dominant winds and currents, but

Poseidon the sea-god was given to sudden terriblerages. As they plied the seas far from theirhomeland, Jason, Ulysses and their companionsfaced terrible dangers. It took far more courageto set out on a long voyage without maps orcompass and brave violent storms than it did to

fight against the King of Colchis or the Trojans.These journeys were plagued by hunger, thirst,fatigue and stress. . . . How else can we explainthe fact that Ulysses weeps so often?

When storms blew up, the Greeks dependedon skilful seamanship to save them. Without asteady hand on the tiller all was lost. The Greeks

have never been good swimmers and shipwreckwould almost invariably be fatal. Ulysses himselfbarely escapes drowning on two occasions.

Ulysses has angered Zeus. The god hurls athunderbolt at his ship, which is shattered topieces. Billowing waves sweep the crew into thesea. Ulysses, the only survivor, clings to a pieceof wreckage. A gust of wind blows him towards

the strait guarded by Scylla and the whirlpoolCharybdis, who swallows up the debris of theship. Ulysses just manages to grasp a fig-treegrowing on the rocks above the waves. ThenCharybdis spits back the mast and the keel, and

Ulysses continues his adventurous wanderings.But before long the son of Laertes falls victim

to the anger of another god, Poseidon, who haslong been persecuting him.

Aboard the raft which the nymph Calypso hasunwillingly allowed him to build, Ulysses comesin sight of the land of the Phaeacians. Suddenlya violent gust of wind breaks up his fragile craft.Ulysses manages to haul himself on to a plank buthe is battered by the waves and is soon overcomeby exhaustion. Leucothea, the white goddess,saves him in the nick of time. She gives him herveil to tie around his waist, and he manages toswim through the stormy sea to Phaeacia.

Ulysses and the sirens,

detail from a Sth-century-BC

Greek vase.

Many Greek sailors over the centuries insimilar perilous situations to those described inthe Odyssey have lost their lives because they didnot know how to swim. This failing, which Ihave often noticed among fishermen and sailorsserving in one of the world's biggest fleets of mer¬chant ships, is particularly surprising since theGreeks are outstanding divers.

SPONGE DIVERS

In ancient times, sponge diving was practised inGreece more widely than it is today. Spongeswere used for various, and sometimes unusual,

purposes. Soldiers drank from them when theyhad no goblets and made them into protectivecushions which they wore beneath their armour.Today synthetic sponges compete with naturalsponges. Nevertheless, beautiful women stillprefer real sponges, as do painters, craftsmen,polishers, cabinet-makers and surgeons.

Sponge divers can still be found on someGreek islands such as Kalymnos and Skyros,where their marvellous but arduous skills are

handed down from father to son. The only differ¬ence is that they have to sail further and furtheraway, near to the coast of Cyprus or Libya. Andthey must dive deeper and deeper. The old menremember the time when they used to skin-diveto find sponges 30 metres underwater. Todaytheir successors have to dive more than 60 metres,

wearing diving suits and other equipment. Theiroutfits are often the worse for wear, and accidents

are frequent. The men's health suffers. On thequayside of the port of Kalymnos, old men offorty can often be seen.

THE ANGER

OF POSEIDON

Thousands of Greek sailors serve in the merchant

navy. Many of them accept low wages to work inold tubs which often sail under flags of con¬venience and which they describe among them¬selves as floating coffins.

When one of these decrepit hulks runs intoa storm the crew need all the courage they canfind. Heavy seas pound the deck murderously. 25

Neptune's Horses (1892) by

the English painter andillustrator Walter Crane.

Summer solstice

The sea they call calmships and white sailssea breeze from the pines, and the mountain

ofAegina

breathlessly,your skin glided over the sea's skinwarm and welcominga thought almost formed was immediately

forgotten

But in the shallow waters

a harpooned octopus discharged its inkand in the depthsif you but knew where these lovely islands

take root

I looked at you with all the light anddarkness that I possess

George Seferls (1900-1971)Greek poet

In the dark night stars topple into the waves likea shower of meteorites, then rush back heaven¬

wards in a cosmic firework display. Roilingbreakers race from the distant horizon and crash

over the ship, which pitches and rolls. Theirwhite foam rushes to the top of the mainmast,making whirlpools of spray. The wallowing oldtub is buffeted hither and thither.

The crewmen race around, complaining butputting their backs into their work, stemming theinflow of water with packing and cement, stowingaway overturned sacks and boxes before the shipbegins to list, keeping the ship's electrical systemworking. They never let up, driven by their senseof danger and their matchless experience of thesea, rather than by their officers. This is why theirreputation for seamanship is second to none.

PIRATES AND SHIPOWNERS

Greek sailors are not superstitious. Children ofthe Sun and the Mediterranean, they have neverbeen obsessed by the appearance of the dreaded

mW

M

m

- aaàaV

Flying Dutchman which haunts the imaginationof northern seamen. It's not ghost captains thatthey fear but real ones who let themselves be cor¬

rupted by cynical shipowners and deliberatelysink their ships on desert island reefs. Barratry,the fraudulent breach of duty by the master ofa ship, which often endangers the life of the crew,is still relatively frequent. The older the ship, thegreater the temptation to barratry. The sailorsknow this and are secretly afraid.

Of course not all shipowners are sounscrupulous. Many of them have combinedtheir maritime instinct with a genius for businessand have become very rich without infringing thelaws of trade.

A VISION OF THE SEA

Greek shipowners, sailors and fishermen make

their living from the sea. But the Greek peopleas a whole also lives from the sea, albeit indirectly.

Greece has profited from the tourist boommore than most countries. Hundreds of thou¬

sands of foreigners spend their holidays there eachyear. What are they looking for? Archaeologicalsites such as Delphi, Mycenae and Delos are stilla magnet for visitors. The beautiful marble of

ancient temples, theatres and statues bears wit¬

ness to the cult of beauty in a distant past andglows in the soft light of the present. But moreand more tourists are flocking to Greece to realizean ideal vision of the sea. They head for the Greekislands to escape from oil-polluted beaches andthe dirt of the big city, hoping to bathe in trans¬parent waters and make friends with the Greeks

who live in close contact with the sea. (Even ifthey do not bathe in it, for the good reason thatthey cannot swim).

One myth that symbolizes perhaps morethan any other the extraordinary symbiosis of theGreeks with the sea, as well as their inadequacyas swimmers, it is that of Orion, son of Hyrieusking of Boeotia. Orion was a giant who walkedacross the sea from island to island without ever

getting out of his depth. One day when Apollowas engaged in an archery contest on the beachwith his sister Artemis, the goddess and huntresswhose arrows never missed their target, hepointed to an object floating far out to sea.

"I bet you can't reach it," he said.

Artemis strung her bow and her arrow spedunerringly to its distant target, which was, alas,the head of Orion who was walking as usual inthe water far from the shore.

When she saw that she had killed the goodgiant by mistake, Artemis was so distressed thatshe bore Orion to heaven and transformed him

into a constellation.

-P-x^.-jtV.

"Shellfishing". Painting on

silk by the Japanese painter

and printmaker Hokusai

(1760-1849).

ANDRE KEDROS,a Greek author who writes in

French, is the author of 13

novels which have been widelytranslated. He has also

published several historical

essays including a History ofthe Greek Resistance

1940-1944 (Robert Laffont

publishers, Paris).

The Coloured Beach

It was again a fine day on the sixteenth. Iwent to the Coloured Beach to pick up somepink shells. I sailed the distance of sevenmiles in a boat and arrived at the beach in

no time, aided by a favourable wind. A manby the name of Tenya accompanied me, withservants, food, drinks and everything else hecould think of that we might need for ourexcursion. The beach was dotted with a

number offishermen's cottages and a tinytemple. As I sat in the temple, drinkingwarm tea and sake, / was overwhelmed bythe loneliness of the evening scene.

Lonelier I thoughtThan the Suma beach

The closing of autumnOn the sea before me.

Mingled with tiny shellsI saw scattered petalsOf bush-cloversRolling with the waves.

I asked Tosai to make a summary of theday's happenings and leave it at the templeas a souvenir.

Basho (1644-1694)Japanese poet

(The Narrow Road to the Deep North,translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa, in The Narrow Road

to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches,

Penguin Books 1966).

27

28

In Polynesian myth, the primal spiritual forceis Tangaroa, the atua, or god, of the ocean. Thesky, Raki, is his parent, and Hinemoana, thewoman of the sea, is his partner. Tangaroaappears in different forms within the diverse butconnected cultures of Polynesia as a figure whocannot be escaped and must always be accom¬modated.

The Polynesians inhabit a world which con¬sists almost entirely of ocean. Apart from NewZealand, the land area they know consists of smallislands, some of them volcanic outcrops andmany others mere coral atolls. Habitable landconstitutes no more than 1.5 per cent ofPolynesia.

In Polynesian mythology the land comesfrom the sea, from which it has been drawn bythe demi-god Maui. Islands are great fish draggedfrom the depths, or waka (canoes) from whichMaui brought lesser islands to the surface.

The indigenous people of Polynesia share ahigh level of linguistic, ethnic and cultural unity,tempered by a diversity resulting largely fromadaptation to the specific island worlds wherethey have made their homes. They live within

the vast area of the Pacific which is known as the

Polynesian Triangle and is divided into twoclosely related yet culturally distinct areas,Western Polynesia and Eastern Polynesia. Theformer comprises Tonga, Samoa, Tuvalu and,historically, part of Fiji. The latter consists ofHawaii, the Tahiti group of islands, the CookIslands, the Marquesas, Rapanui (Easter Island)and Aotearoa (New Zealand).

THE PEOPLING OF POLYNESIA

Who were these people and where did they comefrom? Modern scholarship concludes that theirancestors were Austronesian seafarers who

worked their way from a starting point some¬where in Southeast Asia down the island chains

to what is now the western Polynesian Triangle.Archaeological evidence based on the remains oftheir distinctive pottery suggests that these peoplewere capable of sailing over vast areas of oceanfrom one group of islands to another.

What was to become Polynesian culturebegan to appear about 6,000 years ago in theTonga-Samoa triangle. Then, some 2,000 years

later, some of these proto-Polynesians broke outinto Eastern Polynesia. It is widely believed thatthis great leap into oceanic space took them tothe Marquesas Islands, from which they then dis¬persed to Hawaii, the Tahiti group and fromthere to Aotearoa. This last major movementseems to have occurred about a thousand yearsago. A glance at the Polynesian triangle on a mapof the Pacific is enough to give some idea of theextraordinary distances involved.

Were these migrations purposeful or werethey accidental "drift" voyages? The scholarlyconsensus, based on computer simulation ofancient weather conditions and other evidence,

such as the distribution of plants and animals, sug¬gests that although some accidental voyages mayhave occurred there was intended and purposefulmigration.

One argument against the drift thesis is thatthe known pattern of migration conflicts withthe prevailing easterly winds of the Triangle. Infact the wind shifts to the west at more or less

regular times, and waiting for this west windbecame an important element in Polynesian reli¬gious beliefs. Tawhiri-a-matea, the god of winds,

Padficpioneers

Tipene O'Regan

Tahitlan war canoes are

shown In painting, left,

executed by William

Hodges during Captain

Cook's second voyage to

the Pacific (1772-1775).

Right, a figurehead from

Rarotonga, Cook Islands,carved In the form of a

fisherman's god known as"Great Ears".

is almost as important in Polynesian traditionsas Tangaroa, and in the whakapapa (genealogy)of creation, he is the elder brother with whom

Tangaroa most closely interacts. This relationshipwas activé and constant, and when the Polyne¬sians put out to sea it was into the hands of thesetwo atua that they entrusted themselves.

THE CANOE, SYMBOL OF PRESTIGE

The dominating cultural object in migration tra¬dition was the waka or canoe, which was a

symbol of mana, tribal authority, chiefly pres¬tige and, most of all, wealth. Building a great 29

canoe was a major exercise which required thefull commitment of the skilled members of the

tribe and called for resources that only a few ofthe high island cultures of Polynesia could afford.The decoration of the waka and the ritual

associated with it became a major focus of reli¬gious life.

Far from being a frail and inadequate vessel,the traditional Polynesian canoe was, for its time,at the leading edge of maritime technology. Weknow from historical evidence and more recent

From the sea to children

The seaa soaring mountain-Lashes and crushes mighty cliffs of rock.These flimsy things, what are they to me?"Know ye my power?" The sea lashesThreateningly, it breaks, it crushes.

No fear assaults, no terrorMasters me. Earth's power and prideAre tedious toys to me. All that the earthImagines mighty is to me no moreThan a mere feather floating by.

Ch'oe Nam-son (1890-1957)Korean writer

simulated research that its double hulls, lashed

together with sennit, were capable of sailing atgreat speed. The heavy stresses experienced inmodern twin-hulled catamarans were avoided bykeeping the canoe hulls quite close together sothat they did not create too much resistance tothe pressure of the sails on the hulls. The latterwere able to "give" to the pressure of wind andto flex and "work" with the movement of the

waves.

The distinctive Polynesian sprit sail whichdrove these canoes was woven from pandanusfibre. Recent simulated studies suggest that it hadmore driving force than even the fore and aft rigof modern vessels. It was, however, more difficultto control. A remarkable modern reconstruction

of a Polynesian voyaging canoe, the Hawaiian-built Hokule'a, has made swift voyages betweenHawaii and Tahiti, Tahiti and Raratonga, andRaratonga and New Zealand.

PRODIGIOUS FEATS OF MEMORY

But the waka by itself was not enough. The greatvoyages would have been impossible withoutmastery of a developed and sophisticated systemof navigation. Considerable astronomicalknowledge was required, and an intimate under¬standing of oceanic wind patterns and othernatural and seasonal phenomena. A navigatorwould, for example, need to know the rising andsetting positions of roughly 1,000 azimuth stars.

Right, carved post from a

Maori meeting house In

Rotorua (New Zealand).

Below, replicas of Hawaiiancanoes off the island of Maui.

30

1

As well as performing that prodigious feat ofmemory, the priestly navigator would have tomake and master "memory maps" of islandgroups and know much about wind patterns andwave systems. The absorption and retention ofthis huge volume of knowledge, transmittedwithout notebooks or instruments, were a partof religious practice. We know that these naviga¬tional systems were workable because they havebeen tested extensively in the Hokule'aexperience.

Why did these people undertake theirremarkable travels? There is much historical evi¬

dence of inter-island trading in canoes betweenSamoa and Tonga, Tahiti and other islands ofeastern Polynesia. But what of the migrationvoyages over hundreds of miles of ocean? Poly¬nesian traditions speak of competition on over¬crowded islands, defeat in war, and chiefly con¬flicts of family and prestige. Much voyaging,however, seems to have been driven by that mosthuman of all needsthe lure of the far horizon

and the desire to know and to explore. Whateverthe motive, it is clear that these remarkable

seafarers were supremely confident in theirability, in the capacity of their craft and in thegoodwill of their atua.

The high and ornately carved stern posts andlow-slung prows of the Maori and Tahitian wakaare examples of a blending of art and belief. Art,knowledge, and the pride of the community allfocused on the canoe. The smaller, more

IB

TIPENE O'REGAN,

a New Zealander of Ngai Tahu

Maori descent, is chairman of

the Ngai Tahu Maori Trust

Board and chairman of the

Maori Fisheries Commission. A

member of the New Zealand

Geographic Board and atrustee of the National

Museum of New Zealand, he

has written widely on Maori

and Polynesian history andcultural affairs in the Pacific.

utilitarian waka for fishing and coastal travel wereless adorned, but there was always somedecoration carving, inlaid shellwork or the geo¬metric design of the lashings holding the crafttogether.

There is art in both the structural design andthe decoration of these canoes. To the Polyne¬sians, art is inseparable from function. The carvedprow of a Maori war canoe is a defiant figureflying over Tangaroa towards the enemy. Thesmall carved figures carried aboard fishing andvoyaging canoes were not works of art takenalong as prized possessions, but symbols andresiding places of the protective atua of the Poly¬nesians.

Everything to do with Tangaroa wasdecoratedfish-hooks, sinkers, spears. Art wasnecessary to evoke from the atua a good catch.Even today the custom of returning the first fishto Tangaroa remains an important one. Art andcustom decree that the god of the ocean must beappeased.

The sea of courage

Perhaps the encyclopaedist who would provemost instructive for us would be Hegel whenhe ascribed man's finest qualities to the sea.

In describing this sea, he spontaneouslylit upon the expression he had used tocharacterize the logic of History: the cunningofReason (die List der Vernunftj; nor is itinappropriate to hark back to the Iliad andto cunning Odysseus. Let us consider thepassage devoted to the sea. The seafarer is aman who, better than any other, symbolizeshuman grandeur, courage and endeavour:"The sea arouses courage" (Das Meererweckt den Mut).

Here courage is bound up withintelligence and must also involve cunningas it is directed against an element which isthe most cunning, the least trustworthy andthe most deceptive: "This infinite expanse isperfectly malleable for there is no pressure itresists, not even a breath; it seems infinitelyinnocent, submissive, good-natured anddocile and it is precisely this pliability thattransforms the sea into the most dangerousand the most powerful element.

"Against such deceitfulnesss and suchviolence man pits no more than a simplepiece of wood, relies solely on his courageand ingenuity and moves from what is firmto what is unsupported, bringing with thefloor that he has set beneath his feethimself."

Yvon Belaval

French philosopher

{La mer au siècle des encyclopédies,1987, collective work,

Champion, Paris, Slatkine, Geneva, 1987)

31

From siren song to shanty, the sea

has always been associated with

music. For songwriter Georges

Moustaki it was a formative

influence as he grew up in the

cosmopolitan port of Alexandria. On

the Atlantic shores of Brazil it has

brought inspiration to the "saltwater

poets" who have created explosive

forms of popular music from a

multicultural tradition. The sea is

also a cradle where, alone beneath

the stars, the sailor can find solace,

away from the pressures of modern

life ashore.

Mask 0/ the f«

1 HE sea, a source of sustenance to those who live on her

shores, the homeland of travellers, of those who span worlds;the sea, which rises and falls with all the majesty of a symphonicpoem. The sea, fountainhead of sounds and rhythms. The seawind plucks the strings of guitars, harps and lutes, and makesthe tom-tom skin vibrate. It fills the bellows of the accordion.

Great music and light music, Debussy and Trenet, live andbreathe the cadence of the waves as they endlessly advance andretreat.

I am a son of Alexandria, and my vocation as a musiciangrew in a port city, a seaside city where from childhood myrovings were accompanied by the tang of algae, by glitteringcascades of spray, by the splashing of waves against the stoneblocks of the jetty and their discreet murmuring as they diedon the sand, by the sirens of liners, by the lapping of wateraround the hulls of the caiques, and the cries of seagulls.

As I walked along the seashore to school, I would hear thefirst songs of the day being intoned by the fishermen as theydrew in their nets, hauled their boats ashore or serenaded an

early morning bather.After the war, a film entitled Fièvre was shown in Alexandria

in which Tino Rossi, alone in the middle of the Mediterranean,sang Schubert's Ave Maria unaccompanied. As I spent most ofmy time on the Maiscaizone, the cockleshell my father had givenme, I identified spontaneously with the hero of the film andsang away as I pulled on the oars. Later, I learned that the writer-

sailor Gérard d'Aboville sang my songs during a solo voyage,to break the silence, fight exhaustion or simply to amusehimself.

When I wrote the music of Milord for Edith Piaf, I triedto remember the sounds I had heard in the sailors' dives I knew

when I was a teenager, with the disturbing beauties of the portand the songs the seamen bawled out to the accompanimentof a honky-tonk piano.

Songs of the sea, of love, of death.Songs of the deep or the shore. . .. . . My memory is steeped in them, and my verses some¬

times hymn the urge to travel. It was on the Greek island ofSpetsai that the sea whispered my first notes to me.

GEORGES MOUSTAKI, French singer and composer, was born in Alexandria

(Egypt) of Greek parents. He wrote songs for a number of well-known Frenchsingers before becoming a successful singer himself. He is the author of twobooks, Questions à la Chanson and tes filles de la mémoire (with a preface byJorge Amado).

by Georges Moustài

Wherever there is sea, songs are born to reduce tensions,ease partings, salute arrivals, win the girls waiting on the jettyor console the wives dressed in black who have learned that

the sea, their rival, has kept their husbands.The songs of Dorival Caymmi, a poet, singer and musician

from the north of Brazil, describe the daily odyssey of thefishermen of Bahia, lovers of the ocean, victims of its fury, cap¬tivated by its sorcery and by Yemanja, goddess of the waves,who sometimes takes them to her underwater kingdom.

Before Hertzian waves, the waves of the sea transmitted

music between people, countries and continents, mingling withother forms of music to give rise to new melodies and newrhythms.

The bandoneón, a portable harmonium invented by theGerman musician Heinrich Band to accompany religiousprocessions, was introduced by the sailors of Hamburg to the

porteños of Buenos Aires, where it became indissociable fromthe tango.

At Tananarive I bought a kind of musical bow and a drumwhose notes could be modulated by a stick fixed on to its skin.Some time later I came across almost identical instruments in

Brazil where they were known as the "berimbau" and thecuica .

Andalusian music, which originated in Pakistan or Byzan¬tium, was brought to north Africa and southern Spain bynomads who travelled by land and sea.

The meeting of European folklore and emigrants to the NewWorld with the pulsating songs of the African slaves, all borneby sea, created the musical expression of the two Americas. Thisintermingling brought universality to American music.

The World of Silence is the title of a great film about thesea. Silence, too, is music.

Yemanja, godàss of the sea

by Mario de AraUnha

Boats laden with offerings arelaunched In Rio de Janeiro on

New Year's Eve during a

fiesta In honour of Yemanja,

goddess of the sea and of

fertility.

I HE musical tradition of the Brazilian littoral

began with the arrival of the first Portuguese navi¬gators and developed during the 300 years ormore which saw the forced migration of slavesfrom Africa. This century it has achieved nation¬wide popularity and recognition through thetalents of Dorival Caymmi, a mulatto of Afro-Italian origin who drew inspiration from thesongs of Portuguese sailors, mestizo fishermenand worshippers of the three black divinities ofthe sea.

THE AFRO TRADITION

The coastline of Brazil is almost 8,500 kilometres

longlonger than that of almost any othercountry in the world. Along it the early sixteenth-century colonists first settled. Only later didcolonization spread to the hinterland with thegold rush to Minas Gerais in the eighteenth cen¬tury, the rubber boom which attracted settlersup the Amazon, and the development of coffee-growing inland from Sào Paulo. The inaugura¬tion of a new capital, Brasilia, in 1960 constitutedan official challenge to the Brazilian's passion forthe sea.

Maritime culture is important in the bignortheastern cities such as Recife and Fortaleza,

and throughout the region as a whole. But it isprimarily in Bahia that the ripple of waves turnsmost easily to music. Early Portuguese influencessuch as that of the majurada ("Sailor, it's the fishin the sea/ that taught me to swim, that taughtme to swim. . . .") were followed by African Can-domblé chants which established a tradition of

sea songs, whose musical form and religiouspower attested doubly to their black origins. Thepeople of Salvador de Bahia, the most African ofBrazilian cities, sing for all the Orixás, the saintsof their syncretic religion, but they keep theirbest offerings for Yemanja, the goddess of thedeep sea more beloved than her fellow-divinities,Oxum god of the shore and Ayoka goddess ofthe deep.

"On the second day of February, festival dayat sea,

I want to be the first to celebrate Yemanja.J)

Thus sang young Dorival Caymmi, who leftBahia in 1938 to seek fame and fortune in Rio

de Janeiro, where he was a fantastic success withhis big guitar and his serious way of singing aboutgods, fish, fishermen, and the sea off Bahia.

"The raft set sail with Chico Ferreira and

Bento,

the raft returned alone. ..."

"How many have losthusbands and sons in the waters of the sea."

While Caymmi sang of dramatic events fromthe lives of the fishermen of northeastern Brazil

and their familiesdisconsolate widows, weeping 35

fiancées waiting for their men to return, offeringsbegging Yemanja to provide fish Admiral PauloMoreiro da Silva, the architect of modern Brazil's

fishing policy, said jokingly that "The hungerproblem of the northeast would be solved if weturned the map of Brazil upside down and sentthe great shoals of fish from the south to thenorth". In rich, cold, southern Brazil, where the

economy is based largely on industry and agricul¬ture and where the coast is sparsely populated,sardines are plentiful and fishing is practised ona large scale with modern vessels.

In the northeast, where fishing has alwaysbeen a source of subsistence, the fish are biggerand finer, but they are caught individually on theline, from rudimentary craft such as the saveirosof Bahia or even from rafts. The recent industri¬

alization of fishing in the region has largelybrought profits to a handful of companies fromthe south.

POETIC INSPIRATION

Solitary adventures like that immortalized byHemingway in The Old Man and the Sea arecommon in the warm waters off Bahia, Ceará and

Pernambuco. They have inspired many poems,including one written by Caymmi and his greatfriend Jorge Amado, which contains the words:

"It is sweet to die at sea, in the green wavesof the sea. . . . The siren has seduced the hand¬

some sailor. . . ."

Caymmi's influence on Brazilian popularmusic has been far-reaching. Many other com¬posers inspired by folklore have followed hisexample, and have brought the music of distantregions to Rio, the cultural centre of the Braziliansub-continent. As a composer and guitaristCaymmi has been a great innovator in the fieldof harmony. Already a veteran, he wrote four ofthe early songs of Joào Gilberto, the creator ofthe bossa nova. His musical heirs are countless.

Caymmi was still very popular when thebossa nova appeared on the scene. He shared itsglory on the record in which he and Gilberto,accompanied by Cuarteto em Cy, sing a bossanova classic, "The fishermen's suite":

"My raft is off out to sea. . ./ when I comehome from the sea a fine fish I shall bring/ myfriends will come back too/and we shall givethanks to God in heaven. . . ."

"Farewell, farewell fisherman, do not forgetme/I am praying for fair weather/that theweather won't be foul. . . .

"With weather like that we stay in port/Hewho goes to sea does not come back. . . ."

A NEW CULT

From the historic encounter between Caymmi36 and the bossa nova a new cult was born on the

shores of a sea that had become symbolic, anurban sea edged by the concrete buildings southof Rio from which people can greet the summerfrom their windows:

"Day of light, festival of the Sun, and thelittle boat glides on the tender blue of the sea"(O Barquinho by Mensecal and Boscoli, recordedby Joào Gilberto in 1961).

This is the cult of health, beauty and passion.From Tereza de Praia, in which Dick Farney andLucio Alvez sang "She belongs to nobody, shecan't be mine, she can't be his", to Tom Jobimand Vinicius de Moraes's great hit The girl fromIpanema, the shapely beauty of the girls (andboys) of Rio who congregate on the beaches andin the bars of Ipanema, Copacabana and Leblonhas become the great source of inspiration for thepoets of salt water and ice-cold beer.

Most of the movements that have changedthe life of the Carioca and of Brazilians in generalhave come into being and found expression insong on the beaches of Rio: cultural resistanceto the dictatorship, the liberalization of morals,and now the prevention of AIDS.

As the urban population increases, theproblem of seawater pollution gets worse in spiteof all that has been done to extend sewage pipesfurther from the shore. The ecological balanceis precarious. A great effort is being made torestore beauty to the beaches and purity to thewater.

Perhaps this is a response to the dearestwishes of Yemanja, whose cult is gaining groundin Rio not only among the traditional practi¬tioners of Candomblé, the country's secondreligion after Roman Catholicism, but alsoamong the general public. New Year's Eve hasbecome a great festival in honour of the seagoddess. That night, southern Rio comes to a haltas hundreds of thousands of worshippers throwflowers into the sea while cascading fireworksilluminate the scene.

The moment symbolizes what is expected ofthe sea throughout the year. When it is not areceptacle for the city's wastes it is the recipientof requests for good luck and happiness, money,health and love. It is almost as if the sea can

absorb all the negative energies of humankind andreturn them in the form of food and fortune.

Perhaps the Bahia song-writers Gerónimoand Vevé Calasans were seeking to placate the seadivinities of Brazil when they wrote:

"A dozen roses ... I wanted to give,but without asking a thing, I threw them in

the sea,

embracing the sea, but without asking a thingI just gave thanks. ..."

MARIO DE ARATANHA is a Brazilian journalist, record

producer, and organizer of cultural events.

Night waé, ahne

A M I T I É is a 7.60-metre cutter with

L\ a blue hull and white sails. We

JL Jl. named her for friendship

ours, that of the people we hoped to meeton our two-year cruiseand for a songwell known to international volunteer

workcampers. We only discovered muchlater the other Amitié which appears,dragged up on the beach, in a painting byVan Gogh.

One late April afternoon, our Amitiénosed out of the harbour of Las Palmas,

capital of the Canary Islands, and turnedwest. Objective? Bridgetown, Barbados,some 2,700 sea and tradewind miles

toward sunset. On board were Nicole

(France), Glyn (UK) and I (USA). Glyn'sfirst son had just been born back in

England. In a paternal gesture (andperhaps to ward off storms and evil

spiritssailors still tend to worry aboutboth), he streamed astern, on a short line,a rubber duck borrowed from the new

baby. "There," announced Glyn, makingsure the line was tied fast to a cleat, "by

the time he gets back to England, thatduck's going to be a very salty bluewatersailor!"

The first night and day were har¬rowing as we crossed a heavily-travelled 37

north-south shipping lane. We were notmuch bigger than a single lifeboat on thedeck of one of the monster craft that

loomed on all sides. Our radar reflector

probably graced their screens with a blipnot much bigger than that of a seagull.Then the shipping lane was behind us.

And before us? Nothing. We wouldnot see another human being for over amonth.

Nothingness. . . . Sea, sky, wind,waves: huge rollers towering above ourstern, raising us to their crests in slow-motion roller-coaster style, and depositingus (not always gently) in the followingtrough. A nothingness made the moreimpressive by the fact that, as we settledinto a routine, each of us spent severalhours out of every twenty-four on watchalone.

Nothingness, the sea? Beneath ourkeel were something like two kilometresof salt and waterelemental substances

that make up some 70 per cent of you andme. The surface of this ever-heaving,often-roiling liquid was about one metrebeneath the seat of the slicker trousers-

then, as the weather warmed, swimsuitof whoever was on watch.

Close enough to observe the dolphinfish that followed us, the dolphins thatpreceded us, and the flying fish chased bysome ominous icthyomorphous cousinsoff the crests of waves and practically intothe open jaws of frigates and other seabirds that wheeled and waited for a

winged snack.

SOLITUDE

Nothingness, the sky? Sun and stars gaveus our bearings; the sight of a bird tryingto light on the wildly gyrating mastheadgave us mirth; and the Moon and Jupiterjoined forcesI enjoyed night watch-to light up whatever reading matter Iwanted, even an old copy of Le Monde (anewspaper not renowned for large type).

Not nothingness, then; but solitudefor certain. A solitude made the more

present by the disappearance of Glyn'sson's ducky. A sharp tooth had been atwork: the line was severed, notunravelled.

Solitude, then, although humankindwasn't far: strewn along the whole trans¬atlantic crossing were bobbing oil drums,

38 petroleum-coated plastic containers of

The sea's hand

/ lost my way.And I found the sea's hand,its ever open route,the glittering green waves.I walked beside it,

oh gentle lull of evening.Oh drunken rapture of dawn.And the monster of the tempesttook me in his arms.

Elmer Diktonius (1896-1961)Finnish writer

many shapes and sizes and other flotsamand jetsam of our "civilization". Oneplastic box wheedled to nobody but usand the birds: "Drink Coca-Cola!" "Like

hell I will!" I shouted after it as it drifted

astern, already on the lookout for anotheryachtsman-client, improbable before afew days ... or months.

Other news that came, via the BBC,

included civil war in Africa, student dis¬

turbances in Europe, and twice-daily timechecks for our navigation. We also heardMay Day in Red Square: thank you,Radio Moscow; the bands came in loud

and clear and we cavorted in the

1.5-square-metre cockpit.

"IT'S RAINING IN RIO"

About two a.m. one night I craned myneck as two planes approached each otherin opposite directions overhead. At firstmesmerized by their warning flashes, Ithen jumped for the radio and heard twoBritish Airways pilots chat offhandedly:"Hope you've brought your mac, friend;it's raining in Rio. Over." Crackle."Roger, friend. And /advise you to takethe Underground in from Heathrow.They've got the motorway dug up a treatagain. Over."

For me, there was nobody to talk to,but I was speechless anyway. And then Istarted laughing out loud. Those fellowswere each doing about 800 knots andwould reach their respective destinationsin scant hours. We were churning outabout four knots and had several weeks

to go yet.

Little by little, night solitude turnedone's thoughts inwards. Fear? I honestlysearched for it, and knew there were

objective reasons to find it. A Swedish

sailboat had recently been becalmed inmid-Atlantic and turned up in the WestIndies with no more drinking water andonly one tiny pot of jam left to eat forthe five-person crew. We ourselves hadhad a dicey moment when one of the

crosstrees started to crawl down the portstaythat could have been catastrophe.Luckily, Glyn was on deck at the same

time as I and, standing on my joined hands(a prayerful stepping stool they made),managed to jury-rig a repair. In Las Palmaswe had met Poland's first single-handedround-the-world sailor, Leonid Telega.He showed us his logbook in which the

Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whomhe had met in Tahiti, had written that his

boat's name, Opty, made him "half anoptimist". No, there was not much fear,however. (No superman, I'm scared ofhigh places.)

On the other hand there was some

(pardonable?) satisfaction. Contrary tofriends' predictions, I had managed tolearn to use a sextantwe were, in fact,

only about five sea miles off course whenwe arrived "on the other side"; not bad for

a bunch of amateurs. And I had managedto rig a twin headsails arrangementFredand Jim we called them following theexample of a pre-war French solo sailorand seascape painter, Marin-Marie. Theyenabled Amitié to steer herself most of

the time. (Giving time to think.)I felt only a distant relative of the

Tabarly-type racers. Amitié was a friendlydonkey, not a sleek racehorse; our onlycompetitor was danger, not the chronom¬eter; and minus an obsession with speed,we were able to savour the slow passingof time.

THE CALL OF THE DEEP

But if the racers were distant relatives,

they were kin all the same and I thoughtoften of them. Other nocturnal kindred

visitors included some of our hardypredecessors, who managed with wood,hemp and canvas (compared with ourfibreglass hull and synthetic running rig¬ging and sails), who had no radios, no self-inflating life-rafts, and were often monthson a single crossing.

Grandad among the solo artists wasprobably Yankee Capt. Joshua Slocum,who built his boats with his own hands

and may well have beenas early as thenineteenth century the first singlehander

to circumnavigate the globe. There wasalso Vito Dumas, an Argentine relativeof writer Alexandre, who had to operateon himself with a penknife at sea whenan abcess threatened his life. Then there

was painter Marin-Marie, just mentioned.In 1933, he crossed the Atlantic from east

to westa real "first"alone but in rela¬

tive comfort and with a modicum of rest.

Of sixty-five days at sea, he only spenttwenty-three at the helm. The twin-

headsails system he invented obliginglysteered his eleven-metre cutter Winibelle

II the rest of the time.

Why did they do it? Why were wedoing it? "To get away from it all"atleast for a whileand literally to rub

shoulders with Nature in her many

moods, to be in and of and completelydependent on Nature, and to learn notto try to dominate her, but to co-operatewith her. To test ourselves, too, since we

were fairly young at the time. For thesheer joy of the days when the Sun shoneand the wind sped us along leaving astraight bubbling, glistening wake astern;for the thrill of facing nasty blows (thathad been in the winter Mediterranean a

few months earlierand we'd had quiteenough of that particular kind of thrill!).And, finally, because one hot summerevening years before, sitting onGeneviève, a hulk where we lived under

the Pont de la Concorde in Paris sniffing

The sea

Before our human dream (or terror) wove

Mythologies, cosmogonies and love,Before time coined its substance into days,

The sea, the always sea, existed: was.

is the sea? Who is that violent being,

Violent and ancient, who gnaws the

foundations

Of earth? He is both one and many oceans;He is abyss and splendour, chance and wind.Who looks on the sea, sees it the first time,

Every time, with the wonder distilledFrom elementary thingsfrom beautiful

Evenings, the moon, the leap of a bonfire.Who is the sea, and who am I? The day

That follows my last agony shall say.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)Argentine writer

Translated by John Updike in Jorge Luis Borges.Selected Poems 1923-1967. ©Penguin Books 1985.

at the gracelessly perfumed Seine, withauto exhaust fumes wafting down on usfrom the bridge above, Glyn and I hadsuddenly decided that the open sea wasfor us.

Despite a strict prohibition onalcohol, my thirty-first birthday wascelebrated with the merest thimble of

medicinal rum. It came as a reminder of

temporal realityby then, after threeweeks at sea, firmly in inverted commas:"reality". But I was never bored. Theracers have no time to be bored; I had

time not to be bored. Not too many DeepThoughts crossed my mind, but it wasready to receive and nurture those thathappened its way, doubtless a bit ruffledby the tradewind that pushed us inex¬orably towards the New World.

THE RHYTHMS OF NATURE

Day thirty-five dawned with Barbados'eastern shore beginning to rise before usfrom the flat bed of the western horizon.

As Amitié drew closer, I was first

bemused, then astonished, then (a little)

frightened by repeated rapid glintings oflight. Closer still, and the glintings provedto come from the windscreens and

windows of cars zipping along the shoreroads of Barbados, reflecting back to usthe light of the Sun rising at our stern."Zipping" is too weak a word: the driversseemed to have been maddened to dizzy-ingly, fantastically dangerous speeds alongthose winding narrow roads: now I didfeel fear, fear for the drivers' lives!

Later, I realized that the cars had been

moving at a careful leisurely pace, that Iin fact had slowed down, that in one-

month-plus at sea my own biorhythmhad relaxed, to match the rhythms of theelements of Nature: the slow, relatively

regular respiration of the waves, wind andstars.

My night watches alone left me withmany questions and perplexities, but alsowith one secure conviction (on which I

have certainly not acted sufficientlysince): "faster" is not necessarily "better".

Thank you, Amitié.

ARTHUR GILLETTE was formerly editor-in-chief of

UNESCO's international quarterly Museum, and is

now a member of the Organization's Division of

Youth and Sport Activities. He has published a

number of articles on maritime questions in

specialist magazines. 39

A wealth of legends, fables,

poems and allegorical writings

illustrate the fascination that

the sea has exercised on

the creative imagination ever

since ancient times. For modern

seafarers who observe age-old

superstitions and taboos the

symbolism associated with the sea

is still as potent as ever.

However, with increasing

pollution and uncontrolled

tapping of its riches, the sea

may be losing its sacred aura.

A ' ' ¡I » ; v-

,*:?»'

Extracted from Romans et contes

égyptiens, translated into French with

an introduction and commentary byGustave Lefebure © Adrien Maisonneuve,

Paris 1976.

IN this story from ancient Egypt, anEgyptian describes the extraordinaryadventures that befell him when he

sailedfrom a Red Sea port to the mines ofSinai. He tells how he was shipwreckedand then landed on a marvellous island

whose master, a serpent, made him welcomeand sent him home laden with gifts. Back inEgypt he was received by the king, whobestowed on him the honour ofCompanion.

The island on whose shores the sailor

was cast by a wave of the "Very Green"(the Red Sea) is called "the island o/ka."The ka was originally regarded as aninvisible power which is born with man,accompanies him during his life and,

mMÍMm

. Tí

sah's storyleaving him at his death, continuesnevertheless to represent the personality ofthe being with which it coexisted on Earth.It corresponds approximately to theWestern concept of the soul. The ka is alsothe life force, the principle oflife, and thenall that keeps a person alive, from food toroyal favour.

The island o/ka would thus be a placewhere there is an abundance ofall the goodthings which help to keep life going. Giventhe early meaning o/ka, it might also bethought of as the island of the spirit, theisland of the ghostthe enchanted island.

It lay in the "land of Punt", a place-name which seems to have designated

primarily the western coast ofthe Red Seaand later came to include the coast ofArabia opposite and notably the Yemen(where the land of the famous Queen ofSheba was located).

As early as the old empire, the Egyp¬tians sent expeditions to the land of Puntin search ofaromatic essences and incense.Sometimes accidents happened, for thecoast is dotted with many reefs and islands.These voyages were laborious and oftendangerous, and those who returned embroi¬dered the stories of their adventures withextraordinary details to charm and astonishtheir listeners. This must have been the

origin ofthe story ofthe shipwrecked sailor.

An ancient Egyptian vesselis shown In this detail from the burial

vault of Nefer, a dignitary of

the fifth dynasty (c. 2500-2400 BC),at Sakkara.

I am going to tell you something . . .that happened . . . while I was goingto the mines of the sovereign and had

gone down on the Very Green aboard aship 120 cubits long and forty cubitswide.1 Aboard were 120 sailors, theflower of Egypt. Whether they keptwatch on the sky or the land, their heartswere more steadfast than that of a lion.

They could announce a storm before ithappened.

THE STORM AND THE SHIPWRECK

A storm had broken when we were on

the Very Green and before we hadreached land. We carried on sailing, butthe storm redoubled its violence, raisinga wave of eight cubits. . . . Then the shipsank without any survivors. And I wascast away on an island by a wave of theVery Green. I spent three days alone,with only my heart for companionship.Lying inert beneath the shelter of a tree(?), I embraced the tree. Then I stretchedmy legs and went in search of somethingto eat. I found figs and grapes, magnifi¬cent vegetables of all kinds, the fruits ofthe sycamore . . . and cucumbers as if theyhad been cultivated. There too were fish

and birds. Everything imaginable wasthere. I took a grip of myself and threwdown on to the ground (some of thesefoodstuffs), for I had too much to carry.Then, when I had taken a fire-stick I

made a fire and a burnt offering to thegods.

A BEARDED SERPENT APPEARS

Then I heard the sound of thunder. I sup¬posed that it was a wave of the VeryGreen. The trees cracked and the earth

trembled. When I uncovered my face, Isaw that a serpent was coming: he meas¬ured thirty cubits and his beard exceededtwo cubits; his limbs were plated withgold, his eyebrows (?) were in real lapislazuli. He came forward cautiously (?).

He opened his mouth to me while Iwas on my belly before him, saying:"Who has brought you [here], who hasbrought you, little one? Who has broughtyou? If you tarry before telling me whohas brought you to this island, I shallmake sure that you see that, after beingreduced to cinders, you have become 41

something that is no longer visible." [Ireplied:] "You speak to me and I do notgrasp [what you say]: I am before you andI have lost my senses."

Then he put me in his mouth, car¬ried me to his lair and put me downgently so that I was safe and sound,without anything having been takenfrom me. He opened his mouth to mewhile I was on my belly before him, andthen said to me: "Who has brought you[here], who has brought you, little one?Who has brought you onto this island ofthe Very Green whose two shores are inthe waves?"

[The Egyptian tells the story of theshipwreck]

THE SERPENT

MAKES A PROMISE

Then he said to me: "Fear not, little one;

don't look so tormented now that youhave come to me. God has certainlyallowed you to live, since he has broughtyou to this island of ka where everythingcan be found and which is filled with all

kinds of good things. Here you will passmonth after month until you have spentfour months on this island. Then a boat

will come from the country, manned bysailors whom you know. You will returnwith them to your country and you willdie in your city.2 Happy are they whocan tell what they have experienced, oncethe painful moments have passed!

"I shall tell you a similar story, whichhappened on this island where I was withmy fellows, among whom there werechildren. There were seventy-five of usserpents in all, including my children andmy fellows. Not to mention a very younggirl whom I had obtained by prayer. Astar fell, and set them ablaze. This hap¬pened when I was not with [them]; theyburned while I was not in their midst. I

nearly died because of them when I foundthem in a single heap of bodies.

"If you are strong, master your heart:you will clasp your children to yourbreast, you will embrace your wife, youwill see your house again, and that willbe worth more than anything. You willreturn to the country where you lived inthe midst of your brothers."

THE PRINCE

OF THE LAND OF PUNT

Then, prostrate on my belly, I touchedthe earth before the Serpent with myforehead and said: "I shall tell the Sover¬

eign of your power and will see that he42 is informed of your greatness. I shall have

[perfumes] brought to youibi, hekenou,iudeneb, khesayt, and the temple incensein which each god rejoices. I shall thustell what has happened [on this island],mindful of what I have seen by virtue of[your] power. You will be thanked in thecity, before the notables of all thecountry. I shall sacrifice bulls for you asa burnt offering, I shall twist the necksof game birds for you. I shall have shipsladen with all the precious products ofEgypt brought to you, as is meet for a godwho loves men, in a distant country thatmen do not know."

Sea and darkness

At first I thought it impossible toremain alone at sea for three hours.But at five o'clockfive hours aftermy shipwreckI found it natural tobe waiting still. The sun was goingdown. . . . Suddenly the sky grewcrimson and I continued to scan the

horizon. Then it turned dark purpleand I continued to look at it. On

one side of the raft, the first starcame out, set like a yellow diamondin the wine-red sky. And all at oncepitch-black night descended upon thesea.

My first impression, on realizingthat I was so completely immersed indarkness that I could no longer seemy hand before my eyes, was that Iwould not be able to surmount myterror. The sound of the waterlapping against my raft was my onlyway of knowing that, slowly butsurely, I was continuing to advance.Plunged in the gloom, I realized thatnever during the daytime had I beenso alone. The darkness added to myfeeling of loneliness on this raftwhich I could not see but which I

felt gliding beneath me on a viscoussea inhabited by strange animals. Tofeel less lonely, I started looking atmy watch. Ten to seven. Muchlatertwo or three hours later, so it

seemed to me!I looked again: fiveto seven. When the big hand reachedthe figure twelve, it was seven o'clockprecisely and the sky was streamingwith stars. I had the impression thatso much time had gone by that dawnwas about to break.

Gabriel García MárquezColombian writer

(Relato de un naufrago)

Then he laughed at me,3 [or rather]at what I had said and which he thoughtcrazy, and said: "You do not have muchfrankincense, while you were born pos¬sessing resin of the turpentine tree. Butfrankincense belongs to me, the prince of[the land] of Punt. As for this hekenou

perfume which you thought of bringing,it is the main product of this island. It willcome to pass, when you have left thisplace, that you will never again see thisisland, which will be transformed intowaves."

THE RETURN HOME

This ship came as the Serpent hadpredicted. I went and perched high in atree and recognized the people who wereaboard. Then I went to announce this

piece of news [to the Serpent], but I foundthat he [already] knew. And he said tome: "[Go back] healthy, healthy, littleone, to your homemay you see yourchildren again! Make sure that my repu¬tation is good in your city. That is all Iask of you." Then I prostrated myself onmy belly, arms outstretched before theSerpent. And he gave me a cargo offrankincense, hekenou, iudeneb, khesayt,tichepes, chaasekh perfumes, black eyewash, giraffes' tails, much resin of the tur¬pentine tree, ivory tusks, hunting dogs,monkeys, baboons, and all kinds of pre¬cious goods.4 1 loaded it all on the ship.Then, when I prostrated myself to thankhim, he said to me: "You will reach yourcountry in two months, you will claspyour children to your breast, you willbecome young again, you will be buriedthere." Thereupon I went down to theshore to the ship and hailed the crew. Igave thanks, on the shore, to the masterof this island and also [to] those who wereon board.

Then we set sail northwards, towards

the court of the Sovereign and we reachedour country two months later, exactly asthe Serpent had said. I was taken to theSovereign and I gave him the presents Ihad brought back from the island. Hethanked me in the presence of notablesfrom the whole country, then I was raisedto the rank of Companion and rewardedwith serfs belonging to him.

1. Around sixty metres by twenty metres. It was alarge ship.2. The greater misfortune that could befall anEgyptian was to die far from Egypt.3. The Serpent laughs because he has no need toreceive from Egypt the very things that Egyptianscame to his country to procure.4. This list includes everything that the Egyptiansfound in the land of Punt.

The strange èstiny of Urdiim Taro

F.ROM the deep waters of my childhood rose afantastic edifice called the Ryugu, the palace ofthe Dragon. Contrary to what this rather fright¬ening name might suggest, a soft, feminineatmosphere prevailed there. The dragon wasrarely to be seen and a very beautiful youngwoman, Otohime, lived in this underwater palacewhose walls were decorated with enamels and

corals. She wore an exotic dress. Was she the

daughter of the dragon king or some other animalwhich had undergone metamorphosis? My pic¬ture book did not say.

A man named Urashima Taro lived with her

as her guest. These two charming figures spentdays and months together in an atmosphere ofcontinual joy. They lacked for nothing. Count¬less multicoloured fishessea bream, sole andthousands of othersdanced a fantastic ballet to

the sound of exquisite music. Their table wasladen with delicious dishes. Do they eat fish andshellfish even at the bottom of the sea, I often

wondered naively. But as to the nature of the linkthat bound this extraordinary couple, I never gaveit a thought. Were they lovers, or were they mar¬ried? My old book of stories said only that theyoung man was happy. That was enough for me.

I knew why Urashima Taro lived at thebottom of the sea. The young fisherman had goneto the help of a giant turtle who was beingattacked by some naughty children on the beach.Grateful for his aid, the sea creature transportedits saviour to this wonderful place.

Being such a bookworm as a child, I alsoknew the end of the story. After a few years hadgone by, the hero tired of an existence given overto games and amusements. Nostalgia took himback to his home country, where he found to hisamazement no trace of either his home or his

mother. Nobody recognized him. . . . That waswhy I was in no hurry to turn the page and leavebehind the pictures of the dragon's palace.

The last illustration to the story was dis¬tressing for a child. On a deserted beach a piti¬fully thin old man with a long white beard couldbe seen. He seemed overwhelmed by his strangedestiny. Beside him was a small, precious-lookingbox from which a plume of white smoke spiralledupwards. Though forbidden to do so, thefisherman had opened the present Otohime hadgiven him as a souvenir of their life together. The

j^HHl

by Uinomiya Masayuh

Urashima returns to his

village. Illustration from a

17th-century manuscript.

three years he thought he had spent with her werethe equivalent of 700 years on Earth! Thefisherman's death, which was clearly imminent,seemed to me enigmatic. What offence had hecommitted to deserve such a terrible punishment?

LATER on, I learnt that the legendary figureof Urashima Taro had lived for centuries in the

collective memory of my fellow-countrymen,symbolizing for them the sea that surrounds theirsmall islands.

This figure appears for the first time inwritten form in the Nihon-shoki (the "WrittenChronicles of Japan", compiled in 720) whichdescribe mythical and historical events from the 43

The song of the Ocean

Old ocean, great solitary. . . .

Voluptuously rocked by the myriad

vapours of your majestic slowness, which is

the greatest of the qualities vested in youby sovereign might, in the midst of a darkmystery you unfurl over all your sublime

surface your incomparable waves, with a

calm sense of your eternal power. They roll

by in parallel lines one after the other,

with short intervals between them. Scarcelyhas one begun to ebb than another rears

up towards it, accompanied by the

melancholic sound of the dissolving foam,telling us that all is foam. (Thus human

beings, those living waves, die one afterthe other, in monotonous fashion, but

without the sound of the foam).

Lautréamont (1846-1870)French poet

(Les Chants de Maldoror)

44

beginning of the world to the seventh century.The Chronicles describe the physical nature ofthe love between Urashima and Otohime, unlikethe story I read when I was a child.

Subsequently the legend reappears in manyworks belonging to different genres. TheManyoshu (759?), the oldest anthology of Japanesepoetry, contains several poems which tell thestory of Urashima. A folk tale dating frommedieval times (otogi-zoshi) gives a particularlydetailed version which reflects a Buddhist desire

to edify and, through the theme of the quest forimmortality, the influence of Chinese literature.After aging in the twinkling of an eye, Urashimais transformed into a crane by a feather in oneof the three boxes given to him by Otohime, whoreturns to him in the form of a turtle. Thus the

story ends with the uniting of two creatures thatsymbolize longevitya thousand years of life forthe crane, ten thousand for the tortoise. A no playtells the same story. The legend also crops up inseveral tales from oral folklore. Several modern

Japanese writers have also produced variants of it.

I HE story I read in my storybook as a childwas a simplified, perhaps over-simplified, version.But even today I love it, with its pitiless ending,more than any other. Urashima's mysterious

. " . . * . . '

adventure is still deeply rooted in my memorywhere, paradoxically, it is inseparable from thesound of a military march. Like all Japanese chil¬dren who grew up during the Second World War,I often sang in those days a song called "UrashimaTaro" which was put out by the Ministry of Edu¬cation. Its words gave an even simpler version ofthe fisherman's story. Its rhythmical music is byno means exceptional. This tune linked to aspecific moment in history has often come backto me when in my imagination I have plungedto the bottom of the sea.

M,luST I today explain, as an adult, why I preferthe version of the story that I do? Would this notbe an act as fatal as the opening of the little box?By way of explanation, I shall describe anotherlegendary image of the underwater world whichis also engraved in the memory of the Japanesepeople.

In an episode of the Kojiki ("Records ofancient matters"), a seminal text of Japanese liter¬ature compiled in AD 712, two mythical figuresfind themselves in a similar situation to that of

Urashima and Otohime, but their lives are quitedifferent. Toyotamabime no mikoto, the

daughter of the sea god, welcomes to the palaceof her father Watatshumi an earth divinity,

Yamasachibiko. She marries her guest and, unlikeOtohime, becomes pregnant. Thus, for theindividual, the cycle of time is renewed by procre¬ation. As far as I know, Urashima Taro and Oto¬

hime did not have any children, although theylived together for three yearsor 700 accordingto our earthly measurement. To my mind, thisuniverse under the sea can only exist outsidehuman time.

Now we can understand that what breaks the

spell is affection, linked to a personal concept oftime. Urashima's first mistake is to wish to return

to his mother and his village. Then, by clingingto the memory of the underwater palace whichperhaps still lingers on in the box, he irrevocablybreaks the rules of the game. Then, inevitably,everything goes up in smoke. The bewitchedfisherman will return to human time to face his

destiny. In my children's picture book the storyended there. When Pandora opened the box shedid at least find Hope inside it, unlike UrashimaTaro. This children's version of the story is morecruel but it is also more authentic. If the sea of

Eternal Life exists, so do the life and death of

individual human beings. The imagination mustaccept the reality of human life.

With this smoke, which is in the end far too

explanatory, it only remains for me to disappearin my turn.

Urashima arrives in the

Dragon's palace. Illustration

from a 17th-century scroll.

NINOMIYA MASAYUKI,

Japanese university teacher

and essayist, is a lecturer at

the Institut des Langues etCivilisations Orientales in Paris

and executive secretary

general of the association forthe construction of the

Japanese Cultural Centre in

Paris. His Watashi no naka no

Sharutoru ("Chartres in the

heart of memory", Tokyo

1990) was awarded the prize

of the essayists' club of Japan. 45

Moby Dick, monsteroftheforbiäen

seas

IN 1839 eighteen-year-old Herman Melville, theson of a prominent but impoverished Americanfamily, sailed as a deckhand from New York toLiverpool and back aboard the packet ship Si.Lawrence. This was his first taste of the sea. Less

than two years later, after a short and unsuccessfulspell as a teacher, he returned. Signing on thistime as a lowly whalerman, despite his genteelorigins, he embarked upon the Acushnet, whichtook him from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, roundCape Horn, to the Pacific. There, after desertingthe Acushnet and becoming involved in a mutinyon another whaling ship, he became variously aharpooner and beachcomber on islands from theGalápagoswhere just a few years earlier CharlesDarwin had preceded him on board the Beagle-to Tahiti. In 1844 he returned to Boston fromHonolulu as an enlisted seaman aboard the man-of-war United States.

It was then that his writing career trulybegan, informed by his first-hand experience ofthe sea, its calms and tempests, its exhilarationsand tribulations. For Melville, the sea was bothmassively actual, alive with observable creation,yet at the same time a kind of cosmic key orcipher. Within its ebbs and flows, its moving sur¬faces and mysterious depths, its plenitude of life-forms from plankton to leviathans, was to befound the very riddle of existence. "You musthave plenty of sea-room to tell the truth in", heproclaimed.

He could hardly have better indicated theocean dimensions of the epic tale then takingshape in his imagination, one which would takeits hero, Captain Ahab and his ship-of-all-nations,the Pequod, backwards and forwards across thegreat Atlantic and Pacific fishing lanes in pursuitof that most sumptuous of aquatic creatures, thewhite whale, Moby Dick, which would give itsname to his novel.

A LONGSTANDING TRADITION

Yet in speaking of "sea-room" Melville was alsoaligning himself with a very longstanding traditionin Western culture. The Book of Jonah, to takeone starting-point, explicitly alluded to in Chapter9 of Moby Dick, relates a parable of would-beflight and guilt in which the sea is portrayed asthe tempestuous domicile of a "great fish" thatswallows and later spews forth the recalcitrantprophet. Then there is Homer who, with theIliad and the Odyssey, composed epics that becamefounding stories in the Graeco-Roman legacy. Inthe latter, especially, which recounts Odysseus'sjourney homeward to his faithful wife Penelopeafter the Trojan war, we have one of the classicexpressions of the sea as both actual and figurativedomain.

Other landmarks in Western literature, the

anonymous Beowulf znà the Nordic sea sagas,delineate the sea as a place of northern dark andcold. Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff, a fifteenth-

by A. Robert Lee

century German satiric masterpiece, bequeaths usthe image of a Ship of Fools afloat on a sea ofillusion and false hopes. The European Renais¬sance, an age of boundless discovery, yieldsimages of the sea as at once a site for battles andpiracy, for the unknown, and for possible routesto Utopia, reflected in Shakespeare's The Tempestor Camöes's Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads), thenational epic of Portugal. Camôes, not inciden¬tally, was favourite reading for Melville. Otherpoetry of the sea ranges from Coleridge's ghostlyThe Ancient Mariner to Rimbaud's intenselyimagined Le bateau ivre, with the lyrics of a Fer¬nando Pessoa, a Hart Crane or a Rafael Albertithere to enrich the list.

But it has perhaps been in the modern novelthat the sea has found its most striking literaryexpression. Who has not relished the voyagingand the shipwrecks of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe,Swift's Gulliver's Travels or Stevenson's Treasure

Island? Do not Antarctic fantasias like Poe's The

Narrative ofArthur Gordon Pym or Jules Verne'sunderwater empire of Captain Nemo in TwentyThousand Leagues Under The Sea weave a spellwhich extends well beyond childhood? Nor hasthe sea lost any of its fascination for our century,though it does have a growing rival in the immen¬sities of outer space. In Joseph Conrad, Polish-born and also an ex-mariner, one can turn to a

tale of the Malaysian Straits like Lord Jim or ofocean journeying from the Thames to the RiverCongo in Heart ofDarkness. English fiction also

Opposite page, Captain Ahab

struggles with the great whitewhale in John Huston's film

Moby Dick (1956).

Below, Jonah and the whale.

Mosaic from the Basilica

Teodoriana (4th century),

Aquileia, Italy.

47

The Ship of Fools.

16th-century German

engraving.

supplies Virginia Woolf's The Waves, a "moder¬nist" classic in which the sea acts as a metaphorof human consciousness, and, as recently as the1980s, William Golding's Rites ofPassage, the fic¬tionalized log of a late-eighteenth-century crossingto Australia. In these too, the sea goes beyondmere theme: its rhythms and cadences get drawninto the very story-telling itself.

Herman Melville thus joins distinguishedcompany, and not only on account oí Moby Dick.The sea marks much of his other fiction. Still,it is Melville's "whale-book", as he liked to call it,which remains central. Perhaps this is becauseMoby Dick so dazzlingly combines high adven¬ture with philosophy, authentic sea lore with ataste for metaphysics. "I have written a wickedbook", Melville told his fellow writer, Nathaniel

Hawthorne, "and feel as spotless as the lamb".How, then, does Melville's epic picture the sea?

Firstly, there is the sea as a physical power,Melville's ability to render the smack of wind andcurrent. Nowhere more dramatically does he doso than when Ahab and his men confront the

breaching of the white whale:"Moby Dick bodily burst into view! For not

by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by thepeaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head,did the White Whale now reveal his vicinity;but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of

48

breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity fromthe furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus boomshis entire bulk into the pure element of air, andpiling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows hispace to the distance of seven miles or more. Inthose moments, the torn, enraged waves heshakes off, seem his mane. . . ."

Here, sea and whale become one, the ocean

as a kingdom with leviathan as one of its rulingpresences. Few of Nature's dramas, for Melville,

ever matched the sight of a Sperm Whale risingfrom out of the sea's very depths.

But Melville knew the sea to have a myriadof quite other incarnations. It could also be a placeof rapacity, of warring and predatory species andnone more so than the shark. With just the righttouch of gallows humour, he describes howsharks will rip into the flesh of a captured whale:

". . . thousands of sharks, swarming aroundthe dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fat¬ness. The few sleepers below in their bunks wereoften startled by the sharp slapping of their tailsagainst the hull, within a few inches of thesleepers' hearts. Peering over the side you couldjust see them (as before you heard them) wal¬lowing in the sullen, black waters, and turningover on their backs as they scooped out hugeglobular pieces of the whale of the bigness of ahuman head. . . ."

In contrast, in a chapter appropriately called"The Grand Armada", Melville depicts the seaas wonderfully feminine and maternal, an arenafor birth as much as death. He describes a whale-

boat which inadvertently has steered into a schoolof newly born whales and their mothers:

"But far between this wondrous world uponthe surface, another and still stranger world metour eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspendedin those watery vaults, floated the forms of thenursing mothers of the whales, and those that bytheir enormous girth seemed shortly to becomemothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a con¬

siderable depth exceedingly transparent; and ashuman infants while suckling will calmly and fix¬edly gaze away from the breast, as if leading twodifferent lives at the time . . . even so did the

young of these whales seem looking up towardsus, but not at us. . . ."

At the heart of the engaging peace and beautyof this scene is Melville's recognition thathowever we may view the sea, it always retainsits own way of being. Hence the infant whaleslook towards, but not at, their human observers.

FORBIDDEN SEAS

As, too, the Pequod travels ever closer towardsdestruction, Melville undertakes an extensive

survey of every aspect of whale life. He takes apositive pleasure in playing the self-appointed roleof cetologist, supplying lists, systems of categori¬zation, quotations and fables from a multitudeof sourcesand not least from legendary explorers 'like Thomas Cook and Charles Darwin. He

proves just as alert in describing dolphins, por¬poises, walruses, brit, crustácea, seabirds, and thehuge floating colonies of algae and seaweed. It isalmost as if he wants to drive home the vital,incalculable abundance of the seas and their func¬

tion as repositories, places of rebirth and con¬tinuity. What is more, if ever a book cautionedagainst ecological arrogance, it is Moby Dick. Inour own nuclear age, in which global warming

and pollution have become everyday facts,Melville's story of Ahab's monomania and of atechnology which seeks to maim or even destroyone of creation's supreme creatures could notoffer a timelier warning.

Yet rooted in fact as they are, Melville'saccounts of the sea and its creatures are also inter¬

spersed with flights of speculation andphilosophy. From the outset, Ishmael, the nar¬rator, makes no secret of the matter. Contem¬

plating his own going to sea, he declares "Yes,as every one knows, meditation and water arewedded for ever". He speaks of the great seas as"watery prairies" which arouse nothing less than"mystical vibrations". "Noah's flood", he muses

at a later point, "is not yet subsided; two thirdsof the world it still covers". And with an eye tothe sea as a source of endlessly proliferating mythand ritual, he invokes two of the most ancientof world cultures:

"Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy?Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, andmake him the own brother of Jove? Surely allthis is not without meaning. And still deeper themeaning of that story of Narcissus, who becausehe could not grasp the tormenting, mild imagehe saw in the fountain, plunged into it and wasdrowned. But that same image, we ourselves seein all rivers and oceans. It is the image of theungraspable phantom of life; and this is the keyto it all."

In passages like this, Moby Dick confirms howMelville writes both a sea-story, one of the

greatest, yet also something infinitely more ambi¬tious. The Pequod's "voyage-out", in another ofhis phrases, may well take us literally, exhilarat-ingly, into an Atlantic or Pacific. But it also takesus into matching other seas, "forbidden seas" asIshmael calls them. These are the seas which exist

within us and where the very first and last of allmeanings might be encountered.

The Wreck of the Minotaur,

by the English painter J.M.W.

Turner (1775-1851).

The Tempest

Ariel's song

Full fathom five thy father lies,Of his bones are coral made:Those are pearls that were his eyes.Nothing of him that doth fade,But doth suffer a sea-changeInto something rich and strange. . .Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

BURTHEN

Ding-dong.

ARIEL

Hark! now I hear them

Ding-dong bell.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)English dramatist and poet

The Tempest

A. ROBERT LEE,

of the United Kingdom,

teaches American Literature at

the University of Kent at

Canterbury. He is editor of an

edition of Moby Dick

(Everyman Library, 1975) andof 12 volumes in a "Critical

Studies" series published by

Vision Press (London), themost recent of which are

devoted to Herman Melville

(1984), Edgar Allan Poe (1986)

and William Faulkner (1990). 49

étions on the ocean

by Bisabeth Mam Borgese

50

SOME human attitudes towards the

ocean are universal and timeless

almost like the ocean itself. Whether

they originated in one place and spreadfrom there into all cultures, or whetherthey were born identical, in differentplaces, settings, and times, we do notknow.

However this may be, human beingshave always regarded the sea as the originof all things. In virtually all mythologiesof the world, water is given primacy overthe other elements. It was the first thing,after which came all others. To the

Greeks as to the Aztecs, even the gods

were "born of water". Myths of creation,from Peru and Mexico to North

America, India and Scandinavia, depictthe Earth as being created from the sea,and life as evolving from the sea.

A second univeral perception of thesea is the perception of ambiguity. The seais seen as a giver of life and a taker of life:an element of calm and beauty, of physicaland spiritual nourishment, a conveyor ofwealth and power, a road to new lands, tonew knowledge, a medium of communi¬cation. At the same time, however, it

separates lands and their peoples. Itremains mysterious, unfathomable and

irrational. In its wrath, with its storms and

floods, it destroys wealth and power. Itdrowns and kills life. It is horrible tobehold, generating fear, bereavement andmourning. The Great Flood, exter¬minating a humankind at odds withnature and its laws, is a universally recur¬rent myth of doom and damnation.

Other perceptions, though rooted inthese universal ones, are more closelylinked to specific cultures. In thenorthern, terrestrial hemisphere, forinstance, we tend to think of the oceans,and especially the seabed, as an extensionof the landmass. In the southern, aquatichemisphere, people living in island statesthink of the land as a continuation of the

water mass, the most important part oftheir environment. The Western imageof the oceans is as complex as the Westernself-image. The souls of Westerners aremirrored in the ocean, in its veryambiguity between creation and destruc¬tion, good and evil.

'HE WHO RULES THE SEA,RULES THE LAND'

The role the world ocean has played inthe evolution of Western culture is indeed

enormous.

Since the Stone Age fisheries haveconstituted the basis of the economies of

coastal communities. For fisheries to be

successful, ships had to be built, and thisencouraged the development of science,technology, exploration, trade and navalpower. The power and influence of theHanseatic League, the medieval federa¬tion of north German cities, was basedon their maritime skills. With its variants

in many other languages, the expression"He who rules the sea, rules the land"has been conventional wisdom, and naval

battles have decided peoples' destiniesfrom Greek Antiquity to modern times.

Western culture thrived on its

overseas discoveries and conquests, basedon sea power. It has seen the ocean as agreat educator, nursing a love for freedomin seafaring people. Republics are the cre¬ation of maritime peoples; tyranny wasborn inland. In his Philosophie des Rechts(Philosophy of Law), the philosopherHegel compares the role of the seas inindustrial societies with the role of the

Opposite page above, Rooms by the sea

(1951), oil on canvas bv the American painter

Edward Hopper.

Right, Noah's Ark (1731), an engraving

by the German artist Johan Andreas Pfeffel

the Younger.

earth in agricultural, less developed,societies.

Oceans, storms and waves; ships andsailors; fishermen, mermaids and sea

monsters have filled the pages of our liter¬ature, the canvasses of our painters, andthe scores of our music. Occidental music

is indeed the art form most suited to cap¬ture the essence of the sea, the playing ofsilvery ripples and the crashing of surf.The swelling of storms and their exhaus¬tion find expression in crescendo anddecrescendo. The rolling of waves andtheir eternal cadences are readily trans¬lated into the measures of musical time.

The multiple layers of ocean space, fromthe mysterious seafloor through sub¬merged waves and submarine rivers to the

bobbing, scintillating surface can be cap¬tured in harmony and counterpoint, itsflux in time reflected in the duration of

horizontal, melodic development.

FARMING THE SEA

Today the ocean has become our "lastfrontier". Penetrated ever deeper by theindustrial revolution, its immensity isshrinking, yielding to ever more rapidand efficient means of communication. Its

wilderness, where humans used to hunt

and gather at their own risk, is beingtransformed into farms and mines, just asterrestrial wilderness has been trans¬

formed over the past 10,000 years.Fishing from the wild is being over-

I \i) I. M

< «I Mm,i|i\IIIy » -

Corvu» c\ ol.nis

I ";>tuIiT\Mn|i'>(.,.iiviii i...:

jpirr iinr-Mii-nniiV i*lrtBr!51

52

taken by sea farming and aquaculture,which introduce human intervention

and, potentially, genetic engineering, intothe life cycle of every commerciallyfished species. Chemicals, pharmaceu¬ticals, energy, metals and minerals areextracted and produced from the seas,while the marine sciences are trans¬

forming concepts of the genesis of ourplanet. They have demonstrated that con¬tinents are drifting, and oceans are born,made and remade through volcanicmasses welling up from mid-ocean rifts,expanding the seafloor and forcing con¬tinents apart, while other oceans die, theirfloors devoured by deep trenches, andcontinents clash, their landmasses forced

up into mountains.Strange creatures have been disco¬

vered in recent years, deep down on theseafloor where all this activity takes place,where volcanoes spew matter from thecore of the Earth and the water reaches

temperatures too high to support life aswe know it. There colonies of red-

crowned tubeworms, white crabs and

giant clams are thriving, not on the basisof photosynthesis like all other knownforms of life on Earth, but throughchemosynthesis in a symbiotic relation¬ship with bacteria capable of convertingvolcanic sulphur into energy and bodymass. Life on other planets may sustainitself in this way, and it may possiblyhave been the first life system on ourplanet, the one from which all othersystems evolved.

THE MIRROR OF THE OCEAN

What do contemporary Westernersproject onto the mirror of this new kindof ocean? What do they discover aboutthemselves?

Perhaps: that science and mystery arenot zero-sum values, such that one

decreases as the other grows. Westernscience may be the greatest of all sciences,but while spaces are indeed shrinking, themystery of the sea remains as deep as itever was. The more we know, the morewe know how little we know. And some

of our science, at least, may make usrelive old myths in new clothes: universalmyths of genesis and Leviathans andGreat Floods.

Perhaps: that we still feel awe andlove and fear faced by the power and thebeauty of the sea, just as we always did;that we yearn for its healing and dan¬gerous elementariness, for its purity as anescape from the sophistication and cor¬ruption of industrial city life, just as weyearn for the awesomeness and purity of

Leviathan (1908)

by the English artistArthur Rackham.

ELISABETH MANN BORGESE,

of Canada, is professor of

political science at Dalhousie

University, Halifax, Nova

Scotia, and chairman of the

Planning Council of the

International Ocean Institute,

Malta. She has written manyarticles on the law of the sea

and on ocean management

and several books, including

The Mines of Neptune (1983).

Her Ocean Frontiers (with apreface by Federico Mayor)and Chairworm and

Supershark, a book about the

oceans "for children aged 8 to

80", will be published in 1992.

the high mountains and their eternalsnowsfrozen waves; that we yearn toencompass it in our art, our music; thatwe long for its integrity, the unity of alllife in nature, in the cyclic rhythm ofbecoming, being and passing.

And then, perhaps, a cloud movesacross the Sun and the water darkens,

reflecting a different image of ourselves:harvesters of fish, of oil measured in

tonnes. We see wave and tide powertranslated into dollars and cents; portsand harbours and trading ships; satelliteguided fleets and navies; the scum andfoulness from outfall pipes and rivermouths continually streaming in.

We feel greed, but we feel shame andfear: fear of our own destructive poweras much as the ocean's. Greed and love,

the irrationally rational, are clashing in

our minds. Do we want Development, ordo we want Environment?

Western culture has been programmedwith an Either-Or writ large. Good orevil. Ego or other. Egotism or altruism.Mine or yours. Nationalism or interna¬tionalism. It is easy to say but hard to seethat these might be mutually dependent,be considered as a whole.

In the case of the oceans we will have

to learn to see it. For there, beneath our

eyes, everything flows, everythinginteracts with everything else; boundariesare fictitious, and neither sovereignty norownership holds solutions. What is mineis dependent on you; what is yours isdependent on me. If we want to get thingsdone, we have to do them together, acrosssectoral uses, across fictitious geographicboundaries, or we cannot do them at all.

Development depends on conservation.Without conservation it simply cannothappen. Economics becomes part ofecology; culture, part of nature; thehuman being, part of the animal family.The flowing ocean environment revealsthese facts, while the apparently solidstate of terra firma could maintain in us

the illusion of separateness and indepen¬dence, superiority and domination.

Other cultures have stayed closer toa unitary world-view. In the West we hadto return to the sea to regain it, and thusit is no accident that, in the evolution ofWestern culture, the search for a newworld order starts from the Law of the

Sea, a term which in itself symbolizes theunity between culture (Law) and Nature(Sea) and all that flows from it.

A metaphysical dream

Infinity! My love for the sea, whoseenormous simplicity I have alwayspreferred to the pretentiousmultifariousness of the mountainsmy love for the sea is as old as mylove for sleep, and I am fully awareof the common root of these twosympathies.

I have within myself much thatis Indian: a great deal of inert andheavy longing for that form ofperfection, called "Nirvana", ornothingness, and even though I aman artist, I have a rather unartistic

inclination towards eternity. . . .The sea is not landscape. It is the

experience of eternity, of nothingnessand death: a metaphysical dream.

Thomas Mann (1875-1955)German writer

The United Nations Convention

on the Law of the Sea

The adoption in 1982 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea was

a milestone in the history of international relations. The Convention contains the first

comprehensive, binding, enforceable international environmental law. It is the first legal

instrument effectively to integrate environment and development within the concept

of sustainable development. It is also the first instrument to provide for a system of

mandatory, binding settlement of disputes arising not only from environmental issues

but from all other issues relating to the uses of seas and oceans.

The Convention is based on two fundamental concepts: the concept of the Common

Heritage of Mankind and the idea that the problems of ocean space are closely

interelated and need to be considered as a whole.

The concept of the Common Heritage of Mankind, applicable to areas (such as

the deep seabed or outer space), to resources (such as minerals and metals), and to

abstractions (such as science and technology) subsumes four other fundamental

concepts:

Development: The Common Heritage of Mankind must be developed for the benefit

of mankind as a whole.

Equity: In the distribution of benefits, particular consideration must be given to

the poor and disadvantaged.

Environment: The Common Heritage of Mankind must be developed with due

consideration for the conservation of the environment and its resources. Mankind

includes present and future generations, which have an equal right to share in the

common heritage.

Security: The Common Heritage of Mankind is reserved for exclusively peaceful

purposes.

The incorporation of the Common Heritage concept in the UN Convention is of

such far-reaching cultural importance that we have not even begun to fathom all its

implications.

The Common Heritage of Mankind implies a new economic theory, based on a

new concept of ownership, or rather non-ownership, which may provide a point of

convergence in a common effort to meet the environmental challenge.

The economics and philosophy of the common heritage provide a logical basis

for common and comprehensive security. Common, since in the contemporary world

the security of one can no longer be founded on the insecurity of the other and the

security of each must be the security of all. Comprehensive, since in the contemporary

world, security comprises economic and environmental security as well as military

security.

The idea that the problems of ocean space are closely interrelated and should

be considered as a whole has important consequences. For while the problems arising

from the different uses of the oceans interact, the uses of the sea in turn interact

with terrestrial activities. Much of the world's food comes from the sea; seabed metals

and minerals are bought and sold on the world commodity market; offshore oil is used

for the same purposes as onshore oil; the marine environment is part of the biosphere;

the naval arms race cannot be dissociated from the general question of the arms race

and disarmament.

An integrated approach to other world problems is just as necessary as it is for

the management of ocean affairs. Land boundaries are becoming porous, as production

systems, financial systems, communication and information systems move unhindered

across them.

In the case of the oceans this interrelationship was more obvious. This is why the

Law of the Sea is the most advanced legal instrument and institutional framework for

the integration of Environment and Development. Let us try to learn the lessons the

ocean has taught us and apply them to wider global concerns. E.M.B.

53

54

A rouná-np of nauticalsupentitions and rituals

Vn the bridge of yachts bobbing at berth intheir harbours a common sight is a no entry signwith the picture of a shoe placed over it. The mes¬sage is clear and is always heeded by those whoare lucky enough to board one of these gracefulcraft: first remove your shoes. If you are socurious as to ask questions about this form ofcourtesy, you tend to receive vague replies to theeffect that the high heels worn by women woulddamage the deck or that the dust picked up fromthe quay would make the boat dirty.

But apart from the fact that the decks of thesenoble vessels are made of teak, which is one ofthe hardest woods there is, we can be sure that

their owners would not take the same precautionsto protect the sitting-room floors of their houses.Even stranger, this prohibition does not concernworking shoes but only town shoes. One'sSunday best in fact.

One of my friends, a Sicilian fisherman, wastalking to me one day about an uncle of his, whowas a great believer in traditions. "It was a coldFebruary morning", he said, "and we had goneoff to fish. It was still dark. In the first glow ofdawn my uncle saw that I had kept my shoes onmy feet. Furious, he ordered me to take them offand, after attaching them to a rope, threw theminto the water where they remained in tow". Hewas a kind man and, knowing that his thought¬less nephew possessed only one pair, this was hiscompromise solution'.

This prohibition is widespread in the NorthSea, among the deep-sea fishermen of England andScotlandbut the Malay fishermen of Penangtake the same curious precaution. Where yachtingcircles are concerned, it may have originated inEngland along with the practice of sailing as asport, assuming along the Mediterranean coastand probably elsewhere this pseudo-rationalveneer that we have seen.

What is the link between shoes and boats?

To understand, we perhaps need to refer toanother superstition, associated this time with aparticular accident of birth.

Some babies are born with the amnion or

inner membrane which enclosed the foetus before

birthknown as a caulcovering their heads. All

A symbolic sheepskin

on the prow of a Portuguese

fishing boat.

over the world numerous beliefs have been

attached to this. Generally, the caul is thoughtto possess extraordinary qualities and it is not bychance that, in northern Europe and Sicily alike,it is reputed to be a preservative against drowning.Being born with a caul on one's head is a signof good luck.

"Good" births are traditionally thought tobe those where the child passes through theamniotic waters head first. "Bad" ones are those

known as breech births, where the feet appearfirst, making for a difficult delivery which, informer times, was likely to result in the death ofthe mother or the child.

While birth is a voyage through the saltwaters of the maternal womb, death is thoughtof in mythological and religious belief as ajourney to the, beyond. In both cases, there arecertain rules. It is the custom for the dead to leave

"feet first" and, in keeping with the solemnityof the occasion, they depart from from the worldof the living in their best clothesand in theirbest shoes.

This then is the explanation. He who,wearing such shoes, undertakes a sea voyage ina boat will be accompanied by the spectre ofdeath, in a world where danger looms on everyside.

THE NECESSARY SACRILEGE

Since earliest times in many civilizations, waterand the sea have been linked to the nether world

of death, the abyss and the primal chaos to whichall creatures return before being reborn to otherlives.

Crossing the water by means of a man-madedevice (a bridge or boat) involves a direct con¬tact with the element that separates life fromdeath, which also serves as a bridge into thebeyond. This journey into the next life is depictedin many myths, from that of the Greeks' ferrymanCharon to the Mesopotamian, Egyptian or Scan¬dinavian legends. In order to commit thesacrilegealbeit a necessary oneof crossing thewater, one is required to take a number of sym¬bolic precautions.

For the Romans, the pontifex maximus, the"bridgemaker", represented the supreme religiousauthority, vested in Julius Caesar when he com¬manded a bridge to be built over the Rhine. Theannual ceremony of casting a doll into the Tiberfrom the Sublicius bridge, the oldest bridge inRome, served to remind the ancients of thehuman sacrifices needed to build it.

In more recent times, the cross thrown bythe Greek Orthodox bishop into the sea on 55

Above, boat in Syracuse

(Italy).

Top, fishing boats In Bangkok

(Thailand).

56

Twelfth Night in order to bless it and the act per¬formed by the Doge of Venice in marrying thesea with his city and casting a ring into the watersmay be understood as a ritualized means ofobtaining redemption.

This sheds an interesting light on Christ'swalking on the water and on the feat accom¬plished by Moses, for whom the Red Sea divided,enabling him and his people to cross it on foot.Many are the heroes and saints who have thusshown sacrilege to be necessary and reparationpossible.

THE BAPTISM OF BLOOD

The ritual often involves a blood sacrifice,

whether real or symbolicthat of Iphigenia, whoin Greek mythology has to be sacrificed by herfather Agamemnon so that the Greek fleet cansail to Troy, or that of the young Persian whohas his throat cut in the bows of the Greek flag¬ship before the battle of Salamis.

From the the Anatolian coast all the way toAlexandria in Egypt, a sheep is always sacrificedin the bows of a boat, thus perpetuating theancient Mediterranean ritual and the symbolicsubstitution, dating back to Abraham, of a lambfor a human being. This is indirectly testified toby Homer's crimson-cheeked ships and the sheep¬skins hanging from the stems of fishermen'sboats, from the eastern Mediterranean to

Portugal.Even today, ships are "baptised", from the

smallest boat to the giant oil tanker. Why is this?A Sicilian fisherman told me one day: "Do younot baptise your son and give him a name? It'sthe same for boats. They are Christian creatures"(In Sicily, "Christian" and "man" are syn¬onymous).

There are many practices connected with thebuilding and launching of boats. All reflect sym¬bolically the idea that a ceremony is necessaryto give life to and purify the inert matter, andto protect the seafarer and the members of hisfamily. Greek and Italian shipowners often calltheir ships after one of their nearest and dearestor after a saint or a hero, thereby suggesting thatthe vessel is part of a larger spiritual family.

BOATS WITH EYES

Whether blood is shed or is replaced by wine-champagne at modern launching ceremoniesthe sacrificial rite is always performed in orderto give life to the ship.

In Laos, "eyes" are given to boats in aceremony which involves the feigned sacrifice ofa maiden and the fixing of her eyes on the prow.The prows of dugout canoes in Bali depict thehead of Makara, the mythical elephant-fish.Viking drakkars displayed a dragon's head andGreek and Roman ships looked at the wavesthrough the eyes of boars or dolphins. The figure¬heads of the great Western sailing ships fixed their

hieratic gaze on the waters, and even today junkson the China Sea have eyes.

Considering then that ships are living, almosthuman things, it is natural that they should bethreatened by the same dangers as members ofthe crew. They have to be protected from mis¬fortune by means of various symbolic signs whichmight appear to be fulfilling no more than adecorative function.

In the archipelagoes of Melanesia, as in theTrobriand Islands for instance, the pirogues thatparticipate in gift exchange ceremonies (kula) bearelaborate sculptures on their prows representingthe mythical hero Manikiniki in the form of thelife-giving Serpent. The serpent-hero and the-pirogue become a single creature. In order toacquire the powers needed to achieve this union,the sculptor has to serve an apprenticeship thatmay last for more than twenty years.

On the Mediterranean shore, when the boats

belonging to a particular village are painted ingreen or red monochrome, one can be sure thatthe effigy of that village's patron saint in thechurch will be dressed in the same colour. In

another village, where blue predominates, the

Above, the head of the

mythical elephant-fish Makara

adorns the prow of a Balinesecanoe.

Left above, a boat In

mourning; below, prow of aboat In Ghana.

PIER GIOVANNI D'AYALA,

a staff member of UNESCO's

Division of Ecological Sciencesand a former researcher at the

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en

Sciences Sociales in Paris has

long been interested in the

lore and symbolic beliefs ofMediterranean fishermen.

Among his recent publicationsare Carnavals et Mascarades

(with Martine Boiteux. 1988

Paris).

local boats will be placed under the protectionof the Virgin who is venerated here and whowears a blue wrap. A boat may also be paintedin honour of a more personal and familiar saint.If someone has made a vow to St. Francesco di

Paola, his boat will have a brown stripe addedto it, the same colour as the cowl worn by thehermit saint, who according to legend crossed theStrait of Messina on his coat. St. Francesco,incidentally, is the patron saint of the Italian mer¬chant navy.

IN SEARCH OF SALVATION

The sailor who at the risk of his life has embarked

upon the sacrilegious voyage is required to givethanks when he again sets foot on dry land. AllGreek schoolchildren are familiar with the storyof the prophet Elijah, whom seafarers, bothChristian and Muslim, hold in undying devotion.Legend has it that the holy prophet was a sailor."One day, tired of confronting the danger of thewaves, he took an oar on his shoulder and walked

so far up into the mountains, so far away fromthe sea, that a peasant who knew nothing of boatsmistook the oar for a flail. There the holyprophet planted his oar, on which the greenleaves of an oak tree grew, and made his abode."

A white chapel graces many of the Greekislands, built on the highest point and dedicatedto the prophet Elijah by some sailor grateful forhaving survived the perils of the sea. Even if thiscustom seems to bear Homeric echoes, it is a fact

that holy shrines dedicated to the sea are very fre¬quently situated on a hill inland. Notre-Dame dela Garde in Marseilles and Genoa, Our Lady ofMontserrat in Barcelona, Our Lady of Guadalupein Mexico City and other ancient or recent sanc¬tuaries thus bear witness to the seafarer's secret

need to remove himself from the source of

danger, the sea. He accordingly sets out, oftenbarefoot, on a pilgrimage to the place of salva¬tion, the landmore precisely to the moun¬tainous heartland.

There the salt water becomes the fresh water

of a well or of a miraculous fountain where the

survivor of a shipwreck washes off the bitterdanger, as is the custom in the Sicilian sanctuaryof the Black Virgin of Tindari, which overlooksthe blue expanse of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Therethe votive offeringpicture, model, candle, partof the riggingis laid at the foot of the holyeffigy. Here lies salvation, in this place away fromthe dangers of the everyday world. Here time iseternal; the time of horror and the night of thestorm are no more.

This journey into the symbolic universe ofhumankind must perforce remain incomplete. Butit is only by not rejecting all these beliefs out ofhand on the grounds that they are childishleftovers from a benighted past that we shall getany closer to understanding the secret world ofseafarers and to recognizing how much courageand dignity they need to ply their hard trade.

The "Bag-Noz" {The ghost ship)

Whenever some disaster is about to occur in

the vicinity of the He de Sein, an island offthe coast of Brittany, a ghost ship is seen. . . .

It is called a "bag-noz" (night boat)because it usually heaves in sight at nightfallwithout it being possible to say where it iscoming from nor where it is going. For itsuddenly vanishes just when one is looking atit, then reappears a moment later somewhereelse on the horizon. Onward it plies in fullsail, Jolly Roger at half-mast. . . .

Its crewwhich must be largewail andshout as though calling for help, with piteous,heart-rending cries. But as soon as anyoneseems to want to draw near, the vision fades,and the voices themselves become so distant

that one can no longer tell whether they arecalling from the depths of the sea or from thedepths of the sky.

It is related however that one night apilot from the island managed to sailsufficiently close to the ghost ship to see thatthere was nobody on board except ahelmsman at the stem. The pilot called outto the man:

"Can I do anything for you? Do youwant a tow?"

Instead of answering, the man swung thetiller round and the boat disappeared.

If the pilot had had the presence of mindto say "Requiescant in pace""', he wouldhave saved the whole boatful of dead sailors.

*"May they rest in peace", a Christian formula onbehalf of the dead.

Anatole Le Braz (1859-1926)French writer

La legende de la mort en Basse-Bretagne (1893)

57

ä«i£

"-"Vi.-.;

-

i&S&r.

av: '; '

v.v

. -Jt '«.fTS.

... -Î,Fi

The sea is a treasure-house which

belongs to all mankind. The marine

sciences have revealed the crucial role

played by the oceans in regulating

the Earth's climate and have unlocked

many secrets of the deep. A source of

wealth and perhaps potentially

habitable, the marine environment is

fragile and must be protected if it is

to continue to sustain human life

and inspire the imagination.

A sántist

Building a boat, Japanese

print of the late Kano school

(15th- 19th century).

has at the seaMANKIND lives beside the sea.

Over 145 of the world's nations

are coastal or island states, and

the majority of the world's populationlives within 200 kilometres of a coastline.

Today the use of coastal space for living,trade, resources development and recre¬ation is increasingly intensive. In theUnited States, for example, even thoughthere is abundant space inland, it is fore¬cast that 80 per cent of the populationwill be living within 80 kilometres of thesea by the year 2000.

In addition to this migration tocoastal areas, many works of literature

and music testify to mankind's emotionallink to the sea. Intellectually, however,the tie is much weaker. Although sincethe beginning of recorded history the seahas been used as a highway betweendifferent lands, this vast region has neverbeen explored with the same urgency orthoroughness as the land. The worldocean is truly the last geographic frontieron Earth.

Why should this be so? Perhaps onereason is that until the twentieth centurythere was little demand for scientific

studies on the sea, and in any case themeans did not exist for putting man into

the sea to make direct observations. Even

today, marine exploration does not arouseas much public interest as the explorationof space. The rhythm of events tends tobe slow, the events themselves are not of

great visual interest, and they do notreceive wide publicity. And yet the worldocean has a major influence on our lives.

THE EARLY DAYS OF OCEANOGRAPHY

It is widely agreed that oceanographybegan as an interdisciplinary science 115years ago, when the British HMSChallenger expedition (1872-1876) left 59

England on a round-the-world scientificvoyage. The team that wrote up theresults of the three-and-a-half-year expe¬dition formed the first international net¬

work of marine scientists. The fifty-volume set of reports and the extensivesample collections taken by the expedi¬tion are still being studied by marinescientists today.

It was also during the 1870s that thefirst marine laboratory was established,at Naples, Italy. The Marine BiologicalLaboratory was founded at Woods Hole,Massachusetts, in 1893, and by the turnof the century océanographie studies werebeing conducted in many placesthroughout the world. In 1902 the Inter¬national Council for the Exploration ofthe Seas, the first intergovernmentalorganization concerned with marinescience, was founded in Denmark.

Most maritime research before the

beginning of World War I was in marinebiology relating to fisheries development.Before then, few samples of marineminerals were taken from the sea, and the

study of ocean currents and water depthswas mostly confined to improving thesafety of navigation in shallow coastalwaters. However, the tragic loss of thesteamship Titanic in 1912 set in motion

60

Where do the seas

come from?

Some think that the sea is a vestigeof the primal humidity of which themost substantial and most essential

part evaporated under the effect ofthe heat, while the rest changed intothe sea. Others maintain that, all the

original humidity having beensubjected to the fire of the Sun'srevolutions, which removed

therefrom all that was pure, theresidue became salinity andbitterness. . . . Yet others believe that

the sea is that which escaped, throughthe density of its constitution, fromthe Earth's filtering of the aqueoushumidity, exactly like fresh waterwhich, mixed with ash then filtered,ceases to be fresh and becomes salty.. . It is sometimes reckoned that

the sea is a sweat which the Earth

secretes beneath the action of the Sun,which heats it by turning constantlyaround it. . . .

Al Mas'udi (C.900-C.965 AD)Arab traveller and encyclopaedist

(The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems)

studies of icebergs, their formation anddrift trajectories. These studies still con¬tinue, though Earth-orbiting satellitesmake the tracking safer and moreaccurate.

World War I stimulated the need for

more information about the oceans, espe¬cially to aid the detection and destructionof enemy submarines. Since the primarymeans of submarine detection was sound

propagation through the water, this needpromoted the advancement of physicaloceanography and the field of marineacoustics was born. During World WarII more research was carried out in this

field and by the end of the war effectivesonar (sound navigation and ranging)systems were installed on both subma¬rines and surface ships. The scene was setfor a major expansion in the field ofoceanography in the postwar years.

PREDICTIVE INFORMATION,

THE KEY TO EFFECTIVE USE

OF THE SEA

The primary product of marine scientificresearch is predictive information thatwill eventually enable the sea to be usedin ways that are beneficial to mankind.Without the supporting foundations ofexcellent science and technology, exploi¬tation of the ocean's resources is wasteful,

economically inefficient and potentiallyharmful to the marine environment. Lack

of scientific information is bound to con¬

tribute to misuse of the world ocean in

such areas as overfishing, waste disposal,and coastal and open ocean pollution.

Many of the uses of the ocean are

commercial, but not all. Public safety isalso important. For example, accurateadvanced warning and movement predic¬tion of marine weather systems such astyphoons and hurricanes can save thou¬sands of lives and billions of dollars.

Today the world community is con¬cerned about the complex issue of globalwarming and a consequent gradual rise ofsea level. We need to know more about

how the oceans interact with and

influence the Earth's atmosphere and itsquality. At present we may not be com¬pletely certain that accelerated burning offossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution

has caused these problems. But we cannotafford not to do the necessary science thatwill enable us to know for sure. This

work will require an unprecedented inter¬national pooling of scientists and researchassets. No one nation can do it alone.

THE TOOLS

OF THE MARINE SCIENTIST

In seeking the answers to these and otherquestions, modern oceanographers use a3-tier family of macroscale, mesoscale andmicroscale "platforms" and techniques tostudy the oceans. Macroscale platformsare remote-sensing systems such as air¬craft, balloons and Earth-orbitingspacecraft which provide the "big pic¬ture", permitting scientists to observelarge areas of the ocean surface. Satellitesin particular provide the only means ofmeasuring air-sea interaction processes inreal time.

The principal mesoscale platform isthe ship, which is the primary and gener-

ally the cheapest means of obtaining dataat sea by means of long-term researchprogrammes using relatively large teamsof scientists and large quantities ofinstrumentation. In recent years, sophisti¬cated ship designs, high-powered on¬board computer capabilities and newsensor technologies have made themodern research ship several times moreproductive than the vessels of onlytwenty years ago. Ship platforms are alsoremote sensing systems. They work at theair-ocean interface and make observations

and take samples through the use oflowered mechanical "eyes and hands".

The last, microscale category of plat¬forms puts the trained mind and eye ofthe scientist into the sea. For about $1,000a scientist diver can be fully equippedwith the self-contained underwater

breathing apparatus (SCUBA) and ena¬bled to operate at depths of about 40metres. This research technique is todayused by marine scientists throughout theworld, including under ice in polarregions. At depths greater than 40 metres,the marine scientist will use a submer¬

sible. Using manned submersibles,oceanographers can descend to depths ofup to 6,000 metres to make direct, in situobservations and measurements.

Since they were first developed in the1950s, over 150 manned submersibles

have been built. Today about twenty-four are being used for marine sciencesupport in eleven countries. Currentlydiscussions are going on in several coun¬tries about building a new generation ofmanned submersibles capable of divinginto the deepest parts of the oceans. A

Above, the submarine Caya, with Its

three-person crew, can dive as deepas 300 m. It is used for Industrial or

scientific purposes.

Left, a Soviet océanographie vessel In

the port of Istanbul (Turkey).

Right, satellite Images enablescientists to track the Gulf Stream

with precision.

DON WALSH,of the United States, is a specialist in

oceanography, marine «ngineeiing andunderwater technology. He served in

the U.S. Navy for 24 years and is the

author of many articles and books on

marine subjects. 61

Harvesting salt from Lake Rose (Senegal).

Canadian company has also proposedbuilding a commercial, nuclear-poweredsubmarine which would be capable ofmissions of up to eighty days at depthsup to 1,000 metres.

Unmanned submersibles have also

been developed for submerged scientificoperations. The most common type is the

remotely operated vehicle (ROV), whichis controlled from the surface through along tether cable. ROVs can be fittedwith television and still cameras, mechan¬ical arms for work tasks, and a variety ofinstrumentation sensors depending on thescientific mission.

The vehicle is controlled from a sur

face vessel using television pictures fromthe ROV as well as instrument readingsfor depth and compass heading. Almosta thousand ROVs have been built since

their introduction in the late 1960s, but

only a few have been used for marinescience. In the past five years, however,several have been acquired by marineresearch organizations.

FUTURE EXPECTATIONS

The distance between scientific investiga¬tion of the ocean and commercial prac¬tice is great. At every step of the waythere are major problems which need tobe addressed to ensure that the people ofour planet can enjoy maximum use of theresources of the ocean. One of these

problems is lack of public interest andthus investment in marine science and

technology. Because marine scienceproduces results over the long term, it isdifficult for short-term governments to beconcerned about it. Since modern marine

science calls for international co¬

operation, the political difficultiesbecome even more complex. Can oceanscience prevail in this context? Clearly,the answer is that it must.

Some facts and figures

The ocean covers nearly two-thirds of the

Earth's surface, an area of 361,000,000 square

kilometres. The Pacific Ocean alone covers

more of the Earth's surface than all the land

masses put together.

Two-thirds of the Earth's land masses are

north of the equator. The southern hemisphere

is often called "the ocean hemisphere".

The average depth of the ocean is 3,730

metres. Its greatest depth is nearly 11,000

metres, but only 2 per cent of the sea floor is

deeper than 6,000 metres.

A specimen of Zooplankton. -

The total volume of the sea is over 1.5 bil¬

lion cubic kilometres. The oceans contain over

86 per cent of all the water on our planet.

The water in the oceans has been there for

about 3 billion years. It has been thoroughly

mixed more than a million times. As a result,

this well-mixed "chemical solution" contains

the same relative proportion of chemical ele¬

ments (salts) no matter where a sample is taken.

Only six elements make up 99 per cent of

the salts in seawater: sodium, calcium, chlorine,

magnesium, potassium and sulphur. The

amount of these elements in a given volume

of seawater may vary from place to place. This

is called "salinity". The average for the world

ocean is 35 grams per kilogram of seawater.

It is estimated that if all salts in the world ocean

were extracted and put on land, the layer would

be 150 metres thick.

Life in the sea begins with photosynthesis

when solar energy is captured by microscopic

plants in the sea, phytoplankton, which are the

first step in the marine food chain. Like terres¬

trial plants, phytoplankton absorb carbon diox¬

ide and release oxygen to the sea. A large por¬

tion of our planet's oxygen is produced from

the sea.

Because seawater rapidly filters out the

penetration of solar energy, most marine life

is found in relatively shallow, upper layers of the

sea. In fact, about 90 per cent of the life in the

sea can be found in the upper 30 metres. The

highest biological productivity exists near coast

lines, where river and other runoff from land

provides a steady supply of nutrients. Even

though these coastal areas represent only

about 15 per cent of the ocean's area, they are

the primary areas for marine life. Essentially,

the rest of the world ocean is thinly populated

and more of a biological desert.

The principal current system of the oceans

is called "wind-driven circulation". Its engine

is the wind that blows across the ocean surface

at a constant velocity and from the same direc¬

tion season after season and year after year.

The motion of the surface waters due to wind

forces is modified by the shape of the ocean

basins and the Earth's rotational motion. This

results in a generalized circulation pattern con¬

sisting of giant circular water movements in

each major ocean. These circulations are called

"gyres". Direction of circulation is clockwise in

the northern hemisphere and counterclockwise

in the southern hemisphere. Major surface cur¬

rents such as the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic

and the Kuroshio in the Pacific are examples

of wind-driven circulation and each is part of

a larger gyre in that ocean basin. These mas¬

sive movements of seawater act as part of our

planet's "air conditioning system". Excess heat

is transported from the tropical regions to the

higher latitudes where there is a heat deficit.

This process helps to keep the average regional

temperatures throughout the planet constant

from year to year.

D.W.

The ghost shipof the Arctic

4M n*

WNE of the world's strangest sea stories is stillunfinished, and looks like remaining so for a longtime, perhaps for ever. This is the story of theBaychimo, the deserted ghost ship that refuses todie and still haunts human memory and curiosity.

A fine, trim, solid steel 1,322-ton cargo

steamer owned by the Hudson's Bay Company,the Baychimo was built in Sweden in 1914. Shewas originally used to collect furs from Eskimotrappers along the Victoria Island coast ofCanada's North-West Territory. With her singletall funnel, curved bridge and long high prow,the Baychimo was sturdily built to withstand thefloes and pack-ice of the dangerous northernwaters in which she operated.

She actually pioneered fur trading with theEskimo settlements around the Beaufort Sea,

forging her way many times on her 3,200-

David Gunston

kilometre round trip through some of the mosttreacherous shipping lanes in the world. Eachyear she set out on a regular voyage, always atough and difficult one, delivering food, fuel andother supplies to, and loading pelts from, eightof the Hudson Bay Company's lonely outposts.

On 6 July 193 1 she left Vancouver, BritishColumbia, on such a journey, with skipper JohnCornwell and his crew of thirty-six men. They

On the morning of 22

September 1931 members of

the Baych/mo's crew make a

vain attempt to help their ship

break through ice floes to

open water.

63

expected a hard trip, for all their runs were hard,but what they did not know was that this wasto be the Baychimo's last manned voyage.

PRISONERS

OF THE PACK-ICE

Day and night, under the misty glow of the never-setting sun, the Baychimo steamed on eastward.Eventually they reached the end of their normaleastward run by the shores of Victoria Island.With the hold crammed with cargo, the relievedcaptain turned the Baychimo about for Van¬couver.

Unfortunately winter came early that yearto this bleak northern wasteland. Ferocious winds

and deep-freezing conditions brought the dreadedpack-ice south much quicker than usual. By 30September only a narrow stretch of open waterremained for the ship to steam through, and on1 October the ice closed in.

Her engines at stop, she could only move asthe creaking ice willed. She was not far from theAlaskan village of Barrow, where the companyhad permanent huts built ashore. Seeing that aterrible blizzard was imminent, Cornwell ordered

his men to trudge across the kilometre or so ofice to shelter in these huts, where they remained

for two days, half-frozen and unable to ventureout.

Then the first extraordinary thing in the Bay¬chimo's strange story happened. Without warningthe pack-ice loosened and moved away from theBaychimo's sides, leaving her free to move again.The crew rushed aboard and for three solid hours

the ship steamed away to the west at full speed.Disaster seemed to have been narrowly averted.

But once more the ice gripped the little cargosteamer, and on 8 October a sickening crack her¬alded the sudden appearance of a deadly blackfault-line in the ice. It actually cracked right acrossthe patch where some of the crew were playingfootball.

Now the ice that had held the ship hadbroken away, it began to move slowly but surelytowards the shore. To Cornwell it seemed onlya matter of hours before his rugged little vesselwould be crushed like an empty eggshell. RadioSOS messages were sent out but these doughtymen hung on in the hope that they and their shipmight be saved. By 15 October their plightseemed so desperate that the Hudson Bay Com¬pany sent two aircraft from the base at Nome,almost 700 kilometres away. Twenty-two of the

Baychimo's crew were rescued, and her skipperand fourteen men were left behind to wait until

the melting ice released the ship and its precious64 cargo. They knew they might have to wait as long

as a year, so they built a small shelter on the pack-ice a short distance from the shore.

Their sojourn proved to be short andstartling, for on the pitch black night of 24November a hellish blizzard descended, trappingthe men inside their wooden shelter. When at

last the storm abated, they emerged into the

wintry gloom to find that the Baychimo had com¬pletely vanished beneath mountains of ice over20 metres high. They searched around as muchas they could, but on failing to find their doomedship they came to the conclusion that she hadbeen broken to pieces in the blizzard and hadsunk.

A GHOST SHIP

They reached the safety of the mainland and pre¬pared to return home. In a few days, however,an Eskimo seal-hunter brought the astonishingnews that he had seen their ship some 70kilometres away to the south-west. Already theBaychimo had been turned into a ghost ship, apolar puppet pushed this way and that by thepower of ice, wind and water. The fifteen mentrudged to where the Eskimo led them and, sureenough, there was the ship.

It was obvious to the captain that the chancesof salvaging his vessel were nil. The ice was notgoing to allow it. So the men rescued the morevaluable furs from the hold and reluctantly leftthe Baychimo for ever. In due course they wereflown back home.

American planes rescuethe crew of the Ice-locked

Baychimo.

DAVID GUNSTON

is a British free-lance writer

and journalist whose work has

been published in over 40countries. He has written

widely on the natural world and

is the author of biographies of

Marconi and Faraday.

Wfi. mt u

As the months went by, the Company's basein Vancouver received strange reports fromEskimo sources that their ship had again beensighted, this time hundreds of kilometres to theeast. On 12 March 1932, a young trapper and

explorer named Leslie Melvin discovered herwhile on a journey from Herschel Island toNome by dog-team. She was floating inshorepeacefully enough. He managed to board her andfound that many of the furs were still intact inthe hold. Unfortunately, as he was alone and

without much equipment, far from his base inAlaska, he could do nothing.

Some months went by and a group of wan¬

dering prospectors saw the ship and also managedto board her. They reported that everything wasin perfect order. In March 1933 the Baychimoapparently drifted back to roughly the pointwhere her captain had abandoned her. A groupof some thirty Eskimos saw her floating idly inthe freezing waters and went out in their kayaks,but no sooner had they clambered aboard thana terrific storm blew up. They were trapped onthe ghost ship without food for ten days beforethey could get away.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC

By August 1933 the Hudson Bay Company knewthat the Baychimo was moving calmly in a north¬erly direction, but she was still much too far fromcivilization to make salvage operations a possi¬bility. The next visitors were an exploring party

on a schooner. They came across her in July 1934,and boarded her for a few hours.

By now the legend of the little grey tall-funnelled ghost ship was well known among theArctic Eskimos, many of whom sighted her fromtime to time on their travels. By September 1935she had reached the Alaskan coast, alwaysmanaging to avoid the crushing grip of the pack-ice, always surviving the worst polar storms.Nature seemed unable to destroy her, but manwas unable to rescue her.

After 1939 the Baychimo was seen scores oftimes, mostly by Eskimos but occasionally byexplorers, traders and pilots. Each time she eludedwhatever pursuit was possible, and over the inter¬vening years she has sailed on crewless and alone.

In March 1962 a small party of Eskimos dis¬covered the ship again while fishing from theirkayaks. This time she was floating serenely in theBeaufort Sea near a desolate strip of coastline.

Once again there was no means of capturing her,so they left the desolate, rusting, but stilluncrushed hulk to drift away into the unknownonce more. The last recorded sighting, again byEskimos, was in 1969thirty-eight years after shewas abandoned. But this time she was once more

fast in the pack-ice of the Beaufort Sea betweenIcy Cape and Point Barrow.

A representative of the Hudson Bay Com¬pany told me, at their headquarters in Winnipeg,that even now they cannot say definitely whetheror not the Baychimo is still afloat.

It is often forgottenthat the sea is ageless;therein lies its

strength.Mohamed Dib

Algerian writer

(Qui se souvient de la mer,Seuil, Paris 1959)

65

The four pilkrs of Neptune'stemple by ¡acques Ferrkr

His breast must have been protected all round with oak andbronze, who first launched his frail boat on the rough sea. . . .

(Horace, Odes, I, III, 9)

Xhe ocean is the largest expanse on Earth andthe vastest resource available to humankind. It

contains in abundance, in a state of continual

regeneration, the source of life from which thehuman race emerged. It inspires the industry ofHomofaber and whets the imagination of Homosapiens, stimulating his creative genius andchallenging his spirit of adventure and courage.The scientific, technological, industrial, economicand social responses to the ocean's hold on thehuman imagination may be grouped under fourheadings, each of which corresponds to a dream:the achievements of the maritime genius (walkingon the sea); the conquest of the abyss (penetratingthe ocean depths); the exploitation of the oceans(harvesting food from the sea); the new Atlantis(inhabiting the sea). These are the four greatpillars of Neptune's temple.

The achievements of themaritime genius

Free man, you will always cherish the sea(Charles Baudelaire)

The sea has inspired human genius to invent ahost of navigational devices. The Greeks, theChinese, the Arabs, the Portuguese, the

Spaniards, the British, the Italians, and theFrench, among other peoples, may claim to haveinvented the astrolabe, the compass, portulansand sea charts, the chronometer for calculating

longitudes, the anchor and rigging, the keel and66 the rudder. The polders of Holland and the

embankments promised for Bangladesh, the artifi¬cial harbour of Arromanches and the Channel

Tunnel rank with with the lighthouse of Alex¬andria as Wonders of the World. The Statue of

Liberty in New York harbour and the Colossusof Rhodes were born of the same spirit of inven¬tion. Dictionaries in every language abound inwords that designate things and eventsexperienced, dreamed of and created under thesway of the sea. However, the ship remains themost beautiful of these creations.

Many peoples have left the mark of theirgenius on the design of ships which have beenthe witnesses and often the agents of their des¬

tiny. The history of science and technology,which forms the infrastructure of the history ofcivilizations, is a fresco in which naval pomp and

circumstance play as big a part as they do on theBayeux Tapestry. The English poet John Masefieldwrote of a "Quinquireme of Nineveh from dis¬tant Ophir/Rowing home to haven in sunnyPalestine/With a cargo of ivory". Today, twenty-seven centuries later, giant oil tankers ply in theirwake.

The strands of legend and history, dream andreality, have been woven into a rich tapestry ofimages by poets, novelists and historians: thelongship of the Argonauts; the barques of Ulyssesand Aeneas; the triremes of Salamis; Polynesianrafts; the drakkars of Ragnar Lodbrok and LeifErikson; the ships of the crusaders; the SantaMaria of Christopher Columbus; Chinese warjunks; the praus of Malayaancestors of today's

"Sfc

Cartoon, below, shows

Jules Verne, the author of

Twenty Thousand Leagues

Under the Sea, investigatingthe seafloor (1883).

multi-hulled ocean racers; the storm-battered

invincible Spanish Armada; Mongol fleets dis¬persed by the kamikaze wind; the galleys ofLepanto; the dhows of Sindbad and Henri de

Monfried; tea clippers; the Victory of Hood andNelson; the Queen Elizabeth and the France, greatliners in the tradition of the Great Eastern immor¬

talized by Jules Verne in Une Ville Flottante, andthe Titanic, recently rediscovered on the oceanbed.

~^£5:

The conquest of the deepthat ye . . . May be able to comprehend with

all saints what is the breadth, and length,and depth, and height.

(St. Paul, Ephesians III, 17, 18)

In 1868, Jules Verne described for the enchant¬

ment of generations of "children in love withmaps and prints", how Professor Aronnax andhis two companions discovered beneath thepounding waves Captain Nemo's electrically-powered steel monster the Nautilus, as vainly pur¬sued and harpooned by Ned Land as the whitewhale Moby Dick had been in 1851 by CaptainAhab in Melville's novel.

Less than a century after Jules Verne, theAmerican nuclear submarine Nautilus became the

first vessel to sail beneath the polar ice-cap andtook only a few years to cover more than tentimes "Twenty Thousand Leagues under theSea". Also in our own time, the divers of the

French vessel Calypso descended to the mostsecret corners of the "World of Silence"; the

"Extraordinary Voyages" ofJules Verne's imagi¬nation were emulated in real life by Comman¬dant Jacques-Yves Cousteau; while the Frenchmarine engineer Camille Rougeron amused him¬self by designing a submarine supertanker whichcould carry several million tonnes of crude fromone deepwater terminal to another. May Godpreserve us!

All these feats, both mental and physical,were performed a few cables beneath the surface,in the blue sea that is penetrated, caressed andbrought to life by the not totally absorbed raysof the Sun. However, no one ventured into the

ocean depths until the early 1930s when WilliamBeebe and Otis Barton made the first dives in the

bathysphere, a steel sphere suspended on a cableattached to a boat. By 1934 these courageous menhad reached a depth of just under 1,000 metres.

It was not until 1954, twenty years afterBeebe and Barton's exploit, which was withoutpractical consequences but had a catalytic effecton the collective imagination, that psychologicaltaboos and technological obstacles to deep-seaexploration were finally overcome when GeorgesHouot and Pierre Willm in the bathyscapheFNRS 3 reached a depth of more than 4,500metres off Dakar. The spherical cabin of thebathyscaphe, which was made of high-qualitysteel, had to resist pressures of over 400 kg percm2. Its success was due to the scientific imagi¬nation of professor Auguste Piccard, theengineering skills of French submarine con¬structors, and the courage of the two pioneerdivers.

The hidden depths of the ocean have beenvisited and observed at close quarters on several 67

A 16th-century Korean

"turtle-boat".

occasionsto a depth of 9,050 metres in theKouriles trench by Houot and Willm in 1958aboard the Archimede, and frequently in recent

years at the mid-Atlantic ridge, where the con¬tinental plates supporting Europe and Americameet and fray. Although no sea monster has yetappeared, this does not necessarily mean that suchmonsters do not exist. Neither have the stocks

of living creatures which accumulate at certaindepths according to the hypothesis proposed bythe Danish oceanographer Hans Petterson1 ever

yet been seen beneath the arc lights (whichperhaps drive them away).

The exploitation of the oceansThe sea is the forest

(Victor Hugo, Les pauvres gens)

The most imaginative and universal poet of thenineteenth century, exiled at the age of fifty ona cliff overlooking the sea, regarded the sea as asterile and frightening immensity, a cemetery ofwrecks, a hostile power, a source of uncontroll¬able energy ready to crush and bury the coastalpoor who were condemned to forage for theirmeagre food supplies using ways and means thathad hardly changed since biblical times.

-fs } * Jk * À M

68

Within less than two generations, this night¬mare situation had changed into a far morehopeful one. Lone fishermen were replaced byindustrial fisheries. Then came the developmentof aquaculture. Soon it will be possible to orderrobots by remote control to shovel up the man¬ganese nodules which carpet the seabed. If ther¬monuclear fusion of hydrogen in confined con¬ditions is successfully developed, the seawhichcontains inexhaustible supplies of hydrogenwillbecome the reservoir of a virtually free and non-

polluting energy source, which could satisfy allour energy needs in a new golden age. Perhapswe shall see a happy ending to the wonderful Per¬sian story of the poor fisherman who cast his netafter imploring Allah and invoking Moses andcaught a bottle which he was unwise enough touncork after breaking the seal of Solomon to doso. A genie emerged from the bottle "in the formof smoke which rose to the clouds, billowing overthe sea . . . before solidifying into a monstrous

giant". The genie would have wiped out the over-curious fisherman if the latter had not persuadedit to get back into the bottle. For us the geniewas the cataclysmic mushroom cloud which roseabove the Pacific Ocean off the island of Bikini

on 26 May 1956 after the testing of a ther¬monuclear bomb. Today there are grounds forhoping that scientists working on nuclear fusionmay return this particular genie to its bottle, pos¬sibly in the form of a Tokamak2 or some otherform of apparatus serving this fourth and lastpillar of Neptune's temple.

The new Atlantis

The sea begins and ceases and then again beginsAnd when after thought I long rest my gaze

On the calm of the gods, I have here my reward. . . .But the wind is rising! . . . I must try to live!

(Paul Valéry, Le Cimetière Marin)

The imagination and the sea have been closelylinked ever since the legend of Atlantis. But isit really a legend?3 Whatever the case, it may beconverted (or restored) to reality. More and morepeople dream of lotus-eating on tropical islands,and holiday clubs and leisure centres of all kindsare proliferating. Offshore oil platforms couldalready serve as models or embryos for earthlyparadises.

We must aim higher and settle in ever moreremote locations. Today it is possible to build off¬shore and even way out to sea, far from the dirtand noise of cities, islands dedicated to the higher

pursuits of humanity. Habitations can be builtabove the deep blue waters, looking out over avast expanse, the inviolate horizon and "the calmof the gods", but above all in the freedom of theopen sea, subject only to international law. The

"serene temples of the sages" which Lucretiusimagined in the marine environment (Suave maremagno), the ideal scientific city which FrancisBacon called the "New Atlantis", could thus

emerge from the limbo of the mind.Philippe Tailliez, another pioneer of under-

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

All in a hot and copper sky,The bloody Sun, at noon,Right up above the mast did stand,No bigger than the Moon.

Day after day, day after day,We stuck, nor breath, nor motion;

As idle as a painted shipUpon a painted ocean.

Water, water, everywhere,And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)English poet and philosopher

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

water exploration, has been cherishing this ideaever since his first dives in 1937 with Jacques-YvesCousteau. He has worked out an outline

Archipelaego Project and in 1981 founded an

association whose aim is "the design, construc¬tion, and experimentation of a floating inhabitedarchipelago extending from the heights to thedepths, by means of spatial and underwater struc¬tures. Such an archipelago, dynamically anchoredto the seabed, is being planned for the PacificOcean, outside those areas which have alreadybeen or are being appropriated by the nations ofthe planet for economic exploitation."

Described as "a symbol and affirmation ofthe common marine and spatial future of thehuman race, in line with the concept of thecommon heritage of humanity", the ArchipelaegoProject was favourably received by leading diversand astronauts who met at Miami in 1985, in

Tunis in 1986 and in Japan in 1990, under theauspices of the World Confederation of Under¬

water Activities (CMAS). It is still no more than

a project, perhaps even a pipe-dream. But it is nottoo late, nor perhaps too soon, to start to buildthis "last shore".

Summer holidaymakers on theAtlantic coast of France.

1. La croisière aux abîmes, cited by Georges Houot and PierreWillm in Le bathyscaphe, Les Editions de Paris, 1954.2. Tokamak: an apparatus for the magnetic confinement of thereacting matter (plasma) involved in nuclear fusion.3. One recent study suggests that an Atlantis civilization may haveexisted in the North Sea 10,000 years ago. Jean Dequelle, De lapréhistoire à l'Atlantide des mégalithes, France-Empire publishers,Paris 1990.

JACQUES FERRIER,Commissioner General in the

French Navy, is honorary

president of the Academy of

the Var département in Franceand a member of the French

Academy of CommercialSciences. He is the author of

many scientific papers, and

recently published a study onthe French Revolution and the

Var (Académie du Var, Toulon

1990). 69

M ÙMS LONELY M)

70

I he pearls described in sixth-century-BC Sin¬ghalese and Indian literature and the sponges

mentioned by Homer and Hippocrates must have

been fished by divers. The oldest unequivocal

reference to diving is in book sixteen of the

Iliad, in which Patroclus gives the following

description of the Trojan Cebhones whom he

has just hit with a stone and knocked from his

chariot: "Ha! Quite an acrobat, I see, judging

by that graceful dive! The man who takes so neata header from a chariot on land could dive for

oysters from a ship at sea in any weather and

fetch up plenty for a feast. I did not know the

Trojans had such divers." Thucydides and other

historians of Antiquity also describe how divers

managed to take enemy fleets by surprise.

The first skin divers certainly lived in parts

of the world such as the east Mediterranean and

Polynesia and on the shores of the Yellow Sea

in southeast Asia where there was a combina¬

tion of several favourable factors for diving,

including relatively calm seas, Clearwater, and

a temperature enabling divers to stay in thewater for a reasonable time.

Until the end of the Renaissance diving was

limited in time (by lung capacity) and depth (by

visibility). From the time of the Roman author

Vegetius in the fifth century to that of Leonardo

da Vinci in the fifteenth, people thought of con¬

necting the diver to the surface by means of

an air tube, but attempts to do so came to

nothing since certain principles of hydrostatics

(the branch of mechanics which deals with the

equilibrium of fluids) were only established by

Pascal in the seventeenth century. It then

became known that an underwater swimmer

breathing through a tube linked to the surface

needs to exert a force greater than the water

pressure in order to inhale. The human respira¬

tory muscles are weak. Two metres underwater

the effort to inhale is very tiring, and impossible

any deeper.

Nevertheless, experiments with diving bells

were carried out during this period. These bell-

shaped hulls open to the water at the bottom

were modelled on saucepans or on the urns

containing air which Roman divers placed on

the seabed, with the mouth facing downwards,

and used to supply themselves with air.

BELLS AND CAISSONS

In 1690, Edmond Halley invented a method of

renewing the air inside the diving bell from

barrels lowered to the seabed.

Taking up an idea formulated a hundred

years before by Denis Papin, the English

engineer John Smeaton (1 724- 1 792) went one

step further when he fitted a pump to the bell

in order to provide it with fresh air from a ship

on the surface.

But diving bells were heavy, unwieldy, and

difficult to use. A diver has to breathe air at the

surrounding water pressure, the inflow of air

must be sufficient to keep him or her supplied

with oxygen, and carbon dioxide must be elimi¬nated so that it is not reinhaled.

Early in the nineteenth century, the German

engineer Augustus Siebe took the decisive step

of providing the diver with a "bell" tailored to

his own sizea diving suit in which the diver

was equipped with a copper helmet with port¬

holes, and supplied with compressed air

pumped from the surface. The supply of air was

continuous, and excess air escaped through the

edge of the helmet below the chin. By 1837

Siebe had developed an improved model with

a valve which let air out without letting water in.

Inventers next tried to make an autono¬

mous diving suit which would free divers from

the need to be in contact with the surface and

enable them to move about more easily.

Borelli (1680), Fréminet (1776), Forfait

(1783), Klingberg (1796) and de Drieberg with

the Triton (1811) had already tried to construct

apparatus of this kind, in which the diver

breathed through the mouth by means of a tubeconnected to a container carried on his back

and caused the air to circulate by activating a

bellows with movements of the head.

Further improvements were added by W.H.

James (1825-1828) and then by Condert, who

designed a system for adjusting the supply of

compressed air, a primitive regulator and a free

escape system for surplus air. Cabirol improved

this apparatus even further in 1885.

SCUBA DIVING

In 1860, a French mining engineer, Benoît Rou-

quayrol, and a naval officer, Auguste Denay-

rouze, made a decisive improvement to the

diving suit when they invented a regulator, a

valve which provides air at a pressure equal to

the prevailing water pressure.

In 1864, a swimmer equipped with a gas

regulator supplied by a pump on the surface

could thus easily move around up to 40 metres

down.

In the following year, these brilliant

inventors devised a system for providing the air

supply directly from a container carried on the

diver's back. This was the birth of modern

SCUBA (self-contained underwater breathing

apparatus) diving.

Divers could now operate for up to half an

hour at a depth of ten metres without any link

with the surface. The apparatus was outstand¬

ingly successful. Jules Verne understood its

potential immediately and equipped Captain

Nemo and his men with it in Twenty Thousand

Leagues under the Sea.

Source: Revue de la Fondation Océanographique

Ricard, No. 7, 1984.

Right, "Got a spanner?"

Mechanics adjust a diver's

helmet (1927). Middle,

Halley's diving bell (17th

century). Top, diving hood

designed by the Roman writer

Vegetius (5th century AD).

A*à Jï

IN BRIEF... IN BRIEF... IN BRIEF..

Mozart's unfinished

symphony

At the request of the

prestigious Internationale

Stiftung Mozarteum

foundation, the Japanese

composer Shigeaki Saegusa

has recently completed the

score of an unfinished

orchestral work by Mozart, the

Symphonia Concertante KV

320. The new version of the

symphony, which lasts 20

minutes, will be played in

Salzburg, Mozart's birthplace,

on 5 December, the

bicentenary of the great

composer's death.

Spain's Islamic artAn exhibition on "Al-Andalus,

Islamic Art in Spain", will openin March 1992 in the

Alhambra Palace, Granada.

The exhibition is being

organized by the Metropolitan

Museum, New York, under the

patronage of the Bank of

Bilbao-Vizcaya. On display will

be 125 objects produced

during the 8-century Islamic

period of Spanish history, onloan from museums and

private collections in Spain,

Berlin, London, Leningrad,

New York and Paris.

EEC acts on exhaust fumes

Environment Ministers of the

European Economic

Community (EEC) have agreedon a new directive to limit

exhaust fumes from diesel

lorries. The directive, which

will come into force on 1 July

1992, will cut the maximum

permitted emission of carbon

monoxide, hydrocarbons and

nitrogen oxide.

Brain drain earlier for men

After studying the brains of

34 men and 35 women aged

18 to 80, scientists at

Pennsylvania University have

concluded that men's brains

deteriorate three times faster

than women's. The results of

their research, published in

the Proceedings of the

National Academy of Sciences,

show that men's brain cells

die earlier than women's and

that much of the loss is

concentrated in the parts of

the brain responsible for

reasoning, calculating,

planning and conceptualizing.

Family planning spreads but

world population still risingMore than half of all couples

in developing countries nowuse some kind of

contraception, as against less

than 10 per cent in the

1960s, according to the latest

annual report of the United

Nations Population Fund. The

report also says that without

family planning programmescarried out in the last 20

years, world population would

be 412 million higher than it

is today. In spite of this

progress, United Nations

specialists estimate that world

population will rise from 5.4

billion in 1991 to 6.4 billion in

2001 and 8.5 billion in 2025.

an increase which will be

overwhelmingly concentrated

in the developing countries.

The right to a clean planetThe French ocean explorer

Commandant Jacques-YvesCousteau has launched a

campaign for the United

Nations to proclaim the right

of future generations to

inherit a planet where life will

not be seriously threatened by

pollution and overpopulation.

He suggests that a 5-article

Declaration of Rights should

be added to the United

Nations Charter. Commandant

Cousteau has drafted the

Declaration in co-operationwith French and American

scientists and philosophers.

Amnesty International at 30

The humanitarian organization

Amnesty International, which

this year celebrates its 30th

anniversary, has published a

pessimistic report which says

that 2 out of 3 people live in

countries that torture and kill

their citizens. Amnesty

International is appealing to

decision-makers and citizens

to reject all attempts to justify

violations of human rights.

...

Fighting drug abuseIn accordance with a United

Nations resolution, 26 June is

observed each year as

International Day against Drug

Abuse and Illicit Trafficking.

This year the Day, whose

theme was "Preventing Drug

Abuse: all together against a

common threat", coincided with

the launching of the

International Decade against

Drug Abuse (1991-2000), which

is designed to strengthen and

support national, regional andinternational efforts in this

field.

Waste not...

To remedy defects in the 3

widely-used methods of

treating household wastes

(incineration, tipping and useas raw material for the

manufacture of fertilizer), a

Swiss company has invented a

high-speed fossilization

process which produces

neither fumes nor residues.

The waste is subjected to heat

and light radiation in a

reactor, and petrified within 8

minutes. The end product is a

kind of gravel which can be

used in industries rangingfrom construction to

mechanical engineering.

Nausicaa, the magicof the sea

Nausicaa, a marine centre

designed to present to the

general public the spectacle

of the marine world and its

riches opened in May at

Boulogne-sur-Mer (France).

With 15,000 square metres of

exhibition space, 1,400 square

metres of aquarium, a library

containing 5,000 titles and

4,000 references to works

about the sea, a video library

with 5,000 images and 300

films, Nausicaa is also a data

bank providing researchers,

journalists and lovers of the

sea with a matchless source

of information.

A woman's world

Some 4,000 craters, plainsand mountains have been

identified on Venus as a result

of topographical

measurements made by the

Magellan space probe. The

nomenclature commission of

the International Astronomical

Union has decided to name

these sites for famous women

who died more than three

years ago. The only exception

is the planet's highest point,

which already bears the name

of the physicist James Clerk

Maxwell.

From the Chunnel,

a 95-million-year-oldfossil

During work on the Channel

Tunnel between the United

Kingdom and France, 16 km

from the coast of Kent in

southeast England, a

surveyor has made the first

major palaeontological

discovery of these gigantic

excavations: a perfectly

preserved fossil, that of an

octopus-like mollusc which is

believed to have lived 95

million years ago. This

species, says British geologist

Stuart Warren, has not

changed in appearance for

500 million years.

The Jeu de Paume reopensin Paris

In June the old Paris museum

of the Jeu de Paume

reopened after renovation.

Built in 1862 by Napoleon III,transformed into a museum in

1947, it housed until 1986 a

splendid collection of

immpressionist paintingswhich were later transferred

to the new Orsay Museum.The new Jeu de Paume will be

a national gallery without a

permanent collection. The

inaugural exhibition, a

retrospective of the last years

of the French painter Jean

Dubuffet, will be followed by

exhibitions of work by

contemporary artists who are

little known outside their own

countries.

IN BRIEF... IN BRIEF... IN BRIEF...71

UNESCO IN ACTION

ENVIRONMENT

The Blue Plan for the Mediterranean

by Michel Bâtisse

X or us human beings the ocean is an alienenvironment where there are no familiar fea¬

tures to help us get our bearings, a place ofwhich we still know little. Sometimes we over¬

estimate its wealth, sometimes we neglect itsimportance. We behave as if the oceans canabsorb anything, and do not suspect that theyplay a crucial role in the regulation of climate.We think that there are unlimited stocks of

fish, whereas in reality world fishing hasalready reached saturation point. Where thesea is concerned, we seem to find it hard to

distinguish myth from reality. . . .These contradictions between what we

believe and what is true, between what we

want and what is possible, are nowhere moreapparent than in the Mediterranean, that "seain the midst of land", the cradle and crossroads

of ancient civilizations, which is today pointed

to as an example of pollution and degradation.What are the facts, and what does the future

hold for these shores "where the orange treeblossoms"?

Since 1976, political and economic differ¬ences notwithstanding, all the Mediterraneancountries have been co-operating within theframework of the Barcelona Convention to

protect their common sea from pollution. TheMediterranean is a closed sea, without bigtides, and accidents like those involving theAmoco Cadiz off Brittany in 1978 or the ExxonValdez off Alaska in 1989 could have disas¬

trous consequences for the historic cities onits shores, for its beaches, for its tourist and

port facilities, and for the fragile economy ofits coastal regions. A small oil slick whichrecently appeared off Genoa caused conster¬nation on the Italian and French rivieras.

"Integrated coastal management comes up against

administrative compartmentalizatlon."

72

Naturally enough, co-operation betweenthe Mediterranean countries focused initiallyon risks of oil spills and the discharge of toxicwastes and other pollutants. However it soonbecame clear that the harm being done to thesea originated mainly from the landfrom thecoast, from rivers, and from the atmosphere.Contrary to what is often said, the mainsources of offshore pollution in the Mediter¬ranean are plastic bags, lumps of tar and occa¬sional algae blooms produced by nutrient-richagricultural fertilizer. On the coast, however,the situation varies widely. On the one handthere are sparsely populated areas which arestill very clean; on the other there are zoneswhere considerable chemical and bacteriolog¬ical pollution is caused by urban, industrialand agricultural wastes. It is on the coastalregions of the Mediterranean countries thathuman activities are focused and where all

kinds of pressures are created.The Mediterranean basin, whether consi¬

dered in its totality or in terms of individualcountries, provinces and sites, behaves as a"system" whose components act and reacttogether. Any attempt to understand thepresent and possible future situation of theMediterranean has to be based on an analysisof the system and its possible futures. Anyaction which affects only one or another ofthe components of the system and ignores theovert or covert links between them runs the

risk of failure. It may, for instance, be futileto try to attract more tourists to a stretch ofcoast where the necessary water resources arenot available, or if a polluting industry iscreated nearby.

The Mediterranean countries decided to

produce a system-based and future-orientedstudy which would help them to understandthe nature and extent of current developments

and to make sound policy decisions. This toolis the Blue Plan. In it population is regardedas the primary component in the Mediterra¬nean system, for it is people who, by theirnumber, age, needs, aspirations and move¬ments, are the dominant factor of change sincethey act directly, both quantitatively andqualitatively, on all the other components ofthe systemagriculture, industry, energy,tourism, transport, soils, forests, continentalwaters, the coastal areas and the sea itself.

Scenarios for the future

In the Blue Plan, a number of scenarios havebeen constructed for the Mediterranean

system until the year 2025. They are based oncoherent sets of hypotheses relating to demo¬graphic change, to types of development andthe growth rates that result from them, toenvironmental policies, and to levels of co¬operation between the northern and southernMediterranean countries.

Of course these scenarios do not claim to

predict the future, which will doubtless emergefrom the course of history as erratically as italways has. But they aim to show what mayhappen in the logic of things, depending on

Fishermen are depicted

on this mosaic from the ancient city of Utica,Tunisia (4th century AD).

whether or not certain conditions exist. Two

types of scenario have been constructed: so-

called "trend" scenarios which, to a greateror lesser degree, prolong observable currentdevelopments in different parts of the system;and "alternative" scenarios which depart con¬siderably from current developments, paymore attention to the environment, and arebased on far more effective economic and tech¬

nical co-operation between the countries ofthe northern shores of the Mediterranean and

those of the south and east. The latter coun¬

tries are and will be in a far more difficult posi¬tion than those of the north. The populationof their Mediterranean coastal regions may risefrom 60 million today to somewhere between100 and 130 million in the year 2025, whereaspopulation in the northern countries mayonly rise from 80 to 90 million at most. Popu¬lation growth alone would create a parallelgrowth in needs, with major socio-economicand environmental consequences.

The results of the different scenarios of the

Blue Plan are too complex to be summarizedin a few lines. It is clear however that the trend

scenarios describe situations which it is hard

to accept from either an ecological or an eco¬nomic point of view. They suggest the whole¬sale destruction of coastal landscapes by ram¬pant urbanization, increased pollution,damage to the terrestrial and marine environ¬

ment, and a marked deterioration in livingconditions in the countries of the south. The

figures are alarming. To take but one example,between now and 2025, an average of onepower station would have to be built everytwenty kilometres from the coast of Moroccoto that of Turkey.

The alternative scenarios are of course

more acceptable, even if they are based on thesupposition that major difficulties will havebeen overcome. The most obvious of these

difficulties concerns the radical change in poli¬cies implicit in the channelling of massive aidfrom north to south. At the same time there

would have to be a real change in attitudes,both in the north and in the south, towards

the environment and the consumption ofresources. Perhaps the rarest of these resourcesis fresh water, whose scarcity imposes con¬siderable limitations on development in manyMediterranean countries, and which will have

to be economically and rigorously managed. 73

74

The most threatened resource, however,

is the coastline itself. It is there that the most

serious conflicts arise about land use. I would

cite one example to illustrate the importanceof the choices which will have to be made. By

the beginning of the next century, almost allthe Mediterranean countries will have to

import much of their food. To obtain thenecessary foreign currency, their most pre¬cious capital will in many cases be a naturaland cultural heritage which is concentrated onthe coast. Depending on the scenario, theseareas may be visited by between 125 and 190million foreign tourists each year from Europeor elsewhere. But the coast will not attract

tourists if it is blighted by anarchic buildingand infrastructure development and by allkinds of pollution on land, on the beaches andat sea. There are other places where tourists

can go.

Priority to the coast

If the idea of "saving" the Mediterranean isto make any sense at all, it is essential that thecoastline be properly managed. All the com¬ponents of the "coastal system" must be takeninto account, both on land (controlled urbandevelopment, wastewater treatment, agricul¬ture without excessive discharge of fertilizersand pesticides, respect for productive land,appropriately sited industries and clean tech¬nologies, the control of air and water-pollutingemissions at source, the development ofhighways and airports in the hinterland, theconservation of forests and humid zones) andat sea (the development of ports with debal-lasting facilities for ships, control of dredgingand waste disposal, the disposal of wastewateroffshore, limitations on marina development,the protection of aquatic plant life and theseabed, regulation of fishing).

Unfortunately, there is no tradition ofintegrated coastal management of this kind.In most countries matters concerning the landand those concerning the sea are handled bydifferent parts of the administrative system.

MICHEL BATISSE,

French engineer and physicist, is internationally

known for his work on the environment and

natural resources. Currently a consultant withUNESCO and the United Nations Environment

Programme (UNEP), he has headed the Blue PlanRegional Activity Centre for the Mediterranean at

Sophia Antipolis, France, since it was createdin 1985.

Integrated management conflicts with cor¬poratism, private interests and administrativecompartmentalization. However, there isreason to react, and all those of us who are

interested in the sea or go to the seaside cando something to help.

The Blue Plan for the Mediterranean

shows both the limits and the possibilities ofprotecting the shoreline. It also shows thatother blue plans could be useful for the futureof other regions. By the very nature of theproblems that exist therebetween north andsouth, between the environment and develop¬ment, between land and seathe Mediterra¬

nean basin is a truly representative microcosmof the planet as a whole.

This region has seen a succession of richand varied civilizations: Egyptians and Phoe¬nicians, Greeks and Hittites, Romans and Car¬

thaginians, Arabs and Franks, the ItalianRenaissance, the rise of the modern world. It

was doubtless right and proper that it shouldbreak new ground in reflecting on the future.But now it must vigorously continue theaction it has begun so that its future will beworthy of its past. Time is running out if weare to modify or reverse the degradation ofthe coastline. If Venus, goddess of beauty,daughter of the Mediterranean, ever rises fromthe waves again, let us make sure that she isnot covered with red algae, plastic and tar.

^«**.*

*"<**,*«<£«

The Blue Plan has been

published in English under

the title Futures for the

Mediterranean Basin {Oxford

University Press, 1990).

An ecological Eldorado: Peru's ManuNational

Park

by José Serra-Vega

ELanu National Park in south-east Peru

rises from the sweltering fastnesses of theAmazonian forest up through a labyrinth ofgiddying scarps to an altitude of 4,000 metreson the eastern slopes of the Andes. The twogreat rivers that flow through the region, theManu and the Madre de Dios, rush down from

the high plateaux to the plain where, slack¬ening their course, they meander alongthrough a succession of different ecosystemsand climates, joining up to flow together intothe Amazon.

In the west, flocks of vicunas, the occa¬

sional guemal (a small American deer) andfearsome mountain lions roam across the

frozen peaks and the cold, wind-sweptplateaux dotted with black lakes where all thatgrows is a coarse yellow grass known as ichu.From time to time a spectacled bear can beseen, a species found nowhere else in SouthAmerica. The mountain forest stretches out

further down between altitudes of 3,800 and2,500 metres, shrouded in thick mist. Lower

down the temperature rises and rainfallincreases, making for a proliferation of plantand animal life. Manu National Park consists

mainly of tropical rainforest whose tangle ofgiant trees, creepers, plant parasites andorchids, climbing plants and epiphytes, pro¬vides a habitat for a huge variety of wildlife.In the vast Amazonian plain down below, theriver Manu winds its way through a valley

UNESCO IN ACTION

WORLD HERITAGE

The ai or

three-toed sloth,

a tree-dwelling

vegetarian.

made well-nigh impenetrable by the densityof the vegetation, forming in places oxbowlakescochaswhich teem with aquatic life.

The lure of the unknown

For centuries people have been drawn to theAmazon by the lure of the unknown, a thirstfor adventure and the prospect of fortune. TheIncas of Cuzco sought to expand their empirein this region and found themselves with nochoice but to trade with the warlike tribes of

the region in order to obtain the colourfulfeathers with which they decorated theirceremonial costumes and the hallucinogenicand medicinal plants on which they relied.

Legend has it that Paititi, the lost citywhere the Incas are believed to have hidden

enormous quantities of gold and silver afterlearning of the murder of their ruler Atahu-alpa at the hands of the Spanish conquerorFrancisco Pizarro, was located in the Manu

region. The Spanish armies, in their search forthis Eldorado and its fabulous treasures,penetrated deep into the jungle where theywere decimated by disease and hostile Indians.They too ended up by abandoning all attemptsto settle there.

For three more centuries it was not

known whether the rivers in the Madre de

Dios basin flowed northwards or westwards.

Some geographers of the time, who embel¬lished their maps with mythical creatures andmonstrous caimans, thought that theAmazon's source lay somewhere within it.

The rubber boom in the late nineteenth

century attracted thousands of adventurers tothe area. For twenty-odd years the tapping oftrees for latex was a thriving industry andAmazonia edged its way into the worldmarket, but competition from the Britishplantations in Asia brought this activity to asudden end.

Lethargy again descended on the region, 75

only to be shaken off in the 1960s with thedevelopment of the trade in fursocelot,jaguar, otter, black lizardand exotic wood-manly mahogany and cedar. Around the sametime people started taking an interest in theexceptional biological resources to be foundthere. In 1968 the Peruvian authorities

organized an expedition into the basin of theriver Manu and its tributary the Sotileja. Onthe basis of the information collected, theydeclared Manu a national park in June 1973.In 1977 UNESCO recognized it as a biospherereserve and since 1987 it has been on the

World Heritage List.The core of the biosphere reserve is Manu

National Park, which has an area of 15,328km2 from which all economic or touristic

activities are barred. It is bounded in the east

by a buffer zone measuring some 2,500 km2where the aim is to preserve the forest whileallowing limited tourism and scientificresearch. Further south is a transitional zone

covering 900 km2 inhabited by a few settlersand by Indian communities which continueto practise their traditional activities, withinset bounds.

The Cocha Cashu biological observatorywas established in 1969 beside a cutoff of the

river Manu. Its laboratories and research facil¬

ities can accommodate about twentyresearchers. The work done there has helpedto provide a fuller picture of the forms of lifepresent in the reserve and of tropical forestecosystems in general. Another observatoryis being built outside the national park so thatcertain studies can be carried out which are

not allowed in the park itself. But there is ahuge amount to be done. The forest harbourscountless mysteries. We know little about itsaquatic forms of life and virtually nothingabout the tropical montane rainforest or thegrasslands of the high plateaux or punas.

In a sense, then, the legendary treasuresof Eldorado do exist in the form of the sixteen

ecosystems present within the 18,800 km2 ofthe reserve, which have remained practicallyintact since the dawn of time.

Parrots, monkeys, and turtles

The most characteristic feature of the tropicalrainforest is doubtless its fabulous diversity.It would be impossible here to list even themain forest species in the reserve. To givesome idea of its biological resources,researchers have identified 1,200 vascular

plants within an area of 4 km2 around the76 Cocha Cashu observatory. One tenth of the

Macaws, members of

the parrot family which often

live in groups.

plants in the reserve have not yet been identi¬fied and may belong to species hithertounknown to scientists. When an inventorywas made of canopy insects within one hec¬tare of rainforest, 41,000 species of inver¬tebrates were found, including 12,000 kindsof beetle. In one single tree there were 43 typesof ant belonging to 26 different genera, prac¬tically as many as in the whole of the BritishIsles.

No less than fifteen per cent of the world'sbird species are found in Manu park, whosedenizens include majestic condors, tiny hum¬mingbirds, and noisy black and yellowicteridae whose hanging nests look like greatpurses made of straw. There are twenty-eightspecies of macaws and parrots, including thevery rare blue-headed parrot.

From beneath the trees these birds are

easier to hear than to see, but they can some¬times be glimpsed in the open spaces along theriver. At sunrise a squawking, multicolouredflight of parrots can sometimes be seenswooping down on the furrowed banks of theManu to gobble up the clay which is rich inmineral salts. Herons, wild geese and ducks,delicate spoonbills and other gangling wadersmingle on the shores with sleepy caimans thatcan move into action with devastating speed.Kingfishers, large-billed toucans and stiletto-billed snakebirds also live by the river, feedingon its plentiful supply of aquatic animals.Perhaps the strangest bird of all is the hoatzin,which nests at the riverside. Its young haveclaws on their wings which they use to

clamber about in the trees before they learnto fly. Its digestive system resembles that ofruminants.

The forest is also the habitat of monkeys,thirteen species of which have so far beenidentified, including the tiny pygmy marmoset,the smallest in the world, which weighs barely120 grams, the restless emperor tamarin,which owes its name to its superb whitemoustaches, worthy of emperor Franz-Josefof Austria, the spider monkey and the howlingmonkey whose roars, imitating those of thejaguar, have curdled the blood of more thanone tourist.

The jaguar itself, like the puma and theocelot, is mainly nocturnal but can be seenprowling along the river bank at the time ofthe year when turtles come there to lay theireggs. Tapirs, peccaries and wild dogs come tothe water during the daytime to drink. Thereare also many other mammalssmall batswhich sleep head downwards, hanging fromthe branches over the cochas, vampire batswhich live exclusively on blood, giantanteaters and armadillos, some of which weighas much as fifty kilograms.

There are also large numbers of giantotters. Much sought after for their valuablefurs, these carnivorous mammals once camenear to extinction in the Amazon basin.

Insatiably curious and extremely fast-movingin the water, otters hunt and fish in groups.Endowed with powerful teeth, they do nothesitate to attack one-and-a-half-metre-longcaimans in order to defend their young orobtain food.

Many dangers lurk in this spellbindinglybeautiful world, vibrant with sounds and

colours. In the forests and swamps there are

poisonous snakes and other dangerous crea¬tures. The most fearsome and aggressive of thesnakes is the deadly bushmaster [Lachesismuta), which can be more than three metreslong and is reputed to pursue people who arefoolhardy enough to cross its path. The mostcommon reptiles are pit vipers of the genusBothrops, which are capable of detectingsources of heat from a distance and can thus

hunt in the dark, and the brightly-colouredcoral snakes of the genus Micrurus, which aredistant cousins of the Asian and African

cobras. The rivers and lakes are the home of

the anaconda and the gigantic aquatic boawhich can be as much as nine metres long. Bythe riverside or on drifting trunks it is notuncommon to see river turtles basking in thesun in the company of black lizards. The largestreptile in the reserve, which has been observedat Cocha Cashu, is a black female lizard nearlyfive metres long and over 500 kilos in weight.

The forest hunters

The most mysterious area in the reserve is thePusharo gorge, a colossal gateway throughwhich the river Palotoa finds its way out ofthe mountains. On one side of the gorge, con¬cealed by the vegetation, is a thirty-metre-longfrieze of rock carvings which display solarsymbols, snakes, women's heads, spirals andcrisscross patterns. Behind, a ramp, which isprobably artificial, leads to a stone terrace.Like many other examples of rock art scat¬tered through Amazonia, they have beenneither studied nor interpreted. They are theremains of a forgotten Amazonian cultureprobably dating back to the earliest settlers inAmerica.

Today very few people live in this com¬plex and wonderful setting. A few Amahuacaand Yaminahua Indians live in the valleys ofthe Panahua and Pinquén rivers and in thenortheastern part of the reserve. In the rainyseason, the Neolithic Amahuaca hunters,fishermen and farmers return to the sources

of the two rivers to tend their crops. Duringthe dry season, from July to December, theygo back to the banks of the Manu where theyharvest the river turtle eggs which are the mainsource of protein in their diet. The indigenouspeoples have permission to live on theresources of the reserve, and care is taken not

to disturb their traditional way of life, whichis the result of thousands of years of adapta¬tion to the harsh forest environment.

Even more mysterious are the Kugapákori,who lead a nomadic existence between the

basins of the Madre de Dios and the Uru-

bamba. They jealously defend their territoryand shoot arrows at anyone who crosses theinvisible frontier that runs around it.

The Machiguenga people are verydifferent. Converted to the ways of themodern world, some have settled in the vil¬

lage of Tayakome, a distance of five hours bycanoe upstream from Cocha Cashu, wheremissionaries brought them from their hometerritory in the upper reaches of the Uru-bamba valley. The rest live in small scatteredgroups consisting of a few households,provided by the government with rudimen¬tary schools and with teachers, many of whomspeak their language.

Few people come from the high plateaux

The jaguar is the largest species

of the cat family in the western hémisphère.

and settle on the edge of the park and hencethey present no threat to the forest. The poorstate of the road from Cuzco makes transportexpensive, and this discourages people fromsettling in the area.

A threatened world

But the park is being increasingly exposed todanger. There is a risk that certain industri¬alization projects may jeopardize the integrityof the reserve and the survival of its inhabi¬

tants. If these schemes come to fruition, the

extraordinary natural heritage of Manu willsoon be no more than a memory.

In the region of Madre de Dios, which isone of the last unspoiled areas of Peru, andespecially near the Brazilian border, linked toSao Paulo by a tarmacked road, the forest isbeing burnt away, sometimes illegally, tomake space for big stock-raising farms.

A multinational oil company has disco¬vered an enormous deposit of natural gas atthe north-east edge of the Manu Park, whichis believed to extend beneath the actual

reserve. A camp set up for the prospectors hasalready caused incalculable harm. Wildanimals have been exterminated, rivers have

been polluted with oil and chemical productsand indigenous groups have been driven fromtheir traditional hunting grounds.

But this is nothing in comparison with theecological and human disaster that would betriggered by the installation of a pipeline totransport gas to Cuzco, along with a powerstation which would produce electricityexported to Brazil via a 350-km-long high-voltage cable, 120 km of which would passthough the reserve. Almost 300 km of a roadplanned to run from Puerto Bermúdez, in thecentre of Peru, to the frontier of Bolivia would

cross the northern part of the reserve.If these projects are carried out, the forests

of Manu will cease to be.

JOSÉ SERRA-VEGA,of Peru, is a former staff member of the United

Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi

(Kenya). He helped to set up a new scientificresearch station in the Manu biosphere reserve

and contributed to a plan for a biosphere reserve

at Beni in Bolivia. 77

The return of the RA al-Safamaftby François-Bernard Huyghe

Or'n 25 April 1991 the Fulk al-Salamah, the"Ship of Peace", dropped anchor in the portof Mina Qabus in Muscat. Six weeks hadalready gone by since the ship, which had beenloaned by Sultan Qabus of Oman toUNESCO's Maritime Silk Roads expedition,had left its passengers at Hakata, Japan. Butthe festivities to celebrate the return of the cap¬tain and his crew had been postponed untilthe end of Ramadan. Like the celebrations on

17 November last that had marked the start

of the voyage, these were in traditional Omanistyle and featured hundreds of dancers.

It would be an understatement to say thatthe expedition received a royal welcome. Her¬alded by fireboats spouting great jets of waterand with a helicopter whirring above ourheads, escorted by launches and patrol shipsand encircled by a flotilla of white boatsdecked out in the national colours, our shippulled into port. There we were greeted byfloating rigs adorned with the United Nationsflag, the Sultan's portrait and a mysteriousflower that several of usclearly no greatshakes as botaniststook for a lotus, seeingit as a possible symbol of East-West relations.Later we were told that the flower thus

depicted was a new variety of rose, the "SultanQabus".

But it was the noises that made the strong¬est impression: drumbeat, chanting andwhooping sounds punctuated the dances per¬formed by hundreds of dancers on board boatscrammed with people. They brandished sticks,swords and kandjarsthe traditional daggersported by Omani men on solemn occasions.Meanwhile, on land, ministers, members ofthe royal family, an escort, other dances, anda procession of official cars awaited us. . . .

Our arrival in Muscat coincided with the

twentieth anniversary of the Sultan's accessionto power. In actual fact, what was beingcelebrated in the city, transformed into a daz¬zling tricolour array by thousands of lightbulbs in the national coloursgreen, red andwhitewas the amazing leap in time that had

78 been made in less than a generation, and the

change that had occurred in people's minds.It was the transition, effected through dynasticsuccession and with the help of petrodollars,from an Oman immersed in its history, whereelectricity and sunglasses were suspected ofbringing the evils of modernism, to the mostup-to-date form of civilization. And yet, heremore than anywhere else, there was clearly aconcern to maintain spiritual values, and evi¬dence of a discipline that seemed to be freelyaccepted.

The stereotype image is of an "ArabianSwitzerland", of a place where camels andcomputers exist side by side, but what I actu¬ally saw was: a city rebuilt in accordance withaesthetic standards which endow it with unity;a military parade ended with a tribal march-past featuring ancient rites of war; sheiks fromDofar visiting an ultra-modern cultural centrein Salalàh, amazed to see objects from theireveryday lives being displayed in showcases;hundreds of youngsters moving together inunison to create an electronic tableau vivant

reminiscent of the opening of the OlympicGames, and in the stands every single manwithout exception dressed in the traditionalOmani costume. Few places present suchstriking contrasts.

I leave it to better-informed observers than

I to explain how the people can experiencesuch a culture shock while remaining seem¬ingly unperturbed. I would also ask them tomake allowances for what may be no morethan a superficial impression.

Losing our bearings

But for us passengers of the Fulk al-Salamahthe culture shock had been even greater. Wehad left behind us the agricultural and urbanMediterranean world with its layer cake ofdifferent cultures, and found ourselves face to

face with something radically other. The Euro¬pean writer of these lines, who had beentaught to see the succession of Egyptian,Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic civili¬zations as a harmonious continuum within

which "influences" could be identified and

studied, was gradually losing his bearings.From kafenion to fonduk, from Memphis toEphesus, from the archaeological museum inAthens to the one in Cairo, a line of develop¬ment could be discerned, or interactions could

be seen. Now there was no longer any per¬ceptible pattern.

At the seminars which we attended ashore

and during the twice-daily working meetingson board we were supposed to be adding toour knowledge. Inundated with new informa¬tion, faced with the impossible task of sum¬ming up that which constitutes the fabric ofall the different cultures, namely exchange,

UNESCO IN ACTION

THE SILK ROADS

1

13

how could we know which clue to follow? We

could at least try to remember what our pointsof reference were, for they seemed to havegone astray somewhere in the Red Sea.

In Athens, we hadn't yet lost the thread.It wasexcuse the play on wordssilk. Weknew that the introduction of this preciousfibre in ancient Rome had triggered a riot ofindulgence and a craze for imported fabrics,leading finally to a debt of such proportionsthat the English historian Edward Gibbonconsidered it to be one of the causes of the

fall of the Roman Empire. The case of Byzan¬tium is no less striking. In the time of the lateempire silk clothes were highly prized and

passed on from generation to generation, soit is not surprising that the introduction intoByzantium of the modest silk-worm in themid-sixth century caused a total upheaval.Trade in this precious commodity and its sub¬sequent manufacture were strictly controlledby the state. Silk was also the source of con¬siderable economic activity in some parts ofGreece up to the nineteenth century.

At a seminar in Izmir in Turkey we like¬wise discovered the role of ancient Smyrna inthe silk trade and the relationship of the city'speriods of prosperity and decline with fluc¬tuations of the international market. The links

between the maritime silk route and the

caravan trails helped to reassure us that wewere indeed finding similarities and exploringa unifying network which was a cause of strifeamong the powerful but which was usuallykept open in the interests of a deep-rootedneed for security.

Little by little, we turned from silk toother commodities. The spice road increas¬ingly attracted our attention, and this was per¬fectly logical. The expression "silk roads" wasto be understood not in geographical and eco¬nomic terms but, to quote one of our fellowpassengers, as a "metaphor of dialogue".

A sense of identity

To return to Oman, what we found bewil¬

dering there was not the absence of such linksbut their profusion. Archaeological studieshave only recently been undertaken in thecountry, but they already reveal links thatreach far back into pre-Islamic times. As earlyas the third millennium BC and right up tothe beginning of the following millennium,Oman, the land of Magan, exported copperand diorite to Mesopotamia. At the same timepottery from Mesopotamia appeared inOmani tombs. Similarly, relations betweenMagan culture and the Indus Civilization canapparently be traced back to about 2,300 BC.

A number of stories from later times

provided us with other examples of culturalexchanges between Oman and other countries.

One of the specialists on board recountedto us the tale of an Omani merchant of Indian

Left, the Fulk al-Salamah in

the port of Venice. In

foreground is the Zlnat al-

Bihar, a traditional Omani

ship.

Above, three-coloured

enamelled statuette of a

bearded camel driver. It was

found in an 8th-century tomb

near Xi'an (China).

79

origin, Sayyid, who lived in the thirteenth cen¬tury. Not only did he have frequent and cor¬dial commercial dealings with the Chinesenavigators who came to Oman but, whenPrince Ma'abar took exception to these friend¬ships, Sayyid fled to the court of Kubla Khan,who showered him with gifts and wedded himto a Korean princess. He died a rich man inBeijing in 1299.

A story from the early fifteenth centuryconcerns the famous Chinese navigator ZhengHe, a Muslim, who travelled several times to

El Balidid, present-day Salalah, in the southof Oman. Zheng He was provided with inter¬preters who were trained in a special school;their writings are the source of our informationabout his visits to Oman.

These cases are striking not only becausethey suggest vast areas for study. The first twoexamples take us back several thousand years,and far from the regions which the expeditionhad studied. The second two show that rela¬

tions between China and Oman were by no

The Fulk al-Salamah is welcomed

in style on its arrival in Muscat, capitalof the Sultanate of Oman.

means confined to trade but had a cultural

dimension.

The history of Oman, until relativelyrecent times, seems to consist only of accountsby foreign observers and of the records oftrade. For a people which has taken as itsnational heroes Sindbad the Sailor and Vasco

da Gama's helmsman, Ahmed bin Majud,travel and discovery led not to self-enrichmentbut to identity.

Coming into port

With hindsight, our magnificent welcome inMuscat came to assume a significance that ithad not possessed at the moment when welanded there. Several times during our voyagewe had talked about how we had gainedanother sense of time and had come to see

travelling in another light. We had slipped ourmoorings, both physically and metaphorically,forgotten our everyday lives for severalmonths and formed a community. We had dis¬covered that coming into port is an event, thatit has nothing in common with the trivialityof modern travel which blots out distances and

differences. The distant noise of war reached

us but was somehow muffled. And this helpedto remind us of the strangeness of our adven¬ture, causing us to look at the world with neweyes.

One specialist pointed out that thepresiding geniuses of our journey, Marco Poloand Ibn Batuta, had been able to roam freelythrough the then known world without beingarrested or murdered. What was their secret?

What signs of peace did they use, what codeof salutation? Our voyage could be an occa¬sion for meditating upon the rituals that defuseaggression in different cultures.

If the longest journeys are in the mind,the flood of sounds and colours that greetedus in Muscat or celebrated the homecomingof the Fulk al-Salamah perhaps showed thatthe traveller is someone for whom novelty canbe a source of inner change. Far from theworld of total and instantaneous media

coverage, we had come to see things in adifferent way.

FRANÇOIS-BERNARD HUYGHE,French writer and journalist, is a former member

of UNESCO's Division of Cultural Heritage.

80

UNESCO IN ACTION

UNESCO launches

AIDS appealAn appeal for international

solidarity with the victims of AIDS

was launched by a group of

leading personalities meeting

under UNESCO auspices in Venice

on 8 June. The signatories of the

Venice Appeal, which is intended

to further the Global Programme

on AIDS co-ordinated by the World

Health Organization (WHO), call on

all those who wish to fight this

terrible pandemic to contribute to

national programmes to combatAIDS in the countries that are

most stricken in Africa, in order to

strengthen preventive education,

training and scientific research,

and to support those orphaned by

AIDS, especially by covering their

educational expenses. A bank

account has been opened for this

purpose: UNESCO Sidaids World,

compte 77666, Chase Manhattan

Bank, N.A. Chips Uids 019719,

18 bd Malesherbes,

BP 450 Paris Cedex 80.

Germany supportseducational projects inSahel

Under an agreement signed in

December 1990, Germany is

contributing 1.5 million dollars to

a basic education project to be

carried out by UNESCO in sixcountries of the African Sahel:

Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali,

Mauritania, Niger and Senegal.

The first stage of the project willlast 3 years and is designed toenable each of these countries to

produce 100,000 textbooks for

use in literacy and post-literacywork.

An ethics of developmentThe importance of an ethical code

of development as a factor in

lasting peace was emphasized by

Mr Federico Mayor, Director-

General of UNESCO, in a recent

interview with the French dailynewspaper Le Monde. "Togetherwe must work out a moral code

for development", Mr. Mayor said,"which, over and above interest

rates, technology transfers, the

price of raw materials, financial

flows, tariff and non-tariff barriers,

etc., helps us to devise forms of

development of which we can all

be proud, because they

incorporate universal and eternal

values, in particular those of law

and justice."

"How", he went on, "can we

devise forms of human

development that do not give rise

to these huge migratory

movementsresulting in a

diasporized humanity these

inequalities in respect of food,

health, education and access to

scientific and technological

knowledge that affect hundreds of

millions of people, the threats

hanging over the biosphere and

the environment in general, the

scourge of ever less cultural and

biological diversity, loss of values,

a diminishing sense of solidarity,

loneliness and drugs? The answer

that is given to these questions

will largely determine how we

reshape international relations."

The Arabia Plan

Within the framework of the World

Decade for Cultural Development

(1988-1997), UNESCO has

launched a plan for the promotion

of contemporary Arab culture,known as the "Arabia Plan".

Among the projects proposed as

part of the Plan are the creation

of training fellowships, the setting

up of a data bank on Arab culture,

action to provide financial supportfor the international distribution of

Arab films and to increase public

awareness of the majorachievements of Arab art in such

fields as architecture, miniatures

and the graphic arts.

The media and the cultural

heritageA major international conferenceand festival entitled "Media Save

Art 91" took place in Rome from

17 to 22 June under the joint

patronage of UNESCO and theItalian Government. The aim was

to alert public opinion to the

dangers threatening the cultural

heritage and to seek closer co¬

operation between the media and

institutions responsible for

protecting the heritage.

Highlights of the occasionincluded an exhibition on the

restoration of works of art, the

projection of films and audio¬visual documents on art and

culture, and discussions among

leading specialists on the role of

the mass media in safeguarding

the cultural heritage.

Mandela and De Klerk

awarded Houphouët-BoignyPeace Prize

Nelson Mandela and Frederik

de Klerk, of South Africa, were

named on 27 June first winners

of the Houphouët-Boigny

Peace Prize by an international

jury of eleven distinguished

figures nominated by the Director-

General of UNESCO. The president

of the jury, Mr Henry Kissinger,

said that the two prizewinners

had been chosen for their

contribution to international

peace, to encourage them to

continue their efforts, and as a

tribute to what they had done to

educate their peoples towards

understanding and towards

overcoming prejudices that manyconsidered to be insurmountable

only a few years ago.

The prize, worth 800,000

French francs, will be presented

later this year. It is intended to

honour persons, institutions or

associations that have made a

significant contribution to the

promotion, maintenance or

restoration of peace.

IDAMS,an integrated internationalsoftware packageUNESCO has developed an

integrated data management andstatistical analysis software

package (IDAMS) for large and

small IBM and IBM-compatible

computers. Designed for

professionals who have to processnumerical data for scientific or

administrative purposes, IDAMS

may be interfaced with other

UNESCO-produced CDS/ISIS

software for the management oftextual data bases.

Users will find in IDAMS the

standard range of univariate and

bivariate statistics, and

multivariate statistical techniques,

plus some recent advanced

techniques. IDAMS also provides

a series of data management

programs, and a powerful

language for transformationof data. The version of

IDAMS for micro-computers is

equipped with highly efficient

word-processing functions,

graphic facilities and on-line help

messages.

The software can be used

without programming know-howand is distributed to institutions

free-of-charge on request to:

IDAMSCII/PGI, UNESCO,

7, Place de Fontenoy,

75700 Paris, France.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Page 3: Denarnaud © Sipa Press, Paris. Pages 3 (right),

14-15, 21 (right), 31 (above), 39, 73: © Charles Lenars,

Paris. Pages 4, 6, 9: U. Andersen © Gamma, Paris.

Pages 10-11, 22: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Pages 12-13,

16, 32, 40, 58: © Monique Pietri, Paris. Pages 17, 18, 19, 68,

back cover: © Roland Michaud, Paris. Pages 20-21: Roland

Michaud © Rapho, Paris. Page 23: by permission of Institut

Chine-Europe, Louvain, taken from Chine, ciel et terre (1988).

Pages 24, 27, 47, 49, 58-59: © G. Dagli Orti, Paris.

Pages 25, 29: © Trustees of the British Museum, London.

Pages 26, 48, 51, 52, 66-67: ©Jean-Loup Charmet, Paris.

Pages 28-29: © National Maritime Museum, London.

Pages 30-31, 61 (below): © Luc Cuyvers, Maryland.

Page 33: © Charles Carrie, Paris. Pages 34-35: Claus Meyer

© Rapho, Paris. Pages 36-37: UNESCO-Arthur Gillette.

Pages 40-41: Brian Brake © Rapho, Paris. Pages 43, 44-45:

© Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Page 46: © DITE/IPS,

Paris. Page 50: © Yale University Art Gallery, Stephen

Carlton Clark donation. Pages 54-55, 56, 57: UNESCO-

Ayala. Pages 60, 70 (middle and below): © Viollet

Collection, Paris. Page 61 (above): © CNM Nausicaa,

Boulogne-sur-Mer. Page 62 (below): © C. Carré, Nausicaa,

Boulogne-sur-Mer. Page 62 (above): © Claude Sauvageot,

Paris. Pages 63, 64, 65: © Hudson's Bay Company,

Winnipeg. Page 69: © Muñoz de Pablos, Paris.

Page 70 (top): © Boyer Viollet, Paris, Bibliothèque de

l'Arsenal. Pages 72, 74: UNESCO-Ivette Fabri.

Pages 75, 76, 77: UNESCO-Peru Tourist Office.

Pages 78-79, 80: Delegation of Oman to UNESCO.

Page 79: © Robert Harding Picture Library, London.

81

RECENT RECORDS

listeningFOLK

Les nouvelles polyphonies corses.

CD Philips 81885-2

This CD is an example of the

worldwide trend to update and

revitalize folk music. It features

Corsican vocal music traditionally

performed a capella but here

accompanied by Manu Dibango,

Ryuichi Sakamoto and other

musicians mainly associated with

pop music. It might seem sacrilege

to provide instrumental backing, but

this in no way detracts from the

superb voices of the Bonifacio

church singers. A rough poetry

("Onda", "Terra Brusgiata"), true to

the spirit of Corsica, is distilled by

this music whose beauty matches

that of Bulgarian music, better

known internationally.

Radio Bratislava.

CD Philips 848 207-2

This is an anthology of the finest

examples of folk music broadcast

on the radio stations of Eastern

Europe (Prague, Budapest, Sofia,

Thessalonica, Skopje, Warsaw,

Helsinki, etc.) that have taken part

in the Bratislava Radio contest over

the past twenty-odd years. The

pieces, which are seldom

performed on the radio, range from

the fiery to the melancholic.

Especially noteworthy are an epic

song from western Bulgaria and a

wistful melody performed by

herdsmen of central Slovakia. The

instruments played include the

cymbalum, associated with gypsy

music, and the domra. At a time

when things are moving in Eastern

Europe, this welcome recording

serves to remind us how rich and

varied is its musical heritage.

POPULAR

Gerardo Nuñez.

Flamencos en Nueva York

CD VeraBra No. 28

The new German label VeraBra

seems to go in for eclectic musical

forms, as reflected in the title of

this CD. The title song, described

as a "rumba", ¡s a successful

marriage of flamenco and salsa.

"Mi patio" is a tango, but

modernized and adapted to the

tastes of young people in Argentina

Q¿. today. "A Gill Evans" (presumably

a misspelling of Gil Evans, who

worked with Miles Davis), has a

jazzy flavour, while most of the

other compositions are closer to

traditional bulerías, alegrías and

sevillanas. The guitar playing is

quite dazzling.

JAZZTom Harrell. Forms.

Harrell (trumpet, flugelhorn), Joe

Lovano (tenor sax.), Danilo Pérez

(piano), Charlie Haden (bass), Paul

Motian (drums).

CD Contemporary/Carrère

9031-73600-2

Harrell is a young trumpeter who

is increasingly in demand, both for

the quality of his playing and for

his compositions. The title of this

CD is "Forms", which is very

appropriate to this dense, lyrical

and highly structured music, which

is also of a consistently high

quality. Harrell is the leader on this

session, but Danilo Pérez arouses

the most admiration. Pérez, a

23-year-old from Panama whose

first recording this is, is Dizzy

Gillespie's current pianist and has to

be heard to be believed. An

exponent of a polytonal, polymodal,

"modern" style of jazz, he is an

attentive accompanist and virtuoso

soloist who has well and truly

assimilated the lessons of the

pianists who came before him. But

his rhythmic inventions are most

fully brought into play in Latin jazz

and I hope that it won't be too

long before he is given an

opportunity to record in this vein,

which is perfectly suited to his

temperament.

The Branford Marsalis Quartet

featuring Terence Blanchard.

Mo Better Blues.

Marsalis (sax.), Kenny Kirkland

(piano), Robert Hurst (bass), Jeff

Watts (drums), Terence Blanchard

(trumpet), Cynda Williams (vocals).

CD CBS 467160 2

The best thing about Spike Lee's

latest film "Mo Better Blues" was

Its soundtrack. Marsalis, Blanchard

and their rhythm sectionall

seasoned musicians despite

their youthare producing

some of the best jazz around,

tightly scored and, on some

tracks, full of bounce, in the

good old Dixieland tradition.

A special word of praise for

Cynda Williams, who also acts in

the film and who gives a vibrant

rendering of the old W.C. Handy

number "Harlem Blues" In a

sparkling new arrangement for

strings by pianist Claire Fisher.

Isabelle LeymarieEthnomusicologist and Journalist

CLASSICAL

Maximilien Koibe. Opera by

Dominique Probst, libretto by

Eugène Ionesco.

Andréa Snarski, Paul Gerimon,

Pierre Danais, Vicenzo Sanso.

Conductor Olivier Holt.

CD Cybelia CY 879

The Cybelia record company is

trying to make French music better

known, and particularly the music

of living composers. Dominique

Probst was born in 1954 in a family

of musicians. A percussionist, he

has composed a great deal for the

theatre and it was therefore natural

that, after many changes of

direction, he should try his hand at

opera when seeking to forge his

own style. The libretto by the writer

Eugène Ionesco is based on the

martyrdom of Father Kolbe, who in

1941 gave his life to save a

prisoner at Auschwitz. After

Shostakovich, Schoenberg, Britten,

Penderecki and a few other lesser

composers, Probst in his turn

denounces the horrors of Nazism.

First performed in Italy in 1988, this

ambitious work was originally

commissioned by the Paris Opera

House. Although in live

performance the work is not always

entirely convincing, on record it

comes over with an impressive

simplicity and authenticity.

A NEW EMI COLLECTION:

"L'ESPRIT FRANÇAIS"

Gounod.

Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2.

Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse,

conducted by Michel Plasson.

CD EMI 7639492

Vincent d'lndy.

Symphonie sur un chant

montagnard cévenol/

Symphony No. 2.

Orchestre de Paris et du Capitole,

conducted by Serge Baudo and

Michel Plasson.

CD EMI 7639522

Ishtar/Wallenstein/La forêt

enchantée.

Orchestre philharmonique des Pays

de Loire, conducted by Pierre

Dervaux.

CD EMI 7639532

Henri Dutilleux.

Le Loup.

Orchestre symphonique des

Concerts du Conservatoire,

conducted by Georges Prêtre.

CD EMI 7639452 (with Poulenc and

Milhaud)

The famous label EMI/HMV is

reissuing its treasures of

nineteenth- and twentieth-century

French music. As we know all too

well, everybody loves French music

except the French. This people,

particularly sensitive when its sense

of national pride is at stake, seems

however to be changing its attitude.

Gounod is not just the composer of

"Faust"; he wrote two symphonies

under the influence of the classical

composers, particularly

Mendelssohn. A far cry from

Berlioz, Gounod was true to a

tradition and contributed to it. As

for Vincent d'lndy, he seemed to

have sunk without a trace. However,

the work of this nationalist

composer marked by Wagner

reveals a refined lyricism. His

second symphony is to be

savoured, especially for its mystery.

Also to be rediscovered are the

symphonic fragments from Henri

Dutilleux's ballet "Le Loup", which

enjoyed great success when first

performed by Roland Petit In 1953.

This appealing work sheds valuable

light on the development of one of

the great twentieth-century masters.

Other CDs in this collection are

devoted to Castillon and Rabaud,

Poulenc and Pierné, Koechline and

Messiaen. It will be interesting to

see what other treasures lie in

store. . . .

Beethoven. Symphony No. 2.

Brahms. Variations on a theme of

Haydn.

Marlboro Festival Orchestra,

conducted by Pablo Casals.

CD Sony Classical SMK 46247

Schubert. Quintet D. 956. The

shepherd on the rock.

Benita Valente, Harold Wright,

Rudolf Serkin.

CD Sony Classical SMK 45901

Schoenberg. Serenade op. 24

Chamber symphony No. 1 op. 9

Marlboro Festival soloists.

CD Sony Classical SMK 45894

In 1954 a group of musicians

including Adolf Busch, Marcel

Moyse and Rudolf Serkin founded

the Marlboro Festival in Vermont

(U.S.A.). The aim was to provide a

place where musicians, whether

recognized masters or promising

young talents, world famous or

unknown, could come together and

play purely for the pleasure of it,

without there being any kind of

pecking order. The celebrated

cellist Pablo Casals honoured the

Festival with his presence from

1960 to 1973. He is featured as

conductor on the first of

these CDs where he reveals a

luminous poetry which also

pervades the other recordings.

Each one is a gem that does full

justice to the composer

represented and brilliantly illustrates

one of the most marvellous musical

events of our time.

Claude daymanJournalist and music critic

TheUnesco^courier

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plus an interview with Colombian writer

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZNobel laureate for literature (1982)

g by Anamlka Pual (aged 5, India). © The International Museum of Children's Art, Oslo.

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