In deep trouble

Atlantic by Simon Winchester and The Wave by Susan Casey are, at first glance, very different works. Atlantic is a historical-philosophical-fantastical meditation on the Atlantic ocean, from the ‘post-molten Hadean’ through the ‘cool meadows of today’s Holocene’, to the conjectured end-days of the ocean ‘about 170 million years’ from now. The Wave is a pithy account of some years Casey spent following the elite American surfer Laird Hamilton as he travelled from one storm-lashed coast to another in search of waves. Yet, on closer scrutiny, the two books have much in common: both authors are highly contemporary in the way they write about nature, with their mingling of humility and eschatology; both suggest that we have half-ruined the oceans they describe; both squint nervously into the darkness of the future.

‘In Victorian times,’ Winchester explains, ‘we thought of the ocean as vast and frightening: we still regarded it with some kind of awed respect. Not any more.’ Now, the Atlantic is ‘changing under the malign influence of landsmen so utterly careless of the sea.’ For much of his book, Winchester pays entertaining homage to the traditional sagas of the sea: Vikings, pirates, explorers, naval victories and disasters, slave ships, Moby Dick, Atlantic civilisations, U-boat attacks during two world wars, pioneering flights above the ocean. There are gripping diversions into memoir: the time Winchester was nearly engulfed by tides on a barren Atlantic beach, or nearly shipwrecked off the Western Cape, or nearly frozen in the remote North. For Winchester

the Atlantic ocean is surely a living thing — furiously and demonstrably so. It is an ocean that moves, impressively and ceaselessly. It … is forever roaring, thundering, boiling, crashing, swelling, lapping . . .

Yet, in the final third of his book, Winchester becomes less glittering and anecdotal.