if rather obscurely, to this day.
Its most important publication occurred in 1928. Back then, and costing thirty-five American cents, it was a handsome green-covered pamphlet, printed letterpress by the Imprimerie Monégasque of Monte Carlo and titled IHO Special Publication No. S.23, “Limits of Oceans and Seas”. In the twenty-four pages of this endearing publication one would find such official pronouncements as the formal description of the limits of the English Channel:
On the West: From the coast of Brittany westward along the parallel of the E. extreme of Ushant (Lédènes), through this island to the W. extreme thereof (Le Kainec), thence to the Bishop Rock, the SW extreme of the Scilly Isles, and on a line passing to the Westward of these Isles as far as the N. extreme (Lion Rock) and thence Eastward to the Longships, and on to Lands End.
The world may not have expanded in the years that followed, but the definitions and denominations of its seas, and the arguments among the countries that lay beside them, most certainly did. In consequences the size of this pamphlet grew, modestly at first, and then prodigiously. The twenty-four pages of the first edition grew to twenty-six pages in the second, and then thirty-eight pages in the third edition — but when the fourth edition was published in 2002, it had ballooned into 244 pages. Seas so obscure that only those who live beside them have ever heard of them now officially exist: there is a Ceram Sea, for example, a Cosmonauts Sea, an Alboran Sea, a Lincoln Sea, a somewhat tautological Sound Sea,19 and scores upon scores of others.
Three senior naval officers from member states are elected to preside over the International Hydrographic Office, usually for five years at a time. Before I travelled to Monaco to see them I had visions of this trio, all splendid in crisp blue uniforms and with coils of gold tassellage, ruling definitively on lofty matters of world navigation — on how best to define the new limits of the Kattegat, on demanding the mapping of where the Arafura Sea abuts against the Gulf of Carpentaria, on determining whether L’Anse aux Meadows was truly washed by the Labrador Sea or the Gulf of St Lawrence. They would settle these quibbles while quaffing pink gins, smoking pipefuls of rough shag and carving scrimshaw doodles on the side.
As it happened, two of the officers - from the navies of Greece and Chile — were away when I called one blissful midwinter morning, and the only sailor “on deck”, as seamen in offices like to say, was the representative from Australia. He turned out to be a middle-aged, full-bearded Briton in civilian dress, a man who had long ago left the Royal Navy for its Royal Australian counterpart and was now usually based in Melbourne. His driving passion was not so much ships and the sea - they were his job - but the building in his modest apartment in Villefranche of model railway layouts, HO scale.
Officially, however, he and his brother sailors spend a great deal of time wondering about, fulminating over and trying to reverse what they see as a general world ignorance of the oceans. The world’s seas may now have more names than ordinary man may care to know - that much seems true, but this is the fault of politicians, and a consequence of national pride. What troubles the IHO, which, as mentioned, has as another of its mandates the creation of charts to help ships navigate safely around the world, is just how dangerously unaware most landlubbers are of what goes on beneath the surface of these bodies of water. To illustrate the point, they mention repeatedly one unanticipated statistic: even though mankind now knows the precise altitude of the entire surface both of the moon and Mars at points little more than five feet apart, he knows the altitude of the bottom of the sea only at points that are separated in many cases by as much as five miles.
For all the hydrographic surveying that has been done over the years, all the soundings taken and the reefs plotted and the headlands marked, the admirals complain that the current inhabitants of the earth know far too little about their seas, even though they cover seven-tenths of their world. This is not for want of trying, however. Europeans especially have been attempting to divine the details of their ocean for the past five hundred years. Ever since Columbus and Vespucci came home, and ever since it became clear that Europeans were inevitably going to trade and fight their way across the Atlantic and all the other seas, there have been great national efforts — in Britain, in Portugal, in Spain, and in time in America and Canada and Brazil and South Africa, too - to survey and chart the waters, to find out the seas’ depths and shallows, their tides and currents, their races and whirlpools and the accurate measure of their coastlines, their islands and their reefs, and all the other features that mark them out so peculiarly. Educating the world about the ocean — with the knowing of the Atlantic in the very forefront of the effort - was a venture that got under way as early as the fifteenth century, and it has not stopped for a moment since.
To survey an entire ocean required access to all of its farther limits — access that in the case of the Atlantic was for a long while frustrated by more than a few navigational challenges. The severest limit was the existence of a highly inconvenient sandstone headland known as Cape Bojador - a West African cape that the Arab sailors had feared for centuries and knew as Abu khater or the father of danger.
2. THE ROADBLOCK IN THE WATER
The road into the Sahara south from the old Moroccan seaside fort city of Essaouira happens also to be the main trunk Atlantic coast road into West Africa — it passes on to Mauritania, and then to Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau … With careful planning, good fortune, decent springs in your car, and a fair amount of time, a determined driver could make it to Cape Town, arriving in time for tea under the jacarandas at the Mount Nelson Hotel.
For most of its early miles, the journey has a steady tedium. After the spectacle of the Atlas Mountains dipping into the sea to which they gave their name, and after passing through the tiny Spanish enclave of Ifni, and after seeing the chains of great French-built lighthouses and the surfers carelessly riding the rollers thundering in from the sea, you drive inland for a few miles and the road becomes flat. The groves of argan-oil trees and goat-busy scrub eventually give way to the stony desert plains of the hammada, and there is a dreary little junction town called Guelmime, where the desert proper begins.
Beyond the dust and chaos of its medina - with blue-robed Touareg still to be seen, and desert-weary cameleers bringing trade goods for the souqs — the two-lane highway, oil-dark against the sands of the hammada, winds empty over the horizon, with just the occasional tanker whooshing past, and fleets of rickety Mercedes taxis travelling too fast for their own good. The sea rumbles endless to the west, and there is the glint of the high ergs of the Sahara far to the east. The east wind constantly whistles, leaving grit in one’s hair and teeth. This until lately was the entranceway to Spanish territory, and one sees it in the landscape and the feel of the place. The north of Morocco possesses a certain silky plenitude, whereas this more southerly corner of the place has a harshness: dry, dusty, and stained with oil.
The towns are far apart, and generally worth stopping at only for fuel — though one of them has a monument to Antoine de Saint Exupéry, memorialising his time as a pony express pilot for the 1930s coast airmail service between Toulouse and Dakar; and there are plenty of fishermen’s huts where one can find grouper, swordfish, and sardine, plucked from the sea and grilled over driftwood fires. The coastline itself becomes more interesting, too. Near Tarfaya it turns abruptly out to sea, a fifty-mile change of direction jutting into the ocean and into which, over the years, scores of vessels with captains sleeping, stupid, or drunk have ploughed: there are wrecks of fishing boats sitting high and dry and majestic on the rocks, all being slowly chewed away into nothing by the ever-digesting surf.
The seas here have a particular reputation for peril. From high up on the hills above this headland’s terminal point, Cape Juby, it is just possible to make out the closest of the Canary Islands, Fuerteventura. Until the ever-gnawing seas did their work, a famous shipwreck also lay here: the great transatlantic star of the Fifties, the Virginia-built liner SS America broke loose in a storm while being towed to Thailand in 1994 to be turned into a floating hotel. She now lies almost wholly sunk a hundred yards off a Fuerteventura bathing-beach, a forlorn memorial to the brief greatness of America’s merchant marine.
…
It