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Next time you go to sea, study the color your piece of the world’s ocean. “The cold water off Nova Scotia is a hazy turquoise,” Helen Czerski writes, “illuminated by diffused sunlight above and fading to darkness below. The fog is made up of tiny bits of floating organic life that are individually invisible but collectively shroud every inhabitant in a soft ignorance of anything more than five meters away.’
Blue Machine, Czerski’s compendium of scientific and cultural stories about the oceans, is a great dispenser of ignorance. Some of its wonders will be known to the sea: the 300-year-old Greenland shark, the voyages and extraordinary life cycle of the European eel, or the treasure voyages of the eunuch admiral Zheng He, who distributed China’s wealth, art and artifacts around the Indian Ocean coast in 1415, the return with giraffes and ambassadors of enthusiastic nations. (The peoples Zheng encountered became diplomatic if they could send someone to thank and praise the Yongle Emperor, or face the largest fleet the world had seen at the time.)
But regardless: Czerski, a physicist, is wonderful storyteller. He is happy to explain how Chinese ships sailed through the monsoons to Africa and back; how and why mighty currents like the Humboldt, on the Pacific coast of South America, flow at an angle to the prevailing wind; how eels go from salt water to fresh water and back again; why leatherback turtles cry 80 times an hour (to get rid of the salt they ingest while eating jellyfish); what the sea sounds like (“a list of sounds made by different species of fish includes cackling, mooing, panting, murmuring, whining, grinding, moaning, and howling”); and perhaps even why Mark Antony and Cleopatra lost the Battle of Actium. “Dead water”—subsurface waves caused by fresher water on a saltier layer—may have prevented Antony’s ships from gaining enough speed to crash into Octavian’s.
Although I looked forward to the chapter on “travelers” – and Czerski is passionate about the Hawaiian and Polynesian arts of canoeing and sea navigation – it contains the only flaw I could identify. Comparing the operation of a sailing vessel to a steamship or a motor vessel, and lamenting the loss of the connection between man and ocean that tall ships require of their crews, he writes:
People no longer needed to mentally connect with the ocean in the same way, so the habit was lost. Understanding the intricacies of the blue machine is no longer a matter of raw survival, now that radio, radar, GPS, satellite phones, weather forecasting…AIS [Automatic Identification] and emergency signals are self-explanatory.
This is not true. The reason why more seafarers do not lose their lives every year is because they take nothing for granted and because their captains are deeply connected to the boundless specialness of the sea. Wrong predictions still kill ships. GPS can lie to you, pirates use distress signals as bait, AIS is a help at best – smugglers, spy ships and dangerous vessels turn theirs off. I saw a gyroscopic navigation system descend in the Singapore Strait and watched the captain of a tall container ship use a typhoon’s tail as a slingshot just as Zheng He rode the monsoons.
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