The Pull of the Sea

There comes a moment, and it is always a very distinct, memorable moment, when you first feel the sea’s power. For me, it was as a child on a summer holiday in Normandy. A sunny day with a coastal breeze animating the top of the water. I waded out to where the small waves just started to topple and I could jump up and feel the surge of energy as I was lifted and carried a foot or two back.

At some point, I mis-timed my jump or perhaps the wave was bigger than expected. I jumped, my feet were swept from under me, and I was upside down, pressed under the water. As I fought my way back to the surface, another wave broke and pressed me down again. This happened maybe just twice more but it was long enough to have the breath milled out of me, to feel the indifferent, utterly inhuman force of the sea – an absolute power, like gravity or darkness – and to wonder whether I’d survive. When I eventually escaped and got to my feet again, I found the water didn’t reach my waist. It was embarrassing to look back at the gently cresting little waves that had trivialized all my strength. This experience came back to me about ten years later when I first read James Hamilton-Paterson’s Seven-Tenths: The Sea and Its Thresholds, a rich, immersive (pun intended) and very elegantly written study of the oceans and humanity’s relationship with them. The book’s many and varied evocative descriptions recruit all one’s memories of the sea. Like Joseph Conrad, Hamilton-Paterson wants ‘to make you hear, to make you feel . . . before all, to make you see’, and he has the gifts to do it. But unlike some of the plethora of nature writing that has appeared since this book’s first publication, Hamilton Paterson always writes with a purpose. Nothing is merely an effusion of lyrical biophilia or description for its own sake. In this he resembles the great Victorian scientists – Darwin and Gosse and others – whom he admires for their Ruskinian devotion to precise but personal visual records.

How many naturalists nowadays have the artist’s eye, like the great nineteenth-century scientists who so lovingly sketched their specimens in the field? It is not only sensibility but memory itself which atrophies, since the need for attentive observation is less. The camera takes the place of the eye, the recorder of the ear, the computer of the memory.

In his chapter on charts and mapmaking, he is dismayed to be aboard a vessel mapping the sea floor with sonar and to find the crew indifferent to the vivid reality of ‘the strangeness of being a floating speck suspended miles above mountains, like the silver dot of an airliner over the Alps’. The book is divided into thematic chapters, on islands, on coral, on shipwrecks, and so forth, each preceded by a brief italicized section that describes the predicament of ‘the swimmer’ in the middle of the ocean who has lost sight of his boat. They are frightening passages that follow his panic and rapidly deteriorating chances of survival, alone against the sea. ‘He has no proper existence at all, being only a tiny hole in the water shaped like the lower two-thirds of a man. There is no way the tons of ocean can be held apart and prevented from filling the mould.’ It is a brilliant device that keeps returning the reader to this primal scene of human fragility. ‘Fear returns in cycles . . . Lacking all co-ordinates, he sees his own head occupying a fixed place . . . In his moment of loss, he becomes the pivotal point about which the earth turns.’ The drama of this swimmer and his uncertain survival insists on one of the sea’s thresholds that Hamilton-Paterson would like to maintain or restore. He laments, too, the retreat of other thresholds, the fading of mystery in the face of increasing knowledge, for example, or the diminishment of all distances in a global village, or how Britain ‘lost consciousness of itself’ as an island archipelago ‘some time between 1945 and 1990’. Hamilton-Paterson is particularly attracted to islands. For some time in the 1980s he lived on an uninhabited island in the Philippines, a story he tells in his book Playing with Water (1987). Here I might say that part of the attraction of Seven-Tenths when I first read it as a teenager was the obscure glamour of its author. A winner of the Newdigate Prize for poetry at Oxford, he had gone his own way, Graham Greene-ishly, to far-off places and deep interests. He had written a very well-regarded first novel, Gerontius, about an unlikely journey Elgar took up the Amazon after his wife’s death (it too contains fabulous descriptions of the sea, its scale and its moods), and an account of the Mir submersible deep-sea expeditions. Clearly, he was a free and original person living an enviably expansive life. It is originality and difference, the richness of the world and the reason for travel, that Hamilton-Paterson sees disappearing from the Philippines and other islands in Seven-Tenths as the global tourism business arrives and takes over. ‘And suddenly there were no more islands, only scattered slabs of a single moneyed empire joined each to the other by something solider than water.’ Seven-Tenths was first published in 1992, and it speaks with that moment’s awareness of burgeoning globalization and what we now call the neoliberal order, the wall of its wave still visible before it submerged everything. At the cultural level, it is hard to imagine anyone making this criticism of America and the pervasiveness of its movies and language now, as though life might be otherwise:

American culture seems embodied in a catastrophic anger. It is with these furious heroes we are supposed to identify, these men with their scratched biceps and bared chests and 400-word vocabularies . . . so that [onboard an oceanographic research vessel] a mild geologist from Godalming says, ‘I’m off to the bridge to kick ass.’

Seven-Tenths is in part a lament and a protest at ecological degradation, so it is poignant to read it now, thirty years after it first appeared, and realize that the degradation has continued. In his chapter on ‘Fishing and Loss’, which has much to do with overfishing and the insane scale of netting fleets, Hamilton-Paterson notes how ‘each generation adapts to an impoverished world but for the first time people are conscious of having to make do with scraps. This has its effects.’ But unlike much contemporary ecological writing, Hamilton-Paterson is wary of pious attitudes towards nature.

The present generation is as much contaminated by its own reverential and placatory attitude [to the wild] as the older was by domination. There is something ignoble about it, compounded as it is of urban sentimentalism, virtuous concern and sheer panic at having irrevocably fouled the nest while so comfortably lining it . . . Luckily, there is a chasm properly and forever fixed between the non-human and the humanist bio spheres, between wildness and caring . . . Virtue and the wild share no common universe.

As the isolated swimmer surely feels, there is a profound disjunction between man and his little schemes and the ocean. In Hamilton-Paterson’s vision, it is out of this estrangement that beauty and fascination and sublime emotions of terror and ravishment can continue to emerge, as they do, for example, in his amazing descriptions of phosphorescence or diving on a coral reef at night. One of the reasons the book made such an impression on me when I first read it was that it matched and magnified my own alternating feelings of enchantment and disenchantment, of depression at environmental loss and the constantly heartening experience when out in nature that, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s words, ‘there lives the dearest freshness deep down things’. As someone who grew up inland, on the suburban edge of London, regretting that I couldn’t see the stars at night through the orange pallor of light pollution, looking for butterflies in buddleias growing in railway sidings or chiffchaffs in remnant scraps of ancient woodland, Seven-Tenths struck a deep chord with me. Over the years, these feelings have only become stronger, and the book continues to evoke them. But Hamilton-Paterson has marine interests outside of the ecological and Seven-Tenths is a very compendious, diversely fascinating book. It is wonderful on the history of our understanding of the oceans, from the nature of coral to early deep-sea diving, on piracy and shipwrecks, on whale song and flat earthers. The book is a cabinet of curiosities. In his chapter on ‘The Deeps and the Dark’, Hamilton-Paterson explains that it used to be thought that dead bodies find their own level in the sea according to their weight. He quotes an ‘otherwise sensible’ American book of 1844:

Heavy bodies, which will sink rapidly from the surface, do at length apparently cease to descend long before they have reached the bottom: the pressure of the water being such as to cause them to remain at certain depths, varying in proportion to their weights. Thus it is that the plumb line will not act beyond a certain length, and we have no means, of course, of extending our enquiries deeper.

And thus it was, apparently, that some of the relatives of the missing of the Titanic were reportedly tormented by the thought of their loved ones’ bodies circulating endlessly in a watery limbo. That mournful and dreamlike image encapsulates something of our imperfect knowledge of the sea and its hold on us, how our mortal fears live in it, our imaginations suspended in its abysses, its reefs and its shores. It is a kind of miniature poem and as good a place as any to stop writing about a book full of details such as this that bear repeating – which is as much as to say a book that bears reading and rereading.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 90 © Adam Foulds 2026