>> next, simon winchester presents a history of the atlantic ocean. the author examines the early exploration of the ocean as well as current issues such as overfishing and be pollution that effect the body of water today. simon winchester discusses his book at politics and prose bookstore in washington d.c. the program is just under an hour. >> i'm barbara meade, i'm one of the owners here at politics and prose. the first time that i met simon winchester was about 12 years ago in 1998, and he had come here to speak about his book,

"the professor and the madman," the book about -- [applause] the making of the oxford english dictionary. but i tell you, i was just so bowled over by listening to his stories. if ever there's anybody who is a natural-born story teller, it's simon. and so i was just determined that after that, that we would have simon back for every book so he could tell us the stories behind every book. [applause] and so it's, this is the seventh time, i counted, that you've come. and so i'm just, i hope that we can have a lifetime of your telling stories. simon studied geology at oxford, and you could certainly see this in his new book. he has, first of all, that he feels the atlantic ocean is so

alive, that it is perfectly qualifies to have a biography written of it. he says it's alive, capricious and wondrous thing of waters -- water and waves and wind, of animals and birds, of ships and man. that, further -- this is a quote from simon -- of all the ocean of the world, he says, the atlantic possesses the greatest concentration of marker events of human history. if, as seems unarguable, the mediterranean could once fairly be said to have been the inpoland sea of -- inland sea of class call civilization, then surely the atlantic ocean by virtue of this huge concentration of ideas, inventions and developments has become unarguably, also, the

inland sea of modern civilization. no other ocean comes close to filling this role which is why the atlantic rises head and shoulders above all it taller, prettier and calmer maritime cousins. so here's simon to give us some more stories about what is going on in the atlantic. and, simon, i hope that you'll include in that the time that you were stranded on the shore of the fjord in greenland waiting for the inyou wit fishermen to come rescue you. >> i can certainly -- yes, i can -- >> you can tell that quickly. [applause] waiting for the inuit fishermen >> thank you, barbara, very much indeed, and it is wonderful to be back here although tinged with sadness. all of you know, of course,

about carlo's passing, and i'm really sorry. all of the writers that come here revered this extraordinary couple of women who created this store, and we miss her terribly. so i'm sorry, i'm very sorry, indeed. [applause] about five or six years ago, i was driving in chile. the story begins, really, in the pacific ocean. and i was driving on the road in southern chile to the national park, and i dare say one or two of you, maybe more, have been there. it's a fairly rough gravel road with very few habitations along it, and it's not a very pleasant road to drive on. and it was certainly late in the evening, and there was a furious rainstorm. it was just the most appallingly

dreadful night. and i needed a hotel because, clearly, i wasn't going to progress much further to the north. and there weren't any villages or anything like that. but i saw on the left-hand side a little wooden sign which said hasta ria which didn't look terribly promising. [laughter] but i thought, well, i'll give it a bash anyway. so i turned left and bumped down this even more dreadful road and eventually was confronted by this enormous scottish-looking castle. i mean, a huge place with one or two lights, rather dim lights burning. and i knocked on the door, and i was greeted by this elderly sort of functionary. he said, yes, we are, indeed, a hotel. we haven't had a guest for six months, but more than happy you should come and stay the night.

[laughter] >> he told me a little bit of the history which had, indeed, been built by a scotsman in the 1860s or so, and it was not -- today raised -- well, i was going to say llamas, but sort of a kissing cousin. they've said they had fields and, indeed, they would cook one for me for dinner. i'd never heard of the cat role, but that's, indeed, what they made for me. it was a totally nice evening. and they baked bread, and i felt like, you know, king of the world. it was great. and then afterwards -- this does have a point, incidentally. [laughter] they showed me into the library which had a huge sort of ingle nook and a fireplace, and they lit the fire, and there was a bottle of good whiskey, and i couldn't have been happier. and confronted by this enormous collection of books, most of

which were in the english language. in the end i selected one, and i must have taken it down from the shelf at about half past ten and started reading it, and i was so fascinated by the story that i read that when i stopped reading it, when i finished the book, the sun was coming up. it was one of those books that just completely captivates you. it was the book that galvanized me into action to write this book about the atlantic ocean. and this is it is, therefore, somewhat ironic but not entirely because actually this book was borne sort of intellectually if i can use that word without sounding too pretentious. i had written a book about 20 years ago when i was living in hong kong about the pacific ocean. and everyone told me in hong kong that the pacific was the ocean of the future. so i was sort of, i drank the kool-aid and said, well, okay. [laughter] decided to write a book about it and spent a lot of time traveling from, you know, from

chile and from australia to alaska and crisscrossing the ocean and going to lots of the islands in between. and wrote a book which was a fairly severe commercial failure. it wasn't as bad as the book i wrote about america in the '70s which sold only 12 copies. [laughter] it wasn't quite as bad as that, but it was pretty bad. and the reason, i think, when we sort of analyzed why is that it might well have been true to say that the pacific was the ocean of the future, but what it cleary wasn't in human terms -- clearly wasn't in human terms anyway was an item of the past. it had very little history in it. of course there were the polynesians, but generally speaking it was nothing compared to the great richness, as you mentioned, barbara, of the mediterranean and then of the atlantic. so with that idea at the back of

my mind and galvanized by this book that i read in chile that i'll tell you about later, i'm going to tell you about that book but towards the end of this little chat. i decided that what i had done in the 19 l 0s in hong kong was simply backed the wrong horse. i had chosen the wrong ocean to write about. if i chose the right ocean, i would have a bigger chance of making a book that was somewhat more readable. and so as you mentioned i decided to write it as a biography, first of all, because it has a definable birth. we know when the pacific came into being which was about 200 million years ago when this great ubercontinent that dominated the world then surrounded by this enormous sea, it broke in half, and the water cascaded into the middle, and that was the beginning of the atlantic ocean. it didn't really assume the sort of s-shaped configuration it has

today until about 50 million years ago. nonetheless,ing that's its origin. so it's birth could be written about geologically and its likely death which is in about 170 million years. there's this fairly keen school of geological futurologists in texas who they're very clever people who do a lot of mathematical modeling and predict how continent are going to move in the future. i won't linger on it, but basically what's going to happen, they think, is cape horn -- oddly enough back down in patgonia -- will start moving eastward and will describe a path along the bottom end of the atlantic ocean and will pass south of south africa, cape of good hope and then will continue moving eastwards until it gets to south australia and tasmania. then it'll sort of nudge australia to start itself moving

anti-clock wise, and then cape horn will start moving northwards and eventually collide with singapore. [laughter] it sounds ridiculous, but when cape horn collides with singapore in about 170 million years' time, then all of the water will be squeezed out of what we know as the atlantic today, and the atlantic will cease to be. and, of course, it goes without saying that humankind will no longer be anywhere near it. i mention this only because i might have mentioned this to you before on a previous occasion, but i was once talking -- the con especially of geological time is sometimes difficult for people to grasp, and i was talking to a group of ladies who lunch in kansas city once about the likely volcanic eruptions in yellowstone national park which is going to be a fairly titanic event. and i said when the volcanos pinely erupt in yellowstone, all of the great cities of the

northwestern united states like seattle and portland, probably san francisco, certainly vancouver, they'll all be buried under hundreds of feet of ash. and everyone looked slightly alarmed by this, and i said don't worry, it'll be at least 250,000 years by which time, of course, humankind will be totally extinction. and everyone was relieved -- [laughter] except for this woman in the front row who got red-faced, and she said, what? even americans will be extinct? this. [laughter] but anyway, so we'll certainly be extinction in 170 million, even americans. laugh so it's got a life span of about 400 million years and more or less in the middle of that period where we are now there's a very slim in geological terms period of time, about 200,000 years, when humankind inhabits the ocean, and that's the period i really concentrate on for this

book because that's where the richness in the stories comes from. and the way i decided to organize that because, i mean, how on earth do you try and corral all these eventses into some sort of order, buzz given to me -- was given to me -- bless him, by shakespeare. a man who was completely unaware of the atlantic's existence, never went on a boat as far as we know. but nonetheless, i had read while crossing the atlantic a copy of -- in an area -- david owen, former british foreign secretary now lord owen had written an anthology of his favorite poetry organized according to -- and that's what he gave the title -- seven ages, the seven ages of man from shakespeare's as you like it. and as you'll remember from school, the seven ages are infant, you know, muling and puking in his nurse's arms to the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier, the justice, the old

man and then return to childhood. and it seemed to me that that would provide a framework into which i could corral as much of what i could find out about the atlantic into. and it seems, thus far -- it's early days and so not all the criticism is in yet -- but thus far no one has said, how dare you use shakespeare. he provided me with a very useful structure. so i thought what i would do because i know there's a time limit, and i know barbara's very fierce and was the other day apparently talking about siberia, i'm going to keep this relatively short. what i thought i would do is just select from this great sort of collection of stories three to illustrate or just the tip of the iceberg, if you like, the kind of things that i discovered when i was doing the research. it's sort of buried somewhere in the book. and then tell you a tiny bit about the book i read in chile

and why it's important. the stories, three that i've sort of selected, one is sort of ludicrous and trivial and unimportant. one is unknown, generally speaking, little known. i didn't know about it anyway, only it's quite important, and the third one is completely ridiculous. [laughter] so as you will see. the first one was something that i came across in the north atlantic, and that was in the pharoah islands. and the pharoah islands -- maybe some of you have been there -- a group of 18 islands between shetland and iceland. it's way up at the high latitudes, very foggy, very rainy, quite cold. the kind of place that an englishman actually likes. [laughter] we flourish in places like that. [laughter] and belong as it were to denmark, but they really are thest the last -- the last bastion on the planet of the vikings.

it language is essentially what the vikings spoke or similar to what we believe the vikings spoke. the reputation of the vikings, very strong, pillaging and sacking all the time. unfortunately or fortunately, no one is at war with them, and the men -- there are 50,000 in the population -- and the men are big, strapping chaps. no one to fight. and so they're absolutely bursting with superaup with dance of testosterone and clearly need to get it out in ways you can't imagine. what i'm giepg to describe to you is one of those ways. but don't worry, it's not, not dirty. [laughter] the islands -- i'm sorry. the islands, there are 18 of them, and they are made of -- [inaudible] and they have been tilted from west to east such that on the western side there are enormously tall cliffs, some of tallest in the world, 2,000 feet. and they slope down at an angle

of about 35% and then the eastern side the grasslands sort of disappear into the ocean. so i went, first of all, in the springtime to an island which is the westernmost of the 18 pharoah islands and, sure enough, there is this vast cliff which goes way up into the clouds. black, dripping basalt but with occasional patches of green which if you look through binoculars are patches not much bigger than this table. and they're dotted all over the otherwise vertical landscape of the cliffs. well, what happens each spring is that boats arrive at the bottom of the cliff with the young men in them. and if you can imagine the scene with a little rowing boat or something smashing up and down. i mean, the cliffs are formidable. i mean, there's water, there's seaweed. nonetheless, the men inch their boats up to the bottom of the cliffed and leap onto this

vertical cliff. it's not as foolish as all that because you realize because they've been doing this for years, there are, in fact, ropes which have been suspended from the very top of the cliff all the way down, 2,000 feet. very long ropes. so the pharoahese chap chooses his moment to leap out on an upswing of the water and crashes onto the cliff and holds the rope, and he's at least secure for a few minutes. then what he does which is slitly unusual is he turns around and reaches down into the boat and plucks from the well of the boat a lamb. there are lots of lambs in the bottom of the boat. you didn't know this at first, but he picks up this lamb and puts it around his neck and somehow secures it with a string into his collar so the little lamb legs are each tied -- and then hand over hand he starts climbing up this, up this rope. [laughter] see him go up 100 feet, 200

feet, and then he sort of disappears into the mist, and then when he's about 8 or 900 feet up, i mean seriously high level -- way above the sea which is down below -- he then finds to his left or his right, but let's say to his left, a patch of this grass which seems in his mind to be suitable for the lamb he's got round his neck. and the grass is lush and beautiful because it's fertilized by the began know from the puffens that live in abundance on these cliffs. when he's found what he deems to be suitable except for its verticality, he then removes the lamb from his neck and puts it on the grass while he's holding on with his other hand so he doesn't fall off himself. the lamb looks down and thinks, croiky, this is not exactly what i bought into -- [laughter] but after a few moments the lamb realizes that if he doesn't keep

his footing, he will fall, so he better do whatever he can to make sure that he doesn't, and he sort of scrambles and scuffs about. eventually, he reaches a point of equilibrium whereupon the man says you're going to be okay, thumbs up, and the lamb gives a little thumbs up x the pharoahese man descends and goes back and joins his chums in the boat leaving the lamb there for the rest of the year. if you go to any of the cliffs in any of these 18 islands, you'll see vertical cliff, green patches of grass, and on each patch of grass, a tiny little lamb. really, very tiny the higher up they are. but then and i saw this -- what then happens in september/october is that the pharoahese chap comes back, clearly not having gotten rid of

his testosterone in the summer, and reascends the rope up to where the lamb was up in april. and he is confronted not with a lamb, but now with an enormous sheep because it hasn't had anywhere to run, it's just been eating the grass and, you know, just gets really chubby in hanging on. and he -- i would like to be able to report that he puts the lamb around his neck and -- not at all. not at all. a simple gesture, he pushes the lamb off, and the lamb tumbles down, crashes a few seconds later into the sea. and apparently it is enormously dangerous to travel anywhere around the foot of cliffs in the pharoahs because in a sort of monty pythonnesque moment, there are cascades of falling sheep. [laughter] and then they take them back and eat them. they have feasts and claim that this is the finest-tasting lamb anywhere in the world. so that's all there is to the story. but i just thought it was something i would share with you

in the ludicrous end of the spectrum. [laughter] now you have to wipe the smiles after your faces because the next story is not ludicrous at all, it's quite serious. and maybe -- i was telling this to some people in new york yesterday who because of the demographics were quite likely to know of the story, but few of them did. so i'm hoping not too many of you know the next story. july 1916, the royal navy was losing the battle of the atlantic. there were two battles of the atlantic, both in each of the world wars, german submarines would attack vessels coming eastbound from canada in the united states bringing supplies to the british isles. the subs would fire torpedoes, and the royal navy would attempt by using either gunfire or depth

charges to stop this practice. in the first world war german submarines had to come to the surface. the technology didn't allow them in the first world war fire the to have pados from underwater. so it was relatively easy for the royal navy if they saw one of these submarines to attack them with naval gunfire. but the problem was in 1916, summer, is that the royal naval guns counterfire with much -- couldn't fire with much frequency because we had run out of corps diet, the propellant for the shells. and the reason was because we couldn't get enough of the singular chemical component which is acetone which many of you in this audience will know from nail polish remover. exactly. i mean, it's not -- i don't want to make any gender-related claim, but 50% of you will know

what that is. the rest of you probably won't. [laughter] so anyway, that was the background. there was not enough acetone because hitherto we had bought all our acetone from the germans who were unlikely to be selling it to us when we were at war with them. well, that's the background. in manchester the editor of the manchester guardian, a chap called c.p. scott -- a much revered figure. the man who made the remark that comment is free but facts sacred which is one of the motifs of modern journalism or should be anyway, he used to have lunch every tuesday in manchester at the liberal club with someone that he found interesting. and on this particular tuesday he -- which was, i think, in july 1916 -- he had lunch with a white russian professor of biology from the university of manchester called weitzman. and during the course of a very long conversation, weitzman

said, got very excited and said i'm often tempted to try and do an accent, but i won't. he said, i've developed this new technique for producing acetone in very large quantities. now, scott had no idea what acetone was but remembered this fact. well, the following tuesday he was down in london where he was having lunch with david lloyd george, and lloyd george was going on and on about the fact that the royal navy was losing the battle of the atlantic because we had run out of cordite and, we couldn't make it because we didn't have i enough acetone. a light went off -- or on -- in scott's mind, and he said, well, this is extraordinary. i met a chap just last tuesday in manchester who claims, he's a sensible-seeming biologist -- to be able to create acetone in large quantities. and lloyd george said, that's amazing. we should have him down to

london. he was interviewed and discovered that he wasn't a nut case and said what do you need, professor weitzman? he said, first of all, to do this i need something with vats or hoppers, distilling tubes, a brewery or a distillery. and they said, well, you're in luck because the nicholson's gin factory has just gone bankrupt, and we've taken control of the site. he said, oh, couldn't be better. thank you very much. [laughter] so he was given a gin factory. and what else? he said, well, something with a lot of cellulose in it, something like maize. that keeps getting torpedoed by the germans, we can't spare that. what else? he said how about chestnuts, horse chestnuts? as it happens and some of you may know, each autumn in britain school children or schoolboys play a game called conquers.

and i was told yesterday that in america it used to be called killers where you take fallen horse chestnuts, and you put a string through them and suspend them like on a plum bob, and another little boy with another one will try and hit your conquer against your conquer kerr and see which one breaks first. anyway, it's a very, very popular game. still is in britain. so it was decided to capitalize on this, and the summer -- the autumn of 1916 the word went round from the british government that children could earnly collect conquerors, but they should collect them and they would be given to someone and brought down to london. so children collected conquerors as usual, put them in paper bags, but then lorries would turn up with sacks and be persuaded to give their conquerors to the man on lorries. thousands of these would arrive,

would go to the nicholson's gin factory. they'd be poured into the vats at the gin plant and using professor weitzman's magical technique, first of all, from the taps at the bottom of the vats would come a trickle, then a stream, then a gush, then a torrent of pure acetone. which was then taken in tanker cars down to the royal naval ordnance factory, turned into cordite which was loaded on to the ships, and by the late autumn of 1916, the whole tide of the battle of the atlantic was reversed, and the german submarines were being sunk again, and the prosecution of the war started to turn very much in britain's favor. so come the following year, now the spring of 1917, when it was clear that everything had changed and the battle of the atlantic, the complexion of it had changed in be our favor, of it was decided among other things that we should give this

fellow, weitzman, a medal, an award or something like that. and so the government talked about this and then said, well, because he was a foreigner, the person that should give him this award should be the british foreign secretary who was arthur bellford. so he invited weitzman -- who he knew, they knew each other for different reasons -- down to london and said, you know, we're terribly freightful, we'd love for you to be able to call yourself sir weitzman. and weitzman said, well, that's awfully nice of you and i'm terribly grateful, but the fact of the matter is i don't want an honor from the british government. what i do want, however, because i am secretary of the english league of zionists is i want a public declaration from your government to say that his majesty's government would look with failure of an establishment for the homeland of the jewish people in palestine. and so arthur said, well, i think we can probably do that. and so there were discussions, obviously, through the summer. and then on the 17th of

november, 1917, the letter was formally written, delivered to the president of the world's zionist congress. a copy out of gratitude to professor of boyle isy at the university of manchester saying precisely that, his majesty's government would look in favor at an establishment of a homeland for the jewish people and that led to the creation of the state of israel, a state which was created from chemistry, a little-known aspect of chemistry. but from my point of view, crucially in the middle of the atlantic ocean. [laughter] so that's the more important story. [applause] and then the third one. have i time to tell a third story? and then there's going to be a tiny bit on the last book. i'll be good. i'll try anyway. the third one is, frankly, ludicrous. there's an island in the south atlantic called tristan decuna which is a british possession. it is an extremely miserable

place. it's the most isolated inhabited island in the world. it's about 1800 miles west of cape town, fairly dreadful weather. it's dominated by a volcano which erupts spectacularly from time to time. but there are 220 people, british citizens, members of only seven families, so there's a great deal of in-breeding which produces all sorts of interesting side effects. [laughter] and, basically, all they do is they grow potatoeses. i mean, just not a very interesting place, i have to say. in 1941 for the reasons best kept to themselves, the british government decided to classify or reclassify this island as a ship. [laughter] gave it an entirely new name, they called it hms atlantic isle, and they decided that it was a static ship -- [laughter] from which one could observe,

once again i'm not obsessed with submarines, but how submarines were operating in the south atlantic. and they appointed six sailors to go down there and take command of this ship. [laughter] and the captain, as it were, was a young lieutenant called derek booy. and during the four years he spent on the island, he was a very literate and very sensitive chap. he fell in love with one of the island women, a woman called emily rogers although from what i can gather from his writing, they never even held hands. they barely spoke. but he in his writings was, evidently, totally enraptured by emily, and he hoped -- i think it was more fancy that reality -- that she e reciprocated. he wrote very tenderly about three paragraphs in a book that he published in 1954 about his love for emily rogers. but as i say, nothing, nothing

ever happened. and he was very sad. what he wrote about, the departure when the war was over and this he had to leave this girl behind on the beach was a very, very affecting. and there were two beautiful paragraphs which i found very affecting when i read them. well, i went to tryst can decuna in the 1980s, i think it was, and one of the things i wanted to do was go and see emily rogers. i mean, who was this woman? of course, 30 years had passed, 40 years, in fact, so she was no longer a slip of a girl, she was a 60-year-old lady, by now married and a grandmother, indeed, married to the chief islander, a chap called mr. glass. i forget his first name. anyway, i walked through the village of eden wore row of the seven seas, not a particularly difficult place to navigate as there are only about 40 houses, to where they lived. and there was her husband with

his arms folded at the garden gate. he said, i understand you're a writer. i said, yes. he said, i imagine you're here to see emily. i said, i would like to. he said, no, absolutely not. that story was so embarrassing to me and to her and to everyone on the island, we never want it repeated so it'll go away. and he was the only -- he and emily were the only two islanders i never got to see. so anyway, i did all sorts of other things and then got back to where i was living at the time and wrote a book in which there was a big chapter about tristan decuna, and i quoted those two paragraphs from derek booy's book because they were beautiful, and it was a very tender piece of writing about a young naval officer with his unrequited love affair for this island girl. so i thought no more about it. then in the 1990s i was in the south atlantic lecturing on various islands like south georgia in the falkland islands.

and eventually we came to tristan, and you see this beautiful volcano ahead of us. we sailed up to it with me in full flood telling them that the history of of napoleon. and then we dropped anchor, or at least we hoped to. out from the harbor came a little rubber boat with a policeman onboard. i mean, the police ma'am does many other jobs, and he quite literally wears many different hats, and on this hat he was wearing the hat of tristan police department. he came onboard and said, is there a from winchester on this boat? i said, yes. the island council has decided you will not be able to land. why not? the story you told about 15 years before about emily. he was implacable, i couldn't land. so that -- it was embarrassing because all the americans sort of filed past me.

why on earth can't you be lecturing -- you know about it, you're not allowed -- so i had to sort of play patience with the captain of the ship. and they all came back three or four hours later saying potatoes aren't that interesting. and we went somewhere else. and that happened two more times. and then i had to go back to research to do this book, and so i was down there again last year, but now they have e-mail, and so at least the administrator of the island has e-mail, and he was a chap i knew. he was a friend of mine. i used to know him in pakistan although he clearly is not at the cutting edge of diplomacy. [laughter] i don't know. but i e-mailed him, and i said, david, i'm writing this book, and i'm coming down to tristan. you know i've got a little bit of history with tristan, what's the situation? this so he said, very much hoping to see you, my wife and i

would like to have a cup of tea or something, but we'll put it to the island council. and about two weeks later, and by now, of course, emily rogers is dead, her husband is dead, and it's 50, 60 years since derek booy's book, it's 40 years since my book. you'd think the fires had been dumped down. not at all. back came this reply: the island council has formally decided -- and this is quoting -- that you will not be allowed to land on this occasion or, indeed, ever. [laughter] so i stand in full rulesty before you as the man who despite having written about this, i'm not allowed to travel to tryst can. [laughter] so those are the three stories that i plot, and i'm just going to, if i may, just round it off by going back to the book that i read in chile. the book that so captured me, and i think it's out of print, the sort of book if it ever comes back into print stock here. it's very much a p and p book. it's by a man called john marsh,

and it's called skeleton coast. and it's about a ship wreck which occurred in 1942 on the skeleton coast of what was then southwest africa that is now namibia. a skeleton coast is about a stretch of 300-350 miles from the an goal land border down to the bay. it's absolutely treacherous. i mean, razor sharp reefs, onshore winds, fogs, disagreeable, cold currents, and if you do happen to fetch up on this coast, there is no water, and you die, basically. i mean, there's just no sustenance at all. well, the star which was coming down from liverpool ultimately to go around the cape of good hope and go up to aden with 60 passengers onboard, it did. it struck some shoal in november 1942, ran aground. sent out a distress message.

sixty survivors -- everyone survived the wreck. they managed to get onto shore, they built themselves a temporary shelter, and they awaited rescue. normally you don't get rescued. in this particular case they did, and this was the story of their rescue which was all accomplished over land. a convoy of police individuals, took them about two months to get to them, but they were all rescued. no one died except in the maritime side of the rescue which didn't succeed. a thurm of ships came. one of them was wrecked its. the one that was wrecked was a south african harbor tug called the sir charles elliot. it got relatively close to the wreck of the boat, and two young men tried to swim ashore with a rope. they were called mathias and an gus mcintyre, and both of them drowned. mathias' body was found, angus'

body never was. these wrecked ships don't decay. and, also, there was now this incredibly lonely grave. so i vowed that i would try and get there eventually, and on researching this book, i did. i managed to find -- i happened to be in cape town, and i got a flight to the capital of namibia, and then i got on a little tiny plane which took me to a very remote place in the northern part of the skeleton coast, found a very agreeable man with a land rover, and i had the gps reference of where we believed the ship had stranded. no one had seen it for a donkey's years. went up the coast and sure enough in the end, we found it. there was the old wreck of the star all its cargo still strewn around. you'd open these big wooden boxes and find one of the cargoes she was carrying were

lightbulbs still unbroken after 60 years in the desert. probably didn't work but, nonetheless, they were still there. obviously, the canvas was no longer, but the sticks were there. and then i wanted to go to the grave, and that's about 15 miles south of the wreck site. you come to this point called rocky point. when you look through the waves, these enormous waves coming in. every time the waves go down, you can see two tiny sort of pyramids of rusted iron which are two stanchions which is all that remains of this tug. and then a great big pile of rocks and whale bones. and planted vertically in the sand a brass plaque which most unvisited grave site in the world. i mean, no one goes there. but it said -- this is raised in memorial to two men who very bravery attempted a rescue in 1942 -- mathias and angus. well, i was really moved by this. i decided that i sort of needed

to do something. and i had taken -- there was a tiny bottle that i had found in the wreck of the ship. sandblasted almost pure, unaforeigned glass. i think it was the sort of thing that a woman might have kept, you know, smelling salts in or something like that. and i had it, so i wrote a note saying -- it sounds awfully corny now -- thank you for trying, now rest in peace. i put it into the bottle and screwed it shut, a typical message in a bottle for a sailor. and left it by the grave. but then i got back -- i thought that was as much as i thought i could do then. but then i got back to new york and wrote this book, and at the end i kept being haunted by the fact that angus was an atlantic man, born on an island in the atlantic in western scotland, traveled down the atlantic to cape town to another atlantic ocean city, had taken a job on a little boat that worked in the

atlantic, attempted a rescue in the atlantic, drowned in the atlantic and his body was swept out into the atlantic never to be found again. so in the end i decided the best thing to do was to dedicate the book to him. so the book is dedicated to an angus campbell mcip tire, sums up at least part of the story of our human relationship with this great mass of water, the atlantic ocean. [applause] thank you very much. >> we have time for questions. you've just got to go to the mic. over here. >> thank you, that was wonderful. >> [inaudible] >> john marsh. john marsh. i think the book you can get online. i know that's a dirty word to use, but you can find secondhand

copies. published in south africa by hutchinson, i think. >> something that seems to connect all the stories is they connect to england which is an island nation. so in the middle of the atlantic, so that makesceps. do you have of -- sense. do you have stories about new england which depended heavily on the atlantic and where people went back and forth to sort of stay in touch and to make a living whaling and then trading? >> there's a whole heap of stuff about whaling from glouster and new bedford, of course, nantucket. there is, there's a lot -- i don't want to sound as if i'm a shill trying to sell this book, but i suppose that's what i am trying to do in a way. [laughter] there's a lot about everything. in fact, i don't know if any of you heard this morning, i was on the morning edition program. looking at the -- there was a very nice interview by lynn neary, and looking at the comments as i did on the train

coming down to washington this evening, the first content was an angry man saying you're a racist, there was no mention in your discussion on npr about slavery. but, i mean, there is heaps in the book about middle passage and slavery. there's not very much about titanic. there's quite a lot about the louis tape ya but not so much about the titanic. but i try and cover all bases. and so, yes, there's a lot about -- and wins low homer, of course, because there's a chapter -- the lover chapter is all about poetry and music and art and architecture. and the day i was writing about winslow homer or, he lived in maine. and on the day that i was writing, by extraordinary coincidence and you may remember this story, a little girl from new york was standing on a rock just where winslow homer used to paint, and she was swept away by a wave as her parents watched in

horror. i know, it was dreadful. so there's a lot about new england. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> you've alluded to it a little bit but just a logistical question. krakatoa, your boat is about a huge event, but a single event at a point in time. this is about a huge subject, limitless. what are the logistics of writing a book on a limitless subject? i mean, you've talked a little bit about the framework and selecting some things, but do you just select the outline first and then research it and then write it? or how do you do a book like this? >> well, certainly in a way the structure is hugely important. i think i've always a said if i'm asked to teach about writing nonfiction, i say the three elements. the idea is king. the primacy of the idea, got to

have a good idea. but then the second most important thing is how you write this idea. and this is a classic example of the idea really could get away with you. you could write a 20-volume dissertation. you've got two 900-page books, and that is one point in time describing the history of one much smaller sea. so you've got to be very disciplined about your structure. and, of course, that -- an awful lot of risk comes with that. is shakespeare the right structure? thus far, i've dodged the bullet. some will come along to say this is a monstrous way to organize it. and the third leg -- i don't mean to dismiss the writing, but the writing, one tries to make it good, but in the order of precedence i think idea,

structure and writing. it'd be nice if all three were given equal merit, but if they had to be put in order, idea comes first but structure comes a very close second. structure certainly comes before writing, i think. that was rather a vague answer to your question, but it's important to me. sir. >> i was delighted to hear you had not attempted to go back to visit tristan. that was my favorite book of yours, "outposts," which they actually have here. i was wondering if you'd been to back any of the other items -- >> st. helena, there is a ship that leaves portland every 12 weeks. it's inexpensive, wonderful food, terribly nice staff on the boat. it goes portland to ten a reef to dakar and senegal and then goes to ascension island, then goes to tristan -- to santa lina

and drops you off for a week. you have to stay in the consulate hotel in this town called jamestown. the reason you have to stay there is the ship then takes contract workers back north wards to ascension island where they're working on an american base and picks up the contract workers working there and brings them back, and then you go back on with it to cape town where you can fly back to washington. so i heartily recommend it. it sounds as though i'm working for the tourist board. there is no airport in santa lina, so you have to go by ship. >> thank you, mr.-- sir. i was curious, going back to cac toe what. -- krakatoa. one of the impressions i gleaned from your book was that scientists were not exactly attentive to seismic activity. and mount merapi in central java is now demonstrating some

seismic activity. should we be concerned -- >> about krakatoasome. >> exactly. >> no. >> okay. >> i mean, krakatoa is like a safety belt. it goes off almost every day. the volcanos that you need to worry about are those that don't go off like mount st. helens because when it does go off, it goes off big time. no, krakatoa is a nasty volcano, but it's releasing, it's doing what pharoahe is se people should do more often. [laughter] release its energy. o don't worry. >> if i can ask a question about dictionaries. is it true that you've stopped consulting your dictionaries at home, and you now only look up words on your ipad? >> well, i know where this question comes from. it's the decision -- i was in australia when a chap at oup made this remark that he could

not envisage the third edition of the oed being publish inside a hard pay -- published in a hard paper format. and i got telephoned because of the books i'd written about the subject, and i said, quite honestly, i think that's the natural -- i hate saying it in a place like a book shop, but in 30 years' time the oed volume, third edition will be published in 2037. they say june 20, '37. and i think by then humankind will not be extinct, but by then i think most massive reference books will be available, essentially only online. i would have thought for purely romantic reasons the oed will produce a hardback edition. but as to what i do now, i have go complete 20-volume oeds. but if i want to know a word or if i -- for instance, i mean, the oed web site is being

relaunched on december the 10th, and i've been given a sort of sneak preview of it. it is amazing. because you can look, as i did the other day, i wanted -- i looked at a timeline of the introduction of words from various languages into the english language. so i decided i wanted to look at australian aboriginal words that had come in to the accomplish language. and you can -- it's interesting historically because there were an awful lot came in when we started colonizing australia in the 1830s and 1840s, and then it dropped off, and then there's been a recent resurgence because of the resurgence of pride among the aboriginal peoples. so words have been introduced, and bruce chapman had a lot to do with that as well. but using the new tools available, you can find out all the words that have come from the really most obscure australian aboriginal languages

and then find quotations from books that employ them. and then if book that employs them was written by an interesting author, you can find his biography. it just goes on and on and on, and you could not do that with hardbacked book, and so i rarely use the hardbacked books. the dictionary i look at almost exclusively online. >> we've got time for two more questions. >> you go ahead. >> thank you. thank you. in terms of karma changing global warming, are as many islands in the atlantic at risk as they are in the pacific? >> no. because the islands, well, particularly the islands in the indian ocean thinking of the mall deefs and the islands in and around the ganges, they're much more liable to be inundated most of the islands in the atlantic ocean are volcanic and big and massive, and they're at

risk from other things, but not so much from the rise in sea level. it's the cities around the periphery of the ocean that are and most notably rotterdam, london and new york. and it's interesting that rotterdam is really stepping up to the plate. i mean, they're doing remarkable things. one of the things they're doing is not fighting the water. i mean, they know from -- we should know from king knut there is no point in fighting rising sea levels. venice should know that. build things that float. so rotterdam is building apartment buildings and department stores that float. if the water rises, fine, then the department stores rise. rising tide rises all department stores. [laughter] but london is, at the moment, still not advancing funds to rebuild the thames barrier, and new york, of course, has a subway system which is really vulnerable from flooding.

they've got a huge number of pumps at the moment, but if pumps is the only thing they can do to fight rising sea levels, then they're going to have to spend a lot of money on more even bigger ones. so floating. i mean, stop global warming, of course, but float rather than fight. [laughter] >> okay. one last question. >> forgive me because i cannot remember the exact location in the atlantic, whether it's the canary islands or portugal, but there is a geologic slip -- >> not going to happen. [laughter] this, i'll remind you, the volcano which is on the west side of the canary islands. and it is -- this is an extraordinary story, and i go into it in some detail in the book. it was the bbc, with all the accuracy and reliability of the bbc, there was a documentary that says when the volcano e

results, an enormous slab of rock is going to fall off the western slide and create a tsunami which will inundate new york. well, no geologist in his right mind thinks that's going the happen. certainly, once again in tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years and, in any case, if it does happen, this big chunk of rock almost certainly suspect going to fall off -- isn't going to fall off, and theaway it's going to -- wave it's going to create isn't going to be nearly as large as that. but the interesting thing is that the sponsor, the financial backing for that bc film was given by a chicago-based reinsurance company. [laughter] [applause] >> simon winchester is the author of several books including "the professor and the

madman," and "krakatoa." for more information, visit simonwinchester.com. >> follow booktv on twitter. send us a tweet at booktv with your favorite booktv of program from 2010. from now until december 10th, we will select one tweet per day at random to receive booktv swag and, and the tweeted program will be included in our holiday schedule over the december 24th-26th weekend. we look forward to seeing your favorite booktv programs from the last year. thank you for watching. >> every weekend booktv brings you 48 hours of history, biography and public affairs. here's a portion of one of our programs. >> i'm going to continue to work our way around the room. >> is the motivation for women going into the military, did you

find it any different than the reason that men go into the military other than nurses? >> well, i think there are a whole range of reasons. some women told me, you know, it sounds very much like cara's nurses, that they really wanted to escape their small towns. they didn't want to live like their friends who were marrying young and having lots of babies. other women wanted adventure. they wanted to go to war. they really wanted to fight. i talked to one woman who was german who had actually emigrated to the united states because she was too old for the german military, and she really wanted to fight in war. >> [inaudible] the ones with families? i mean, what would be their motivation? >> some of it was economic. there were many women i talked to who came from real poverty. i mean, very serious above poverty -- poverty, and for them the military was a way out. i spoke with many, many women who had been teen mothers and

had children very, very young, and they saw this as a career path. and it was, it was a good career path. and, you know, in light of the current debates over health care, right? there were several women who had children with diseases or health conditions, and they needed good insurance. and that's why they joined the military. >> that just makes me think, what was the socioeconomic background of the women who were joining us as nurses in vietnam? >> it was pretty widespread. economic factor was a big motivator for most young nurses. there was a split largely in the vietnam war of career nurses who had been in for quite some time and the young nurses recruited straight out of nursing school. most of them signed up through the rotc for nurses. and most nurses had signed up for those educational benefits. so, again, it's a whole range