Seven Tenths

"Yes. This is a much more recent book, but you find the same themes. Hamilton-Paterson’s life has been peppered with maritime journeys, and when he thought, “I want to do a book about the sea” he came up against the usual problem – the sheer scale of his subject. It’s a wonderfully baffling book. There’s a lovely opening passage of a swimmer – presumably him – diving down through the water. It’s a beautiful description of entering the water. Of light coming down through it – and from then on he drifts from one great sea-subject to the next. He recreates various expeditions – maritime expeditions – including the Challenger Expedition which in 1872 set out to circumnavigate the globe. She took four years and carried a team of scientists and one of their objects, simply, was to find out how deep the water was. They discovered that in many places it was very, very deep. They scooped up all sorts of samples from various levels of the water and after 20 years and 50 written volumes analysing these specimens, they still weren’t finished. I’d put those books on my list if they weren’t so unwieldy. They have in them these wonderful pictures of phytoplankton and diatoms and dinoflagellates. And you realise looking at them – as Hamilton-Paterson points out – that you’re looking at a completely strange world. An exquisite but very alien world. He touches also on the notion of conservation, with wonderful elegiac sections on what has happened to the sea, what man has done to it."