Genta Nishku
A Sounding Line
non-fiction
Little stories are forever surfacing.
—Daša Drndić, Trieste
On too many maps, the oceans are negative space. Secondary to land, oceans and seas fade into the background, even as that background becomes essential in what the map makers instruct us, the viewers, to see. Without the space of absence that the oceans create, the land—and thus, human settlements and their arbitrary, artificial borders, their pastel-colored states—couldn’t dominate. What is the dichotomous relationship between land and ocean on the ordinary map but a relation of dominance, power, and conquest on a bed of nondescript blue? Flattened, the oceans are stripped of history, existing on the map as relief-less masses summarized completely by the docility of their names. Even if they cover most of the globe, the oceans are made secondary: perspective shapes the story.
Of course the seas aren’t made of absence. Of course the oceans aren’t meaningless. Even when we fall into agreement over their denial, some truths are well known. It’s not only the cartographers, after all, who are privy to that tremendous knowledge: underneath the negative space, the background of blue, the earth that seems finite and established is alive with unpredictability. And so if the volcanic eruption that created the island of Surtsey in the north Atlantic and the journey of a bathyscaphe called the Trieste to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western North Pacific seem unrelated, it’s only because of a failure of the imagination.
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Is the ocean’s depth measured by sound or by silence?
That’s not the question that the men on the Trieste wanted to discover. Their journey, like so many others, was surrounded by war. Barely over a decade after the end of the Second World War, the US Navy’s Project Nekton aimed to be the first to reach the deepest point of all the world’s oceans: Challenger Deep within the Mariana Trench. This trench is formed by the convergence of the Pacific Plate and the Mariana Plate, with the Mariana pushing the Pacific Plate underneath its mantle, forming an elongated depression or trench. In the case of the Mariana Trench, a smaller valley within the trench goes even deeper inside the earth, deeper than anywhere in the world. This is Challenger Deep, named after the HMS Challenger, a British Royal Navy ship used for a long, far-reaching expedition to study the ocean—again, we’re reminded of the connection of oceans and war and of the veneer of discovery that can be placed over them.
In January of 1960, US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss engineer and oceanographer Jacques Piccard descended 10,911 meters, down to the Challenger Deep to conquer “inner space,” as reports would later declare. The first step to conquest is knowledge. Walsh and Piccard’s adventure had the major aim of reaching the bottom of the deepest part of our planet’s oceans, just to prove that they could. The men and the bathyscaphe weren’t equipped to do anything else but measure the depth of where they landed; no scientific observations or experiments were carried out that day in January. If outer space had once been unknowable and unreachable, it would soon become polluted by our waste—why not invade inner space, too? If the journey was a scientific one, would the men feel they were going in combat against the forces of the ocean? The terrifying pressure that the Pacific exerted on the small bathyscaphe was not experienced as negative space or absence. In such depths, the ocean made itself heard: the sounds of metal being compressed, the sharp sound of glass breaking. Trieste didn’t leave a mark that day—its descent and ascent were unnoticed by the water. The ocean did, however. On the machine’s body, it left a broken window as a testament to its presence.
Seen from our distance in time, the Trieste is a rudimentary creation, an upside-down balloon with floats full of gasoline and tanks full of water and iron ballast. A long float chamber with a pressure sphere attached to its bottom, big enough to fit two men, allowed the bathyscaphe to free dive into the depths of the ocean. A small plexiglass window allowed a view into these depths, which were punctuated with life even at an unimaginable distance from the surface, down where the rays of the sun can never reach. The bathyscaphe carries the name of the port city of Trieste on the border of what is now Slovenia and Italy. “What is now” is a temporal indicator of political change, of the work that naming carries out. After the older Piccard, father of Jacques, designed his bathyscaphe, he had it built in Italy and the Free Territory of Trieste, an independent territory that existed for eight years between northern Italy and Yugoslavia, before it was divided among the two nations. It’s not clear what made Piccard choose this location to make his deep-diving dreams come true.
Perhaps it was the experience and high-quality productions of the manufacturers there, like the United Shipbuilders of the Adriatic located in Trieste, which before building the bathyscaphe’s upper part in the early 1950s, had built the Vittorio Veneto and the Roma—two of the battleships serving Italy’s fascist government during the war. Before that, the United Shipbuilders of the Adriatic built the SS Conte di Savoia, a commercial ocean liner making transatlantic voyages from 1932 until an early retirement in 1940 when the vessel was repurposed to serve wartime needs. Or perhaps it was the famed industrial city of Terni in central Italy that attracted Piccard, a city known particularly for its stainless steel industry, whose production of steel was indispensable to Mussolini and Italy’s war effort. The website for the modern Acciai Speciali Terni relates its 137-year history in broad strokes—the industrial complex’s direct participation in a fascist system and war earns only three quick notes (Italy Joins the War, Bombardments, The End of the War) before moving on to the history of its triumphant “rebirth.” The manufacturing of Piccard’s pressure sphere is highlighted as a key event that placed Terni on the path “from military to civilian.” Adaptation is the most necessary key to survival.
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The bathyscaphe Trieste itself is proof of that. Despite its Italian manufacturing, when the US Navy purchased the Trieste in 1958, five years after the Piccards first launched it into the Mediterranean to explore the depths of that sea, the bathyscaphe was refitted with a new pressure sphere. So much for all the work done at Terni. The new sphere was manufactured by the Essen-based Krupp Steel Works, a German weapons conglomerate producing various arms, artillery, ammunition, and steel, whose history is deeply entrenched in that of the Third Reich. Devoted antisemites with an eye on maximizing profits by any means possible, and in the most macabre ways, the Krupp dynasty supported the Nazi Party enthusiastically. In fact, the company became its key arms supplier and used the slave labor of thousands of political prisoners and Jewish concentration camp inmates to produce these arms, while simultaneously plundering raw material, property, and land from German-occupied territories throughout Europe. Alfried Krupp’s record of cruelty is relentless: over a five year period, he, his associates, and all Krupp employees exploited the labor of “over 55,000 foreign workers, over 18,000 prisoners of war and over 5,000 concentration camp inmates, not including replacements … and not including workers in Krupp plants in the occupied countries.” Torture, abuse, violent beatings, and executions controlled and terrorized the people enslaved by Krupp. Extermination through work was the euphemism Krupp had used for genocide.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Krupp was the biggest company in all of Europe. Its wealth and power had been established long before then, with the family first coming into prominence in the 16th century, a time when Europe was being devastated by the plague and Krupp was profiting by buying the homes of families who escaped Essen in hopes of surviving. Since then, a steady involvement in arms manufacturing for major conflicts, battles, and wars has provided Krupp endless wealth and notoriety, well into the modern era. In the 1920s, it was Krupp who produced the steel for the art0-deco crown and spire adorning the Chrysler building in New York City. The German boy of the future, Hitler had said not long after, must be as tough as Krupp steel. That must have surely made Alfried Krupp smile, as head of the company during the war and recipient of such honors from Hitler as the title of Minister for Armaments and War Production, and a second- and first-class War Merit Cross.
Convicted in 1948 of crimes against humanity, Krupp served only three of his twelve-year sentence. It hadn’t even been the prospect of imprisonment that had troubled Alfried Krupp—who maintained he had only done what was necessary to help his business flourish. Instead, it was the confiscation of his property that made Krupp “white as a sheet … on the point of collapse.” On the other hand, he enjoyed his imprisonment, described as a “long sunlit holiday,” where he could smoke his Camel cigarettes, eat good food, and get lost in Landsberg’s library, the same prison that had once housed his beloved Führer. Soon, Krupp was directing his company from prison, working hard to rebuild German industrial power and assist the West during the Cold War. And so in 1951, the US High Commissioner to Germany, John J. McCloy, officially pardoned Krupp and issued the restoration of his property, at the time worth $45,000,000. Apparently cleansed enough of its past, Krupp industries was once again a useful partner for the US. By the time the bathyscaphe Trieste’s pressure sphere needed to be replaced by the US Navy, Alfried Krupp roamed the world freely, once more the head of Krupp Steel Works. The same man who, just a few years prior, had ordered his company to manufacture their own special equipment for torturing enslaved workers, prisoners of war, and concentration-camp inmates would then manufacture equipment for the deepest dive into the ocean that humanity ever took. Redemption—if we can call it that—comes in many, peculiar forms.
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To find the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, the men of Project Nekton dropped explosives into the ocean. They measured the echo, the speed of sound in the water: how long until the ocean groaned back at them. Was it the sound of the echo they were waiting for, or were they welcoming the end of silence?
Sound has always been used to measure water depth. The clue is in the word itself: “sound,” from the Old English “sund,” meaning water, sea, swim—unrelated to the sound we hear, from the Latin “sonus.” From “sound,” the verb “sounding” came to mean the action of measuring the depth of the sea. One fathom, the span of a person’s outstretched arms, is the unit used to do this. A sounding line, marked by fathoms and weighted down by a lead plummet, is thrown into the water to determine its depths. Unlike the explosive echoes or today’s modern echo sounding and sonar technologies, the sounding line doesn’t disturb life inside the waters. The sounding line is nearly soundless, sliding silently downward until it reaches the bottom with a thud. The problem with the sounding line, of course, is that it can’t be used to find and measure depths like the Challenger Deep, meaning that it can’t confer glory by conquering the unimaginable. For that, you need an explosion.
Explosions tortured the air and the shocking scene took on the spectacle of a volcano in violent eruption, Alice Bowman, a nurse imprisoned in a Japanese camp near Tokyo wrote about the barrage of incendiary clusters, magnesium bombs, white phosphorus bombs, and napalm unleashed over Tokyo by the United States on March 10th, 1945. Using the Mariana islands—including Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Aguijan, Rota—as airfield bases and launching grounds, the US would continue to bomb Japan and Japanese civilians until the end of the war. That March morning, the Great Tokyo Air Raid—the culmination of Operation Meetinghouse, when 1,665 tons of bombs destroyed 267,171 buildings, killed over 90,000 civilians, and left one million without homes—was just the beginning. Fifteen years later, Guam, now under the control of the United States, would serve as a station for the crew working on Project Nekton and the bathyscaphe Trieste. Although it's not as easy to find information about this part of the story—where did they sleep? who cooked their meals? who washed their clothes?—the crew could have lodged nowhere but Guam, since the islands are the closest landmasses to the Mariana Trench and the Challenger Deep in that expansive negative space of the western North Pacific Ocean.
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Surtsey came out of nothingness, out of the absent ocean. The nurse’s metaphor comes to life: the spectacle of the volcano in a violent eruption that lasted years, mellowing into a flow of lava hardening over the surface of the water. On a mid-November morning in 1963, crew members aboard Isleifur II saw a column of dark smoke rising from the ocean in the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago off the southern coast of Iceland. Seeking an explanation, they thought it may have been a boat on fire, and moving closer, they were met with black columns of ash formed by the explosive eruptions of an undersea volcano. In the months that followed, the volcano continued to erupt, its explosions sending large and loud clouds of dust, ash, and rocks high into the atmosphere. Ash is dark: it erases all it lands on, like the censored words of a redacted document. The constant flow of lava hardened on the water’s surface, gradually forming an island made of loose scoria and tephra, stabilized by the more resistant rock laid on top of this layer over the next three years until the eruptions finally ended in June of 1967. The island, which at its maximum surface measured 2.7 km², was named Surtsey, after the fire giant Surtur. Along with Surtsey, several other small islands emerged from the underwater volcanic activity, none of them became as established, quickly being dissolved into the ocean by wind and waves. Like other, older islands in the archipelago, these islands have been turned into small, rocky formations: black and white cliffs dotting the ocean.
Since it formed, half of Surtsey’s surface has been lost to erosion. They don’t predict a long life for Surtsey, perhaps another one hundred years before it has become eroded down to a single cliff. For now, scientists are studying the island diligently. Designated as a protected space from the moment it was formed, no one is permitted to step foot on the island without authorization. The scientists’ goal is to observe how a natural environment evolves without human interference: which plants, fungi, insects, and animals populate the land, how do they arrive there, and how do they interact with each other? How does life generate and regenerate without us, even in the most improbable of places? The botanists and biologists who monitor and study the island are meticulous in their work, joyous at the discovery of a new plant brought over in seed form by a bird resting on Surtsey during its migration or a clump of tussock grass washed on the island’s shore, carrying hundreds of microscopic invertebrates. Sometimes, even if they aren’t supposed to, young adventurers sneak to the island from Iceland’s other shores. In one of these excursions, a group of boys planted potatoes on Surtsey, a sight that alarmed the scientists working there because it was proof of human intervention. They removed the potato plants right away, but still, for a brief moment, that foreign plant must have thrived on Surtsey’s volcanic land.
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Small islands like Surtsey or the Mariana Islands are enveloped in the maps’ oceanic negative space. Rendered invisible by acts of organization and categorization, they retreat into nothingness. Some things we only notice when they are absent, negative space. It’s their absence that makes them known—a belated discovery, devoid of all glory and superlatives. Once, I woke up facing the quietude of the morning sea. If I noticed the boats in the water, they did not make any big impression, being less than secondary to the bay’s blues and greens: its brilliant sparkle. It wasn’t until I had walked down to the beach and entered the sea that I saw the sinking boat not too far from shore. Swimming in the same waters, I watched the boat go deeper and deeper into the sea until it finally disappeared completely, while all around, families delighted in the waves, and summer hits played from the beach-side bar. Overfishing and global climate change have critically damaged the oceans, Don Walsh warns in an interview after once again recounting that famous dive on the Trieste. Yes, we see things more clearly by their absence—we see they were never empty space. Like the bottom of the Challenger Deep, where the ocean floor is covered in diatomaceous ooze, sediment produced over the millennia by erosion—the same force that will one day erase Surtsey, transforming it into the unknowable longing felt by the migratory birds, who will miss it on their flights above the negative space of the ocean, the blue between two shores.
Genta Nishku lives in New York and was raised in Tirana. Her translations have been published by Akashic Books and Apofenie Magazine, and her writing can be found or is forthcoming in Warscapes, The Kenyon Review, Bennington Review, Washington Square Review, The Babel Tower Notice Board, B O D Y, CHEAP POP, XRAY Literary Magazine and others. She is completing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She tweets sporadically at @gentanishku.