Immediately to the north of Hawaii, scattered across the Murray Fracture Zone, lie the Musicians Seamounts. They stretch for maybe 200 miles, from Strauss in the north to Mendelssohn in the south. There is a Bach Ridge and a Beethoven Ridge. There is also Mozart, a considerable mountain rising from the abyssal plain 5 kilometres below to within 900 metres of the surface. Mount Mozart, while a fairly minor affair by suboceanic standards, is therefore slightly taller than Mount Fuji, although of nowhere near such classic proportions.
The presence of this random clutch of composers engloutis in the middle of Pacific wastes is a reminder of how much of the physical world belongs in its taxonomy, description and name to the Western nations. It is also a reminder that in a sense things do not exist until they are named. Before that, everything partakes of a state of undifferentiated chaos which is never a neutral matter to human beings but carries a degree of menace. To name something is to take control of it. It could be argued that the Old Testament story of Genesis was less a matter of creation than of naming, of God taking control of chaos. Whereas before, the pre-Universe consisted of a kind of primordial babble, God-grammarian sorted out its constituent parts and uttered some solid nouns – dualities, mainly: crude oppositions such as light/dark, heaven/earth, sea/land. How he had entertained himself before this basic act of intelligence is open to speculation, but if he was anything like the humans he created (and according to Scripture he was) he was bored, repelled and finally menaced by a universe which was still a state rather than an infinite collection of objects. Ever since, Homo has felt the same and travellers have gone about the globe as adventurers, conquerors, sightseers, nomads and scientists, naming its parts and often bestowing on them their own proper names as well as those of their friends and sponsors. In his short story ‘Colomba’ (1840) Prosper Mérimée’s English heroine, Lydia Nevil, takes pleasure in learning the names of places on the Corsican coast as she passes in a schooner, for ‘nothing is more tedious than a landscape without names’. Many a sea captain found his spirits insupportably lowered by a coast such as that of Africa, when whole days might go by without sight of a single named feature. It would presumably have made little difference knowing the local tribespeople had their own names for the hills and capes and rivers. Being illiterate, they would have been ineligible to bestow valid names because unable to write them on a map. Only cartography can remove names from merely local usage and bring places into international being.
The desire to tame a threatening landscape by subjecting it to the control of language can be seen in the old Greek name for the notoriously treacherous Black Sea: the Euxine, or hospitable. An extension of this may result in the temporary renaming of already well-known places. In World War I when British troops were mired into the static and murderous wastelands of trench warfare, micro-maps were devised for the tiny localities which bounded their lives. London place names were wistfully bestowed on slivers of Belgian and French farm-land. What a year or two earlier had been ‘Quineau’s acre’ or ‘Drownedcow bottom’ were now Haymarket and Leicester Square. This yearning domestication of threatening foreign places is a common enough trope in wartime (‘Hamburger Hill’) and came equally naturally to Pincher Martin, William Golding’s wrecked sailor. Almost his first act on being able physically to patrol the Rockall-like Atlantic islet on which he was washed up was to give its features familiar names like Prospect Cliff, High Street and Piccadilly. This was in recognition that, unnamed, the place of his marooning would have remained inimical to him as well as invisible to rescuers, being quite literally off the map.
A Mozart Seamount does, however, seem particularly arbitrary in the subtropical latitudes around Hawaii. Odder still, it is equally close to Gluck and Puccini Seamounts, just as Haydn is to Mussorgsky and Beethoven Ridges. Clearly it is useless to look for any correlation between the physical proximity of these seabed features and the chronology of their namesakes. Somebody must have thought ‘We’ve done poets, now let’s do composers,’ much as local councils name the roads of new housing estates. It is only since the invention of a technology powerful enough to map the deep seabed that the finding of names has become a pressing issue. By the early years of the twentieth century most of the planet’s territorial features had been mapped and named, with the exception of the remotest hinterlands like Antarctica and the Amazon jungle. Sidescanning sonar is now revealing ever more details which for geologists, if for nobody else, need to be identifiable by name. As far as the military is concerned the situation remains equivocal. Strategic seabeds like that beneath the Arctic ice cap have been extensively mapped by NATO and Russian submarines, but their charts remain classified. There are projects for civil mapping and geological surveys of North Polar waters, but they remain projects until somebody donates a nuclear submarine to an oceanographic institute.
In order to cope with the need for new names on new charts there are various regulatory bodies which amount to a more or less official international committee on names. There is, for example, BGN/ACUF: the US Board on Geographic Names, Advisory Committee on Undersea Features. There is also the Monaco-based GEBCO: General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, an organisation founded at the beginning of the twentieth century. These bureaucracies are constantly turning out documents, indexes, guidelines, lists of eligible names and the like. Very occasionally a lone human voice cuts through it all, like Robert L. Fisher’s in his ‘Proposal for Modesty’. In this he inveighs against
parvenu scientists who offhandedly baptize a deep-sea … feature that may have been known and well-explored – even if possibly unnamed – earlier, or even one bearing a long established name in another language. … Some … apparently know so little about historical courtesy, significant commemoration, or even good taste that the seafloor is becoming littered, and the literature of marine geology and geophysics cluttered, with personal, in-group, self-aggrandizing, back-scratching, trite unimaginative (‘14°N Fracture Zone’) names or ugly acronyms (‘GOFAR Fracture Zone’).*
The Musicians Seamounts are an example of bureaucratically approved naming. It was likewise decreed that a group of submarine features off the south-west tip of Ireland should be named after Tolkien characters, which explains the Gollum Channel. The bureaucrats do not have it all their own way, however. Now and then the working names which pioneering geologists assign their discoveries stick, in all their whimsicality. A few years ago Quentin Huggett and his IOS colleagues were mapping some seabed fields of manganese nodules with GLORIA when they found a series of hills which they needed to be able to identify as they worked. One became Nod Hill, a second (felicitously named on Christmas Day) Yule. A third hill became Mango while the fourth – unfortunately never discovered – would inevitably have been Knees. Nod, Yule and Mango Hills remain to this day and probably always will, long after they have been stripped of the asset which gave them their name, like the Gold and Ivory Coasts.
A more famous and no less whimsical example is of an area of Atlantic seabed to the west of Spain which celebrates British biscuits. This centres around the Peake Deep, modestly named after himself by the ship’s captain who discovered it. A later expedition from Cambridge found a long, shallow depression in the same area which they loyally named King’s Trough. Then they discovered a second deep near Peake Deep and called it Freane [sic] Deep. Further surveying disclosed two ridges between these features which became respectively Huntley and Palmer Ridges. Finally, the trip was completed with the identification of Crumb Seamount.
In the late 1980s, while mapping the 200-mile EEZ around Alaska, GLORIA at the end of one of its turns revealed an unknown volcano beneath Soviet waters. Quentin Huggett, interested in pre-Soviet Russian anarchist movements, reported its existence to the Soviet Academy of Sciences with the customary apology for unintentionally having ‘spied’ into Soviet waters and suggested it should be called Kropotkin Seamount in honour of Peter Kropotkin, the celebrated geologist and anarchist. It so happened that Kropotkin’s nephew, himself a geologist, was on the panel of Academicians considering the suggestion and reportedly the proposal raised a laugh in the relaxed climate of perestroika. A certain edge to the laughter might have come from the knowledge that Peter Kropotkin had been distantly related to the Romanovs and his nephew is considered by some today to be the Russian citizen nearest in succession to the Russian throne. In this particular case, and beneath the international exchange of jocularities, curious games are perhaps being played. For while the implication of the story – heard from the Western side – is that scientists with superior technology could tell a country things it does not know about its own territory and would happily do so for a price, the story from the Russian side might be quite different. With military security it is never quite certain what is known. The Bering Strait must after all be one of the areas most familiar to Cold War submariners, and it would seem likely that this seamount was already known to the Russians, who might have declined to submit it themselves for international naming in order to disguise the extent of their own knowledge.
* Robert L. Fisher, writing from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in Geology (June 1987).