A gap in the record

21st June 2024

The Torrey Canyon is approaching the Seven Stones from the south on the morning of the 18th of March. She’s on automatic steering, making good speed, the weathers bad but she’s nearly 100 feet long and 119 tons deadweight, like a magically floating menhir on the water. The noise of her and the noise of the increasing wind, must make the water she passes throb and hum with her. As she started to pass over the sunken granite ridge of the peninsula, almost as soon as she’s on the seven stones, I wonder then if the noise changes, if the ridge feels it, if the tiny jewelled anemones anchored to the rocks feel her coming. The noise would have changed, bouncing off the rising hard stone. Anyway, somewhere high above the ridge something has gone, is going, wrong and the ship catches fast on the exposed top of Pollards Rock. 280 Million year old granite releasing 80 Million year old oil into the ageless sea.

Theres a gap in the record.

The Torrey Canyon left Mina al Ahmadi on the 18th of February. The ship’s too big for the Suez Canal so she passes round the Cape of Good Hope and passes the Canary Islands on the 14th of March. She picks up the Rennell Current up towards the Bay of Biscay and the mouth of the English Channel and then pulls north for the lanes towards Milford Haven. The automatic steerings on but the ship is still far too close to the Scilly Isles and the reef and it tears a hole in her side.

Theres a gap in the record, it’s only minutes but it’s there. As the Torrey Canyon scrapes over the crest of the Seven Stones, stranding the vast ship on that single point of Pollards Rock, the engineer looks at the clock - it says 8.45, the lightship - watching horrified as the giant pushes unseeing onto the rocks - records 9.23. Official records later say 9.11. Time is distance, it’s minutes that divide the map not meters, perhaps it’s time not space that the ships sail in, measure, communicate through, and yet here theres a gap.

It could all be mistakes, and heaven knows for a crew thats, by sheer neglect driven 120,00 tons of oil onto the sea’s surface it’s likely.

But I have another explanation; in that lacuna the history of the Torrey Canyon happens, condensed and total and perfect, like the expanding idea in your head that you can never quite do justice to. Everything is in there at once, all in the same lost quarter. The ship kaleidoscopes between the man striking oil in the yet unfamiliar California desert outside a yet unbuilt Los Angeles, volcanic plutons push from the crevices of the earth, granite forms ridges like a dragon’s spine splitting the current channel. The land repopulates with our mesolithic cousins picking along the shoreline for mussels, storybook arthurian knights, the brightly coloured heroes and heroines of Lyonesse unfurl their banners. The horrified holidaymakers look on on the disaster and the first outside broadcast trucks roll out their cable. The oil seeps, grows, reforms out of it’s condensation into the jewelled microorganisms and winding plants of the cretaceous. The reef on the ships corpse grows, sprouting jewel anemones and darting fish, forests of sugar kelp spread across the sunlight zone of the channel. The murked sea bird god rises incarnate in the flowing oil, calls to it’s fellow anointed. The gold filled caskets, stacks of dainty plates, amphora of wine in the ships hold, because the wreck is all wrecks and all wrecks have treasure, glitter and clatter and splash as the afterlife splits open the tomb. Here in the surprisingly ornate dining room of the sunk tanker the government meets and lawyers talk, make records, a whole room of the national archive is accessible through the smaller door. The Liberian ambassador struts in his Saville row suit towards the podium with his report. The ship sees, as ships see, Frank Holmes - Abu Naft and William Richard Williamson walking through the almost empty sands for the Burgon Oil field, it hears like a whale heres, the ships beneath it and their beloved corpses, wreck upon wreck upon wreck on these stones.

Theres a gap in the record. The Torrey Canyon built in 1959 at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company in Newport News, Virginia, USA. In 1965 the ship was enlarged to nearly double her capacity in Bremerhaven in West Germany; a country that existed in my childhood, loomed large even in the news and in our popular imagination as a place of boundaries. A gate in a wall (I passed through it once), a bridge for exchange into that vast mirror world of the soviet empire.

The Torrey Canyon, cut and enlarged with new tanks added, the Mary Rose, tragically refitted and enlarged, toppling over on her (second) maiden voyage. All the ships at the bottom of the sea are works in progress not finished artefacts. Not all. The Vasa, whole and perfect, brand new and submerged 1000 meters into her first voyage. The gap in the record for the Vasa is 1628 to 1961; three hundred years of living in another world before - perhaps rudely being dragged back into the surface world. Not all, the ships built for burial remain perfect as no body lying with them in the tomb does. I think the thing I’m getting at is that there are different time zones. Here out in surface world, was it like being drawn up from sleep? Imagine ships resting on the bottom of the seas, are they sleeping? Is the ships purposes to float and these resting broken things have failed, dwell there in failure? Or, is it like the feeling in the theatre balcony - that one could, should almost step off into the void below, tumbling in some dreadful mirror of the aerialists on stage (or is it the other way?). Is there a sense of relief when finally the defiance of the deep ends. Does the ship yearn for the rocks and the deep? To meet it’s sisters in the water, be done with the baubles of the surface and surrender to the seabed and it’s legions?