By The Landlord
“In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed and the boldest staggered.” – Edmund Burke
“We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.” – Gilbert K. Chesterton
“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.” – William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
“This, then, was the Drake Passage, the most dreaded bit of ocean on the globe—and rightly so. Here nature has been given a proving ground on which to demonstrate what she can do if left alone.” ― Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
"The Bermuda Triangle coughs up myths like a consumptive asthmatic. Missing vessels are blamed on aliens. Atlantis. Time rifts. Ghost ships. Magnetic anomalies. Methane eruptions." — Chelsea Cain
"Gibraltar, a fortress carved by the gods and steeped in history." — Joseph Conrad (1907)
“Gibraltar, a bridge between continents, a meeting point of cultures." — Graham Greene
“A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!” – Leigh Mercer (with a famous palindrome)
“The sea has testified that Africa and Europe have kissed.” — Michelangelo Saez
"The Bering Strait is an object lesson, reminding us that people are part of, not superior to, the natural world." — Bathsheba Demuth
"Off Cape Horn there are but two kinds of weather, neither one of them a pleasant kind." — John Masefield
"Below 40 South there is no law, below 50 South there is no God." — Sailor's Proverb
They are often small, but potent stretches of water connecting two seas or big basins, sometimes known as channels, passageways, straits, and sometimes, appropriately for this site, called sounds. They connect also countries or continents, cultures, east and west, north and south, as vital short-cut trade routes, military strongholds and flashpoints, rippling with tension, history, danger and mystery, wars and sea skirmishes, shipwrecks and strange disappearances, bubbling and swirling with myth, stories and naturally … song.
RIght at the the moment the most talked about is the Strait of Hormuz, one that perhaps before this current, and frankly, quite crazy war, many people may never have even heard of (perhaps including the current US president) – a deep but only 50-mile wide intersection between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, south of coast of Iran, and north of the Musandam Peninsula, shared by the United Arab Emirates and an exclave of Oman. It’s a passage that carries 20% of all worldwide oil and other trade. It’s so important to the global economy that anyone who controls it really has holds a huge amount of power, and right now, with the ability to fill it with mines, it is predictably Iran. “Iran holds a lot of cards with the Strait Of Hormuz,” and, with such geography always, as history teaches us, so key to economic power, “that vulnerability remains pretty much forever,” as recently remarked by Australian economist and public policy scholarJustin Wolfers. Currently, with many ships unable to move through, it’s what’s known as a choke point.
You’ll no doubt be hearing about Hormuz much more elsewhere, so that’s enough from me on that, and there may not be many songs about that strait yet, but there are hundreds of other straits around the globe that would apply to this topic, not only real, but also those of fiction can also count. There is only time to briefly skim across a few of them them, but hopefully song suggestions will take us around the world with a more profitable maritime and musical voyage.
So where might this topic sail? Nearest Song Bar’s home port, you could start with the English Channel, at its narrowest point just 20 miles between Dover and Calais and the site of many historical naval wars and tensions, but also since 1994, a connecting underwater railway via the Channel Tunnel.
Could a similar project, even a vast bridge, connect Russia and Alaska over the 50-mile so-called Ice Curtain on the Bering Strait that shocks many how close the US and Russia are when looking at a map?
Almost touching distance: The Bering Strait
South of the Bering, in Canada’s British Columbia, was the famous site of Ripple Rocks -two underwater mountain peaks which by their geography created hazardous passage. To counteract this, in 1958 the tallest one was blown to smithereens. The explosion was noted as one of the largest non-nuclear planned explosions on record at the time. Here’s a photo in 1957 of the dangerous waters prior the the explosion, and then a video of the event:
Dangers waters of Ripple Rock in 1957, then in 1958 … Bang!
Back over to Europe, the Mediterranean Sea’s straits are not only full of ships, but also stories and absolutely vital trade routes. The Bosporus or Bosphorus Strait is a natural internationally significant waterway located in Turkey which is straddled by the city of Istanbul, connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara. It’s a the site of a huge amount of trade transfer, including, apparently, a constant ghost fleet of undercover vessels by Russia despite embargoes since the Ukraine war. -
Strait of Gibraltar (left) links Africa to Europe and the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Seas. The Bosphorus (right) the Mediterranean to the Black Sea the Russia ….
The Bosphorus is also the site of many a Greek myth, including the colossal floating rocks known as the Symplegades, or Clashing Rocks, once guarded both sides of the Bosporus and destroyed any ship that attempted to pass through the strait by crushing them, recreated in the famous Jason and the Argonauts movie, in which the rocks that crushed ships passing between them. Steady, lads!
While the clashing rocks are a myth the Bosphorus is still known to be dangerously fast-flowing, eddying waters.
Then the west, there’s the Strait of Gibraltar, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea and separates Europe from Africa by just 9 miles at its narrowest point, and is the site of shared and claimed military territory between the UK, Spain and Morocco. “Gibraltar, the key to the Mediterranean,” declared Lord Horatio Nelson in 1805. “Twin giants watching the Herculean Straits,” said the Anglican archbishop and poet Richard Chenevix Trench of the land masses either side and referring to the so-called Pillars of Hercules, the promontories that flank the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar.
Manmade waterways could also count this week, such as the Panama Canal, the artificial 51-mile waterway in Panama, first opened in 1914 that connects the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific Ocean, with a long history of political control and conflict, originating from an idea first conceived in 1513 by the Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa, but since attempted and built by several countries, particularly France and US, and one described by former peace-keeping US president, when signing a treaty in 1977 with Panama to give that country control as “a vast, heroic expression of that age-old desire to bridge the divide and to bring people closer together.”
The first ship to transit the Panama Canal at the formal opening, SS Ancon, passes through on 15 August 1914
The Suez Canal in Egypt, connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea is another artificial channel that has certainly travelled in song lyrics.
Sailing around the world, songs might also visit the dangerous Drake Passage (between South America and Antarctica, or Cape Horn (Chile), the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa), or much further east, in one of the most dangerous areas, Japan’s Ma no umi" (魔の海) and also known as the Devil’s Sea or Sea of Troubles, the Devil's triangle, the Dragon's Triangle, the Formosa Triangle and the Pacific Bermuda Triangle, thought to be the site of not only dangerous waters but even paranormal activity, from Kamikaze (Divine Wind) to Umibōzu - mythical sea-spirit monsters sighted here by sailors that appear on calm seas and create disasters.
Devil’s Sea, south of Japan
Beware of Umibōzu around the Devil’s Sea
Naturally of course the area to the east of the Caribbean, the Bermuda Triangle, also counts as dangerous waters, such is the equally tragic catalogue of disappearing ships and also planes in the area, possibly do to extreme and very unpredictable weather conditions. What better for the imagination to swirl for stories and song? Where else? Falkland Sound? Deception Sound? Lancaster Sound? Windward Passage? Check out this list.
So then, helping this vast voyage through straits and channels, passages and sounds, through choppy history, geography and myth, is our own Captain Marco den Ouden! Anchor your song suggestions in comment boxes below for deadline at 11pm UK Maritime on Monday, for playlists published next week. But first, time to raise those sails …
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