Seven-Tenths by James Hamilton-Paterson Page B

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’vedone 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