Under the Sea-wind: A Naturalist's Picture of Ocean Life

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Rachel Carson: The Sea Trilogy is kept in print by a gift to the Guardians of American Letters Fund from The Gould Family Foundation, which also provided project support for the volume.

The fish were nervous, he could tell. The streaks in the upper water were like hundreds of darting comets. The glow of the whole mass alternately dulled and kindled again to flame. It made him think of the light from steel furnaces in the sky. Rachel Carson writes about the sea, the sand, the birds, fish and the smallest of creatures and organisms in a way that makes us realise how little we observe of what is occurring around us, though we may stand, swim, float or fish in the midst of it. For the sea, its shore and the air above thrum like a thriving city of predator and prey of all sizes and character, constantly fluctuating, its citizens ever alert to when it is prudent to move and when it is necessary to be still.

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During her 15-year career in federal service, Carson found the time to research and write a variety of nature writings. Her literary side-hustle supported her family and eventually allowed her to move to Maine in 1953 to concentrate on writing full-time. In 1957 she began writing Silent Spring. Of all her books, Carson’s first, Under the Sea-Wind, reads the most like a collection of fictional stories, yet it features the least human interiority. Its three sections follow a cast of 13 enigmatically named characters (Silverbar the sanderling, Lophius the angler fish, Ookpik the snow owl) and myriad unnamed creatures of the western Atlantic as they fulfill their migratory destinies between the Arctic and the Florida Keys. It is a meticulously researched feat of nature writing told in a roving close third person that assumes the consciousness of its animal characters. Yet there’s nothing so fantastical about it; her animals don’t have language, but they do possess memory, appetites, preferences, ancestries, and enemies.

Who was this woman? Pennsylvania-born, raised on a 65-acre farm near Springdale, north of Pittsburgh. A lifelong naturalist, stemming from a childhood spent exploring that landscape. A brilliant intellect – the first woman, in 1936, to pass the U.S. Civil Service Test. A gifted writer, who was not only readable, spinning prose of great beauty, but also able to seamlessly work in her copious scientific knowledge.

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T he Sea Around Us has ambitions of a wider scope: It is Carson’s lyrical biography of the ocean (the first word in her alphabetical glossary is “abyss”). Here she hits on a style and form that will more or less characterize all her subsequent books. The chapters are messily arranged by phenomena, build on one another, repeat sentiments, and read as one flowing narrative rather than a collection of distinct essays. The voice is just as florid as in Sea-Wind, but more assured, and Carson puts less distance between herself and the reader, so that she is more like a teacher guiding us through the world than an author constructing one for us. This helps with concepts that are even harder to visualize than eel larvae, like the creation of the world, the rise and fall of islands, and the force of tides. We can only sense that in the deep and turbulent recesses of the sea are hidden mysteries far greater than any we have solved. Though Carson had never seen the sea herself, she threw herself into its study. She studied biology, then zoology, eventually taking a job as a writer for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. All of this was incredibly rare for a young woman in the 1920s and ’30s, but Carson’s trajectory was a demonstration of the expansive potential of curiosity. It also reflected the tireless tutelage of her mother, Maria, who had instilled a love of the wild in her children by regularly taking them on walks to learn about botany and birds. Carson absorbed these lessons and, throughout her life, maintained a deep conviction that wonder had to be at the foundation of any relationship with nature. They leave in their wake a cloud of transparent spheres of infinitesimal size, a vast, sprawling river of life, the sea’s counterpart of the river of stars that flows through the sky as the Milky Way. There are known to be hundreds of millions of eggs to the square mile, billions in an area a fishing vessel could cruise over in an hour, hundreds of trillions in the whole spawning area.

Celebrating the mystery and beauty of birds and sea creatures in their natural habitat, Under the Sea-Wind —Rachel Carson’s first book and her personal favorite—is the early masterwork of one of America’s greatest nature writers. Evoking the special mystery and beauty of the shore and the open sea—its limitless vistas and twilight depths—Carson’s astonishingly intimate, unforgettable portrait captures the delicate negotiations of an ingeniously calibrated ecology. I was stunned, for example, by her account of how the molten earth’s atmosphere cooled and produced centuries of rain (“The Gray Beginnings”), by her bleak visions of the ocean’s deepest abysses, drained of all color and utterly hostile to life (“The Sunless Sea” and “The Long Snowfall”), by her many chapters of marine history—oceanic navigation since the Phoenicians—as well as by her sense of undersea topography as a mirror of what we see and measure above sea level, except that its “mountains” and “valleys” are much taller, deeper, and more mysterious (“Hidden Lands”). Again and again, it’s Carson’s language that makes these visionary landscapes unforgettable. Then too she increases her credibility with frequent admissions of fallibility: The story manages the most delicate of balances imaginable; it shows us the danger, savagery and fury of the natural Atlantic world, fish and birds die, hunting and predation are not sugar coated in any way, but the telling is so meticulous that reading the ways of the sea is at worst bitter sweet and it never becomes depressing. Another tactic of the author is to give us one or two 'characters' to follow through the story. This is masterly, because much as I love reading about marine life, following an individual lets one immerse in the story rather than feeling as though one is reading a textbook.Rachel Carson--pioneering environmentalist and author of Silent Spring--opens our eyes to the wonders of the natural world in her groundbreaking paean to the sea. Another way Carson appeals to her reader’s “intuitive comprehension” is oratorical. Sometimes toward the ends of paragraphs and frequently at the ends of chapters, she abandons the clear-eyed prose of jewel-bright exactitude—call it her Darwinian poetry—for an elevated style of long phrases, formal diction, frequent parataxis, and anaphoric repetition, one that may derive in part from the King James Bible, or Milton or perhaps Melville at his loftiest, but one she makes entirely her own. The longest, most brilliant passage in this mode comes at the end of Under the Sea-Wind. The season is early spring, when all the eels and elvers have returned to the bay of their origin, awaiting the moment to head upriver en masse and spawn: Those who dwell … among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.

Fist of all comes The Sea Around Us and it is the perfect one to start with, it is full of facts, knowledge and passion for the ocean but it also gives a really great overview for how the ocean all works. The magnitude of the book is actually quite incredible, when you think of it and the writing is lovely but it is a very practical, matter of fact book. I have reviewed it here:Recognized globally for her writing, Rachel Carson’s work has shaped environmental policy and imaginations worldwide. The book Silent Spring made Carson a household name, though it was not her first work. Published in 1962, Silent Spring was groundbreaking, detailing the negative impacts of synthetic pesticides, namely DDT, on the environment.