WHITE SEAS
• In a report to the US Hydrographic Office in Port Townsend, Washington State, on 13 August 1910, Captain Samuels of the American barkentine Aurora, on her arrival from Callao, Peru, described a phenomenon that marine authorities declared to be without precedent. On 17 June, in latitude 11 degrees south and longitude 80 west, the vessel entered an area of snow-white water. The expanse was so large that it took almost an entire day’s sailing to traverse. Its merging with the natural ocean water was sharply defined in colour, creating a marvellous scene of marine beauty. Investigation with every means available failed to show the cause was submarine volcanic eruption or other upheaval. A bucket filled with the milk-white fluid, when left on deck for an hour, resumed a normal seawater colour. NY Times, 14 Aug 1910.
• Another “sea of milk” was reported to the hydrographic office in Baltimore on 31 October 1931 by AV Potter, third officer of the British steamship Asphalion. Steaming into a heavy south-west swell, the vessel was recently in the Atlantic at latitude 12 degrees 51 minutes north, longitude 54 degrees 55 minutes west when rough broken seas were met. The water, however, appeared to be smooth, because each combing breaker left a shadowless wake of white, boiling water. “The expanse of water had every semblance of a sea of milk,” Potter reported. The phenomenon continued for five hours, throwing the horizon of ink-black sky and white sea into bold contrast. NY Times, 1 Nov 1931.
The news reports from the first half of the 20th century, which I have summarised here, come from two sources. Those from the New York Times were sent to Fortean Towers a few years ago by Martin Piechota of Dupont, Pennsylvania. The others come from 45 massive scrapbooks compiled by George Cecil Ives (1867-1950, pictured left), the illegitimate son of an English army officer and a Spanish-Jewish baroness. Ives was a poet, penal reformer, early homosexual law reform campaigner and friend of Oscar Wilde. The American Beat entrepreneur Jay Landesman discovered the scrapbooks on the pavement outside a junk shop in Islington, north London, and recruited me to edit a selection of Ives’s clippings, which appeared in a book of facsimiles called Man Bites Man, the Scrapbook of an Edwardian Eccentric (1980).