I’ve been trying to read as much of William Langewiesche’s writing as possible, because it’s wonderful. He’s the author of The Outlaw Sea and this article about an attack on a cruise ship by Somali pirates. This article, penned for The Atlantic in 2001, is about extreme weather, particularly as experienced by a small island called Ile d’Ouessant (the British call it Ushant), belonging to France.
… so many Britons have come to grief in these waters that, local lore has it, the royal family helped to fund the construction of a church and established the island’s cemetery for the English dead.
The French, too, have suffered heavily on Ouessant, as have other seafaring people. In any language it is one of the ocean’s notorious places, the treacherous leeward shore at the entrance to the English Channel, a deadly outcrop of rocks among strong tidal currents, where even now, in this era of powerful engines and satellite navigation, ships continue to be threatened.
Ile d’Ouessant, just over six kilometres long and three kilometres wide, is an island at the entrance to the English Channel. You can see the location of the island on this map, unprotected by any other landmass from the weather systems that form in the north Atlantic Ocean. About 800 hardy people live there, and many ships have come to grief on its shores and surrounding reefs.
According to Langewiesche, the island is unassumingly pastoral in summer, but the presence of five lighthouses on the island’s shores gives a clue as to what the weather is like during winter. The storms that batter Ouessant are spectacular, with winds reaching 160 kilometres per hour. Langewiesche makes a visit to the island to experience a December storm, and writes lyrically of the immense strength of the wind and waves that batter this rocky outcrop of French soil. He observes an absence of flying debris during the storm; the island has been scoured so thoroughly by the wind that there’s nothing loose left to blow away.
Langewiesche writes beautifully, but it’s not just the way he writes that makes me want to pack a bag and head for Ile d’Ouessant one winter. The starkness and loneliness of the place seems ideal to be reminded of the power of the wind and waves that shape our planet.
Read the full article here.
