The Sea Inside

and referring, in his no-nonsense northern text, to the White-Rump, noted that the traps were made of horse hair, and hidden beneath a piece of turf. He reckoned ‘near 2000 dozen’ were taken each year around Eastbourne alone, to be sold for sixpence a dozen in London, ‘where they are … thought not inferior to Ortolan’, a small bird which was and still is eaten in France. (A captive ortolan’s eyes were poked out; it was then force-fed oats before being drowned in brandy and swallowed beak-first, its carcase covered with a napkin to hide the shameful act from the eyes of God.) In 1825, Mrs Mary Trimmer, ‘author of
Man in a Savage and Civilized State
’, updated Bewick’s book, silently removing ‘White-Rump’ from its chapter heading, adding that, ‘as they are very timid birds, the motion of even a cloud … will immediately drive them into the traps’, and noting that a single shepherd could catch eighty-four dozen birds a day.
    As the overfed inhabitants of the watering holes of Brighton and Tunbridge Wells, themselves as migratory as the birds, sucked and chewed one white arse after another, it is little wonder that, as the Reverend White noted, ‘About
Michelmas
they retire and are seen no more until
March
.’ White, though, had no idea where they went.

    They may be scared by clouds, but wheatear are bold birds, hopping close to my feet. To Derek Jarman, walking in Dungeness where he had retreated to his tar-black Prospect Cottage, and where he gathered holy stones for friends to wear around their necks as though to protect them from the nearby nuclear reactor, ‘the snobbish wheatears complain –
tch! tch!
’ But Tennyson heard them differently –

    The wheatears whisper to each other:
    What is it they say? What do they there?

    – as he pounded the island’s downs in his military cape and broad-brimmed hat and oath-catching beard.
    Tennyson was born in Lincolnshire in 1809. ‘Before I could read,’ he remembered, ‘I was in the habit on a stormy day of spreading my arms to the wind, and crying out “I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind.”’ He was a poet attuned to nature in what we consider to have been an age of science and industry. Yet the era itself was wild and prophetic, as filled with female Christs and millenarians as it was with evolutionists and industrialists; as much concerned with myth and mortality and looking backwards as it was with moving into the future.
    Tennyson’s most famous work,
In Memoriam
, was a tribute to his handsome young friend Arthur Hallam, for whom he had ‘a profound affection’ and who died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of twenty-two:

    Forgive my grief for one removed,
    Thy creature, whom I found so fair.

    When the poem was published in 1850, many readers thought these lines must have been written by a woman. To Tennyson, Hallam had become conflated with the young hero of Thomas Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
, the inspiration for his own
Idylls of the King
, which in turn Julia Margaret Cameron re-imagined in her dreamy photographs. Their Isle of Wight was a new Albion, clad in its white cliffs, as if its downs and beaches were a concentration of all that Britain represented. After all, the entire empire was overseen from this sliver of southern England, floating in the Channel like Lyonesse, the mythic isle where Arthur was said to have died. A few miles from Freshwater, in her island fastness of Osborne, Victoria, who would lose her own prince to typhoid, pronounced the poem to be her favourite work of literature after the Bible.
    Yet Tennyson’s romantic sentiments were not quite as they seemed. His words expressed the overturning of old certainties in the age of Darwin’s discoveries:

    Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
    With ravine, shriek’d against his creed.

    The way that nature was seen was being overturned. In 1844, Robert Chambers’
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
was published anonymously, and sensationally, addressing the idea of the transmutation of species. It was avidly received, not least by Tennyson, who acknowledged that it explored theories he himself had addressed in his work, and by Prince Albert, who read it aloud to the Queen. As Tennyson was drifting into his Arthurian
Idylls
, Darwin was writing
On the Origin of Species
in a hotel on the same island. It was as if the world were being reordered here, at England’s outer limits.
    ‘The far future has been my world always,’