Of their destination, the sand banks and shallows of the Wadden Sea (that is, the Frisian Islands and the intertidal areas of the North Sea off Denmark, Holland, and Germany), Carruthers at first has nothing more to say than, “They look rather desolate.” He has to replace his fantasies of relaxing on “orderly, snowy decks and basket chairs under the awning aft” with the reality of “roughing it in a shabby little yacht, utterly out of my element,” with a companion who seems “a tiresome enigma.”Īs Davies initiates Carruthers into the Wadden Sea’s tortuous channels and tidal shallows, Carruthers begins to realize they are tracking momentous quarry. Watson–like young Englishman, Carruthers, is invited on a duck hunt by Davies, an obscure Oxford acquaintance. And in sharp contrast to later examples of the genre (Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky), its tale of erroneous escapism devolves not into existential crisis but into global political intrigue. Yet it is also the travelogue of a bourgeois vacation gone terribly awry. His only novel, The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service, originally published in 1903, is a top-drawer spy adventure. Perhaps the most tantalizing and lyrical exploration of those desolate spaces was penned by Erskine Childers, a British civil servant and soldier whose intensifying engagement with Irish nationalism led to his execution in 1922. Yet intertidal lowlands also make rich artistic terrain.

This environmental Orientalism has left the drab, sulfurous North Atlantic marshes and mudflats a distant, dismal-seeming second. Ever since James Cook nearly wrecked his ship on the Great Barrier Reef in 1770, European publics have turned to South Sea cays and atolls when they craved adventures in the shallows.

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