On a hillside not far from Land’s End—near, as well, the famous Minack Theatre, beetling over into the sea—you’ll find the Porthcurno Museum of Global Communications, or PK Porthcurno. Here, near the western limits of Cornwall, overlooking Porthcurno beach, are the archives of the Cable & Wireless Company. I had come with a friend, Laurence, to gather materials for a chapter we were writing together on the cultural history of the deep-sea cables: on the edge of the land, and the edge of the sea, we had come to tune into the voices that had once whirled around Porthcurno—and from Porthcurno, the globe. For, among other things, the museum’s archive includes personal and professional documents relating to the thousands and thousands of miles of submarine telegraph cables that lattice the world’s oceans—wiring the world, so they said; collapsing space and time, so they said—heralding globalised communications networks and the frantic buzz and hum of modernity—heralding even, for some especially anxious poets, the end of the world.
Issue 7
COASTAL BLUR
Jimmy Packham is a writer and academic. He writes about the deep sea, whales and whaling, ghosts and ghostly voices—sometimes separately or in various combinations. He co-runs the Haunted Shores research network and, with Laurence Publicover, writes on the human history of the seafloor.