The sea is one of the most vital and recurring images in human culture. Every civilization has a flood myth, for example, and sixty-five percent of the world’s population lives on the coast of a sea. In The Sea: A Literary Companion:

• Charles Darwin expresses his fascination with the glowing phosphorescence of the nighttime sea,
• Ann Saunders, who crossed the Atlantic in 1826, describes the desperation of passengers stranded for a month at sea,
• the story of the Biblical Flood is told in three versions (from Genesis, Inuit legend, and Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage),
• Yann Martel’s Life of Pi portrays the modern ark, and
• literary sea-watchers Rachel Carson, Jonathan Raban, and Andrea Barrett are all excerpted.