From “Introduction”

“We all come from the sea,” John F. Kennedy once observed. “In our veins is the exact percentage of salt in our blood as exists in the ocean . . .When we go back to the sea, we are going back whence we came.”

Kennedy’s words ring true in several ways. Most scientists today agree that when life originated on this planet three and a half billion years ago, it originated at the bottom of the ocean, probably somewhere along the forty thousand-mile-long mid-ocean ridge that encircles the globe ten thousand feet below the oceans’ surface like the seam of a very large baseball. Along the ridge, ruptures in the earth’s lithospheric plates emit hot gasses, forming mineral clouds called “black smokers” that heat the surrounding water to more than seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Strange creatures cluster around these black smokers: pale, eyeless shrimp; six-foot-long, mouthless tubeworms; animals that breathe hydrogen sulfide instead of oxygen, can withstand temperatures that would parboil less-hardy organisms, and have entered into a symbiotic relationship with bacteria in order to process water molecules into food. Our best guess is that this deep-sea faunal assemblage sprang from the same multi-celled life forms that we did.

There is also evidence of more recent connections to the sea. In the 1960s, Oxford marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy suggested that one of the direct ancestors of Homo sapiens was a semiaquatic hominid, an apelike mammal specially adapted to spend at least part of its life in the water. These were shore-dwelling proto-humans, rather than creatures of the savannahs. They lived primarily on shellfish, became excellent swimmers, and developed layers of subcutaneous, blubber-like fat to keep them warm and buoyant. Like dolphins, whales, seals, and otters, Hardy hypothesized, “perhaps Man had been aquatic, too.”

In 1982, Hardy’s theory was picked up by Elaine Morgan in her controversial book The Aquatic Ape. Morgan looked at modern humans and asked why we differ in certain suggestive ways from other African apes. Why are we the only hairless hominids? Hairlessness is an attribute of aquatic animals, not land-dwelling mammals. Why are we the only mammals with conscious breathing? All other terrestrial mammals breathe involuntarily, unable to hold their breath. The placement of the muscles in our throats allows us to open our mouths underwater without drowning. Even bipedalism is unique to humans; apes do not walk truly upright but, like most birds, keep their spinal columns nearly parallel to the ground. The only other truly bipedal animal is the penguin, which is also semi-aquatic.

Morgan suggested that this sea-dwelling ancestor lived beside the Danakil Strait, at the southern end of the Red Sea, about five million years ago, before the Asian landmass drifted over to connect with the African continent. After that cataclysmic contact, Morgan posited, our forebears retreated inland up the Rift Valley, where they evolved into a grassland species: perhaps the waving grass reminded them of the sea. Support for this contentious theory came in 1997, when two Italian paleontologists discovered the fossilized skeleton of Oreopithecus bambolii on the island of Sardinia. Now known as the “swamp ape,” it seems to have been semi-aquatic, was bipedal in the modern sense, and was probably a lot fatter than we are. And in 2007, evidence of behaviorally modern humans dating back 164,000 years—70,000 years earlier than Homo sapiens was thought to have appeared—was found on the shore of the Indian Ocean, on the east coast of South Africa. Human beings have been gazing out over the sea for virtually all of our evolutionary history.

This may explain, in part, why sixty percent of the world’s population lives in coastal areas and sixty-five percent of the world’s largest cities are beside an ocean. Yes, seaside ports are convenient for shipping, but our affinity for the sea may have as much to do with nostalgia as with commerce. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that virtually every culture on the planet has a flood myth. And, as the biographies of many of the writers in this collection attest, as individuals we are subject to otherwise inexplicable longings to go to sea. Charles Darwin, Herman Melville, Joshua Slocum, and Jack London all came to a moment in their lives when they were prepared to drop everything and join a ship that was sailing for somewhere. Dora Birtles suddenly decided to leave her husband and family in Australia, and with four companions, none of whom were sailors, set out to circumnavigate the world in a thirty-four-foot sailboat. Many of our most popular adventure stories, from the novels of Jules Verne and Patrick O’Brian to accounts of Arctic exploration and perfect storms, are sea stories. One of the most widely read books in Elizabethan England was Hakluyt’s Voyages, which gathered together accounts of expeditions by sea to foreign lands, the more arduous the better. In his book-length essay Shipwreck, excerpted here, novelist John Fowles speculates on the strange fascination we have for disasters at sea: “We derive from the spectacle of calamity a sense of personal survival,” he writes. But perhaps it is also a sense of species survival; we know what the sea can do because we used to live there.

One measure of how closely we are tied to the sea is to recall how much of our language is related to it. In English, we no longer speak much of fathoms (six feet) or leagues (three miles), and we may have forgotten the seafaring origins of such phrases as “the devil to pay” and “to let the cat out of the bag,” but these colorful idioms are not entirely metaphoric. The “devil” was the widest part of the hull of a British merchant vessel, and “to pay” meant to caulk with tar: paying the devil was the most dangerous job on a ship. And the cat, of course, was the cat-o’-nine-tails, or the lash, which was kept in a leather bag when not in use. Jonathan Raban, in his excerpt from Passage to Juneau, reminds us of a few more common expressions of nautical origin; “the bitter end,” “taken aback,” “aloof,” and “by and large” are but a small sampling that emphasize the maritime roots of landlubber ways. Whenever we tell stories, we evoke the sea.

The sea’s lure is undeniable and irresistible. In his poem “Sea Fever,” John Masefield writes of the sea’s eternal attraction:

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied…

I have spent many a mesmerized hour standing at a ship’s rail listening to that wild, clear call, carried over three oceans, trying to account for its magnetic pull. No matter how tempestuous the sea, it is somehow satisfying to watch, as though a willful sea is the final confirmation of a natural power we have always suspected to be there and have always welcomed. It is a kind of relief. “Man marks the earth with ruin,” Byron wrote in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, but “his control / Stops with the shore.” There is a fierce inevitability about the sea, “a pleasing fear,” in Byron’s phrase, wonderfully captured in E.J. Pratt’s poem The Titanic. His description, included in this volume, of the iceberg fated to rendezvous with the “unsinkable” vessel has a chilling rightness to it. It is not indifferent Nature, it is Nature with a vengeance. It is justice we are watching.

Both John F. Kennedy and Sir Alister Hardy spoke of going back to the sea, and so we do; every year, sixty million more of us move from inland to the seashore. Many of us don’t stop there. Although there are no statistics on the matter, I would wager that the ashes from a large proportion of human cremations are scattered over water rather than buried in the earth. Not surprisingly, an industry has sprung up to accommodate such requests. For $2,500, anyone can have their loved one’s ashes mixed with marine-grade concrete, formed into a “reef ball”— a hollow, cone-shaped structure with softball-sized holes in the outer shell—and added to one of many “Eternal Reefs” built on a foundation of decommissioned army tanks off the eastern seaboard of North America. Marine organisms build upon the concrete balls, and very soon a natural undersea colony is formed. This, of course, gives a fresh pitch to Shakespeare’s famous lines:

Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made.

Coral, one of the oldest life-forms on Earth, is not far removed from those mystifying creatures still found around black smokers and so, like Sir Francis Drake and Joshua Slocum, we come full circle. The sea, both ever-changing and eternal, unquiet and peaceful, is a torment to the brain and a salve to the spirit. In these twenty-three selections, each of which evoke the beauty and the terror of the sea, we find the clues to both our origin and our destiny.