ABSTRACT

The ocean must be anthropomorphized, as though it could not exist or possess a meaning were it not a mirror of humankind. The “wheel of human fortune” has “determined the destiny of the sea,” Braudel observes, inextricably binding the fates of human beings and that of the waters which encircle their received earthly domain.1 To write a story of an ocean, then, is to write the story of those who have traversed it, who have inhabited its shores, and who, through the power of the imagination, have conjured its many meanings.