ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to investigate the nature and potential of ‘the new thalassography’ as a scholarly initiative, while it is indeed still relatively new. ‘Thalassography’ has hitherto been a maritime mirroring of geography, in that word’s more literal meaning of the description of the land—a more local subdivision of oceanography. Maritime histories speak directly to scholars of literature and the visual arts as well as to historians, and addressing this is, as has been suggested, a prominent aim of thalassography. Becoming maritime is the transformation through which a community which has to various extents not previously been engaged with the sea undergoes some kind of structural revolution and emerges, typically after a strikingly short time, as one which excels at some or all of the maritime vocations, such as naval war, piracy, seaborne trade, shipbuilding, even systematic fisheries.
