Water, Water Everywhere

Ann Sandford - 

In “Atlantic,” Simon Winchester aims to describe a particular “human relationship with the sea.” He captures glimpses of the Atlantic Ocean’s 190 million years of physical history and depicts aspects of humanity’s involvement “with and within it.”

Archaeologists tell us that humans first began to settle along this ocean at the southern coast of South Africa starting about 164,000 years ago. A stage had been prepared and mankind, the “central character, is set to step into the light,” writes Mr. Winchester, the author of 20 previous books. A “pan-Atlantic civilization” would grow to encompass Western Europe, North America, Latin America, and western and central Africa. How this civilization changed over time is the major theme running through this provocative and artfully written book.

At the start, Mr. Winchester summarizes the maritime exploits of the Phoenicians’ expert sailors, the travels of Vikings with their “freebooting violence,” and the Irish-Scottish Christian missionary expeditions that began in the sixth century and eventually reached Iceland and, perhaps, Newfoundland.

But I found myself most engaged by the middle sections of this sprawling “biography,” the period from 1500 to 1800, when the author’s historical narrative achieves its tightest cohesion. Mr. Winchester uses the moment in the early 16th century when German cartographers recognized the continent America and named the ocean the Atlantic to proclaim that the sea now had a “proper identity [and] demanded to be known.”

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