Unfathomable depths

A wide-ranging — and sometimes exhausting — treatise on the life and times of the Atlantic Ocean explores its influence on the history of civilization

November 07, 2010|Matthew Price, Globe Correspondent

Veteran journalist Simon Winchester has, in recent years, taken to writing what might be called geological blockbusters. His method is to focus on a relatively contained event — the eruption of Krakatoa, say, or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 — and envelop it in several layers of context, social, scientific, historical, political. Winchester’s technique gives him license to pursue tangents hither and yon, which are annoying and charming in equal measure.

The subject of his new book, “the S-shaped body of water covering 33 million square miles’’ otherwise known as the Atlantic Ocean, gives him an even wider latitude to explore the interaction between Earth’s physical geography and human civilization. The Atlantic has had a profound influence on the history of humankind. Winchester tracks the Atlantic from its beginnings, when it “started to achieve properly oceanic dimensions about 190 million years ago,’’ to the present day.

For Winchester, the Atlantic is the very cradle of Western civilization, “a focal point, an axis, a fulcrum, around which the power and influence of the modern world has long been distributed.’’ Primitive man first wandered to its shores in Africa. Phoenician merchants defied superstition and took their trading ships to the Iberian coast and Morocco. The Atlantic fostered trade and commerce; war and empire building; exploration and exploitation. It linked Europe to the New World, a vital passage in the creation of cultures and societies.

“The Atlantic is the classic ocean of our imaginings,’’ he writes, “an industrial ocean of cold and iron and salt, a purposeful ocean of sea-lanes and docksides and fisheries, an ocean alive with squadrons of steadily moving ships above, with unimaginable volumes of mysterious marine abundance below. It is also an entity that seems to be interminable.’’