Re-reading this book was both reassuring and sobering. It was reassuring to an author that so little needed to be changed after fifteen years, and sobering for the same reason. In that time marine science has moved on and fascinating new data have emerged; but nothing, I think, to alter radically my original standpoint. On the political front, one signal and welcome development has been the ban by both the UN and the EU on drift-net fishing. Nevertheless, the steely attrition of the world’s oceans proceeds at an ever-accelerating pace. Given the examples of well-monitored commercial stocks collapsing from over-fishing, the devastation currently being wrought by fishing fleets around the world is a spectacle that makes one wonder afresh at the hubris in styling ourselves Homo sapiens. Homo stultus would have been more accurate taxonomy.
In the long run, of course, our present cavalier treatment of the oceans matters not a jot. However heedless our self-interest, the sea will survive. It will outlive us and remain the source and origin of the planet’s biota aeons from now. In any case, in writing this book I had no interest in producing an environmentalist jeremiad. On the contrary, I wanted to convey something of the affection, awe and often loathing that people have always felt for this mysterious body of water, both our cradle and the earth’s largest geophysical feature. The sea leaks unconsciously into even the most land-lubberly of us from time to time, and manages to leave its tide marks in cultures as in rocks the world over.
The few minor changes I have made to the original text for this new edition are nearly all updatings, and those mainly to the chapter on fishing. I have also added some footnotes to take account of things like new free-diving records or oceanographical data. The single new addition is the inclusion of ‘Sea Burial’, originally published in Granta, which describes a sea voyage I once made in the tropics. Neither precisely reportage nor fiction, it was an attempt to express that strange borderland where the sea’s power to haunt sometimes seems as real a force as a wave’s kinetic energy.
James Hamilton-Paterson
2006