Ocean's Story

The sea in all its uses: navigation, fisheries, whaling, wrecks, lighthouses, cables, pirates and the naval battles that decided empires. Frank Goodrich compiled it in 1873 as a single volume of everything a general reader might want about the ocean. It is an encyclopaedia disguised as a narrative, and the whaling and cable-laying chapters are the strongest. Fifty-nine plates, from Bonaventura Peeters to Aivazovsky and Turner, follow the same water the text does, from Venetian lagoons and the Black Sea to the Thames and the Dutch coast.