“The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans”, by David Abulafia

1088 pages, Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0199934980

Damn, what did I get myself into? David Abulafia’s The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans is 1000+ pages of (very small and very compact) text that seeks to give an all-encompassing and all-inclusive history of when and how humanity began to traverse the waters of the world – and I mean ALL the waters of the world: the book is divided into five sections and 51 chapters, each of which deals with the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean, along with all of the interconnected seas, to boot. Any and every culture that had contact with a puddle is reviewed here, an impressive task considering the age of the world and the comings and goings of people all about. While obviously a testament to the author’s erudition, The Boundless Sea is also that rarest of things: a detailed history on a massive subject that is also enjoyable as heck. No, really, even though this thing is as big as a cinderblock and took me 51 days to read (a chapter a day, sport), I was never once bored or thought that Abulafia should have cut this piece or that paragraph. This is good stuff, right here.

As stated above, the erudition displayed by Abulafia (the Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University) is, in a word, astonishing, and he sails his ship in a way that effortlessly displays the multiple links that have combined to bring political, economic and religious change to the world, as well as trade, for without sea trade, the ability to exchange ideas and knowledge on Planet Earth is necessarily confined. It is easy to forget that, for all of the combined joy and dismay that today’s global economy may bring to modern consumers, this is, in fact, not a modern-day phenomenon. Humanity the world over has always been interconnected and traded goods and ideas with aplomb; it has only been during the 20th and now 21st Centuries that this interconnectedness has been thrust into overdrive, with modern governments evidently unable to stop the spread of merchandise and ideologies (or diseases; thanks, Coronavirus). This has the makings to undermine totalitarian regimes while also undercutting free societies, as ideas are spread and adopted without compunction as to their origins or their ultimate conclusions.

The best history entertains as well as informs, and The Boundless Sea is no exception to this oft-ignored rule, as when Abulafia tells us that Columbus was disappointed (to say nothing of delighted) to find naked natives on his travels, rather than the dog-headed horrors he had expected, and recorded in his logbook: “I have not found any monstrous men, as many expected; rather, they are all people of very beautiful appearance”. Good for you, Chris. Or when he writes that pirates the world over really did wear red cloths upon their heads and drink bottle after bottle of rum (Yo-Ho-Ho). Abulafia’s balance in painting his portrait, warts and all, is displayed as he notes the fact that “black rulers sold slaves to white merchants has not come easily to historians of the slave trade”, or the fact that agents of the East India Company were instructed to treat slaves humanely because “they are men”, not for compassion’s sake but because dead slaves were a waste of a perfectly good commodity. As has been stated before, facts are facts and don’t care about your feelings.

In his preface, Abulafia swears that he hasn’t “attempted to write what pretends to be a complete or comprehensive history of the oceans”, a claim he proceeds to bury over the next thousand pages, give or take. The good professor shouldn’t feel any sense of false modesty, however, for The Boundless Sea opens one’s eyes to the vast vistas of ocean-bound exploration, trade and travel that all of humanity has engaged in for as long as our species learned to float.