Ron Peters's Reviews > The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans

“There is the story of a schooner captain who lost his compass overboard and confessed to his Polynesian crew that he was lost. They told him not to worry and took him where he wanted to go. Puzzled by the ease with which they had achieved this, he asked how they knew where the island was. ‘Why,’ they replied, ‘it has always been there.’”

I read this mainly because it is recommended by Peter Frankopan whose The Silk Roads: A New History of the World was one of my favorite histories from the last few years.

Abulafia looks at human history with respect to maritime trade (including the trade in humans), exploration, war, colonization, bits of piracy, the construction of the Suez and Panama Canals, passenger steamships, and the rise of container cargo shipping, among other things.

Abulafia covers nearly all parts of the globe (he doesn’t include the Mediterranean because he wrote a separate book about that) and probably 10,000 years of history.

The Boundless Sea does feel a tad boundless, because of its sheer bulk and the density of the information it contains. But it’s highly entertaining. If I found it a little slow to read that was because it is so full of interesting stories that I constantly paused, lost in thought about what I had just read.

It has good illustrations and maps, the latter requiring some page flipping; I found that reading next to my computer where I could also scroll around Google Maps helped at times. If obsessively detailed references and indexing turn your crank, you’ll be thrilled!