‘Eminently readable’ – The TLS Books of the Year, 2024

Ocean is an ambitious history of the pre-Columbian Atlantic Ocean, a story that begins with the formation of the mid-Atlantic ridge around 200 million years ago and ends with the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, which served as a model for the methods used by the Spanish in their colonization of the New World.

John Haywood argues that the idea that Atlantic history begins with the first voyage of the famous Genoese navigator is mistaken. The seafaring and shipbuilding skills that enabled European global exploration and expansion did not appear fully developed in the fifteenth century, but were learned over centuries and millennia in the Atlantic and its surrounding seas. The pre-Columbian history of the Atlantic is the story of how Europeans learned to master the oceans, which is key to understanding why it was Europeans, and not any of the world’s other seafaring peoples, who ‘discovered’ the world.

Ocean is informed by the author’s extensive travels around the Atlantic Ocean, crossing Newfoundland’s Grand Banks, the Sea of Darkness, and the weed-covered Sargasso Sea to make landfall at locations as diverse as Vinland, Greenland, the Faroes, and the Cape Verde Islands. Populated by a diverse and multi-ethnic group of sailors, fishermen, monks, merchants, and dreamers, this is an in-depth history of a neglected subject, combining geology, geography, mythology, cosmology, developing maritime technologies, and the early history of exploration to tell an captivating and fascinating story that lies at the very heart of Europe’s modern history and its relationship with the rest of the world.

A history on a grand scale, Ocean offers the reader a rich narrative of history that will appeal to fans of David Abulafia, Simon Winchester, and Michael Pye.

Pages: 560, Year of Publication: 0106, Dimensions: 12.8x12.8cm