Volume 51, Number 13 · August 12, 2004
The Threat from the Sea
By Jonathan Raban
The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime
by William Langewiesche
North Point Press, 239 pp., $23.00
'Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean—roll!' wrote Byron in a comradely salute to the last great romantic wilderness on the planet. '...Man marks the earth with ruin—his control/ Stops with the shore....' In 1818, he could hardly have foreseen that it would not be very long before man would mark the ocean, too, with ruin, poisoning whole seas with his industrial effluent, or fishing them out with vast synthetic nets deployed by immensely powerful hydraulic winches. Yet the sea is still wild: as global warming takes hold, shipwrecking storms are beginning to blow more fiercely, and with greater frequency, than they did in Byron's time, and the reach of the law of the land over the anarchy of the sea is, if anything, even more tenuous now than it was then. Mankind has always had much to fear from the ungovernable sea, and never more so than in this period of international terrorism, when who knows what abominations may soon arrive on our shores from the lawless terrain of the world's oceans.
Review, 4918 words
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