The best books on human's relationships with the underwater world

Helen M. Rozwadowski Author Of Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans
By Helen M. Rozwadowski

Who am I?

I’ve been fascinated with the ocean starting when I was a kid growing up on the Great Lakes. While I sailed and swam in Lake Erie’s freshwater, I dreamed of and read about oceans. My career as a historian and writer has been dedicated to exploring the human relationship with the ocean, especially the underwater realm so often left out of maritime history and literature. My greatest joy is that other historians have joined my quest. The books I’ve selected include some I used as sources in writing ocean history and others by historians who are themselves plumbing the ocean’s depths. 

I wrote...

Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans

By Helen M. Rozwadowski

Book cover of Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans

What is my book about?

Much of human experience can be distilled to saltwater: tears, sweat, and an enduring connection to the sea. Vast Expanses weaves a cultural, environmental, and geopolitical history of that relationship, a journey of tides and titanic forces reaching around the globe and across geological and evolutionary time.

Our deepening knowledge of the ocean has animated and strengthened connections between people and the world’s seas. To understand this history we must address questions of how, by whom, and why knowledge of the ocean was created and used—and how we create and use this knowledge today. Only then can we can forge a healthier relationship with our future sea.

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The Books I Picked & Why

The Deep Range

By Arthur C. Clarke

Book cover of The Deep Range

Why this book?

This sci-fi romp by an author more famous for space fiction takes an unusual dive into the ocean’s depths, where pole-to-pole zones of plankton cultivation and whale ranching provide food to feed the earth’s enlarged population. Using a typical trope of maritime fiction, Arthur C. Clarke introduces readers to this future world through a neophyte whale warden whose past as a spaceman colors his experiences and perceptions of his new ocean surroundings. Compared with outer space, Clarke’s ocean is fuller of resources, and also more mysterious, but emerges as a place that promises to foster peace and understanding.

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Neptune's Laboratory: Fantasy, Fear, and Science at Sea

By Antony Adler

Book cover of Neptune's Laboratory: Fantasy, Fear, and Science at Sea

Why this book?

The title Neptune’s Laboratory invokes knowledge of the oceans through science alongside the equally central role imagination has played in the human relationship with the sea. Antony Adler astutely observes how its mirror-like qualities encouraged scientists, politicians, and the public since the early 19th century to use the ocean to spin utopian fantasies and explore dystopian fears. Most importantly, he reminds readers that our propensity to fathom oceans to project the fate of the human species and our planet offers an important key: imagination could chart a course toward a better future.

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Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora

By Kevin Dawson

Book cover of Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora

Why this book?

This important and revealing book conveys the untold history of West Africans and their relationship with the ocean, including the underwater realm, from before New World slavery and extending around the Atlantic as enslaved African swimmers and divers carried their skills and the culture associated with them in the African diaspora. Kevin Dawson’s story is not only fascinating but also firmly discredits the false and insidious belief that Blacks are naturally poor swimmers and demonstrates instead the long and proud traditions of West African knowledge and use of the undersea.

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Mr. Limpet

By Theodore Pratt, Garrett Price

Book cover of Mr. Limpet

Why this book?

This fantasy by the prolific and well-known American novelist Theodore Pratt follows the adventures of a bespectacled bookkeeper who becomes a fish, serves the American navy during the Second World War, and swims off to evolve a better species of humanity, free of those qualities that provoked global conflict. Reflecting scientific and popular embrace of the idea that life, including the human species, evolved from the sea, Mr. Limpet combines pointed commentary and humor with the growing cultural fascination of the undersea prompted by submarine warfare. Rare today because of its publication shortly after American entry into the war, the novel inspired the more well-known 1963 film The Incredible Mr. Limpet.

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Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity

By Ann Elias

Book cover of Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity

Why this book?

Ann Elias demonstrates how visual media – photography, film, art, and museum displays – re-cast coral reefs in the early 20th century from dangers to navigation into fantastical but familiar and inviting spectacles. Coral Empire reveals photographers, artists, and scientific explorers as they rendered the undersea modern yet colonial. Using technology, indigenous knowledge, and their own visions, they presented the oceans as wild, untouched spaces full of resources that invited exploitation, conquest, and tourism. Desire-fueled uses of the undersea obscured the destructive nature of human activities on coral reefs, now abundantly apparent, while the power of the visual for imagining and knowing the undersea remains.

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