Description

‘Ingenious. Caputo picks out a fascinating path and leads readers along it with the confidence of a practised pilot’ Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, author of 1492

‘Accessible and entertaining, as well as deeply erudite and constantly mind-expanding’ Philip Ball, author of How Life Works

From their first appearance on Renaissance maps, linear tracks representing maritime voyages have shaped the way we see the world. But why do we depict journeys as lines, and what is their deeper meaning? Ferdinand Magellan’s route to the Pacific embodied the promise of adventure and colonisation, while the scientific charts of the Royal Navy inspired others to plan conquests, navigate treacherous waters and establish settlements across the oceans.

In Tracks on the Ocean, prize-winning historian Sara Caputo charts a hidden history of the modern world through the tracks left on maps and the sea. Taking us from ancient Greek itineraries to twenty-first-century digital mapping, via the voyages of Drake and Cook, the decks of Napoleonic warships and the boiler rooms of ocean liners, Caputo reveals how marks on maps have changed the course of modernity.

Publisher Review

Intriguing and original, Caputo’s eventful voyage through the history of navigation has been researched with a depth as profound as the ocean, and has a scope and relevance that transcends the high seas — Maxim Samson, author * Invisible Lines * The best kind of history … a dazzling piece of research which draws the reader in, engages them directly and challenges them to question how and what they see — Katherine Parker, author * Historical Sea Charts * Caputo takes a most ingenious topic, the foamy track of a ship, as a meditation on centuries of globalisation and imperialism. Her story of this constantly reinvented and reinscribed line of passage is a bracingly novel oceanic history. It also shows the origins, costs and legacies of human mobility: an urgent concern of our times — Sujit Sivasundaram, author * Waves Across the South * ‘An enthralling account of maritime wayfaring from Odysseus to Magellan to GPS. Accessible and entertaining, as well as deeply erudite and constantly mind-expanding. This is a model of how history should be written — Philip Ball, author * Curiosity: How Science Became Interested In Everything * Sara Caputo’s fascinating story of the mapping of the oceans is full of intrigue, discovery, and drama. A deeply knowledgeable yet readable history of the cartography of water — Alastair Bonnett, author * The Geography of Nostalgia * An engrossing and beautifully chartered literary journey through history, seamanship and maritime map-making — Vitali Vitaliev FRSG, author * Trucks in the Garden of Eden: In Search of Britain’s Utopias * Sara Caputo had an enviably ingenious idea, which few could conceive and very few execute: a history of how people have kept records of routes, in defiance of trackless nature and deficient technology. With distant vision, broad scope and deep scholarship she picks out a fascinating path and leads readers along it with the fluency of a good guide and the confidence of a practised pilot — Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, author * 1492: The Year Our World Began * Striking for its originality and absorbing in its narrative verve, Tracks on the Ocean makes something we think we know-maps-strange and new: a source of knowledge but also distortion, confusion, surveillance, and violence. Spanning the globe and hundreds of years, it is a book of fresh vision and necessary insight — Bathsheba Demuth, author * Floating Coast * From an unassuming starting point – the ‘tracks’ of voyages reproduced on maps – Caputo takes us on our very own journey of discovery. Through these delicate impressions we see first-hand the development of empire, explore the subjectivity of knowledge, experience the tenacity of state control and re-think humankind’s relationship with the natural world. Representing deep learning, but written with passion and precision, Tracks on the Ocean is maritime history at its finest — James Davey, author * Tempest: The Royal Navy and the Age of Revolutions *