A History of Sea Literature: From Homer to Hemingway

The literature of the sea is as old as literature itself, and its beginnings can be found in one of the most ancient Greek epics. Usually credited to a poet named Homer (c. eighth century BCE), The Odyssey describes the adventures of the Greek warrior Odysseus on his ten-year voyage home after the Trojan War. Mixing accounts of mythological creatures with seemingly realistic descriptions of the winds and waters of the Mediterranean Sea, the poem has given us the word “odyssey,” meaning any long and eventful journey. Poet Apollonius of Rhodes (third century BCE) wrote another Greek epic, The Argonautica, which recounts the experiences of Jason and his illustrious companions in retrieving the Golden Fleece from the shores of the Black Sea. Fantastic tales about yet another intrepid sailor, Sinbad, appear in late versions of the anonymous Middle Eastern stories collected as The Arabian Nights.

A Portuguese poet and a British geographer chose contrasting approaches in celebrating their respective nation’s maritime accomplishments. Luis Vaz de Camoes (c. 1524 or 1525-80) produced what the Portuguese regard as their national epic in The Lusiads (1572), which portrays the Portuguese voyages of discovery in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in Homeric terms. The English geographer Richard Hakluyt (1552 or 1553-1616) compiled factual accounts of his country’s expansion in The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589).

Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe (c. 1660-1731) is the first significant English novel to deal, albeit in part, with life at sea. Dramatizing the trials of a sailor shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, it also gave rise to a genre known as the “robinsonade.” In sharp contrast to Defoe’s earnest approach, the Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett (1721-71) wrote in a vividly satirical style in his picaresque Roderick Random (1748), which draws upon his experiences as a surgeon in the British Royal Navy during wartime.

The literature of the sea has generally been realistic, as in Defoe’s novel, or Romantic, that is, emphasizing strong emotion and the sometimes frightening beauty of nature. The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote in the latter mode in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), in which a sailor describes the terrible events that befall him and his ship when he breaks a taboo by shooting an albatross.

Influenced by Coleridge, the American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) adopted the darker vein of Romanticism known as Gothic, describing shipwrecks, cannibalism, madness, and other terrors of the sea in “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833), the phantasmagoric The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), and “A Descent into the Maelstrom” (1841). Unlike Poe, American lawyer Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815-82) wrote realistically about the hardships of shipboard life in Two Years Before the Mast (1840), his factual record of his voyage as a seaman around Cape Horn and back, and went on to defend seamen’s legal rights. Dana’s fellow countryman Herman Melville (1819-91) had also shipped as a seaman on merchant vessels and whalers, but although he praised Dana’s book, his novel Moby-Dick (1851) reflects the influence of Poe. The lengthy account of Captain Ahab’s increasingly obsessive hunt for the whale that had crippled him is routinely hailed as the Great American Novel.

Prolific French writer Jules Verne (1828-1905) used the ocean as a setting for a number of his imaginative adventure novels, including Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), which chronicles the voyages of the marvelous submarine Nautilus and its enigmatic Captain Nemo. Writing of piracy and buried treasure, Scottish novelist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) produced a different kind of adventure novel in Treasure Island (1883), but also collaborated with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne on the grimly realistic short novel The Ebb-Tide (1894).

Born on what was then Polish soil, Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) spent nearly twenty years in the French and British merchant marines and eventually became a British citizen. Such highly regarded novels and stories as “Youth” (1898), Lord Jim (1900), Typhoon (1902), “The Secret Sharer” (1910), and The Shadow Line (1917) draw upon his service in the Indian Ocean and the islands of what is now Indonesia. Like Conrad, British writer William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) spent several years at sea. His horror novel The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907), which is set in what appears to be the Sargasso Sea, and the overtly supernatural The Ghost Pirates (1909) reflect the loneliness and fear that the immensity of the oceans can engender.

Frankenstein and the Arctic. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, also known popularly as “Frankenstein,” is a Gothic novel written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The novel is full of themes of the Romantic era, but central to the novel is the motif of science overcoming nature and the catastrophic results that emerge from this act. After the creation of “his Creature,” Victor Frankenstein flees and thus sets off a horrific chain of events, which result in a multitude of deaths. In the last section of the novel, the Arctic, called The North Pole in the book, takes on the role of a supporting character. This treacherous region claims as many, if not more, lives than the actions of Frankenstein’s “Creature.” In the end, the Arctic claims both the lives of Frankenstein and his creation. Although the Creature drifts away on a raft of ice, the reader never experiences his death. Instead, the Creature simply fades into the darkness and distance, illustrating, perhaps, that nature ultimately triumphs over science in the end. Sarah Nicole Edelsohn and Rainer F. Buschmann

In The Sea Wolf (1904), the American writer Jack London (1876-1916) produced a vivid novel featuring the ruthlessly amoral Wolf Larsen, the captain of a sealing schooner working in the North Pacific. London later chronicled his disastrous voyage across the Pacific Ocean in The Cruise of the Snark (1911). The American playwright Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) wrote four one-act plays based on his experiences at sea, including his debut production, the grim Bound East for Cardiff (1914). Popular American novelists Charles Nordhoff (1887-1947) and James Norman Hall (1887-1951) produced a famous fictional trilogy based on the 1789 mutiny of HMS Bounty and its aftermath: Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), Men against the Sea (1933), and Pitcairn’s Island (1934).

Three later American writers also wrote outstanding sea fiction. Herman Wouk (born 1915) described life aboard a destroyer-minesweeper under the command of an unstable captain during the Second World War in The Caine Mutiny (1951), and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) recounted the travails of an aging Cuban fisherman in his short novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Although most sea fiction has been conservative in form, Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014) wrote an outstanding experimental novel, Far Tortuga (1975), about the final voyage of a turtling schooner in the Caribbean Sea.

The British author William Golding (1911-93) wrote two island novels—the famous Lord of the Flies (1954) and the robinsonade Pincher Martin (1956). His later trilogy “To the Ends of the Earth”—Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989)—follows the voyage of a British sailing ship carrying immigrants to Australia in the early nineteenth century.

Popular British writers C. S. Forester (1899-1966) and Patrick O’Brian (1914-2000) also looked to the past, with each setting a long series of historical novels during the Napoleonic Wars of 1803-15. Forester wrote realistically about the insecure Horatio Hornblower, who managed to rise from midshipman to admiral of the fleet despite his chronic seasickness.

O'Brian celebrated the exploits of two characters: officer (eventually rear admiral) Jack Aubrey and surgeon and spy Stephen Maturin, in a wittier, more exuberant manner.

FURTHER READING: Bender, Bert. 1988. Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Gidmark, Jill B., ed. 2001. Encyclopedia of American Literature of the Sea and Great Lakes. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Milne, Gordon. 1986. Ports of Call: A Study of the American Nautical Novel. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Peck, John. 2001. Maritime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in British and American Novels, 1719—1917. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire/New York: Palgrave.