Moving the Waters - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 90

seabirds and fishermen's families alike, and, bizarrely, in another oce-
anic hotspot of life right next to the barren Skeleton Coast of Namibia.
Deep waters there may be, but they are certainly not still.
What have people known of these vast oceanic movements? They
long needed a practical understanding of what it takes to survive on
the high seas, for humans have sailed the seas virtually since our spe-
cies originated, over 100 thousand years ago. By 40,000 years ago
they had reached Australia—no mean seafaring feat, even allowing
for the lower sea levels of those days. Five thousand years ago there
was seagoing trading from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf to
the Arabian Sea. When the Phoenician empire was in full cry, vessels
might—as the accounts of Herodotus hint—have reached the
Sargasso Sea. What these ancient peoples knew of, or understood,
or wondered about the oceans, we know very little. Before writing
became sophisticated and widespread, communication between gen-
erations was through the creation and memorization of epic poems, in
which fact, exaggeration, drama, and myth were inextricably mixed.
The greatest of the epic poets, and one of the first to have 'his' 62
poems preserved in writing was Homer ( c . 850 bc), author of the Iliad
and the Odyssey , and whose poems were fixed in text, perhaps even in
his lifetime. Here, one gets glimpses of the oceans, as were then under-
stood. Homer portrayed the god Hephaistos making an immortal
shield to protect Achilles at Troy, with the rim of the shield symbol-
izing the ocean as a mighty river encircling the land. This idea of the
oceans as a river echoed ancient ideas stretching back to the Minoans,
Babylonians, and ancient Egyptians. But what made the oceans move?
The Greek poets and philosophers were perplexed. Socrates, as quoted
by Plato, envisaged a vast set of subterranean cavities, one of which
pierced right through the Earth to come out the other side, through
which the Earth's waters thundered and surged, to transmit their