Simon Winchester on Atlantic at the Luce Library

On Thursday, November 17th, fifty students, faculty, and alumni gathered in the Luce Library for a lecture by bestselling author Simon Winchester on his latest work, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. Given that SUNY Maritime's student body traverses the Atlantic Ocean every summer, the discussion was bound to be one of the most relevant, exciting, and interesting of recent memory. And Mr. Winchester did not disappoint.

He explained that the writing for Atlantic contrasted greatly with his composition of an unsuccessful parallel book he had written about the Pacific Ocean. "All I knew was, I had to write about the Atlantic in a different way than the Pacific, which was a total disaster." Inspiration struck, however, through an anthology of poetry, edited by British politician David Owens, entitled Seven Ages: Poetry for a Lifetime. Owen uses Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man speech to give the anthology its structure; Winchester decided on a similar tack.

"It occurred to me that the structure of Shakespeare's Seven Ages that worked so well for Owen might also work very well for our relationship with the Atlantic," he noted. Therefore, the book is comprised of seven chapters (as well as a prologue), each of which relates a different aspect of humankind's relationship with the Atlantic. For example, a chapter on Shakespeare's "lover" age focuses on the poetry, literature and artwork relating to the Atlantic Ocean; the following chapter, the "soldier" age, details the Atlantic's many famed battles.

Through this framework, Winchester was able to narrate such disparate elements of the sea as the age of exploration, the business of shipping, erroneous human beliefs about the sea, the effect of pollution, developments in oceanic cartography, the oceanic fishing industry, the history of piracy, and much more.

Simon Winchester's lecture at the library was triggered by a lone tweet from one of the Luce librarians which mentioned Mr. Winchester, a fact which seems particularly appropriate given the subject matter of the lecture. As Winchester noted, humankind's relationship with this most storied ocean has always had an unpredictable, serendipitous, and surprising nature, from man's first discovery of oysters as an edible mollusc on the shores of South Africa, to the heroic rescue of a marooned group of eighty British people on Africa's Skeleton Coast during World War II, to the way the British won World War I's Battle of the Atlantic.

After the event, Mr. Winchester stayed on to meet the audience and sign copies of Atlantic. Students exchanged stories of Atlantic adventures on the Empire State with the author, who was very receptive to questions and further discussion of the book. For many, this moment of personal engagement was the highlight of the event.

Simon Winchester's Atlantic is available in the circulating collection of the Stephen B. Luce Library; our newly signed copy will be transferred to the Three Star archives collection. Students interested in Winchester's work may also check out some of his other books from the Luce Library, including Krakatoa and The Map that Changed the World.