A sailor's approach to being at sea

I am on the deck to see with my own eyes what the sailors have been talking about this morning. And they there are: the treacle-coloured folds of rock slathered across the horizon. The unfortunate sailor who joins me by the railings hears how it is the first significant landmass I've seen since boarding, and how this disorientation is making me question the bother of overland travel.

He puts it very simply. As soon as I boarded this ship, he explains, it wasn't overland travel as I knew it but a new adventure entirely: sea travel. When travellers think of “seeing the planet”, we tend think of seeing land. But the planet, he said, was barely land at all.

And that 71% of the earth that is covered by ocean is not some timeless void, as I see it. The more time you spend at sea, and the better you become at navigation, electronic or celestial, the less messy the water becomes and for this officer, it is a familiar, inviting environment, like an open road. He, for example, knows without looking at a map that this long stretch of rock we see emerging from the rolling mist is the same thing they know on land as Crete.

Sea travel, he agrees, is very different from overland travel but despite that, in both cases your feet are still firmly on the earth, and in that respect the two differ together from air travel. “The word 'overland' is misleading for your experiment,” he says. “Maybe you should call it 'surface travel'.”