SOURCE: “Introduction: The Sea, the Land, the Literature,” in America and the Sea: A Literary History, edited by Haskell Springer, University of Georgia Press, 1995, pp. 1-31.

In the following essay, Springer surveys the maritime history of the United States and provides an overview of the beginnings of American sea literature.

I. History

… In their westward movement, starting before there was even an “America” in human consciousness, Europeans encountered the seas that led to the New World and then later helped to define it. The Atlantic, the world's stormiest ocean, was, very early in modern European history, an economic and cultural focus—as it had long been for the fishing and whaling “Indians” on the other side. Next met, though we tend to forget them, were the freshwater seas of the Great Lakes, each of which, Rudyard Kipling remarked, is a “fully accredited ocean.” This phenomenon, like the salt...