Tracks on the Ocean (eBook)

Dr Sara Caputo is a Senior Research Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge. A specialist in maritime and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, she is the winner of numerous awards, including the Prince Consort and Thirlwall Prize. She has been a Visiting Fellow in Germany, California and at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

A triumph ... an act of impressive scholarship

Full of extraordinary detail ... Caputo does a fine job in conveying the pioneering, fearless spirit of those early journeys, made into the unknown

Intriguing and original, Caputo's eventful voyage through the history of navigation has been researched with a depth as profound as the ocean, and has a scope and relevance that transcends the high seas

Sara Caputo had an enviably ingenious idea, which few could conceive and very few execute: a history of how people have kept records of routes, in defiance of trackless nature and deficient technology. With distant vision, broad scope and deep scholarship she picks out a fascinating path and leads readers along it with the fluency of a good guide and the confidence of a practised pilot

An engrossing and beautifully chartered literary journey through history, seamanship and maritime map-making

The best kind of history ... a dazzling piece of research which draws the reader in, engages them directly and challenges them to question how and what they see

An erudite and accomplished account of human wayfaring

Sara Caputo's fascinating story of the mapping of the oceans is full of intrigue, discovery, and drama. A deeply knowledgeable yet readable history of the cartography of water

Caputo takes a most ingenious topic, the foamy track of a ship, as a meditation on centuries of globalisation and imperialism. Her story of this constantly reinvented and reinscribed line of passage is a bracingly novel oceanic history. It also shows the origins, costs and legacies of human mobility: an urgent concern of our times

'An enthralling account of maritime wayfaring from Odysseus to Magellan to GPS. Accessible and entertaining, as well as deeply erudite and constantly mind-expanding. This is a model of how history should be written