Wondrous photographs of the blue and white marble of the Earth as seen from the Artemis spacecraft remind us that 70% of the world’s surface is covered by oceans. In Britain, the sea is never further than 70 miles away; its waters have run in our veins for millennia. The Neolithic culture of Shetland, Orkney, the Hebrides, the Isles of Scilly and the islands off Brittany has much in common with the island civilisations of the South Seas, dating back 40,000 years, or the great ancient Phoenician and Greek civilisations in the Mediterranean and the Aegean. ‘Thalatta, Thalatta!’ ‘The Sea, The Sea!’ cried Xenophon’s 10,000 Greek mercenaries led out of Persia to the Aegean after a disastrous 5c BCE campaign. Perhaps, when we British breast a hill and see the sea spread out before us, we share something of their delight in having reached their spiritual home.
The sea has been responsible for a vast range of cultures and art forms from antiquity to the present, reaching outside and beyond nations and continents. We begin with cultures of voyages hundreds of years before the age of Vasco da Gama. By the 9c Indonesians, using the trade winds of the Indian Ocean, had landed in Madagascar, so that the Madagascar language of Malagasy bears comparison with that of Borneo, 4000 miles away. Much later, the Dutch were able to keep in constant touch with their colonies at the Cape of Good Hope and the East Indies by using the trade winds and the ‘roaring forties’. We see how the culture of crews was polyglot, more so than any culture on land. Indeed, some sailors hardly spent any time on land. Their homeland was the sea, which provided highways when roads were impassable, carrying weights of cargo unthinkable by land, requiring navigation by the stars and eventually the astrolabe, compass and quadrant.
In antique art, ships were scratched on rocks or painted on Greek vases. Dutch painters like Van de Velde announced his country’s mastery of the seas; Turner would claim to have had himself lashed to a mast to observe the sublimity of a storm at sea; Courbet and Whistler would quite literally set their cap at the ocean horizon. Fitz Henry Lane the Luminist would celebrate the idyllic calm of the waters off Gloucester Massachusetts, while Winslow Homer would see the sea as a terrifying foster-mother of sharks. Even sculptors such as Eduardo Chillida combing the wind with his ironwork on the cliffs of San Sebastiàn or Antony Gormley peopling Crosby beach with his solemn sentinels, have been inspired by the vastness of the ocean horizon to set their work on beaches. Meanwhile, cliffs and beaches would be the workplaces of smugglers, wreckers lighting false beacons or geologists seeking ammonites, eventually giving way to the beach culture of bathing huts, donkey rides and Punch-and-Judy shows. The seaside has even produced its own architecture, developed in places like Brighton, Bexhill, Thorpeness, the south of France, and on the East and West coasts of the United States with variations due to regional influences and climate.
Poets and composers from Coleridge to Tennyson, Keats to Eliot, Mendelssohn to Vaughan Williams, Debussy to Britten, have used the sea to explore profound themes of immortality, drama, morality, politics and religion. More recently, remarkable discoveries have been made of life at unimaginable depths in the total darkness of clefts in the sea floor. With those discoveries a new appreciation of the life of the sea opens before us. This summer seems an excellent time to study the profound impact all aspects of the sea have had on cultural history worldwide.
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Above all this course explores our emotional relationship with the sea; this infinitely complex being on which we depend for trade, food, communications, and summer pleasures every day. An almost otherworldly being the sea does not answer to the commands of men and women, and seems to choose its moods now smooth and seductive now rough even vengeful in its wrath. Always those who go down to the sea in ships or those who play on its beaches are aware consciously and unconsciously of the limitlessness of its horizons its vast expanses its invitation to the unknown suggesting both the appeal and the dangers of freedom. Please join us for reasons of nostalgia as well as scholarship!
Who hath desired the Sea? – the sight of salt water unbounded
The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber wind-hounded?
The sleek-barrelled swell before storm, grey, foamless, enormous, and growing
Stark calm on the lap of the Line or the crazy-eyed hurricane blowing’
Rudyard Kipling
Information:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
‘The Sea’ is a Zoom course (for which we offer support to access) which has been developed, designed and edited by Louise Friend and will be presented by Nicholas Friend. It is held on Thursdays, beginning on Thursday 25 June until Thursday 3 September 2026 at 5pm.
If you book for the course but cannot manage a particular date, then be assured we will be sending recordings of sessions to all registered participants. Each session meets from 15 minutes before the advertised time of the lecture, and each lasts roughly one hour with 15 minutes discussion.
COST:
£500 for members, £600 non-members for ten sessions. Single sessions, £55 for members, £65 non- members. All sessions are limited to 21 participants to permit a vibrant after-lecture discussion session.
Please make your payment to Friend&Friend Ltd by bank transfer to our account with Metrobank, bank sort code 23-05-80, account number 13291721 or via PayPal to nicholas@inscapetours.co.uk, or credit/debit card by phone to Henrietta on 07940 719 397. She is available on Tuesdays or Thursdays between 2-5 pm.
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How to Connect your Bank Account to your PayPal account:::::::::::::::::::::::
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