Barely four weeks in office, on 4 June 1940, Winston Churchill went before the House of Commons to perform one of his most defining rhetorical feats. On the previous day the evacuation at Dunkirk had effectively been completed but the new Prime Minister did not deem this a cause for celebration: with France teetering on the brink of collapse and the prospect of Hitler’s invasion of Britain seeming only a matter of time, Churchill chose to dispel any illusions Britons might be harbouring at this stage. As his speech unfolded, he reminded his audience that wars are not won by...

Wace’s (c. 1115–c. 1183) tribute to the audacity of the first seafarer is heir to a long literary tradition of uneasiness and ambiguity concerning the sea. The blend of admiration and incredulity betrays the narrator as an observer of the sea, an islander but a land-dweller. And although I believe that the parallel has not been noticed before, it should come as no surprise that another land-dweller, Seneca (c. 4 BC–AD 65), provided the source for the above passage from the Roman de Brut:²

Audax nimium qui freta primus

rate tam fragili perfida rupit

terrasque suas post terga videns

animam...

Benedeit’s Voyage de Saint Brandan (c. 1118) has often been unjustly labelled a translation of the anonymous Latin Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (eighth century).² It cannot be readily assumed that Benedeit’s skilful adaptation of his source material results from a direct translation of the Navigatio. M. D. Legge has even argued for a Latin version of the legend prepared by Benedeit for Henry I’s first wife, Queen Maud or Matilda, which he himself translated into French as the Voyage.³ As one of the more widely read poems of the pre-modern period, the Latin Navigatio boasts over 120 extant manuscripts and...

For Gildas, things could only get worse. Disintegration and the slow but steady decline of Romano-British civilisation into chaos form the main themes of his On the Ruin of Britain, which was composed in the first half of the sixth century. In many ways, he cannot be blamed. After the Romans had abandoned Britannia, their cultural inheritance began to deteriorate and, with time, established British civilisation was confronted by pagan newcomers. As if this were not punishment enough, it was in times such as these that the inhabitants of the British Isles were paying the price for their frontline position...

Romance tales are crowded with accounts of people who are exposed to the sea against their will, but the topos is of course much older.³ In his groundbreaking study, ‘Setting Adrift in Mediaeval Law and Literature’, J. R. Reinhard discusses the custom of setting people adrift in (mostly) unseaworthy boats, and he classifies the extant literary instances into a number of categories.⁴ Reinhard concludes that in Celtic custom and, to a lesser extent, in some Germanic communities (as, indeed, was the case in Roman practice), there existed a code of punishing criminals and sometimes even presumed offenders by setting them...

When God charges Jonah to proselytise among the gentile Ninevites, the prophet shies away from this task. The Bible is silent about the rationale for Jonah’s conduct: ‘et surrexit Iona ut fugeret in Tharsis a facie Domini’ (Jonah 1.3) [And Jonah rose up to flee into Tharsis from the face of the Lord]. In the fourteenth-century alliterative poem Patience the causal relationship between the prospect of obedience to the divine will and the promise of suffering is made explicit: ‘If I bowe to His bode and bryng hem þis tale, / And I be nummen in Nuniue, my nyes begynes’...

At first glance, the concept of territorial waters must be a paradox. ‘Territory’, with its etymology rooted in terra, denotes ground, firm land, which contrasts sharply with the fluidity of ‘waters’. The term ‘territorial waters’ denotes the theoretical and, at times, practical imposition of political claims on spaces that seem ill-equipped to meet them, with the result of yielding, at best, a mixed metaphor (one only has to think of Xerxes’ whipping of the sea). And yet, wars have been fought for the strategic or economic value of water territory, and even to this day there exists no universally accepted...

After all is said and done, and the Milan-bound party has left the stage, Prospero turns to the audience in one of Shakespeare’s rare and perhaps last epilogues. Speaking of himself as ‘confined’ in ‘this bare island’, he asks the audience for release ‘from [his] bands’

With the help of your good hands.

Gentle breath of yours my sails

Must fill, or else my project fails,

Which was to please. Now I want

Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,

And my ending is despair;

Unless I be relieved by prayer

Which pierces so, that it assaults

Mercy itself, and frees...