No other element has such accreted levels of significance for us, such complex archetypal meaning. The sea’s uses and moods sex it. It is the great creatrix, feeder, womb, and vagina, place of pleasure; the gentlest thing on earth, the most maternal; the most seductive whore, and handsomely the most faithless. It has the attributes of all women, and men, too. It can be subtle and noble, brave and energetic; and far crueler than the meanest, most sadistic human king who ever ruled. (“I believe in the Bible,” an old sailor once told Lord Fisher, “because it don’t mention no sea in Paradise.”) I happen to live over the sea myself—I watch it every day, I hear it every night. I do not like it angry, but I’ve noticed that most urban and inland people adore it so. Storms and gales seem to awaken something joyous and excited in them: the thunder on the shingle, the spray and spume, the rut and rage.

The other great nexus of metaphors and feeling is the ship itself. No human invention, with all its associated crafts in building and handling, has an older history—or received more love. That is why we have sexed it without ambiguity, at least in the West; which in this context casts the sea, the domain of Neptune, as raper, berserker, Bluebeard. Even our judgment of a ship’s beauty has tended to be that of the male upon the female—that is, we put a greater value on outward line than on soul or utility, and nowhere more than with the last of the sailing ships, that splendid and sharply individualized zenith of five thousand years of hard-earned knowledge and aesthetic instinct. The vocabulary of the airplane seduced us for a while, but I think it is interesting that we have come back to star- and spaceships. Jet will do for a transport shorthand, yet when man really reaches across the vast seas of space, he still reaches in ships.