In stanzas ten and eleven of Derek Walcott’s “The Sea is History” employs vivid imagery, allusions, and metaphors to argue that the Caribbean’s true history is buried beneath the surface of Western narratives. Walcott’s poem asks his readers to look deeper into who gets remembered and who gets erased in history, and that history is not simply something written in stone but alive in people and places (such as the sea) that has been long silenced. 

Stanza ten of the poem challenges Eurocentric understandings and definitions of “history” and “civilization.” Walcott starts the stanza by describing “the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal, / and that was Jonah, / but where is your Renaissance?” In light of some research, the poem’s allusion to Port Royal is a reference to a wealthy city, a haven for debauchery and pirates, in Jamaica which was destroyed by an earthquake and massive tidal wave in 1692. Furthermore, the poem also alludes to Jonah, the prophet swallowed by a whale. The combination of these two allusions with the tidal wave “swallowing” Port Royal parallels Jonah’s swallowing by the whale, symbolizing natural retribution and an almost divine judgement. Walcott, in tandem with the allusions, reflects on a Eurocentric narrative of progress and civilization rhetorically posing the question: “where is your Renaissance?” The question presents the audience with a sense of irony, a contrast of Europe’s time of cultural rebirth with the Caribbean’s history of destruction and loss. The tenth stanza is a reframing of Western progress taking into account the Caribbean’s past, of slavery and conquest, and gives the Caribbean a “renaissance” of its own.  

Then going into stanza eleven Walcott depicts the sea’s history, specifically the Caribbean, as something that is “submerged” not erased. Stanza eleven begins by “answering” the rhetorical question from stanza ten: “Sir, it is locked in them sea-sands / out there past the reef’s mailing shelf, / where the men-o’-war floated down” The speaker notably uses a creole-inflected dialect, “them sea-sands,” which emphasizes and asserts Caribbean identity and oral storytelling tradition. This type of narration frames the poem in a point of view that isn’t Western, but from someone and someplace that version of history has yet to be told. A version of history “locked in them sea-sands” implying that the ocean is an archive for a past tossed in the ocean at the hands of colonial suffering.