John R. Gillis’s essay “The Blue Humanities” and Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea is History” both argue, in different ways, that if we want to understand the world, its history, environment, and even our own lives, we have to learn to look at the ocean. Gillis shows that modern culture and scholarship have long treated the sea as background, even though it shapes nearly everything on land. Walcott goes further and says the sea is the place where history, especially Caribbean and African diasporic history, is stored and hidden. Taken together, these texts support the claim that humans must turn toward water if they want a fuller understanding and appreciation of the rest of the world.

Gillis opens “The Blue Humanities” with a clear contradiction: “Although fully half of the world’s people now live within a hundred miles of an ocean, few today have a working knowledge of the sea.” People crowd the coasts, but do not really understand the water they live beside. He quotes sea explorer David Helvarg, who writes, “More is known about the dark side of the moon than is known about the depths of the oceans.” The comparison to the “dark side of the moon” makes the ocean sound like an alien world, but Gillis’s point is that this “alien” world covers most of our planet and touches our daily lives. Our lack of knowledge is not a small gap; it is a major blind spot.

Gillis argues that the emerging field he calls the “blue humanities” is a response to this blind spot. It is based on the simple idea that “history no longer stops at the water’s edge.” For a long time, historians, artists, writers, and scientists have treated the edge of the sea as a boundary: history and culture occurred on land, while the oceans lay there as a passive backdrop or a “highway” between “real” places. Gillis notes that “even oceangoing explorers were more land than ocean oriented; they used the sea merely as a highway to get to the next landfall.” He calls earlier exploration “a discovery more by sea than of the sea.” In other words, people used the ocean to reach land, but did not try to understand the sea itself.

According to Gillis, that attitude is changing. He describes how archaeology has “moved offshore, revealing previously unknown aspects of prehistory that had been lost to rising sea levels.” Anthropology, which “got its start on islands,” now pays attention to “the seas between them.” Maritime history, once focused on ships and ports, “is now concerned with life in the ocean itself” and is “rapidly merging with marine biology.” Historians and scientists are beginning to treat the sea as “a three-dimensional living thing with a history, geography, and a life all its own.” This is the core of the blue humanities: if we want to understand human history, we must include the sea as an active part of that story, not just a surface to be crossed.

Walcott’s poem “The Sea is History” shows what this looks like from another angle. Where Gillis says history must extend beyond the water’s edge, Walcott says that for some peoples, history has always already been in the water. The poem opens with blunt questions:

“And where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory?”

These are the usual signs of history in European tradition: monuments, battles, martyrs, “tribal memory” recorded in documents, stone, and ceremony. The speaker answers:

“Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.”

The repetition “The sea. The sea” forces us to stop and treat the ocean as the real subject. Walcott calls it a “grey vault,” which suggests both a tomb and a treasury. To say that the sea “has locked them up” implies that the ocean holds the evidence of history but keeps it hidden from the usual ways of seeing. When he concludes “The sea is History,” he collapses the distinction Gillis makes between land-based history and sea as background. For the Caribbean and for the descendants of enslaved Africans, the ocean is not just where history happened; it is where history remains.

Gillis also connects the sea to large-scale human and environmental history. He points out that some global historians now argue that “our globe is dominated by one great seamless body of water, covering seven-tenths of the planet’s surface and affecting weather, climate, and life on land as well as at sea.” If water covers most of the Earth and drives climate and circulation, then any serious understanding of “the rest of the world” must start with the oceans. Gillis also recalls that early modern voyages taught sailors about ecology before the word even existed. As he summarizes environmental historian Richard Grove, mariners “discovered the damage that invasive species of plants and animals could do on small islands around the world.” These ocean voyages produced “the first glimmerings of ecological thinking.” Again, if we want to understand ecology, empire, and globalization, we need to follow the paths that ships took and see what the sea carried.

Walcott rewrites this oceanic history in biblical terms. Instead of discussing ecology or empire directly, he retells familiar religious stories as episodes in the history of slavery and colonialism, and he locates them in the sea. He describes the beginning of this history not in Eden, but in the Atlantic:

“First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.”

The “caravel” is the small ship used by European explorers. Calling its lantern “Genesis” turns the start of transatlantic exploration into a new creation story, one that results not in paradise but in conquest. Walcott then folds in the horror of the Middle Passage:

“Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.”

The “Ark of the Covenant” is traditionally a sacred container of divine law. Here, it is a mass grave. Bones have been “soldered” together by coral, forming “mosaics” on the sea floor. Sharks cast their “benediction,” a dark parody of religious blessing. Walcott turns the ocean floor into a kind of underwater church, but one built out of human remains. This scene fits Gillis’s description of how, for centuries, people thought of the deep sea as “a dark dead zone that trapped all that sank below the surface, never revealing its secrets.” Walcott insists those “secrets” are not empty; they are the literal bodies of the enslaved, and they are central to Caribbean history.

Both Gillis and Walcott stress that our relationship to the sea is heavily shaped by imagination and art. Gillis notes that “large numbers of people know the sea in other ways, through the arts and literature.” He reminds us that “from the beginning of the nineteenth century, fiction has been imagining undersea worlds that explorers were unable to reach.” Rachel Carson, who helped found modern marine science, was “inspired by the arts and literature,” and wrote that humans were destined to return to the sea “mentally and imaginatively.” In Gillis’s view, “we have come to know the sea as much through the humanities as through science.” Paintings by Turner and Homer, novels like Moby-Dick, and what he calls “ecoliterature” all help people picture the sea as more than just a shipping lane.

Walcott’s poem is exactly that kind of imaginative work. Instead of giving us statistics or maps, he invites us into an underwater tour. At one point, he directly instructs the listener:

“strop on these goggles, I’ll guide you there myself.
It’s all subtle and submarine,
through colonnades of coral,

past the gothic windows of sea-fans
to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,
blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;”

The command “strop on these goggles” is both literal and symbolic: to see this history, we need new equipment and a new way of looking. The “colonnades of coral” and “gothic windows of sea-fans” turn the seafloor into architecture, echoing churches and cathedrals. Walcott later confirms this when he writes that “these groined caves with barnacles / pitted like stone / are our cathedrals.” For him, the sea’s caves and coral reefs are not just natural formations; they are cultural spaces, full of meaning, like the monuments that the opening questions asked about. This is what Gillis means when he writes that modern culture has given the sea “a higher aesthetic power” and turned it into “a fountain of images and metaphors.”

Gillis also describes a major shift in how Western culture thinks about the sea. Before the nineteenth century, he says, attitudes toward the oceans “were more utilitarian than aesthetic.” The sea was “dangerous and repellant, ugly and unfit for literary or artistic representation.” Most people saw it as a route to somewhere else, not a place worth attention in itself. He writes that early fiction and painting were “surprisingly impoverished when it came to the oceans themselves,” focusing on “ships and the skills of the men who manned them, with the sea itself almost an afterthought.”

Then, in what Gillis calls “the second discovery of the sea,” beginning in the late eighteenth century, the sea became a source of beauty, terror, and insight. He explains that the “sublime, previously associated with mountains and forests, came to be associated with wild water.” Thinkers like Joseph Addison wrote of the “agreeable Horror” of storms at sea. Edmund Burke found the sea a better “tonic for mind and soul” than the land. By the industrial age, even people living far from the ocean began to use it as a way to think about their own lives. Gillis notes that “human beings living on land nevertheless prefer, in their imagination, to represent their overall condition in the world in terms of a sea voyage.” Thomas Cole’s painting The Voyage of Life and the spread of nautical metaphors illustrate this. The sea becomes a way to talk about birth, aging, danger, and hope. One writer he cites says that at the seaside “man can muse and meditate” better than “in any inland scenery.” Flood tide suggests “childhood and youth,” ebb tide “old age,” and the horizon “tells of a steadfast future, an immutable eternity.”

Walcott’s poem also uses the sea to think about time and meaning, but he refuses to separate the ocean’s beauty from its violence. When Gillis writes that some people began to seek “wilderness” in the sea, Walcott reminds us that this wilderness is full of bones. When Gillis notes that the sea became a symbol of eternity and “a secular promise of life everlasting,” Walcott shows how that “eternity” is haunted by those who had their lives cut short. Near the end of the poem, after moving through “Emancipation” and the rise of towns and churches, “the spires / lancing the side of God / as His son set, and that was the New Testament”, Walcott undercuts the idea that official events and faith alone make history. He writes of Emancipation as “jubilation, O jubilation / vanishing swiftly / as the sea’s lace dries in the sun.” Just as foam disappears on the sand, so too the initial celebration of freedom fades. He adds, “that was not History, / that was only faith.” Real history, for him, is harder to see.

The poem ends with a description of nature on land, flies, herons, bullfrogs, fireflies, bats, mantises, caterpillars, ferns, rocks, and then this striking line:

“and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools, there was the sound
like a rumour without any echo

of History, really beginning.”

The “salt chuckle of rocks” and the “sea pools” show that even on land, the sea is present. The sound is “like a rumour without any echo,” which suggests something being told, but not yet recorded or repeated. When Walcott says this is “History, really beginning,” he implies that true history has only started once we begin to listen to these faint, ocean-linked traces, the rumours, the underwater mosaics of bone and coral, the “grey vault” of the sea.

Gillis makes a similar point about how late this realization is. He calls the emergence of the blue humanities “a belated recognition of the close relationship between modern western culture and the sea.” He writes that “the sea became a mirror that landlubbers used to reflect on their own condition,” and he notes that “even as actual involvement with the sea diminished, its symbolic and metaphorical presence increased.” He also stresses that “most of our encounters with [the sea] are at a distance, by way of the illustrations and stories of our childhoods.” Rachel Carson, for example, “was smitten early with images of the sea, but did not really become acquainted with it until adulthood, though she never really learned to swim.” For “millions, if not billions” of people, the sea “lurks in the imaginations” of those “who will never test its waters.” Gillis ends by saying that “the manner in which this occurred and the significance it holds for modern culture and society is only just beginning to dawn on us. This is the domain of the blue humanities, open, like the sea itself, to further exploration.”

Walcott’s poem can be read as part of that exploration. It shows what happens when we take seriously the idea that the ocean is not empty, but full of history and meaning. It gives specific content to Gillis’s broader claims. Where Gillis writes that the deep sea was long seen as “an unfathomable abyss, impenetrable and unknowable,” Walcott fills that abyss with slaves’ bones, shipwrecks, Port Royal’s destruction, and underwater “cathedrals.” Where Gillis says that “pristine nature, now in short supply in industrialized heartlands, found refuge in the oceans,” Walcott reminds us that this “pristine” ocean is also a graveyard. Where Gillis describes the sea as a source of metaphors for life, tides, voyages, and horizons, Walcott uses those same metaphors, but grounds them in the concrete history of colonial violence and survival.

Both “The Blue Humanities” and “The Sea is History” push us toward the same conclusion. If we keep treating the ocean as a blank, as just scenery or a route between “real” places, we will misunderstand not only the sea, but also the land, our histories, and ourselves. Gillis shows that the ocean shapes climate, ecology, migration, trade, literature, and art. Walcott shows that for entire peoples, the ocean is the main archive of their suffering and resilience. To understand “the rest of the world,” we have to learn to read the water, scientifically, historically, and imaginatively. Only then, as Walcott puts it, does “History, really beginning” become possible.