Francis Drake. Meanwhile, at grammar school in grades five, six and seven, I was moving up from the Greek gods and heroes, among them Odysseus and his wide-wandering on the wine-dark sea, to the various discoveries of America by Viking seafarers, Christopher Columbus, and theMayflower, in eighth grade to the battles of Actium and Trafalgar.

Conrad says the love of the sea is in fact the love of ships, the thought coming to him in 1905 as an affectionate memory of the New South Dock as it was to be seen in the 1880s, “fifty hulls, at least, molded on lines of beauty and speed,” square-rigged and metal-plated, “moored all in a row, stem to quay, as if assembled there for an exhibition not of a great industry butand I contrived to picture myself as somehow engaged in mankind’s age-old struggle with the mystery and power of the sea.

The conceit was not that far-fetched. At the beginning of the war in 1939, the US government requisitioned the American-Hawaiian’s fleet of 38 cargo vessels, most of them eventually pressed into service with the North Atlantic convoys bringing food and munitions to Britain and to Russia; 11 of them were torpedoed by German U-boats, another three scuttled to make the Mulberry harbors supplying the invasion of France; my father (an executive of a shipping line no longer possessed of ships) had been put in charge of the military port of embarkation forwarding the freight of men and weapons to every theater of operations south and west of the