glimmering in “the liquid eternity” of infinite blue; the romance of that first voyage into the Caribbean didn’t stow aboard the second, nine years later under contract to The Saturday Evening Post, as a wide-wandering journalist.

The sea was in a restless mood, the control by others incompetent and violent. The editorial direction of the Post in 1963 had fallen into the hands of a publisher fond of staging publicity stunts, and in the summer of that year, the magazine was intent upon salvaging the wreck of a Spanish treasure fleet believed to have been lost somewhere off the coast of Honduras in 1605. Seven galleons in transit from Cartagena, Colombia, to Havana, all of them burdened with shipments of silver coin and gold plate.

Three hours out of Keythe last days of the Ohioan, but it didn’t lead me to abandon the idea of the sea as apostrophized by Lord Byron as the “deep and dark blue ocean” unmarked by the ruin that mortal men visit upon the green but shallow earth. By the mid-1970s, married and with children, I was an editor in New York City who vacationed in the summer at Newport, Rhode Island, where metaphors for the sublime were not hard to come by. As the days of sail gave way to the age of steam, Newport had become one of the first points on the American map at which oceanfront property was seen to be desirable, the value added by the nineteenth century’s fishing out from the mighty ocean the existence of