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Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps, and Maritime Travel
An engaging look at ocean routes’ complicated beginnings and elusive impact.
Sara Caputo’s Tracks on the Ocean is a sweeping history of how we have understood routes of travel over the ocean and how we came to represent that movement as a cartographical line. Focusing on the representation of sea journeys in the Western world from the early sixteenth century to the present, Caputo deftly argues that the depiction of these lines is inextricable from European imperialism, the rise of modernity, and attempts at mastery over nature. Caputo recounts the history of ocean tracks through an array of lively stories and characters, from the expeditions of Captain James Cook in the eighteenth century to tracks depicted in Moby Dick and popular culture of the nineteenth century to the use of navigational techniques by the British navy. She discusses how tracks evolved from tools of surveying into tools of surveillance and, eventually, into paths of environmental calamity. The impulse to record tracks on the ocean is, Caputo argues, reflective of an ongoing desire for order, schematization, and personal visibility, as well as occupation and permanent ownership—in this case over something that is unoccupiable and impossible to truly possess. Both beautifully written and deeply researched, Tracks on the Ocean shares how the lines drawn on maps tell the audacious and often tragic and violent stories of ocean voyages.
Sara Caputo’s Tracks on the Ocean is a sweeping history of how we have understood routes of travel over the ocean and how we came to represent that movement as a cartographical line. Focusing on the representation of sea journeys in the Western world from the early sixteenth century to the present, Caputo deftly argues that the depiction of these lines is inextricable from European imperialism, the rise of modernity, and attempts at mastery over nature. Caputo recounts the history of ocean tracks through an array of lively stories and characters, from the expeditions of Captain James Cook in the eighteenth century to tracks depicted in Moby Dick and popular culture of the nineteenth century to the use of navigational techniques by the British navy. She discusses how tracks evolved from tools of surveying into tools of surveillance and, eventually, into paths of environmental calamity. The impulse to record tracks on the ocean is, Caputo argues, reflective of an ongoing desire for order, schematization, and personal visibility, as well as occupation and permanent ownership—in this case over something that is unoccupiable and impossible to truly possess. Both beautifully written and deeply researched, Tracks on the Ocean shares how the lines drawn on maps tell the audacious and often tragic and violent stories of ocean voyages.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
352 pages, Hardcover
Published October 22, 2024
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240 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
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January 6, 2025In Tracks on the Ocean, Sara Caputo focuses on another imaginative leap, this one made by the anonymous sailors who, for long-forgotten reasons, decided to record their voyages as a line on their charts. In her inventive cartographic history, Caputo frames these tracks as conceptual tools as well as narrative ones. Sometimes ‘simple [and] unidirectional’, sometimes a ‘puzzling maze of pencilled lines’, they provoke discussions of celebrity, patriotism, secrecy, and surveillance.
Sometime after the voyages of Vikings and Columbus alike, the notion from the biblical Book of Wisdom that a ‘ship follows no path and leaves no signs’ was dramatically overturned. Why? Like Haywood, Caputo sees the ocean as a precipitating factor. Terrestrial journeys did not inspire their protagonists to trace out paths for the simple reason that roads already showed their progress. But in the 16th century, ‘ship tracks appear almost out of nowhere’.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Margaret E. Schotte teaches at York University, Toronto and is the author of Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).
Sometime after the voyages of Vikings and Columbus alike, the notion from the biblical Book of Wisdom that a ‘ship follows no path and leaves no signs’ was dramatically overturned. Why? Like Haywood, Caputo sees the ocean as a precipitating factor. Terrestrial journeys did not inspire their protagonists to trace out paths for the simple reason that roads already showed their progress. But in the 16th century, ‘ship tracks appear almost out of nowhere’.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Margaret E. Schotte teaches at York University, Toronto and is the author of Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).
November 29, 2024
Oh, how disappointing. "Trailblazing" should be an exciting subject, but Sara Caputo (an apt surname) gives us an academic thesis riddled with the usual academic obsessions with imperialism and the exercise of power.
June 22, 2025
Shit. Filled with anecdotes that have no follow up with the subject they are talking about.
Constant downgrading of Indigenous cultures feats on the ocean and the possibility they could have done their seafaring WITHOUT influence from the west! Key example Pacific Islanders, PNG, Timor, and Indigenous Australians.
Also, in the first few chapters where they talk about who invented maps and the different types of maps, again with the downgrading of Indigenous cultures. The oldest continuous culture on earth, Indigenous Australians, have been painting aerial and hydrographic maps and there is NO mention of them but a tiny reference to a South American Indigenous group but AGAIN referenced to the possibility of them being influenced by the west 😒
Constant downgrading of Indigenous cultures feats on the ocean and the possibility they could have done their seafaring WITHOUT influence from the west! Key example Pacific Islanders, PNG, Timor, and Indigenous Australians.
Also, in the first few chapters where they talk about who invented maps and the different types of maps, again with the downgrading of Indigenous cultures. The oldest continuous culture on earth, Indigenous Australians, have been painting aerial and hydrographic maps and there is NO mention of them but a tiny reference to a South American Indigenous group but AGAIN referenced to the possibility of them being influenced by the west 😒
January 13, 2025
Interesting topic.
September 21, 2025
Work of enormous scholarship, but a surprisingly hard read
October 22, 2025
Varied
November 29, 2025
Fascinating description on how sailors and others plot their courses on the high seas.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews