A Dictionary of Sea Quotations surveys nearly four millennia of literature, including novels, poems, songs and religious texts, to show the extraordinary diversity of the human experience of the sea, the passions that it awakens and the hold it has on our imagination. Historian Edward Duyker draws upon the annals of sea exploration, the carnage of naval war and excerpts from the memoirs of admirals, yachtsmen, castaways, naturalists, pirates, privateers, U-boat commanders, surfers and statesmen.

With quotations from the ancient Greeks and Romans; the Old and New Testaments and the Qur'an; the plays of Shakespeare; the poetry of Baudelaire, Coleridge, Dickinson, Goethe and Lawrence; the novels of Austen, Conrad, Dickens, Hugo, Melville, Verne and a multitude of other writers; voices from the mutiny on the Bounty, the sinking of the Titanic and the voyage of the Kon-Tiki, A Dictionary of Sea Quotations is an anthology of extraordinary breadth. This is a book for browsing to be enjoyed by all who love the sea.