Writing The Waves

GRANGER COLLECTION
SAILOR BEWARE: A 1697 engraving of Captain Kidd wounding a mutinous gunner

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FISH AND FOWL. Of course, those who watch human misfortunes from underneath the waves look on them with a distinct lack of sympathy, if not with actual anticipation. In Shark Trouble, a collection of essays, anecdotes and observations on nature's Disposalls, Peter Benchley sticks to the golden rule of shark books: less writing, more biting. He piles on the chilling factoids the cranky, aggressive bull shark, he notes, has been known to wriggle up rivers and attack swimmers in fresh water but he also reveals a soft spot for his subjects. After all, he points out, humans kill about 10 million sharks a year, in contrast to the roughly 60 to 80 attacks the sharks make on us. Coming from the man who gave us Jaws, this is a little hard to take, but Benchley knows whereof he speaks: he's a veteran diver, and on several occasions has nearly wound up as bait.

While the sharks rule the depths and mankind clings precariously to the surface, the albatross owns the air above the sea. In the mid-1990s, when scientists first started tagging albatrosses for tracking via satellite, they discovered something astonishing: albatrosses spend 95% of their lives over the ocean, and most of that flying. Albatrosses have the longest wingspan on earth, and they can stay aloft continuously for years, dozing on the wing. In Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival ignore the sappy subtitle Carl Safina follows a single bird as it roams the globe gathering food for its chick (be warned: this book contains extended scenes of fish regurgitation).

Safina has one of those effortlessly synthetic minds that range almost as far afield as his beloved birds do, from vulcanology to population biology to the history of Pacific exploration, alighting to sketch thumbnail portraits of the curious characters who study seabirds. But none of them are as memorable as his protagonist: "An albatross is a great symphony of flesh, perception, bone, and feathers," Safina writes, "composed of long movements and set to ever-changing rhythms of light, wind, water."

In Moby-Dick, Ishmael happens on an albatross that one of his shipmates snared with a hook and line. "Through its inexpressible, strange eyes," he soliloquizes, "methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God." Whatever those secrets are, most of us will have to learn about them secondhand. And maybe that's the appeal of the sea tale: it's the closest we will ever get to the riddle of the deep, a glimpse of a life and, often, a death we will never know. And who can blame us? There's nothing like a salty sea story to remind us how solidly appealing dry land really is. For all his talk of the ocean and its cosmic mysteries, after six months on a whaleboat even Melville jumped ship, trading his cold, wet hammock for a warm, tropical beach and, surely, a good book.