About the book
The line on a map that shows where a ship has been seems obvious, but it had to be invented. Sara Caputo follows the ship's track from the first early modern charts that drew one, through the voyages of Cook and the nineteenth-century surveys, to the data trails of modern shipping and the GPS trace on a phone, and asks what it has meant to turn movement across an empty sea into a line.
Caputo is a historian at Magdalene College, Cambridge, working on the history of the sea, maps and travel.
Notes
To come.