MR. MARC FISHERFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your community with the world. I'm Marc Fisher of the Washington Post sitting in for Kojo. Staring out the window of an airplane at endless miles of gray sea, it can be hard to think of the Atlantic Ocean as a place of great battles or epic adventures. But the body of water we now scarcely acknowledge once inspired and intimidated the people who lived on its shores.

MR. MARC FISHERFrom the Phoenicians, the first to venture out into the choppy waters of the Atlantic, to the business men who built the great ocean liners of the 20th century, men have been trying to conquer the Atlantic for thousands of years. Writer Simon Winchester tells the story of the great ocean from its ancient history to modern day efforts to protect it from pollution in his new book, "Atlantic."

MR. MARC FISHERYou can join our conversation by calling 1-800-433-8850 or e-mail us at kojo@wamu.org. You can send a tweet to @kojoshow. And Simon Winchester, author of many books, including most recently, "Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, " joins us from the studio's of WNYC in New York, welcome.

MR. SIMON WINCHESTERThank you.

FISHERSo you seem to have fallen in love with sea travel and perhaps the ocean itself on first sight or at least on your first journey from Liverpool to Montreal. Why were you going -- making that trip by sea and what drew you to the ocean?

WINCHESTERWell, what drew me across the sea was a young woman who I'd met in London. I was, at the time I met her, 17 and she was 16, I think. And with all the sort of puppy love of teenager-dom, we decided we should meet and I took a year off between high school and the University and decided that I'd go across North America to see her.

WINCHESTERAnd so I saved up my pennies and I think the one-way ticket from Liverpool to Montreal on the Empress of Britain was about 70 pounds for a very, very rudimentary berth right down in the bowels of the ship. And I went across to see her and then hitchhiked around Canada and America for the rest of the year and then went up to Oxford. So that first trip was the first major trip I had ever taken overseas and a pretty memorable way to begin traveling.

FISHERAnd at that time, there was at least the alternative of air travel, even though it was not yet dominate. Was your decision to go by sea a matter of economics or romance or what?

WINCHESTERI think it probably was romance and indeed I came back on an airplane, but it was pretty grizzly. I remember it was an airliner out of -- it was Capital Airways of Nashville. And it was a four-engine super constellation propeller driven plane, which nearly ran out of fuel and we nearly came down in the Atlantic near -- near Shannon in Ireland. We just made it, apparently, according to the pilot, by the skin of our teeth. So it -- being on a ship turned out to be much safer and more reliable a way of crossing the ocean than going on this rickety old airplane.

FISHERAnd on that first cross-Atlantic journey, you had a moment where the ship stopped in the middle of the ocean to take an aerial delivery of emergency medicine for a passenger. And the engines went quiet and you write, "There was something uncanny about the sudden silence, the emptiness, the realization of the enormous depths below us and the limitless heights above."

FISHER"The universal grayness of the scene, the very evident and potentially terrifying power of the rough seas and the wind and the fact that despite our puny human powerlessness and insignificance, invisible radio beams and Morris code signals had summoned readily offered help from somewhere far away." Sounds to me like you fell in love right away.

WINCHESTERWell, I think I did. I was standing -- I remember vividly the moment I'd gotten up about 4:00 in the morning, maybe half past 4:00 because I really wanted to see the first sight of North America. I wanted to see the lighthouse at the point, the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec, which I knew would be our first point of land. So I got up, and rather like that moment in Titanic, you know, the king of world moment where he stands on the -- on the bow, I was doing that all, but there was no one to see me. It was pitch dark, although astern, you could just see the beginnings of dawn coming up behind us.

WINCHESTERAnd then, in the middle of this reverie, sudden the engines were cut and we glided to a halt. And then, it was just the sound of the waves slapping against the hull and I thought, what on earth is going on? And then heard the engines of what turned out to be an airplane and then there was the parachutes coming down from it and men from our ship going across to pick up the package.

WINCHESTERAnd it did strike me then and retrospectively struck me more forcefully that something about being in trouble in mid-ocean and yet being helped by virtual radio signals. It seemed sort of very elemental, very, very much what the Atlantic was all about. Remoteness and mystery and vastness. And I decided, therefore, to use that at the beginning of the book story.

FISHERAnd is that kind of elemental connection or bond with the ocean, that kind of adventure, still available to an ordinary person today in an era of transatlantic flight where we seem as removed from the ocean as many of our supermarket food products are a farm?

WINCHESTERIt's a -- it's a very good question and I think it applies both to ship travel these days and to air travel. Air travel, it's a given, you sit up there 35,000 feet above the ocean and you're -- you're really unaware of it. It's just -- it's usually covered by clouds. If it's the Atlantic you're crossing and you just see it on the seat back map and you're sort of twiddling your thumbs and thinking, when is this inconvenient mass of distance going to be over?

WINCHESTERBut it's much the same thing on modern ships. I mean, I've been on the Queen Mary II and I'm going to go, I think, on the new big Queen Elizabeth. And they insulate you from the realities of the sea or, you know, you've got stabilizers. You've got casinos, restaurants, endless ways of spending money. The actual connection that you had in the early days with seagulls and spray and salt air and so forth, you know, the idea of having, as we had...

WINCHESTER...I remember at 11:00 o'clock every morning, you'd gather on the boat deck for bullion, you know, beef tea, and you'd sit there under your blanket and being blown to be-jesus by the -- by the gales or whatever, but you'd feel, I'm on the sea. And I -- you'd love it for being that. But nowadays, even the big ships are insulated from it. So I've said that if ever I'm invited by Cunard to talk about the Atlantic Ocean, I'm going to stipulate that the passengers are not in some theater way down in sort of A deck, but up on the boat deck and experiencing the sea as I talk about it. I'm sure they won't agree, but that's what I'd like.

FISHERSo how did you come from that basic experience with the ocean, that sense of the immensity, that sense of the drama of it, to having enough of a passion about this ocean to devote years of your life to studying it and writing this book?

WINCHESTERWell, it really was born -- I have to confess here, born out of a failure of an earlier book, at least a realization that I hadn't got an earlier book right. I was living in Hong Kong in the 1980s and early '90s and everyone was saying, oh, the Pacific is the ocean of the future. You've got to look at the amount of trade going, you know, between Yokohama and Seattle, the number of aircraft going between Beijing and San Francisco, whatever. This is the ocean of the future.

WINCHESTERAnd so I drank the Kool-aid and went off and wrote a book. And spent quite a long while traveling from, you know, from Alaska to Australia and from Kamchatka to Chili and the Islands in between and wrote a book. What I didn't realize until the book came out was that, yes, it may well be the ocean of the future, but what the Pacific certainly isn't, is in human terms anyway, the ocean of the past. Because apart from the Polynesian navigations, there isn't much of a human story to tell.

WINCHESTERAnd I thought about it and I thought, you know, the oceans that really are connected with human kind, there are two of them. There's the Mediterranean, which clearly is the class -- the inland sea, if you like, of classical civilization. I don't think anyone would disagree with that. But then as sort heir to that is the Atlantic, which clearly is the inland sea of modern western civilization with a vast human history. And so what I had done in the '80s was essentially backed the wrong horse, chosen the wrong ocean, and finally said, this is, in a way, is a correction.

FISHEROkay. And when you write a history of something as vast as the Atlantic Ocean, it's a daunting proposition and you structure it in perhaps an unusual way using the Shakespeare's, "All the World's a Stage," speech from -- for, "As you Like It," as a way to view the Atlantic. Explain how that works.

WINCHESTERWell, it actually -- I was puzzled, as you suggest I might well be. How on earth do you corral everything that you want to talk about about such an entity, 34 million square mile ocean, into a manageably sized book? And I pondered this long and hard and then I thought initially, well, the Atlantic had a beginning. We know when it was born, which was about -- and I used to be a geologist a long time ago. We know it was born about 200 million years ago. And people that are in the business of geological futurology, many of them are down in the University of Texas, using very complex mathematical models have sort of predicted how the Atlantic is going to end its existence in about 170, 180 million more years.

WINCHESTERSo we -- it has a birth and a likely death. And so the obvious basic structure for a book like this could be a biography. So you even have a geological beginning and a geological ending, but how to deal with the human aspects, the human relationship with the ocean. And that was the big puzzle. And then, I was crossing the ocean one day in a plane, as one does, and I had in my briefcase and was reading a copy of a, "Anthology of Poetry," by the former British foreign secretary, a man called David Owen who later went on to be called Lord Owen. And his anthology of all the poems that he had come to love in his lifetime, he had called "Seven Ages."

WINCHESTERAnd he had organized the poems according to, "All the World's a Stage," speech that you mentioned from, "As You Like It." And just to remind ourselves from what we learned at school probably, the "Seven Ages of Man," were infancy, school child, lover, soldier, justice, old man and return to childhood. And as I looked at David's poetry, I suddenly thought, "Well, I could organize the human story of the Atlantic along those lines." And so that's what I tried to do. Well, it's early days and I haven't seen all the reviews yet, but generally speaking, people seem to think that this is a reasonable structure. It's quite a risk, but I hope they like it and it seems certainly to work for me.

FISHERAnd so where in those seven stages are we now?

WINCHESTERWell, we're in all of them. If I just -- perhaps to elaborate in that case. So on the stages, to take one, I mean, to plot from those seven, the middle one, which is soldier. So all of David Owens poetry would be about military, you know, the boy stood on the burning bridge and that sort of thing. All military poetry. So what I would choose to cover, those aspects of the Atlantic Ocean in which man's sort of belligerent or less pleasant side is on display, is to write about the history of maritime warfare. Surely from the Vikings and the Roman invasions, right up through Trafalgar and Battle of Jutland to the Falklands War, but also to look at other nasty things, like piracy and, of course, nastiest of all is the terrible story of slavery.

WINCHESTERSo that chapter, we're in it, as it were, now because we still have ships. I mean, the American second fleet out of Norfolk, Va., the British fleet in Portsmouth. So the military side, we're in each one of the seven chapters, but a different aspect of us in all of them.

FISHERWhen we come back, we'll talk to Simon Winchester about the Atlantic Ocean and its impact on the founding of the United States of America. And your thoughts about what the Atlantic Ocean has meant to our history and culture. You can join our conversation at 1-800-433-8850 or e-mail us at kojo@wamu.org. We'll continue our conversation with Simon Winchester after this short break. You're listening to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show."

FISHERWelcome back. I'm Marc Fisher of the Washington Post sitting in for Kojo Nnamdi. We are talking about the Atlantic Ocean with Simon Winchester, author of a new book "Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million stories." And one of those stories is how the Atlantic Ocean has served as, what you call, the cradle of modern western civilization and really the birthplace in some ways or the inspiration for not only the discoverers, Columbus, Vespucci and so on, but the United States of America. What is it about the ocean that made this country what it is? Is it simply a matter of distance from the motherland or is it beyond that?

WINCHESTERWell, I think it's behind that. I mean, to cross it as an immigrant, and this is really what is at the heart of this aspect of the story, it required money, not very much, admittedly. It was said to be -- the going rate for immigrant fares to the United States was normally about three pounds a ticket. But you did have to pay something and you had to endure considerable discomfort. Robert Louis Stevenson, of course, writes very eloquently about it in his -- that wonderful book called the "Amateur Immigrant."

WINCHESTERSo you had to be somewhat courageous and you had to have the will and the braggadocio and the enthusiasm to get on a ship, to pay the money, to suffer the exigencies of the trip and then turn up into -- in an utterly alien country and begin this entirely new life, if the authorities in, first of all, lower Manhattan and then once there had been a federal immigration organization set up on Ellis island, if they passed you, as it were, fit to be an immigrant.

WINCHESTERThere's an interesting disparity, I've always thought, between immigration to -- and we don't often talk about it, from Europe to South America compared to Europe to North America. Argentina, for instance, in its early days as a country, gave free tickets to anyone that was physically fit and wanted to come to Argentina. America always insisted that money be paid by immigrants. And this had the effect of weeding out some people.

WINCHESTERI think Argentina got a lot of very, very unskilled people, a decision which, for many years, Argentina was to rue, whereas America generally got people with some sets of skills and at least enough money to cross the Atlantic. And, what, between -- I think between 1776 and 1840, about a million people came to America from overseas. But from 1840 to the end of the 19th century, 30 million comes from ports like Liverpool and Glasgow and Geneva, huge numbers. And most of them, of course, ultimately passing under the lamp of Lady Liberty and to be processed on Ellis island.

FISHERSusan in Washington D.C., it's your turn. Susan, are you there?

SUSANHello?

FISHERYes. Go ahead. It's your turn.

SUSANOh. I am so excited to read your book. I'm a sailor and would love to invite you out on my boat -- our boat, if you have time, so that you can see how beautiful the Potomac Channel is, leading from the nation's capital out past Mount Vernon, out towards the Atlantic. And I think that Americans -- I hope a lot of people enjoy this program and get to read your book because I think if -- the more you know about the founding fathers, especially the ones that came from Virginia, and understand the role of how our waterways were used for the development of our country, it's just fascinating.

SUSANAnd all the different chapters that you're talking about, if you walk along the southwest waterfront, they have historic markers for where they had, you know, some of the tragic realities of our history and also some of the more interesting things. And, you know, when the War of 1812 happened right up the Potomac, it's all -- it's amazing. And it's a beautiful sail, too.

FISHERSimon?

WINCHESTERWell, I couldn't agree with you more. I was actually down there the other day doing something for the BBC about the lighthouses that exist in the middle of the channel and how many of them are being decommissioned by the U.S. Coast Guard. But a small number of them are now being bought privately and opened as little museums on rocks in the middle of nowhere. So I have an abiding fascination for lighthouses. And believe you me, I'd love to come on your boat. So thank you. I look forward to it very much indeed.

FISHERWe'll see if we can make that work.

WINCHESTERSuper.

FISHERThe War of 1812 makes a cameo appearance in your book, 22 American ships going up against 85 British ships and yet the Americans managed to push the British off Cape Cod and chase the Brits to Brazil, where the U.S.S. Constitution forced a British ship to surrender. These kinds of battles we think about being some -- from some very distant part of the past. Are sea battles still with us? Are they still an important part of warfare in the Atlantic?

WINCHESTERWell, they are. This is a wonderful question for me because it opens all sorts of doors. But if I can open one, and I hope it's not an irrelevant door, but about the U.S.S. Constitution. I'm actually just about to become an American citizen so -- which is why I particularly liked what Susan had to say a few moments ago.

FISHERCongratulations.

WINCHESTERWell, thank you. But the arrangement that I'm trying to consummate is that the ceremony, and I'm looking forward to it enormously, will actually be performed on the deck of the U.S.S. Constitution, which, as you well know, is the oldest floating commissioned warship in the world. The oldest commission warship in the world is H.M.S.Victory, which is Nelson's flagship, but that doesn't float. That's in Portsmouth in dry dock. But yours floats and occasionally it moves. And it has a naval officer who commands it and very kindly he's said, if you'd like to, take your ceremony of becoming an American there. And if it happens, I will be an enormously happy new American.

WINCHESTERSo that's a sort of peaceful side of -- obviously, the embarrassment of the fact that that ship, yes indeed, defeated one of ours. It'll be interesting for me because when I go on board, the memory will be, well, this ship defeated a British ship so I won't like it. But when I leave the ship, I'll be an American and I think, well, good for you. I'm jolly glad you beat us or beat the British ship. But your question, I'm sorry to have strayed...

FISHERThat's quite all right.

WINCHESTER...but your question was about does warfare still occur at sea. And I was quite intimately involved in the last maritime conflict, which was the Falklands War. And indeed remember vividly a moment, which I think all Britons will remember, which was, I think, in May 1982, the sinking of H.M.S. Sheffield, which was a beautiful new -- almost brand-new destroyer, which the Argentines managed to sink by firing a missile from an airplane.

WINCHESTERAnd I heard it in rather particular circumstances because I was actually in prison at the time on spying charges in southern Argentina. And the governor of the prison came roaring into the cell and shouted, you know, we've sunk one of your ships. We've sunk one of your ships. But there's a coder to that story because about 15 years later, when the Falklands war was over and the three of us who had been arrested were released, he -- the same officer who had made this sort of exultant remark, wrote to me and persuaded me to come back down to southern Argentina to meet him. -

WINCHESTERAnd he took me out to dinner and apologized profusely. He said all naval officers, whatever country they come from, are saddened to see a ship sink because they know the terror, particularly in an ocean as big and as rough as the Atlantic. And so he wanted to apologize and he thought he -- well, they were at war and all is fair in war, I suppose. He did not wish to be remembered as the man who exulted over the sinking of a ship.

FISHERNow, you mentioned -- you just sort of slipped it in there in one sentence. And I see that in the book you do the same thing, that you just happened to be locked up on espionage charges. Tell us how that happened to occur.

WINCHESTERWell, I -- it's a rather long and complicated story. But the essence of it was that in 1982, I happened to be doing a story in India. And I go to send a telegram -- this was in the days you got telegrams, from my foreign editor saying, come back to London. And I thought it was a problem with my expenses so I flew back to London with my tail rather between my legs, turned up in the office and they said, oh, there's a war brewing in the south Atlantic in the Falkland Islands, will you go there?

WINCHESTERSo I went down there and happened to be on the Falkland Islands when they were invaded. So saw the invasion force come ashore and was hiding under the bed of the governor of the Falklands when they were machine gunning us. And then, finally, we surrendered. And then, the governor and the British soldiers on the Falklands were deported. I was allowed to stay there for another couple of days.

WINCHESTERAnd then, finally, I was deported to Argentina and then arrested for allegedly spying on Argentine military preparations and was sentenced to life imprisonment in the southernmost town in the world. Actually, a place called Ushuaia, which is near Cape Horn. But then, when the war was over and won, as it happens, by the British, I was released on bail. Rather an insultingly small sum, I always thought. And then, sent back to London.

FISHERThat's a harrowing story. So now, you mentioned being -- that you will be sworn in as an American citizen on the U.S.S. Constitution...

WINCHESTERI hope, yeah.

FISHER...in Boston. And you live in New York, obviously Port City. And so you've chosen to stay near the coast. And in this country, there is something of a cultural and political divide between those who have settled on the two coasts and those who have not, who are inland. Is that a common -- do you see that, as you look at all of the lands that border on the Atlantic Ocean, is there something distinctive about a coastal culture, even today when our lives don't necessarily rely day-to-day on the ocean? Is there some kind of primal connection there that changes our culture?

WINCHESTERThat's a wonderful question. I think there absolutely is, particularly in island countries. I think there's a very -- I mean, I, after all, come from the British Isles, very much an island country but surrounded by the sea. And no place in Britain is more than, I think, 180 miles from the sea, whereas if you live in Nebraska or Kansas, you are a long, long way from the sea. And I dare say there are many, many people who have never seen the sea.

WINCHESTERAnd so there is a very significant and marked connection between those people that for whom a seaside holiday is part of the family ritual each year and those for whom connections with the sea are very much more limited. I could never live far away from the sea. It sort of vexes me that I could only afford to buy a house -- I have a flat in New York, but I live on a little farm in western Massachusetts. I've yearned to live in eastern Massachusetts on Cape Cod so I can see the sea, but that wasn't to be so I go as often as I can.

WINCHESTERBut, yes, there is a very different significant cultural context that these people live, particularly if they live in port cities. Although that's another sort of vexation I have is that here in New York, where I am now, not many people wandering around in New York think of themselves as living in a seaside city. If I go to the very southern tip of Manhattan and you see the custom house and you see Castle Clinton and you see the various slipways and things, then you are sort of vaguely reminded why New York is where she is.

WINCHESTERBut if you're in midtown or downtown, where we are now, you rarely think of it. The connection is a psychological connection, but it's one that many people, sadly these days, have lost.

FISHERYou mention New York and Larry in Crofton, Md. has a question about the explorer who sailed up New York Bay, Verrazano. Larry, it's your turn.

LARRYYeah. There's two parts, one has to do with Verrazano. There's a legend that I had heard that Verrazano was sent by one of the popes to look for remnants of the Templeton knights and basically, ended up at Newport, R.I. where he found -- supposedly found something which indicated that they'd been there. But he never found knight's temple or any part of them. That's one part. The other part has to do with a story that Columbus had charts that he'd gotten from his wife. And she had inherited them from her ancestors, who were Viking or Scott sailors, that had gone west from Orkney Islands and so forth, through Iceland to Greenland and then on to Nova Scotia and so forth.

FISHEROkay.

LARRYIt was -- yeah.

FISHERLet's give Simon Winchester a chance to respond.

WINCHESTERWell, on the first thing. Yes, too, I had heard the story of Verrazano and the knight's temple. And the fact that he found nothing is, to me, hardly surprising, little evidence, apart from anecdotal, that they had been there. If I can just segue a tiny bit from that point to one of the things that I do ravage on about in this book, is to try and not to sort of displace in a discourteous way, but to try to put Christopher Columbus in context. I mean, we all know Christopher Columbus, in 1492, sailed the ocean blue.

WINCHESTERBut to reiterate a point which tends to be forgotten, he was not the first to arrive in North America. The first was in 1001 A.D., 491 years before. And that was Leif Ericson, a Norwegian who settled -- who built a settlement that was discovered in 1960 in the northern tip of western Newfoundland, called L'Anse Aux Meadows and they had a child there. Not only did they build houses, which of course Columbus never did, but they had a child. And the first ever European child to be born in North America was born in 1002. He was called Snorri Thorfinnson and that, I think, is so charming and little detail.

FISHERThat's quite a name.

WINCHESTERIt should underline the importance of Leif Ericson, who incidentally, the road that passes under the Verrazano bridge in New York is called Leif Ericson Drive and that's one of the few places that he's memorialized in America.

FISHERWe have a caller who -- we've had a discussion about the U.S.S. Constitution and Sharon in Germantown has a special connection to that ship. Sharon?

SHARONHi. Thanks for being on your show and I love Kojo, although he's not there today. But I wanted to say that my husband, Commander Lewin Wright, at that time, took command of the U.S.S. Constitution in July of 2003 and he was the first black commanding officer of U.S.S. Constitution. But something that a lot of people don't know about him was that he was born in England. He was born in Tottenham. So he has a...

FISHERSee, Simon, you're not the first.

WINCHESTEREvidently not. That is extraordinary. I think his predecessor, a chap called Christopher Melhuish...

SHARONYeah.

WINCHESTER...who is my friend, who is now down in north (unintelligible) , indeed I'll see him on Friday. I don't know who the current commander is. I assume it's not your relation.

SHARONYeah, (unintelligible)

WINCHESTERBut the thought of being sworn in by someone from Tottenham is, for me, just too delightful for words. Sorry it won't happen.

SHARONWell, he's not there anymore. He left in 2005, but, yes, I do know Chris also. And hopefully I'll be able to be at your swearing in ceremony, as I've been to a couple.

WINCHESTEROh, well, wonderful. Great. I gather that -- and I don't want to get this into a gossip, but I gather both Chris and his wife climbed to the topmost top of the Constitution. Did you by any chance?

SHARONUnfortunately, I was planning to do that, but there was an accident just before then where someone fell from the mast and I was unable to do that. But I hope that I will be at some point in time.

WINCHESTERWell, I hope it's not a rite of passage for me as a new American that that's the first thing I have to do because also it'll be the last thing I do, I think.

SHARONNo. I don't -- so I wish you good luck.

WINCHESTERThank you.

SHARONAnd congratulations on becoming an American citizen. That's also a ceremony that I have been through as a former British citizen so.

FISHERWell, great.

WINCHESTERWell, great.

FISHERThank you so much for calling, Sharon.

SHARONOkay.

WINCHESTERThank you.

SHARONAll right.

FISHERYou can join our conversation by calling 1-800-433-8850 as we talk about the Atlantic Ocean with Simon Winchester. We'll continue that conversation after this short break. You're listening to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show."

FISHERWelcome back. I'm Marc Fisher of the Washington Post sitting in for Kojo Nnamdi. We're talking about the Atlantic Ocean with Simon Winchester. And if you'd like to join us, our phone number is 1-800-433--8850. And Simon, you write about adventure, about war, about the geological beginnings of the Atlantic, but also about politics and diplomacy and that coinage of Walter Lippman's the Atlantic Community.

FISHERThis was really the definition and identity of the world's great powers over most of the last century. And now we live in a world where that doesn't seem to be the center focus anymore. Is the Atlantic still, as you put it, the center of the human world, even in a time of religious strife that seems based more in the Middle and Near East, and even in a time of the increasingly dominant economic power of those countries facing the Pacific?

WINCHESTERWell, this was the question that really confronted me when I was living in Hong Kong. And there is obviously, yes, a great merit to that view. My problem with it was that it may well be true that the Pacific is where the focus of the world's attention is going to be in a few years time, but there's not much of a back story to it. And that's what I think frustrated me.

WINCHESTERHowever, I think the world's business that is conducted between London and New York, between Paris and Baltimore, between Washington and Frankfurt, is going to be the dominant -- the driving force over the Atlantic Ocean for the next very long time to come. There may be, in dollars and cents, more value added goods traveling between Yokohama and Seattle. That may well come to be true, although it's not at the moment.

WINCHESTERI mean, just look at one simple statistic. The two air traffic control centers that run the aircraft that cross the Atlantic Ocean -- the North Atlantic Ocean are at Gander and Newfoundland, and it's called Shanwick Oceanic, which is in Glasgow. They handle 415,000 flights a year. That's 1300 flights a day, far more than any transoceanic sector in the world.

WINCHESTERIf you look at a map of the world -- a snapshot of the air roots at any one moment in time, sure, within the United States, it's a solid mass of lines of planes going hither and yon in America. Similarly in Europe, tons and tons of planes. The world's oceans are relatively free from those lines except in one place and that's across the north Atlantic. And there are so many flights crossing it that it looks like a solid bridge of commerce.

WINCHESTERFar, far greater than any other ocean. And that is going to take many, many decades to unravel. So I think the Atlantic is a place of economic and political importance. Although everyone may talk of the future of the Pacific, it hasn't come to be yet. The Atlantic is still unassailably the one.

FISHERWell, let's go back 500 years. A listener in Alexandria, Va., Ron, e-mails us to ask whether you can shine some light on the 15th century Chinese explorer and navigator, Zheng He, I think it's pronounced.

WINCHESTERYeah. Zheng He.

FISHERZheng He.

WINCHESTERHe is, first of all, Chinese, yes, but actually a Muslim, interesting enough, from Western China and a eunuch, if that has any relevance to his story. He commanded a fleet of ships which left China and went -- well, we know for certain that he went across the Indian Ocean and got as far as Mogadishu. And that he there found, among other things, a giraffe, which he brought back to the emperor of China and apparently startled the emperor of China so much with this foul animal, which the emperor had never seen before, that he forbade any further maritime travel anywhere for a very long period of time.

WINCHESTERThis we know. What we don't know, but (word?) Gavin Menzies suggests we might like to think about is that these same Chinese sailors got into the Atlantic, they got into the Mediterranean, they got all around the world, and that Chinese influence in that part of world history, 400 or 500 years ago, is hugely importantly still Chinese. Well, I think that's nonsense, to be perfectly honest, and so do most Chinese.

WINCHESTERYou won't find much support for this view. Chinese, they're very well aware of what they've invented in the past and their contribution to world history, but in terms of navigating the seas 500 years ago, they don't claim it. And they are surprised that there have been these claims put forward in books published in the west. There's very little evidence.

FISHERMarion at the Bay Bridge in Maryland, it's your turn.

MARIONHello?

FISHERHello. Go ahead, please.

MARIONHi. Mr. Winchester, congratulations on your upcoming citizenship. I'm very proud to hear that.

WINCHESTERThank you.

MARIONI want to tell you -- you're welcome. I want to tell you a quick story of my beloved cousin who just died at 89. He was a 26-year-old pilot crossing the Atlantic Ocean in the Bermuda Queen. He heard a stress call from the sea, from a boat. He landed this big huge flying boat on the Atlantic Sea and rescued 69 people one by one. They all survived.

MARIONThey got the plane back to London and they never, ever, ever could not thank him for the rest of their life that he had given them. There was only 26 pilots of World Airways and to say a hero in our family is to put it mildly. So that's a human interest story on the Atlantic. He was written up in Reader's Digest.

WINCHESTERThat's wonderful. I just wish I had known it and was able to incorporate it in this book. It is an amazing story. 69 people, that's extraordinary.

MARIONIsn't it? He's also on Google if you care to look up Captain Chuck Martin. You will find the actual pictures of the rescue. It's awesome. Thank you for your book. I look forward to it.

WINCHESTERThank you.

FISHERThat's quite a story. Well, on a somewhat darker note, our lifetime has seen unending lamentation about the despoiling of the ocean. And so I wonder, as you've taken this broader look at the history of the Atlantic Ocean, are we generally worse off than those who came before us in this regard or does the sea have ability to absorb damage and heal itself, as we're perhaps seeing off the gulf coast after the BP spill, and ability to regenerate that is really greater than the human imagination might believe?

WINCHESTERWell, that is a truly wonderful question. Let me try and answer it in two ways. First of all, the despoiling of the ocean. Taking one example that may not be amenable to improvement and that's the situation of Newfoundland off the Grand Banks relating to the enormous cod fishery. I mean, this was a place that they used to joke, and not entirely joking, that you somehow felt you could walk from Iceland to Canada on the backs of these huge silvery codfish.

WINCHESTERThere were so many of them, it seemed you could just pluck them out of the water at will. Well, that is no longer the situation. Starting in the 1980s and exacerbating itself in the 1990s, due to some appalling mismanagement by the Canadian government and because of sheer human greed, there are now no cod in the waters off Newfoundland whatsoever. The cod fishery has been completely destroyed.

WINCHESTERThis was a part of the world -- Newfoundland's unofficial motto was "In Cod We Trust." Well, there is no cod and the place, having also suffered the decline in newsprint production, is economically in severe trouble. But the sea -- we casually thought that fish stocks in the sea could somehow regenerate itself. Well, in terms of codfish anyway, it can't.

MARIONAnd currently, the fish at the other end of the ocean which was under threat, a fish that we eat huge amounts of -- the official name for it is the Patagonian tooth fish, but the marketing people have rebranded it, much for familiarly, as the Chilean Sea Bass. That was in trouble and is now being sensibly managed and it is recovering and that is a sustainable fishery. But the more general question is, does the ocean repair itself?

WINCHESTERAnd generally speaking, the answer is no, it doesn't. The British government, particularly, are culpable in this regard. It tossed an enormous amount of radioactive material into the oceanic deeps off Cornwall, off Ireland, off Scotland in the '50s, '60s and '70s, saying essentially, well, it's so big, it will just dilute everything and it won't matter. Well, it does matter and it's had huge effects on the food chain.

WINCHESTERAnd as we also know about mercury pollution, one should never eat tuna again because carnivorous fish absorb lots and lots of mercury. We have done an immense amount of damage to the sea and a lot of it appears to be quite permanent.

FISHERAnd we have an e-mail from Bob in Arlington, Va., asking about that ultimate question, the death of the Atlantic. It says, "Your guest mentioned that the Atlantic will die in 100 million years. How?"

WINCHESTERWell, it's actually going to happen. It's slightly bizarre mechanics, but you have Cape Horn -- and incidentally the figure is a 170 million years, most people seem to think. Cape Horn will move eastwards. And if you can just sort of imagine the geography on the radio, it moves along the east at the very bottom of the Atlantic, as it were.

WINCHESTERIt passes south of South Africa past Cape (word?) , Cape of Good Hope, and continues moving eastwards on the bottom, as it were, of the Indian Ocean until it reaches Australia and Tasmania. Then it starts turning northwards. And as it does that, Australia and Tasmania will rotate anti-clockwise, and Cape Horn, from far away now in South America, will continue to move northwards until finally it hits Singapore.

WINCHESTERSo it sounds utterly bizarre, but the geologists say there's reason for believing this is how the world's continents are going to shape themselves. When the moment that Cape Horn collides with Singapore, then all of South America, what's left of it, will be squeezed up against Africa. Equally so, North America will be squeezed up against Europe and the last bits of water, in what is currently 34 million square miles of ocean, will have moved somewhere else.

WINCHESTERAnd although the water will still be there, it will be in some other shape and it will not be named after the Atlas mountains in Morocco. It will no longer be the Atlantic Ocean.

FISHERWell, and in a slightly more timely fashion, I want to steer you a little bit into some murkier waters on the question of climate change and the impact that that is having and is likely to have on the Atlantic Ocean in a shorter time frame than those 100 million years.

WINCHESTERYes. And there is no doubt at all that the climate is warming. I think everyone agrees to that. And this has two effects on the Atlantic Ocean because its waters are warmer so it expands somewhat and so it becomes bulkier and so the sea level rises. But the sea level also rises because the ice sheets on the continents, obviously not the already floating ice because that makes no difference whether it melts or doesn't.

WINCHESTERBut the land ice in Greenland, most importantly, and Antarctica is melting. And that is further adding to the rise in sea level. I haven't got into the question of whether mankind causes it or whether this is cyclical. That's a completely separate argument and I try to stay away from it in this book. And that is having an effect already in a number of cities and some cities are taking note.

WINCHESTERRotterdam, most keenly and most forward looking city is planning for a one meter rise, a very significant rise before the end of this century. And so it's building floating housing estates. It's all sort of ways of diverting the water or making use of the water. But other cities that are facing the same problem are doing much less about it.

WINCHESTERLondon, for instance, which did build a barrier in the Thames some 30 years ago, that barrier is going to be obsolete very soon and they've no plans for a new one. And New York. New York is not doing as much as it should. And when the subway system here is flooded, that is going to be a major, major problem. So cities are going to have to come to grips with this.

WINCHESTERThey're tending to look the other way at the moment. At least the ones in this side of the world are. Rotterdam is doing -- we should all follow the model of Rotterdam, basically.

FISHERWell, don't say you weren't warned, New York. Here's Arthur in Lovettsville, Va. Arthur, it's your turn.

ARTHURThank you. I was intrigued by your early ship voyage to this county on the Empress of Britain, I think you said.

WINCHESTERYes.

ARTHURI was curious as to whether or not at this time one can go to Europe by ship without having to go by way of a luxury liner and the expense that associated with that. Now, obviously, the immigrants did not come over on luxury liners and I was just curious as to whether it's a viable option to find a ship that would go, let's say, to England from New York or Baltimore and it would not be, you know, run into the thousands of dollars.

WINCHESTERIt most certainly is. And I wish I had done my homework and could give you the website to go to, but there are many berths available each day on ships that -- they're cargo ships, but they usually have five or six additional cabins which you can pay a very modest sum. You live in fairly rudimentary quarters and you eat with the crew. And if you're lucky, you eat with the officers, but perhaps that's not necessarily what you want anyway.

WINCHESTERBut you go from cargo port to cargo port. So it would from the unromantic side of Baltimore to the equally unromantic side of Liverpool. But you can cross the ocean and get a real maritime experience doing so. And there are organizations that help you go through -- there's rigmarole involved. It's not as easy as spending $10,000 and getting yourself a ticket on a (word?)

WINCHESTERBut to my way of thinking, immensely more satisfying. And a friend of mine did it just two weeks ago, going from Glasgow, I think, to Montreal or Quebec City on a container ship. It took 12 days and she found it absolutely fascinating. But you have to learn some degree of Hindu because apparently the language on the deck was all Hindu because all the officers came from India.

FISHERWe have an e-mail from Casey about wanting you to know that there's a statue honoring Leif Erickson in Boston at the intersection of Commonwealth Avenue and Charles Gate. Apparently, some earlier Bostonians were convinced that Leif had made it all the way down to Boston and put the statue up to honor Boston's first discoverer.

WINCHESTERWell, if I can tell you that the person that financed the erection of that statue was the man that invented baking powder.

FISHERWell, there you have it.

WINCHESTERHe made a fortune and decided -- he was a great fan of Leif Erickson and insisted that he came down to Boston. I don't think he did, but that's a very nice statue.

FISHERWell, thank you very much, Simon Winchester. It's been a delightful hour. Simon Winchester is appearing Thursday, November 4th at Politics and Prose in Northwest Washington at 7:00 p.m. His book, "Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories" is available now. And thanks for joining us.

WINCHESTERThank you.

FISHERI'm Marc Fisher from the Washington Post sitting in for Kojo Nnamdi. "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," is produced by Diane Vogel, Brendan Sweeney, Tara Boyle, Michael Martinez, and Ingalisa Schrobsdorff, with help from Kathy Goldgeyer, A.C. Valdez and Elizabeth Weinstein. Diane Vogel is the managing producer. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Marc Fisher sitting in for Kojo.