Cohen Seascape expresses an appealing sense of wonder and humility as well as perhaps familiar hope that the ocean can transcend the various stressors it faces. That it can, in other words, efface those marks of servitude once and for all. And thinking of that servitude, it's worth noting that the narrator's use of the word man is more than generic. For the style, this idealised sea power is implicitly contrasted with patriarchy and with tyranny agents that it goes without saying, continue to operate and ecologically and otherwise consequent fashion 2 centuries after her novel's publication. But of course, it's also true that the narrator is to a large extent wrong, or at least being deliberately naive for rhetorical purposes. The seed doesn't settle back into an unspoiled state once the ship has disappeared from view. And that word trace is worth mulling over, because to read it today is to feel a frustrating kind of irony. For all that's now known about the extent and intensity of human impacts on the ocean, those impacts continue too often to go undetected. And unusually disastrous example and potent emblem of this has been happening since January of this year, when a tanker called Sanchi collided with a cargo ship in the East China Sea.