A Foot In The Water

A Foot in the Water is exactly the sort of title that sounds modest, tentative, perhaps even a little apologetic — as though Felipe Fernández-Armesto is merely proposing a cautious paddle. In fact, what follows is a sparkling, learned, and gloriously wide-ranging plunge into humanity’s long, complicated, occasionally ridiculous relationship with water.

Because water, as it turns out, is never just water. It is life, danger, trade, empire, ritual, leisure, terror, transport, mythology, hygiene, and the setting for a surprising number of human miscalculations. Fernández-Armesto, being one of those infuriatingly elegant historians who can make almost any subject feel both profound and entertaining, takes this everyday substance and shows just how much of civilisation has sloshed around inside it.

This is not a book merely about rivers, seas, and oceans as geographical facts. It is about the ways people have imagined water, feared it, worshipped it, crossed it, polluted it, sailed on it, bathed in it, and occasionally drowned in it while attempting something they probably shouldn’t have been doing in the first place. Water is at once friend and enemy, servant and tyrant, necessity and menace. One begins to suspect that humanity’s entire story is really just a series of increasingly elaborate attempts to negotiate with something that cannot be negotiated with.

Fernández-Armesto’s great gift is to move from the grand to the intimate without ever seeming to strain. One moment you are thinking about oceans and exploration, empire and commerce; the next you are considering baths, cleanliness, swimming, fear, pleasure, and the curious fact that an element essential to our existence has also spent millennia trying to kill us. Civilisation, in this telling, is less a triumph over nature than a long, improvised compromise with dampness.

There is, too, a delightful irony running through the whole enterprise. Human beings build ports, launch navies, map currents, engineer canals, invent seaside holidays, and speak loftily of mastering the waves — only for water to carry on behaving exactly as it pleases. Storms arrive, ships sink, floods spread, drains fail, and entire empires discover that their confidence was not, in itself, waterproof. It is hard not to admire water’s consistency. It has never been impressed by us.

What makes the book so enjoyable is that it is never merely earnest. It wears its scholarship lightly, moving with wit and curiosity through history, culture, and ideas. This is not the kind of history that sits stiffly in a corner and demands reverence. It is alert, fluid, and clever, constantly reminding you that the most ordinary things are often the strangest once someone suitably intelligent starts looking at them properly.

And of course there is the pleasing absurdity that a species largely composed of water has spent so much of its existence treating the stuff with alternating terror and overconfidence. We fling ourselves into it for sport, attempt to cross it for glory, pipe it into our homes, flee from it when it rises, and pay extra to holiday beside it. Fernández-Armesto captures that contradiction beautifully. Water is both background and protagonist, taken for granted until it suddenly becomes the only thing that matters.

This Oxford University Press edition from 2015, ISBN 9780198744429, is in As New condition, which seems only fair for a book so freshly alive to one of the oldest subjects on earth. It has all the elegance you would hope for from OUP: handsome, intelligent, and ready to make you sound more interesting than you were five minutes ago.

Ideal for readers who enjoy history with range, intelligence, and a faintly amused eye on the human condition. Also perfect for anyone who has ever looked at the sea, a river, a bath, or even a puddle and thought there might be more going on here than meets the eye. A civilised, witty, and unexpectedly expansive meditation on the substance without which we would all be having a much quieter time of it.

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