Bruce Wilson Jr.
The Ocean Blue Images
The ocean has shaped human history for thousands of years. Dive into ocean images.
Prehistoric Ocean
Sealife in the prehistoric ocean looked both familiar and strange.
Earth from space
The Earth as seen from space, showing that ocean covers 70% of the planet's surface.
Human migration
The first humans appeared in Africa around 300,000 years ago. It took humanity nearly all of human history to spread across the entire globe––a migration often shaped by oceans.
Early human
A reconstruction of a Homo sapien who lived in modern Romania around 40,000 years ago.
Hawaiian canoe
An 18th-century depiction of a Hawaiian canoe. Ships small and large allowed the Polynesians to cross the Pacific.
Sea Peoples
An Egyptian bas relief from the time of Ramses III shows the Egyptians fending off a chaotic attack from the Sea Peoples.
Egyptian ship
An image of an Egyptian ship shows the mix of oar power and sail.
Nora stone
The Nora Stone, which shows the ancient Phoenician alphabet as it existed around 800 BCE.
Greek ship
Greek galleys carried goods and people across the sea. They helped the Greeks sustain their far-flung colonies.
Salamis
A 19th-century illustration of the Battle of Salamis between the Greeks and the Persians.
Naumachia
A print showing the Roman Naumachia, where ships competed in front of massive audiences in basins or amphitheaters.
Mongol invasion
Japanese samurai board a Mongol ship during the invasion of Japan. The Mongols adopted Song China ship technology.
Lepanto
A fresco in the Vatican shows the battle lines in the Battle of Lepanto. Ships powered by oars clashed for the last time in the battle.
Spanish Armada
Though the naval showdown between England and Spain took place only a few years after Lepanto, naval warfare had left behind oars and switched to sails.
Sea Serpent
The "great sea serpent" spotted by Hans Egede off the coast of Greenland in 1734. The massive creature dwarfs the ship.
Magnus serpent
Olaus Magnus's Carta Marina showed an enormous sea serpent destroying a ship.
Sea Devil
The "sea devil," a monstrous creature drawn by the naturalist Conrad Gessner.
Atlantic humped snake
The "Atlantic humped snake," as drawn by the Linnaean Society based on eye-witness reports.
Persian traders
A 14th-century depiction of maritime trade, from Marco Polo's Travels. Persian traders carry goods and animals to India.
Roman coins
Ancient Roman coins, which date to the 1st century, discovered in Pudukottai, India, show the close trade relationship between Rome and India. So, too, does an Indian statue discovered in the ruins of Pompeii known as the Pompeii Lakshmi.
Pirates
A French ship attacked by pirates in a 1615 painting by Aert Anthoniszoon.
Slave ship
A diagram of the interior of a slave ship on the Middle Passage, made in 1790.
Vinland map
The Vinland Map, once thought to show the first evidence of European contact with the New World, turned out to be a 20th-century hoax.
Giraffe
Admiral Zheng He brought back marvels from his voyages, including a tribute giraffe presented to the Ming emperor.
Transatlantic Cable
The path of the 1858 transatlantic cable, which cut down on the time to communicate between Europe and North America
Challenger
The crew of the Challenger hauls up marine animals from the deep sea.
Thule
The island of Thule, or Tile, on the 1539 Carta Marina. The mapmaker placed Thule in the Atlantic and claimed the island had more than 30,000 inhabitants.
Atlantis
Athanasius Kircher's 1664 map of Atlantis. Kircher positioned the island between the New World and the Old World.
Zeno Map
The Zeno map places Frisland in the North Atlantic. It sits north of Britain but south of Iceland and Greenland. Only, nothing actually exists in that spot.
Gulliver
Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians, from Johnathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. The fictional island of Lilliput let Swift explore absurdity on a fictional island.
Roman mosaic
Ancient Greeks and Romans studied the animals of the Mediterranean. This ancient Roman mosaic shows fish and an octopus.
Hawaii
The earliest map of the Hawaiian Islands, created in 1785 after Captain Cook's third voyage made contact with the islands.
Pangea
Alfred Wegener's map of Pangea. Wegener failed to convince scientists because he could not explain a mechanism for how the continents might have moved.
Ocean floor map
A 1977 map of the seafloor, based on research from Marie Tharp. Today, scientists acknowledge the Mid-Atlantic Ridge as the earth's largest physical feature.
Rembrandt
Rembrandt's only painting of the sea, titled The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The painting remains missing today.
Siren Vase
The Siren Vase, a so-called red-figure vase where the artist paints the black spaces to leave the red clay of the vase showing in the background.
Hokusai
Hokusai's masterpiece, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, dates to c. 1830. Mount Fuji sits in the background, looking much like a wave.
Seascape
Roy Lichtenstein crafted a pared-down, yet still recognizable, seascape in 1965.
Lewis Carroll
The illustration accompanying a 1901 edition of Lewis Carroll's Sea Dirge captures the less enjoyable side of the sea.
Tempest
Miranda watching the shipwreck in The Tempest. Painted by John William Waterhouse in 1916.
Moby Dick
A depiction of the white whale attacking a whaler's ship from an edition of Moby Dick. While Melville's novel was a commercial flop in his lifetime, it later became a classic.
Egyptian food
An ancient Egyptian depiction of food, which prominently features fish, found in a burial chamber dated to the 15th century BCE.
Whale ribs
Whales were used for much more than food. In his 1555 book, the Swede Olaus Magnus showed a house made of whale ribs.
Cod
A painting in the U.S. Capitol shows colonists drying cod, an important industry from the 17th-19th centuries.
Plesiosaur
Mary Anning's drawing of her Plesiosaur fossil, which set off a wave of debates in the scientific community. The astonishing fossil was clearly not a living creature, giving credence to the extinction theory.
Demologos
Demologos, the floating battery built in 1815, combined centuries-old technology on shipbuilding with a new steam-powered engine.
Monitor and Merrimack
The Battle of Hampton Roads between the Merrimack, on the left, and the Monitor, on the right.
Holland
The USS Holland, the Navy's first submarine, in 1900.
Pearl Harbor
The Pearl Harbor attack drew a new line in the sand for naval warfare. Without air defense, entire fleets might be at risk.
Cascadia earthquake
A model of the mysterious earthquake that struck the Pacific Northwest centuries ago and sent a tsunami across the Pacific.
Ghost forest
Stumps from long-dead trees hint at a major disaster that took place centuries ago. But this ghost forest on the Oregon coast held answers to the mystery.
Titanic
The Titanic left Southampton on April 10, 1912. A few days later, on its maiden voyage, the unsinkable ship sank.
Coral bleaching
Bleached coral often looks stark white against the darker colors of living coral.
Pacific garbage patch
The locations of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Pacific clouds
The northwestern Pacific Ocean, as seen from space. Warmer seas create the low stratocumulus clouds.
Stellar's Sea Cow
A 1744 illustration of the Steller's sea cow, with a fur seal and sea lion. The sea cow was three times longer than its cousin the manatee
