The sea is beautiful and alluring, but it is also dangerous and deadly. Above all, it is unknowable and untameable. Storytelling offered our ancestors a means to understand and interact with the natural world, and in time these stories coalesced into the mythological systems of the world. And the ocean features in every mythological system in history. To reflect and explore this, Gerry Smyth has gathered together myths and folktales from cultures around the world Native American, Caribbean, Polynesian, Persian, Indian, Scandinavian and European.