On Livingstone’s letter, see Simon Keynes (ed.), Quentin Keynes: Explorer, film-maker, lecturer and book-collector, 1921–2003, limited edn, Cambridge, 2004. I am grateful to Professor Keynes for sending me a copy of this beautiful book and for letting me reproduce the letter. See also Christie’s auction catalogue, 7 April 2004.

Details on the Lusitania and on Martin Douglas were from Wilmon Menard, ‘Neptune’s Sea-Mail Service,’ Sea Frontiers, International Oceanographic Foundation, vol. 26, no. 6, November/December 1980.

The information on Guinness® beer bottles was supplied by Diageo GB Press Office.

The quotation ‘restlesse mindes are tossed’ is from Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 1, p. 360, ed. T. C. Faulkner et al., Oxford: Clarendon Press 1989–2000.

The film Message in a Bottle is based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks, 1998, screenplay by Gerald Di Pego, directed by Luis Mandoki (Warner Bros). I am grateful to Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. for permission to quote this from the film.

The quotation on Waterworld is taken from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, II, 72 (1670), translated by W. F. Trotter at http://eserver.org/philosophy/pascal-pensees.txt. It continues, ‘When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes forever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.’ The link between Pascal and Waterworld was made by Patrizia A. Muscogiuri, ‘Cinematographic Seas: Metaphors of Crossing and Shipwreck on the Big Screen (1990–2001)’, in Bernhard Klein (ed.), Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture, Aldershot: Ashgate 2002, pp. 203–20.

The information on tides is taken from Macmillan-Reeds Nautical Almanac 2002, eds. Basil D’Oliveira, Brian Goulder, Edward Lee-Elliott, Imsworth: Nautical Data Ltd, 2001.

There is an article on Curtis Ebbesmeyer in http://news.nationalgeo graphic.com/news/2001/06/0619_seacargo.html. Information on rubber duck travelling speeds came from The Hawk Eye, 17 August 2003, at www.thehawk eye.com. Sea bean fanatics congregate at www.seabean.com.

Simon Leys’s La mer dans la littérature française, Paris: Plon, 2003, 2 vols, is an invaluable guide to the subject, and several of the extracts quoted were initially sourced from here. The reference to the two infinities is from Les Misérables (1862), part 1, book 2, viii. La mer et le vent was published in 1865. Jules Michelet’s quotation is from Leys, vol. 1, p. 540, ‘en sortant d’elle’ and ‘La mer et le c*** de ma femme: mes deux infinis.’

On graphology, see Joe Nickell, Detecting Forgery: Forensic Investigation of Documents, Kentucky: University Press, 1996; on its lack of accuracy, see p. 39. The earlier sources mentioned by Nickell are F. E. Inbau, A. A. Moenssens and L. E. Vitullo, Scientific Police Investigation, New York: Chilton Book Co., 1972.