Unit 1 Timeline

"For some strange reason we tend to think of human events as taking place on land. We see the past in the physical solidarity of monuments, in things that have been built, in the remains of things destroyed, in tombs.

But much of history - often the most dramatic part- is written on the seas, where men have left no record of themselves, where everything has sunk without a trace, and the water is just as it was a thousand or a hundred thousand years ago: illegible.

The sea has inspired a man's dreams of conquest; on the sea the fates of civilisations and empires played out. It was the promised of unknown lands beyond the sea that spurred the great navigators to entrust their lives to the waves"

By Tiziano Terzani, a traveller and writer who spent the last 20 years of his life in Asia