I pass like night, from land to land; I have strange powers of speech …                    —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Charles Lamb was fifteen when he saw the sea for the first time. Many years later, in The Old Margate Hoy (1823), he would relate his sense of disappointment. As a boy his knowledge of the sea had been derived from books: tales of wanderers whose journeys were often laced with romance and poetry. He had read of the mystique in the depths of the great oceans, and also of tiny isolated islands and the…