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To linger over Captain John Smith’s 1607-1608 map of the Chesapeake, for instance, is to put you in his boat as he sailed up the Potomac looking for a waterway to the Western Ocean, as if seeing the places he records for the first time.

Nonetheless, MacDonald said his paper is a warning that “we simply cannot take off the table the possibility that the eastern Pacific will cool relative” to western ocean waters “and we’ll have La Niña-like conditions exacerbating aridity in California.”

In the western ocean it harried the sea flat, lifting water bodily out of water and carrying it as spume.

Columbus was fascinated by what he called “the Enterprise of the Indies,” a project to reach Japan, China and India not by following the coastline of Africa and sailing East but rather by plunging boldly into the unknown Western ocean—or, as Eratosthenes had said with startling prescience, “to pass by sea from Iberia to India.”

But when he spoke, his words went to the mark: “After these years, a helping hand? O goddess, what guile is hidden here? A raft, you say, to cross the Western Ocean, rough water, and unknown? Seaworthy ships that glory in god’s wind will never cross it. I take no raft you grudge me out to sea. Or yield me first a great oath, if I do, to work no more enchantment to my harm.”