Under The Sea-Wind, Rachel Carson

Yesterday we shared Helen Scales’ essay Ocean Paths, in which she follows a trail of eels to the place they call home, quoting Rachel Carson’s Under The Sea-Wind and its line, ‘the old eels were to die and become sea again’. Today we share that page.

Under the Sea-Wind was the first book in Carson’s sea triptych and like its companions The Edge of the Sea and The Sea Around Us, it dives into the mystery and beauty of the sea. Split into three descriptive narratives the book tells of life on the shore (The Edge of the Sea), the open sea (The Gull’s Way) and at the sea bottom (River and Sea) where this page is found, telling the story of the Anguilla eel’s migration to the Sargasso sea.

Rachel Carson was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist. She found success in her ability to bring her vast knowledge of the sea and sea-life to the general public with her poetic and absorbing prose. Carson was Editor in Chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and her writing was recognised with various awards including The U.S. Book Award for The Sea Around Us, the George Westinghouse Science Writing Award 1950, the John Burroughs Medal of the John Burroughs Association and the title Woman of the Year in Literature. At the time of publication of this second edition of Under the Sea-Wind, Carson had just been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was engaged in her studies of the sea-shore.