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We're still learning from birds too. U.S. engineers are planning an aircraft called the Pelican, which is based on the way that those slow-flying and often low-flying birds exploit what is called the ground effect—a curious phenomenon in which close proximity to the earth's surface actually reduces in-flight drag, and increases the upward efficiency of the wing. The Pelican aircraft would be huge—on the drawing board is a version four hundred feet long, with a five-hundred-foot wingspan and a cargo capacity of around ten Boeing 747s. It would fly at a stately 250 miles an hour at an altitude of no more than twenty feet—the first major commercial airplane to have to keep a close eye out for icebergs.9

III

A few days after the autumn 2004 storm had passed, we went down to the wharf in the little village of West Berlin to pick up some lobsters from one of our neighbors, Bob Lohnes. The whole fleet was in, all four boats—the West Berlin flotilla is not exactly a threat to global fish stocks. They were all pretty similar, Cape Islanders, a roofed cuddy amidships, an open deck for stacking the metal wire lobster pots, crates for the lobsters themselves, a winch for hauling the pots. The motors were sturdy diesels with a throaty sound; the old one-lungers of the East Coast, with their open spark you could light a cigarette from, have long since retired, nor do modern fishermen any longer shoehorn old Chrysler truck engines into their hulls for motive power. The Cape Islanders are small boats, but very sturdy, maneuverable, and stable even in rough seas, perfectly tuned for the job they are designed to do.

For our purposes, though, the most notable thing about them was the absence of sail. None of them carried any canvas except sometimes a tiny "staysail," used only to keep them into the wind while hauling traps. GPS systems, radars, range finders, echolocaters, cell phone chargers, yes, but no sails. There was no longer any point to sails.

I looked across Blueberry Bay. It was empty except for the sprightly colored buoys that marked where the lobster pots were. Farther out there was a coast guard vessel with a red-striped hull. Otherwise . . . nothing.

In summer it is different. A small marina has been built to the west, in the town of Liverpool, and on summer afternoons little triangular scraps of white bob perkily out from the Mersey River and head across the bay, perhaps bound for Lunenburg or Chester. Less frequently, and usually in the fall, slightly larger triangles appear to the east and head across the horizon, larger yachts, some of them heading for Bermuda and points south. Rich peoples' boats; a whole subculture of self-described "yacht bums" travels up and down the eastern seaboard, making a living of sorts crewing other people's boats to exotic ports. But none of this is any longer necessary. None of it is "commerce." Instead, it is all recreation. Many of the people who sail these little boats are very skilled, but their skill is employed for its own sake, in no cause and to no real purpose. In the old days sailing wasn't fun, something you did after work. Sailing was work. It was the lifeblood of world commerce, and wind was the oil of the time, the motor that drove the engine of global trades. And of course it was free, and lasted forever, the earth as a perpetual motion machine.

All gone now.

But the age of sail, which started the age of globalization, lasted for many millennia, much longer than the upstart machine age that has succeeded it.

Sailing probably began along the Nile, or possibly on the Euphrates delta of old Mesopotamia, or the Middle Kingdom of the Han. The oldest extant pictures of sailing boats are from the pharaonic cultures of Egypt, dating back some four thousand years. The civilized world's first known shipwreck is depicted on a stela at Karnak, dating from the second millennium B.C. Boats eerily like it are still visible plying the river only hours from Cairo. On modern Lake Nasser, formed by the Aswan High Dam, the feluccas