Ocean'Eminently readable' The TLS Books of the Year, 2024 Ocean is an ambitious history of the pre Columbian Atlantic Ocean, a story that begins with the formation of the mid Atlantic ridge some 200 million years ago and ends with the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, which provided a template for the methods used by the Spanish in their colonisation of the New World. John Haywood argues that the perception that Atlantic