The result is not so much a biography of the Atlantic, but of the human perception of it, an ocean once regarded by mariners 'with a mixture of awe, terror, and amazement'. At core, Winchester's perceptual prism is Victorian. He invests the natural world with Dumasien ?lan, a degree of affect antithetical to today's scientific reductionism. Like cloud enthusiast Gavin Pretor-Pinney, angler Chris Yates, forest ranger Colin Elford, and Prince Charles, he is a figurehead of the neo-transcendentalist literary vogue triggered by impending ecological crisis: that of the celebration of nature.

Interestingly, the movement is predominantly male. Landscapes are tethered to accounts of primarily male exploits - angling, farming, and so on - and, ultimately, presented as backdrops to male villainy and heroism. (Nan Shepherd's critically acclaimed classic, The Living Mountain, is tellingly devoid of swashbuckling.) Winchester writes for men (the Drake Passage, for example, 'resembles an iron-plate exit wound from an eastbound bullet'). Women are of significantly less interest, and, when they appear, are squealing, confused, dancing for male gratification, or clad in bikinis ('middle-aged ... excitable ladies all a-twitter', and so on).

His scholarship, however, is impeccable. Mare Atlanticus has, Winchester reports, remained the same for 10 million years, stretching 'from the Stygian fogs of the north to the Roaring Forties in the south, riven with deeps in its western chasms, dangerous with shallows in eastern plains, a place of cod and flying fish, of basking sharks and blue-finned tuna, of gyres of Sargasso weed and gyres of unborn hurricanes, a place of icebergs and tides, whirlpools and sandbanks, submarine canyons and deep-sea black smokers and ridges and seamounts, of capes and rises and fracture zones, of currents hot, cold, torrential, and languorous, of underwater volcanoes and earthquakes'.

Winchester presents the Atlantic as 'the cradle of modern Western civilisation - the inland sea of the civilised western world, the home of a new pan-Atlantic civilisation itself'. Long-distance radio communication, the suppression of slavery, the realisation of continental drift and plate tectonics, the discovery of longitude, the Hanseatic League - all were, he writes, inspired or facilitated by its existence.

Atlantic's overriding theme, though, is the death of romance. Winchester mourns the reframing of our world as a dumping ground or as mere distance to be covered. Some 1,300 commercial aircraft penetrate Atlantic airspace every day, and this tally increases by five or so per cent each year. In addition to the 21st-century anxieties that preclude meditation, this has 'taken much of the mystery of the sea away, has made us indifferent to its existence'. Concomitant to this shift, 'there has been a steady lessening, some would say an actual abandonment, of humankind's duty of care towards it'. Winchester presents the possibility that the Atlantic, 'reverting to type, reverting to the primal nature of what it has always been', may revolt. The world's seas have, after all, risen by 'some eight inches' since 1870. He notes that storm surges could easily flood New York's subway lines and that London, 'sitting uncomfortably in its basin of clay', has had to raise the Thames Barrier more than 100 times since it opened in 1984.

A wonderfully old-fashioned work, bold, solid, engrossing, gorged with information, and punchy with morality, Atlantic is another Winchester best-seller.