Iconoclast photographer and documentarian Allan Sekula unfolds a series of variations shot in the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Japan and other maritime countries around two of his major obsessions: globalization and the sea. In this rumination on the sea as a "primordial source of sublimity," Sekula explores a matrix of narratives--Greek myths, American movies, and stories of longshoremen, lost sailors and displaced populations--and rejects on the globalizing effects of Adam Smith's notion of the seafaring life as a form of gambling.