How does Monsarrat present the sea in the novel, The Cruel Sea?

Monsarrat depicts tha sea as neither beautiful nor generous, but rather, powerful, treacherous, and cruel. That Monsarrat should show it thus, when his seagoing experience was largely on the North Atlantic, where the water is often cold enough to kill a man in minutes and the weather is consistently rough, is not surprising. Monsarrat shows the sea as a hostile, rather than neutral, background for the struggles of opposing human forces.