Except civilizations that sailed the oceans often were terrified of them, and anthropomorphized them as hostile or at least completely capricious deities. Heck, during the Age of Sail, many sailors couldn't even swim, and falling overboard was an incredibly dangerous experience as a result.
One of the mistakes people make, indeed perhaps the defining mistake of imagining space travel, is to relate it to sea travel as if the two are comparable. The problem with space is that the scale simply boggles the imagination and leaves us utterly unable to really imagine it. The collapse of desire for actual space travel in the modern world is in my opinion directly related to the fact that the sea analogy fails.
Because of the vast distances involved in space exploration, and the vast time scale that is implied by that, before a civilization can be truly space faring (much less star faring) it has to be comfortable not merely with the idea of journeying on the 'sea' from place to place but with living on the 'sea' as a place you can call home in and of itself.
Not even Columbus journeyed across the Atlantic with the sense that there may or may not be something on the other side, or with the sense that were there not, then life aboard ship on the stormy seas was one to be permenently prefered over the possibility of reaching land. But its precisely those sorts of feelings that are absolutely required before a civilization can expend the resources necessary to make space faring a reality. Columbus crosses the Atlantic with the hope of economic profit. A space faring civilization must desire to enter space with the certainty that those that send off the ships will never return a profit from doing so. Civilizations will never successfully transition to space bourne civilizations with the hope of colonizing new worlds, because if it is new worlds they hope for they'll just stay home. A reasonable inventory of the cosmos suggests there may well be no colony worlds in all the heavens.
The sea fails as an easy analogy for space for other reasons. For example, a friend of mine quoted Carl Sagan to me saying: "The surface of the earth is the shores of the cosmic ocean." (Sagan is one of my favorite whipping posts.) I replied: "Right, because the ocean is teeming with life in exactly the same way that space is.... not." The surface of the ocean is not nearly as alien or forboding as space. The love of space requires a sailor to see the depths of 'Davy Jones' as a welcoming and wonderful place to be. This is not a natural understanding of the situation.
To understand space in the right context requires the shift in seeing that we see between the protagonists of Verne's "20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea" and the uncanny alien Captain Nemo, and even that may not be enough of a shift to encompass the kind of change in thinking required. The Polynesian myths may be closer to this thought, in as much as in them it is the air deity and not the sea deity that is the one that is hostile and dangerous, suggesting a lack of fear of the water itself and of all the peoples I'm familiar with it is the Polynesians that came closest to a true sea faring culture.
Granted, this is all conjectural and advanced with probably more certainty than obvious justification, but I think it holds up well with the sort of cultural and social techonology that would be necessary to animate any known technology for traversing space. That we still prefer to handwave the problem and travel through imaginary space using magic, and instead prefer stories about magic in space to stories about the reality of space strikes me as a terrible blow towards any progress on that front.
