1819, trans. Christopher Smart, Horace, The Works of Horace volume I, page 123:
Tremendous let her extend her name abroad to the extremest boundaries of the earth, where the middle ocean separates Europe from Africa, where the swollen Nile waters the plains; deriving more bravery from the contempt of gold yet undiscovered, and so best situated while hid in the earth, than from forcing it out for the uses of mankind, with a hand ready to make depredations on every thing that is sacred.
1916, H. Colburn, The United Service Magazine, volume 52, page 390:
The Mediterranean, that Middle Ocean, whence proceeded westward all the wisdom of the ancients and the might of Rome and the mysteries of every creed, was the first of seas […]
14 January 1916, “Marseille Naval Base for Allies in Mediterranean” in Ludington Daily News, page 2:
Marseille, the unwearied contestant for Mediterranean trade during twenty-six centuries, and the city wherein the earliest naval traditions of France were formed, whence fleets were sent before Rome’s day of power to challenge the great Mediterranean port-city, Carthage, is today the principal naval base for the allies upon the middle ocean; […]
a.1961, anonymous, “Lord Bateman” (folk song) as published in John Jacob Niles, The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles:
He sailed in the Middle Ocean Right up into the Turkish shore, And in the harbor he made an anchor, And then his sailin’ days were o’er.
1989, Anne Buttimer, The wake of Erasmus: saints, scholars, and studia in mediaeval Norden, page 4:
And the Mediterranean world, meeting ground of diverse civilizations from Asia, Africa, and Europe, slumbered uneasily during the final hours of the (baptized) Pax Romana. Way to the North lay Scandinavia—Ultima Thule—whose historical experiences only rarely intersected with those of the Middle Ocean; […]
