A vivid and revealing portrait of shipboard life as experienced by
eighteenth-century migrants from Europe to the New World In October
1735, James Oglethorpe's Georgia Expedition set sail from London,
bound for Georgia. Two hundred and twenty-seven passengers boarded
two merchant ships accompanied by a British naval vessel and began
a transformative voyage across the Atlantic that would last nearly
five months. Chronicling their passage in journals, letters, and
other accounts, the migrants described the challenges of physical
confinement, the experiences of living closely with people from
different regions, religions, and classes, and the multi-faceted
character of the ocean itself. Using their specific journey as his
narrative arc, Stephen Berry's A Path in the Mighty Waters tells
the broader and heretofore underexplored story of how people
experienced their crossings to the New World in the eighteenth
century. During this time, hundreds of thousands of
Europeans-mainly Irish and German-crossed the Atlantic as part of
their martial, mercantile, political, or religious calling.
Histories of these migrations, however, have often erased the ocean
itself, giving priority to activities performed on solid ground.
Reframing these histories, Berry shows how the ocean was more than
a backdrop for human events; it actively shaped historical
experiences by furnishing a dissociative break from normal patterns
of life and a formative stage in travelers' processes of collective
identification. Shipboard life, serving as a profound conversion
experience for travelers both spiritually and culturally, resembled
the conditions of a frontier or border zone where the chaos of pure
possibility encountered an inner need for stability and continuity,
producing permutations on existing beliefs. Drawing on an
impressive array of archival collections, Berry's vivid and rich
account reveals the crucial role the Atlantic played in history and
how it has lingered in American memory as a defining experience.
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