I have been reading Washington Irving's travel journals recently. His descriptions of crossing the Atlantic are pretty interesting. He compares it to a blank page in existence - a kind of threshold one passes to different worlds, from which the return trip is uncertain. We don't really get that feeling anymore.
I took a whale watching trip a few years ago off the coast of Maine and experienced a kind of strange isolation and a great fear of the sea. How much more uncertain would it have been on one of those two mast schooners?
