A TITANIC CASE OF NAUSEA

If this saloon’s a’rockin’, don’t come a’knockin’—it’s made to relieve sea sickness via a system of gimbals.

It’s true that you’ll find more ill-advised, more life-threatening, more disgusting and, yes, more plain old stupid treatments in the annals of medical history. But we’re fairly certain you won’t find another one that caused this much property damage.

“Well, you did it, Crom. I know I doubted you along the way, but here we are, standing on the water and not falling. This creation of yours is astounding. What did you call it again? A boat?”

“Yes, my friend, it’s called a ‘boat.’ Now that we’re out here though, I­—” [barfs uncontrollably]

Okay, maybe the relationship between boats and seasickness doesn’t go all the way back to caveman days. But we’re betting it wasn’t too long after the first bottle of champagne was smashed across a ship’s hull that the first bottle of Dramamine was less dramatically uncorked.

But, of course, we didn’t have Dramamine in the early days of maritime adventure (we didn’t have champagne either, but that’s some other book’s problem). This is the story of our ill-fated attempts to cure seasickness, and how they led to one of history’s dumbest boats.

BETRAYAL ON THE HORIZON

So, what is it that causes you to feel a little wobbly out on the waves?

Well, it’s simply confusion between your visual input, and vestibular and position sensors in your inner ear. Easy! Don’t worry—we only half understood it ourselves (the Sydnee half). Let’s break it down: You see a horizon moving one way, but the rest of your body feels itself moving up and down independent of that. Additionally, your legs are adjusting to keep you from falling, and well, it just gets to be too much, especially when parts of the ship aren’t moving.

Though not everybody gets desperately ill on the waves, it’s rare to find someone who’s completely unmoved by this potent cocktail of stimuli. In fact, only 10 percent of people are completely impervious to motion sickness of some sort. (And we would bet that a few of them are just lying to look cool.)

HEAVING THROUGH HISTORY

When tracking a disorder all the way back to the beginning of history, we often like to duck in on the ancient Greeks to see what they have to offer. It’s fun to see all the flowery ways they find of making crap up. The word nausea comes from the Greek naus for “ship”—certainly Hippocrates has something spicy to say on the topic, right? “Sailing on the sea,” he wrote, “proves that motion disturbs the body.”

Uhh, good job, Hippocrates. Try to rest up, pal; we’ll try to catch up with you next chapter.

A few hundred years after Hippocrates stated the obvious without offering any kind of cure to go with it, Roman orator and politician Marcus Tulluis Cicero said he would rather be killed in battle than deal with seasickness.

While the Romans and Greeks groused, ancient China and India had both found that ginger offered some relief to seasickness. A study in the Lancet has shown that powdered ginger staved off nausea twice as long as a placebo.

And that’s the end of the chapter.

No, no, we still have a lot of dumb historical stuff to get out of our systems and into your brain.

A WORLD-CHANGING TUMMY ACHE

Much is made of the Black Plague and its power to shift the course of human history. But humble seasickness deserves at least a footnote for the role it played in helping the English defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588.

The Spanish Admiral Alonso Pérez de Guzmán was more of an administrator than a sailor, and hadn’t spent much time at sea. He wrote to the king of Spain during the campaign, “I know by the small experience I have had afloat that I soon become seasick.” Reportedly, his mal de mer was one of the factors that led to his loss at the hands of the British Navy.

It’s bad enough when poor schlubs like us suffer from a medical condition, but famous historical figures? Seasickness had gone too far. It was time for the medical establishment to fight back the only way it knows how: badly, followed by excruciatingly slow improvement.

Guzmán wasn’t the only chronicler of his own seasickness. Charles Darwin, Lawrence of Arabia, and hero of the British Navy Admiral Horatio Nelson all journaled their struggles with tummy troubles on the water. That’s surprising, but maybe not so surprising, considering one old English proverb states that “The only cure for seasickness is to sit on the shady side of an old brick church in the country.” Poor Nelson never even stood a chance.

Sydnee’s Fun Medical Fact

If you want to sound really fancy, you could always call it a mal de mer. That also means seasickness, of course, but it will probably seem much more impressive to your friends when you start sharing all your interesting new tidbits about nautical nausea.

THE BATTLE AGAINST BARF

Bad treatments almost always start from bad ideas about how the human body works, and those early docs were working with a doozy of one. Namely, the prevailing belief through most of history was that shifting in the intestines and stomach caused the symptoms. So, the treatments for seasickness were largely concerned with keeping all of your internal organs in place.

In the 19th century, a Canadian company made an anti-motion sickness belt, a tight, girdle-like number that held all the gut plumbing in place. It was advised that those especially prone to seasickness could try wiring them to batteries so they could shock themselves if any nausea began, an innovation anyone who’s read this far in the book shouldn’t find too surprising. (Also, not too surprisingly, the belt didn’t work.)

Even once we gave up on trying to keep our organs under control, solutions weren’t much better. The Hamburg American Steamship Company took a pass at the problem with a vibrating anti-seasickness deck chair. How did that work? According to a 1906 edition of New Zealand’s Poverty Bay Herald: “It is claimed for the chair that the up and down vibratory movement renders the pitching, heaving, and rolling of a vessel less perceptible, as the lengthy downward motions of the ship become neutralised by the rapid succession of vibrations imparted from the chair.”

So . . . it didn’t work. That’s the answer.

If you asked Henry Bessemer, the Hamburg American Steamship Company was simply thinking too small. You couldn’t make a simple deck chair seasickness-proof.

It had to be a whole ship.

THINKING BIG REALLY BIG

We’re going to talk about this buckwild invention in a second, but let’s take a moment to meet your new pal Henry Bessemer.

The hero of this tale was born in England in 1813 and followed in his father’s footsteps as a wealthy inventor.

He didn’t invent the same stuff again though, right? That’d be pretty unimpressive.

Bessemer’s most notable contribution to society was the cleverly named “Bessemer method,” which made steel inexpensive to produce for the first time in history. An important fella like that was in demand all over Europe, which meant Bessemer spent a lot of time traveling back and forth across the English Channel. He was sick on every trip. Like the hero of every great infomercial, he thought aloud with frustration to no one in particular: “There has to be a better way!”

Bessemer got his brilliant anti-nausea idea from watching a compass, which stays still despite the pitching and rolling of the ship. He thought, logically—if perhaps fantastically—if we can make a compass that doesn’t move, why not a whole room he could hang out in on the ship?

He built a model in his backyard in London, which must have been quite a treat for the neighbors. The cabin was supported by gimbals—a mechanism, typically consisting of rings pivoted at right angles for keeping a compass or chronometer horizontal in a moving vessel, and not attached to outside walls of the ship. Basically, the saloon could move independently of the ship so it stayed level.

While the term “saloon” is typically just a way of saying “old-timey bar,” we’re using it in the naval sense here, specifically “a large cabin for the common use of passengers on a passenger vessel.” That’s not to say alcoholic drinks weren’t consumed in the Bessemer saloon. You’re on a boat, what the heck else are you going to do?

He did some tests to see if this would work in his backyard (how exactly the hell he did that has tragically been lost to history) and he was pleased. So, he had one of his cabins installed in a steamship with the assistance of a ship designer. It was seventy feet in length, thirty feet wide, and was extremely fancy. It had gold-plated mirrors on the walls, leather seats, and potted plants everywhere. Very Victorian chic.

The fact that it’s extremely fancy is gonna make this next bit extra fun to imagine, so make sure you’ve developed a clear mental picture before we move on. Or just look at these actual pictures from newspapers of the time.

THE SEASICK-PROOF SALOON SETS SAIL

Join us now for the maiden voyage of the SS Bessemer. The year is 1875, and the ship is packed to the portholes with a super high-class, privately invited guest list of investors and assorted other rich people.

They departed from Dover, and headed for France, planning to land at the Port of Calais. Everything was going pretty well and the saloon was miraculously stable. It seemed as though Bessemer had done it!

But then the ship began to slow down as it entered the harbor.

Remember how the saloon was swiveling independently of the ship itself? Well, it didn’t get the memo that it should cut it out when the ship tried to stop moving. The swinging of the cabin as the ship slowed down made it incredibly difficult to pilot the ship. And lo, did the SS Bessemer end its maiden voyage by crashing into the pier.

For a lesser inventor, that’d be the end of the story, but not so for Henry Bessemer. He rushed back to England, and after taking just a month for repairs (and so he could drum up replacements for the investors who had bailed), the SS Bessemer set sail on its first public voyage.

The ship had one important difference this time: The saloon was locked in place.

Okay, so it kind of defeated the purpose to lock the saloon in place, but I get why he’d be desperate to get a win on the books at this point. You know when you’re baking banana bread, and then you burn it, but then you eat it anyway, because hey, at least you’re full? This was the burnt banana bread lunch of sea voyages.

Bessemer claimed that it was locked like this because he had insufficient time to fix the damage after the first trip. Sure, Hank. Let’s go with that explanation.

The Bessemer fared pretty well once again, but the real test wouldn’t come until the ship slowed as it prepared to dock. Crowds gathered at the Port of Calais to see the Bessemer’s triumphant arrival or disastrous slow-motion crash. Considering the crowds were comprised of human beings, we assume they would have been equally thrilled with either outcome.

They got the second one.

As the Bessemer slowed, it began to move erratically, locked saloon be damned. The captain fought to keep control of the ship, but it once again crashed into the port—this time taking out most of the supporting pillars and destabilizing the entire pier.

This second crash was understandably enough to scare off the investors who remained, and the ship was left to rust in port. Bessemer finally abandoned the idea altogether.

The dream lived on though, albeit in a completely stationary sort of way. Years later, when the Bessemer was broken up by British naval architect Edward James Reed, he had the saloon moved to his home in Kent to use as a billiard room. His house would later become the Swanley Agricultural College, and the saloon was used as a lecture hall.

Tragically, the saloon met its final end, not at sea, but after being destroyed by German bombers during World War II. This is probably not even on the top 1,000 list of bad stuff Nazis did (even if you ignore them trying to steal the Ark of the Covenant), but still, the destruction of such a lavishly appointed construction was, in Victorian terminology, a real bummer.

DO WE STILL DO THIS TODAY?

What, build special anti-sea-sickness boats? No, what a silly question. We’ve made strides against the malady in other ways, though! By observing that people with hearing deficits were less likely to become seasick, we began to understand that mal de mer had some connection to the inner ear.

The Second World War increased efforts to find something that helped—the least it could do after claiming the Bessemer saloon, really—and in 1947, we discovered that antihistamines could help prevent motion sickness. This was the breakthrough humanity had been waiting for.

These days we use antihistamines, such as Dramamine and Phenergan, to help treat seasickness. Again, ginger helps too, if you want to go the natural route.

You can also change your boat behavior to help limit the effects. Don’t eat a lot or drink booze, watch the horizon, and try to stay below decks and near to the middle of the ship you’re aboard.

But for heaven’s sake, if you do decide to make a boat to treat your seasickness, try to limit your ports of call to only the most resilient of piers.