CHAPTER THREE

Nostalgia

If what you love is absent, yet its images are there … the sore quickens and becomes inveterate by feeding, daily the madness takes on and the tribulation grows heavier.

—Lucretius, De rerum natura

The discussion in the last chapter of pathologically present sensations, emotions, and images showed how closely the ecstatic intensities of scurvy resemble others (reverie, the reading of certain kinds of fiction, the inhalation of laughing gas, laboratory encounters with singular facts, etc.), where what is imagined is perceived as a phenomenon with a real existence, or conversely, where what is experienced as a fact strikes the mind as so singular it appears like a fiction or a dream. It remains to examine the qualities and gradations of these ecstasies in order to judge what difference, if any, distinguishes the enlargement of Humphrey Davy’s sense impressions under the influence of nitrous oxide from the extraordinary susceptibilities of scorbutic patients, and whether the extreme fits of reverie discussed by Erasmus Darwin have anything in common with the delusion common among mariners that the blue ocean has turned into a green landscape. To do this, I want to begin by emphasizing two things.

The first is the nervous component of scurvy, a disease that many of its students point out effloresces as much in emotional and psychological forms as bodily ones and, in its latter stages, luridly confounds the two—“People’s minds … became as loose and unsteady as their teeth from scurvy,” as Georg Steller puts it in his account of Vitus Bering’s voyage (Steller 1988: 115). In order to probe as exactly as I can the links between a disturbed or uncommonly excited state of mind and a depraved condition of the body and its appetites, I shall place a specific set of scorbutic delusions alongside two conditions often associated with them but which are epidemiologically distinct. The first is the pure form of nostalgia, the pathological longing for home, considered independently of the maritime longings for a landfall with which it is often associated; the other is calenture, a thoroughly maritime disorder exhibiting hallucinations closely resembling scorbutic fantasies and nostalgic obsessions, yet without any apparent cause in nutritional deficits or homesickness, for it can occur within a week of putting to sea.

The second emphasis will advance what I have already claimed for the importance of the word “situation” and the meanings it attracts of a total and unframeable environment in which what normally would have been perceived as a set of distinct positions, periods, and options available to a rational subject are transformed into an event without relative temporal or spatial dimensions. Such confusion leaves the perceptions and feelings as powerful as they are disorganized, and the mind is made prey to impressions whose origin might as easily be the imagination as the external world. When no reflective distance separates the individual from what seems like an atmosphere of images and excitements encircling the senses, then colors flash and sounds reverberate with an awareness of what Coleridge calls their “outness” diminished if not entirely lost. Then things are seen and heard by virtue of a power with no necessarily phenomenal origin, and images can act by their own force as images. The effects such a vortex makes on the brain are extremely vivid, and either they reveal the passive and overwhelmed plight of the ego, quite sunk in what is befalling it—what Willis calls the falling down of the whole soul—or, the very opposite, they bespeak a union with the world at once anticipated and enjoyed by the imagination, a feat Willis described as the soul’s ovation and triumph. How far these two tendencies are congenial to the experience and expression of the three varieties of nostalgia that I am about to discuss—whether they simply represent various degrees of alienation from the sense of outness that stabilizes a situation, or whether on the contrary they are quite distinct, each with a dynamic peculiar to itself—this chapter shall settle as its final business.

Thomas Trotter was the first naval physician explicitly to consider the link between scurvy and homesickness as more than fortuitous when he described the symptoms of “scorbutic nostalgia” in 1792, deploying what he called “the second species” of William Cullen’s nosological definition of the disease (Trotter 1792: 145, 45). In the lethargy and depression following the onset of scurvy, he noticed, along with the usual early symptoms of ghastly countenance, aching limbs, swollen gums, and hemorrhages of the hair follicles, various degrees of yearning for food, liquid, land, and home, often culminating in fits of hopeless tears. “I consider these longings as the first symptom and constant attendants of the disease in all its stages.” He went on to specify them: “The cravings of appetite, not only amuse their waking hours, with thoughts of green fields, and streams of pure water; but in dreams they are tantalized by the favourite ideas; and on waking, the mortifying disappointment is expressed with the utmost regret, with groans, and weeping, altogether childish.” No physician, he warned, ought to overlook such emphatic “cravings of nature” (44, 35).

Like other medical men with an interest in the psychological and sensory accompaniments of scurvy, such as Thomas Willis and Walter Charleton in the previous century, and James Lind and William Falconer in the eighteenth, Trotter wanted to know more about the reciprocal actions of the scorbutic body and the disturbed mind. Eventually, he was to devote a whole book to the topic of nervous disease. With his colleagues Falconer and Thomas Beddoes, he was exploiting the advances made in the study of nervous irritability by Albrecht von Haller, William Cullen, Robert Whytt, and John Brown (Harrison 2010: 62). Like them, he paid close attention to the passions of his patients, fascinated by the contribution they might make to the speed of organic disintegration, as well as to the destruction of the personality. Of rugged sailors bathed in childish tears, he observed, “The hero and the infant here unite,” an astonishing factor in “a new subject in nautical medicine, unfolding such peculiarities in the constitution of officers and seamen, that it would be unpardonable to pass it by” (Trotter 1804: 3.362).

His interest in the affective aspect of the disease was aroused when working as a surgeon on the Liverpool slave ship Brookes in 1783, bound for the Gold Coast and Antigua. It was not a job he relished, but he was assiduous in attending to the human cargo. At night many of the Africans, having woken to find themselves elsewhere than the scene of their dreams, made “an howling, melancholy noise, expressive of extreme anguish” (Abstract of the Evidence 1792: 44). When he asked his interpreter to find out why, “She discovered it to be owing to their having dreamt they were in their own country again, and finding themselves when awake in the hold of a slave ship” (ibid.). Trotter was convinced that this passionate nostalgia was linked to the severe outbreak of scurvy that troubled the ship during its lading as well as its voyage. Like the dejection of pressed men, homesickness among slaves seemed to hasten the onset of scurvy and then to aggravate it, by which time the absence of familiar food and the craving for familiar places were blended as factors both in the scorbutic condition of the patient and its delusional accompaniments (Trotter 1792: 63). Trotter was perpetually aware of the novelty of this kind of analysis and the strangeness or foreignness of its object, “attended with many singular phenomena never before isolated,” for which (he concedes readily) an adequate terminology does not exist (50–63; 1804: 3.364). “Scorbutic nostalgia” amounted therefore to a nomenclatural break-through—as far as I am aware, he was the sole inventor and employer of it—but if it was to be anything more, then the alliance of the two diseases needed more specification.

Trotter was prepared to offer some. What he had done was to modify two entries in William Cullen’s Nosology (1793), a systematic table of illnesses organized on the principles of a Linnaean taxonomy. These were genus 86 Scorbutus, and genus 105 Nostalgia. Neither of Cullen’s outlines of these diseases was particularly original. Trotter thought his assigning cold weather as a proximate cause of scurvy was wrong, and there was nothing new about listing nostalgia as an urgent desire to revisit the homeland. However, Cullen had placed nostalgia in the class of Locales, his name for distempers of the body, and then in the order of Dysorexiae (“False or defective appetites”). That is to say, he was not putting nostalgia in the class of nervous diseases, nor was he assigning it to the order of delusional longings, but treating it as a physical complaint accompanied by difficulties in the consumption of food, such as anorexia (eating too little), and pica (eating what is not food; Cullen 1800: 162–63). Moreover, he offered two kinds of nostalgia, simplex and complicata (164), allowing homesickness some degree of kinship with other diseases in the same class or order. This caused some astonishment among his colleagues, but his biographer John Thomson pointed out that Cullen was determined to mark the boundary between delusions and appetites arising from organic morbidity, and those owing to a derangement of the mind (Thomson 1839: 2.65). For his part, Trotter could not be blind to the resemblance between scorbutic symptoms (craving for food sometimes alternating with a voluptuous enjoyment of it) and the order in which Cullen had placed nostalgia, where preternatural appetites wore the appearance of the pathological sensitivities typical of scurvy, such as polydipsia (unquenchable thirst) and bulimia (unappeasable hunger). So he chose to unite nostalgia with scurvy as a complex instance of two diseases: nostalgia, which Cullen regarded in some important respects as a nutritional disorder, and scurvy, which Trotter was convinced was nutritional, too. He did this knowing that scurvy could mimic a whole hospital of infirmities while at the same time (in his view) remaining “of so singular a nature that no disease seems analogous to it … by any concourse of symptoms or method of cure” (Trotter 1792: 106). Indeed, he proclaimed that “in forming a diagnosis of Scurvy there is but little danger of confounding it with any other disease” (42). In proposing the mixed case of scorbutic nostalgia, he had two motives for compromising what seemed like an unequivocal position on the singularity of scurvy. The first was to take the opportunity of elaborating the testimony he had given a Parliamentary Select Committee on the Slave Trade the year before the Observations was published, where the relationship between the nervous and somatic elements of nostalgia was introduced, but left unclear; the second was to recruit a powerful ally in the debate about deficient versus defective nutrition (a futile gesture, as it turned out).

Like Cullen, Trotter was airing what must have struck his colleagues as a paradox by presenting symptoms proper solely to scurvy as typical of another disease, but reference to his etiology helps clear up some of the contradiction. It was based on four degrees of distance between cause and symptom. Furthest away and of least concern was a pretended cause, such as the humoral theory of scorbutic putrescence entertained by many of his colleagues, a conjecture unconfirmed by observation. Remote causes were next, divided between occasional and predisposing: occasional causes being found in the state of the ship (damp, unventilated, cold, dirty) and predisposing causes lodging in the temperament of the individual who might be melancholy, laboring under a sense of injustice, or just longing for home. Next was the exciting cause, and Trotter was convinced, as were Cullen, Cook, Blane, Anson, Hulme, Nelson, and other influential medical and naval personnel, that this was a shortage of fresh food, especially vegetables and fruit. Finally there was the proximate or immediate cause, of which Trotter thought everyone including himself was ignorant, asserting “the proximate cause of Scurvy is still to be sought for” (124). So how exactly did nostalgia contribute to the scorbutic emergency on the Brookes?

As Trotter expands his account, it becomes evident that scurvy already had a footing in the vessel before it set sail, with at least seven people dead of it on the African coast before the course for Antigua was set. In his account of the outbreak, Trotter initially wants to blame the Duncas, people from marshy coastal land who took no exercise, grew very corpulent on a diet of corn mash, and brooded over their misfortunes; however, he said in his testimony that it was those of an “exquisite sensibility,” particularly among the women of the Fantee nation, who were most prone to nostalgia and, by implication, to scurvy, too (56, 62). To help us understand how he was developing his diagnosis of scorbutic nostalgia, Trotter marks a distinction between two mental aberrations that were assumed to have an effect on the body, hypochondriasis and idiosyncrasy. A hypochondriacal patient will suffer physical symptoms arising from a disturbed state of mind. Trotter mentions dyspepsia as a case where mental anguish acts as an exciting cause of a physical symptom (72). But with idiosyncrasy, this is not so, Trotter believes, for it acts only as a predisposing cause: “I shall not … attempt to explain any symptom that may be said to arise from idiosyncrasy” (43). As for the physical symptoms of the brooding Duncas, the exciting cause is to be found in their diet and their idleness; they are behaving merely “as if hypochondriacal” (46). While insisting that no idiosyncratic predisposition can produce scurvy without an exciting cause, he concedes that “where some are afflicted before others, we ought, certainly, to assign it to idiosyncrasy, or peculiarity of temperament.” But it is never to be forgotten that “when the body has been subjected to the diet of which Scurvy is the immediate Effect, it will make its appearance, though in a longer time, without any predisposition whatever” (67). So if diet was the exciting cause with the Duncas, and temperament only a predisposing cause with the Fantee women, the exciting cause in both cases—that is to say, of scurvy and nostalgia—was food. Although Trotter doesn’t quite spell it out, the question is really whether nostalgia is acting as a predisposing cause of scurvy or as one of its symptoms, since scurvy was well established before the Brookes set sail for the Leeward Islands. He is quite prepared to concede that misery may weaken resistance, but since the disease was already on the march, the identification of its effect on the nerves and emotions is a more important task for him than a medical speculation about the likelihood of nerves and emotions contributing to the sickness.

So what attracts his attention are those cravings, lamentations, and tears whose neglect would be unpardonable in a physician, not because they are symptoms of nostalgia, but because they are symptoms of scurvy that have never before been analyzed as such. “I consider these longings as the first symptom and the constant attendants of the disease in all its stages” (44). He never leaves it in doubt that these longings and cravings refer to the food and drink whose absence acts as the exciting cause of scurvy, nor does he concede that idiosyncratic yearnings for home have anything more than a tertiary relation to the primary symptom. No sooner does he instance the cravings for green stuff than he adds a physical symptom, emphasizing that the want of the right victuals produces bodily effects of which extravagant emotions are merely the outriders: “Around this time the colour of the face is changed” (45). Between the cravings of Trotter’s first symptom of scurvy and the account of nostalgia given in the entry in the Encyclopédie méthodique (1782–1832) cited by Starobinski, there is a perfect reverse symmetry, for in the latter, the sadness of the patient, the haggard look, glassy eye, lifeless countenance, and torpor are accompanied by physical correlates such as an uneven pulse and fever, secondary indications of the indisputable presence of a fatal nostalgia (Starobinski 1966: 97). By producing a nervous disorder as the exciting cause of a physical breakdown, the author of the entry, Philippe Pinel, lays his emphasis squarely contrary to Trotter’s, where nutrition is the cause of a bodily affliction and alterations in temperament are merely symptomatic of that organic disorder.

One of the first experimental identifications of nostalgia as a disorder of the mind possibly in league with scurvy was made by Joseph Banks on the Endeavour during a voyage allegedly free from scurvy but during which he was obliged at least twice to dose himself with inspissated citrus juice specially prepared for him by Nathaniel Hulme. On the second occasion, with blisters in his mouth, he noted that all the crew but himself, Solander, and Cook were “pretty far gone” with homesickness, a condition “the Physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease with the name of Nostalgia” (Banks 1962: 2.145). Three days later, he succumbed himself when he remembered Dampier sailing the same seas, and “this thought made home recur to my mind stronger than it had done throughout the whole voyage” (ibid.) Charles Darwin was to find himself in this condition off the coast of South America sixty years later, overwhelmed by memories of the friends of his youth (Beer 1996: 22–23). James Watt believes that the motifs on a dinner service commissioned by Anson in China at the conclusion of his scorbutic Odyssey through the Pacific are hieroglyphs of homesickness, consisting of scenes from Juan Fernandez and Tinian interspersed with domestic images of dogs, sheep, the Eddystone Light, and Plymouth Sound, “betraying the nostalgia which commonly accompanied vitamin deficiency” (Watt 1998: 577). That these images were set in the glaze of dinner plates, destined to be covered with the food once so passionately desired and of which they had proved so happily to be the harbinger, is a singular triumph of design—nostalgia in reverse, as it were—an adjustment Trotter would have appreciated. In Banks’s case, nostalgia appeared to last only as long as his other symptoms of scurvy, dissipated (it seems) by Hulme’s medicine.

In 1788, Falconer had published a prizewinning essay, On the Influence of the Passions on the Disorders of the Body. In it he gave scurvy pride of place as a remarkable instance of psychosomatic transfers, telling the story out of James Lind about the siege of Breda, where the Prince of Orange cured his scorbutic men with a placebo pill, an incident Trotter found incredible, but which Lind had justified as an authentic lesson in “the wonderful and powerful influence of the passions of the mind on the states and disorders of the body” (cited in Falconer 1788: 85; Trotter 1792: 123). Hulme’s account of this event (in which the siege of 1627 seems mixed up with the one of 1637) is quite contrary to Lind’s and Falconer’s, for he interprets it as a tragic allegory of nutritional deficit: “Had the states of Holland provided the city of Breda … with plenty of [fresh food], it is more than probable, that so many hundreds of their bravest men would not have died piecemeal by the scurvy: but would have held out till the prince of ORANGE could have come up to their relief” (Hulme 1768: 72). Falconer for his part went on to discuss nostalgia as potentially fatal, using material from Johannes Hofer, the Swiss physician responsible for identifying homesickness as a disease and giving it its official name. Then he makes an observation of his own that tied nostalgia to physical evidence of scurvy (“livid or purple spots upon the body”) and to the nutritional problems that may have caused it, but to which it also gave rise. First of all stating that all alterations of mood affect the body to some degree, he turns to scurvy and says “perhaps this is the only endemic disorder of which we have any knowledge … in which mental affections are specifically hurtful” (Falconer 1788: 92). By this, he means that nostalgia is hypochondriacal, not idiosyncratic, and that Trotter’s first symptom of scurvy—nervous collapse consequent upon a depleted constitution—is quite the reverse, actually provoking the petechiae and lesions that Falconer interprets as symptomatic of mental distress.

Here Falconer and Trotter part company, for Falconer was installing idiosyncrasies as exciting (possibly even proximate) causes of the disease. In drawing the line at Lind’s story of the Breda placebo, Trotter was insisting that the cure of an established scorbutic condition could not merely be imagined into existence, or banished by a change of mood. Something substantial would have to be added to hope if an organic amelioration were to occur; likewise, the absence of something equally solid would need to act as the exciting cause if a predisposing cause were to herald and possibly accelerate a fatal outcome. In order to become scorbutic, the nostalgia of the Africans on the Brookes had to be owing to a change in their diet, most likely the corn mash they were made to eat on the coast (at first), followed by the refusal of food so common among the homesick once the ship was under way. What hurries the patient into scurvy is not misery itself, but the alteration in diet caused by it, or coincident with it.

The first difference between scorbutic nostalgia and pure nostalgia emerges here, since there were plenty of alleged cures of nostalgia obtained simply by the promise of returning home, provided the physical symptoms of self-starvation had not become too severe (Dames 2001: 33–34). But in spite of the fact that scorbutic decline was far from steady, often interspersed with false signs of recovery, there is no reliable evidence that scorbutic nostalgia was ever cured merely by encouragement, promises, or good news. Once established, its excesses appeared “as if hypochondriacal” (Trotter 1792: 46), but they were in fact geared to images of the colors, foods, and liquids directly associated with the remedies the body needed.

The opposing views of Falconer and Trotter were representative of a difference between French and English physicians. Pierre Barrère performed a series of autopsies on the bodies of French soldiers who had died of nostalgia. In almost all of them, he found proof of the fact that extreme nostalgia was a fatal disease. “Cette pensée continuelle de revoir son Pays cause d’engorgemens au cerveau, des tremblemens, des roideurs aux Membres … d’où suit la mort” [The perpetual thought of returning home causes blockages in the brain, trembling, stiffness in the limbs … from which death follows] (Barrère 1753: 26). Again and again, he discovers the physical proof of nostalgia in the blockage of arteries and ventricles, clotted with blood as black as ink (14). D. J. Larrey found the same swollen blood vessels in the brains of men dead from nostalgia, but like Barrère’s evidence, it was consistent with the vascular damage typical of scurvy and therefore typical of a nutritional deficit rather than a constitutional melancholy (Dames 2001, 30; Brown 1788: 2.347). A military contemporary of Larrey and Barrère noticed that patients talking obsessively of home lost their appetite and found it difficult to digest the little food they were able to eat, suggesting that nostalgia was indeed a predisposing cause of scurvy; but as for its role as an exciting or proximate cause, it was most probable that the damaged blood vessels and dark blood ascribed by Barrère to obsessive longings for home confirm a diagnosis of scorbutic decline. Gilbert Blane noticed in sailors dead of scurvy “large effusions of coagulated blood into the cellular membrane” (Blane 1799: 486). Giving evidence to the enquiry into the disastrous Nares expedition, Dr. Buzzard identified as specifically scorbutic those symptoms the French assigned to nostalgia, pointing out that autopsies of the brain revealed areas “gorged with very dark fluid blood, or coagula, and … sanguineous effusion into its substance (RCA 1877: 198; Malieu de Meyserey 1754: 105). However, that is not what either Barrère or Falconer claims. They say there is a direct link between the nervous symptoms of diseases such as nostalgia and signs of physical deterioration, particularly in the blood vessels, as if (Barrère seems to suggest) the heart and the brain were literally suffused with grief.

Unless physicians espoused J. J. Scheuchzer’s theory of barometric pressure as the problem behind homesickness among the Swiss (Hofer 1934: 383; Starobinski 1966: 88), nostalgia had really only one exciting cause—being away from home—which was not clinically measurable. The only sure remedy of return was likewise not medically verifiable. So in the first instance of what I have termed “pure nostalgia,” there is evidence of a temperamental refusal of the patient’s present circumstances but not, as Kevis Goodman suggests, a specifically physiological component, that is an exciting or proximate cause in the shape of “a somatic revolt against forced travel,” unless scurvy is to be installed as something more than the “less likely accomplice” of nostalgia (Goodman 2008: 196, 204). In scorbutic dreams, on the other hand, the cravings of appetite may produce illusory scenes of domestic pleasures, but these frame vivid and exact images of the food the stomach needs, as if the imagination were urgently sending pictures to the mind on the body’s behalf of what it needs: green vegetables, fresh fruit, clear water. Home is no more than the alibi of the nutritional remedy. Of the scorbutic visions of sailors, James Lind wrote, “What nature, from an inward feeling, makes them thus strongly desire, constant experience confirms to be the most certain prevention and best cure of their disease” (Lind 1753: 128). During the Admiralty enquiry mentioned previously, the question was put to Dr. Buzzard whether scorbutic dreams of fruit and vegetables were “a mental expression urging the dreamer to the choice of a food best suited to his condition,” and Buzzard emphatically agreed that it was (RCA 1877: 198).

Under no circumstances do the visions of pure nostalgia conform to this model, for they are neither specific nor efficacious, as we shall see. The difference between the two conditions is always to be gauged from the reality of loss in the case of scurvy and its inexact or illusory appearance in nostalgia, each to some degree measurable when an encounter with the sought object is achieved. Trotter observed closely both the grief of those who yearned for fresh food and liquid, and the delight with which at last they beheld and consumed them. The change in mood is exactly calibrated to the imminence of real physical satisfaction, such as the scorbutic John Mitchel, thinking of oranges, carefully noting the colors of their skins, then rapturously eating them at Pernambuco (Mitchel 1864: 88). These are moments of indisputable sapid recognition when what is desperately fancied as well as needed, and what is presently being seen, tasted, and swallowed, overlap in a conjoint sensation. On the other hand, homecoming is almost inevitably spoiled by disappointment when the imagined good fails to be matched by the real thing.

Tears flow, says Willis, from “the moisturising juice of the Brain” when it still has enough power to know what it wants and to reach out for it in an “irradiation,” albeit “refractedly and disturbedly” (Willis 1684: 179–84). Charleton calls it corroboration when the irradiated image is greeted by the sensation of its arrival, and then redoubled by the energy of the animal spirits (“whole brigades of them … dispatched into the Organs of the Senses, and into all Muscles”; Charleton 1670: 109). Montaigne used the same model of corroboration in his essay “Of Experience,” where he confesses he sometimes has himself woken up at night so that he might relish the pleasure of slumber “better and more sensibly” (Montaigne 1711: 3.458). Willis used the flux and reflux of the animal spirits to explain drinking a long-anticipated fine wine: “The Imagination of its Pleasure is again sharpened by the taste, and then by a reflected Appetite drinking is repeated. So as it were in a Circle, the Throat or Appetite provokes the Sensation, and the Sensation causes the Appetite to be sharp’ned and iterated” (Willis 1683: 49). Georg Forster describes the Resolution’s taste of fresh fish in Dusky Bay at the scorbutic conclusion of Cook’s first great loop into Antarctic seas as exemplary of the action and reaction of desire and pleasure: “The real good taste of the fish, joined to our long abstinence, inclined us to look upon our first meal here, as the most delicious we had ever made in our lives” (Forster 1777: 1.124). So the still lifes of fruit and vegetables painted by the scorbutic imagination were always a tryst kept with reality, or at least with the material world, provided the victim lived long enough to enjoy it. The sequel of physical repletion, far from extinguishing appetite, reacts with it to make the sensation of taste even more delightful. Among the diseases of the order Dysoriexia, Cullen had listed polydipsia, or “preternatural thirst,” and bulimia, “appetite for a greater quantity of food than can be digested.” The scenes of repletion described above demonstrate satisfactions quite as exaggerated as the cravings that preceded them, their intensity prolonged in a variety of sensory registers. After his meal of fish in Dusky Bay, William Wales recalled, “I was entertained in bed with a serenade by the winged Inhabitants … far superior to any ever enjoyed by a Spainish Lady” (Wales MS Journal, 26 March 1773).

Banks’s thoughts of Dampier in the Arafura Sea, therefore, are likely to have had a more material connection than that of their common nationality, for in his scorbutic state he was primed to enjoy at Savu, his next landfall, tastes of exotic fruits already described in luscious detail by his predecessor, such as the durian, ripe only for a moment with a taste so rich and curious it was only just this side of repulsive. These fruits were going to put a more glorious end to scurvy than Hulme’s concentrated juice, even though objectively some of them were not in the best condition: “Bad as the character is that I have given of these fruits, I eat as many as any one, and at the time thought as well and spoke as well of them as the Best freinds [sic] they had” (Dampier 1999: 144; Banks 1962: 2.213). To the extent nostalgia was part of his ailment, we notice that home recurred to his mind powerfully but indistinctly—did he mean London, his estate in Lincolnshire, his friends, Miss Blosset, or a permutation of them all? Apart from food, it is not certain what he was missing, or whether on his return he was particularly gratified by the reunion with it, them, or her.

In his landmark essay on the disease, Jean Starobinski generalizes the stage set of the nostalgic illusion—“sad, tender recollections, golden visions of childhood” (Starobinski 1966: 87)—while Hofer himself points out that a nostalgic mind “feels the attraction of very few objects and practically limits itself to one single idea” (cited in ibid.). Taking his lead from Hofer, Helmut Illbruck has argued recently that the poignancy of homesickness arises from nothing else than its being sealed up in the imagination, where the impossibility of its longings ever being satisfied is the whole point, for as soon as the opportunity of satisfaction is introduced, the disease begins to disappear. Hofer had said that nostalgia “admits no remedy other than a return to the homeland” (Hofer 1934: 382), but Kant, for one, disputed the prescription, or at least the meaning of the word “remedy,” when he said, “After they visit these same places, they are greatly disappointed in their expectations and thus also find their homesickness cured” (Kant 2006: 71). When Odysseus finally gets back to Ithaca, he cannot recognize it as home: “He therefore, being risen, stood and viewd / His countrey earth: which (not perceiv’d) he rew’d / And striking with his hurld-downe hands his Thyes, / He mourn’s, and saide, ‘Oh me! Againe where lyes / My desart way?’ ” (Homer 1956: 232 [13, ll. 292–96). He is the first in a long line of nostalgic voyagers who have difficulty in treating homecoming as either real or pleasant.

There is a dramatic specimen of this disappointment recorded by Robert Scott on his Discovery expedition to the Antarctic, when he and his party got back to their ship after an exhausting trek to the South. “How can I describe this home-coming … how our eyes wandered about amongst familiar faces and objects … how in the unwonted luxury of clean raiment we sat at a feast which realised the glories of our day-dreams; how in the intervals of chatter and gossip we scanned again the glad tidings of the home-land…. It was a welcome home indeed, yet at the time to our worn and dulled senses it appeared unreal: it seemed too good to be true that all our anxieties had so completely ended, and that rest for brain and limb was ours at last” (Scott 1907: 2.92–93). The same flatness of a long-anticipated arrival afflicted Bligh when he finally made land and ate fresh food after sailing three thousand miles in an open boat, and he feels like an unlovely spectre in an unpleasant dream (Bligh 1937: 2.229). In these two examples, one detects an unquenchable nostalgic desire not magnifying but impeding the scorbutic corroboration of the taste of food; or perhaps having already eaten, the shadow of the longing for the circumstances of food persists in the mind of the sufferer as a sort of bulimic refusal of satisfaction.

Before going any further, it is necessary to consider alongside nostalgia another disease that had a much longer history in the literature of medicine and voyaging, and this was sea-fever, or calenture, defined summarily by Samuel Johnson as “a distemper in hot climates wherein [sailors] imagine the sea to be green fields” (Johnson 1760: “Calenture”). There is a lively literary pedigree for this sort of disturbance of the brain. The episode of the sirens in the Odyssey is an early example, where mariners are allured overboard while listening to haunting songs sung by beautiful women, only to add their bones to the hedges made of skeletons that enclose the flowery meadows where the sirens sit and sing (Homer 1956: 210 [12, ll. 67, 236]). In the seventeenth century, the mariner who throws himself overboard into a fatal delusion of pleasure, often fringed with meadow, is a byword in the drama and poetry that lasts well into the Romantic period. Nicholas Rowe uses the image in The Ambitious Step-Mother, and John Dryden in The Conquest of Granada when Almahide tells Almanzor, “ ’Tis but the raging calenture of love. / Like a distracted Passager you stand, / And see, in seas, imaginary land, / Cool groves, and flow’ry meads, and while you think / To walk, plunge in, and wonder that you sink” (Dryden 1808: 4.143 [II, iii]). In his satire on the South Sea Bubble, Swift compares the deluded bankrupt with the febrile sailor who sees “On the smooth Ocean’s azure Bed / Enamell’d Fields, and verdant Trees” (Swift 1958: 1.251). Wordsworth’s fullest treatment of calenture is found in The Brothers (1800), where Leonard “would often hang / Over the vessel’s side, and gaze and gaze; / And, while the broad blue wave and sparkling foam / Flashed round him images and hues that wrought / In union with the employment of his heart, / He thus by feverish passion overcome, / Even with the organs of his bodily eye, / Below him, in the bosom of the deep, / Saw mountains; saw the forms of sheep that grazed / On verdant hills” (Wordsworth 1984: 157, ll. 51–60).

Trying to offer an intelligible account of the mutiny on the Bounty, Bligh naturalized the irrational impulses of calenture: he said his men were willing to risk their own destruction for “alurements of disipation [sic] … more than equal to any thing that can be conceived” (Bligh 1937: 2.123). James Weddell had a man on his ship who had seen a siren with green hair sitting on a rock and heard her distinctly emitting cries “in a musical strain … a musical noise” (Weddell 1827: 143). In his autobiographical romance, Loose Fantasies (1968), Sir Kenelm Digby recalls his expedition to the Mediterranean in 1628 when his ship was ravaged by a contagious fever: “But that which of all others seemed to cause most compassion, was the furious madness of most of those who were near their end, the sickness, then taking their brain; and those were in so great abundance that there were scarce men enough to keep them from running overboard, or from creeping out of the ports, the extreme heat of the disease being such that they desired all refreshings, and their depraved fantasy made them believe the sea to be a spacious and pleasant green meadow” (Digby 1968: 166). In Moby-Dick (1851), Ishmael issues a warning about the peril of the individual who stares too long at the ocean and loses his footing: “Lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature” (Melville 1972: 257).

The point they labor and Wordsworth transposes in The Brothers is the powerful urge of the victims to throw themselves into the mirage or hallucination appearing below them. Calenture can be a very active state. People under its influence know what they want and believe they know how to get it: “Those affected have a fierce look, and are very unruly, being so eager to get to their imaginary cool verdure” (Chambers 1786: “Calenture”). Digby talks of the difficulty of restraining men who were convinced that heaven on earth lay on the other side of a porthole. Even when the objective was pursued in the more sedate manner of Juan Francisco, a seaman with de Quiros, the very deliberateness of his preparations evinces the same immoveable determination to reach land evident in the actions of his more reckless colleagues. He carefully fashioned himself a tiny raft made of plank and a buoy, with two empty jars for flotation, and after paying his debts and making his will, he disappeared in search of the shore visible three leagues from the ship, and was never seen again (Kelly 1966: 1.261). Whether calenture was in some cases a purely optical reaction to the monotony of ocean views or the motion of the ship, a kind of hypnosis uninflected by a conscious longing for home; or whether it was a decision simply to leave the vessel and seek the shore, such as that made by Juan Francisco and later by Herman Melville’s Tommo; or whether it was indeed a powerful hallucination associated with heat and a strong fever, such as nearly carries Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random over the side of the Thunder, is hard to determine. But it is clear that the victims, rather than keeping dismal faith with a memory of home, move impetuously or at least deliberately toward the sight of land, or into an exotic and seductive prospect lying either on the surface or in the depths of the sea. Drake said of his crew of circumnavigators, when they were down with the “Calentura,” that the past meant nothing to them: “Yea, many of them were much decayed in their memorie” (Keevil 1957: 1.14). Many years later, Alexander Armstrong discovered the same kind of amnesia in scorbutic seamen: “I observed that the faculty of memory in the more severe cases became confused and defective” (Armstrong 1858: 42). Whatever they remember, therefore, is as much a delusion as the meadows at their feet.

Medical discussions of scurvy freely associate it with calenture. In the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society abridged by Henry Jones in 1721, “Strange Effects of the Scurvy at Paris” sits next door to “An Account of a Calenture” (vol. 5, part 1, ch. 6, xiv and xv). Ephraim Chambers excerpts the latter for his Cyclopaedia (1786), confirming that calenture is a delusion, “wherein the patients imagine the sea to be green fields; and if not prevented, will leap over-board … being so eager to get to their imaginary cool verdure” (Chambers 1786: “Calenture”). In Zoonomia, Erasmus Darwin sees little difference between calenture and nostalgia, offering a definition that will do for both: “An unconquerable desire of returning to one’s native country, frequent in long voyages, in which the patients become so insane as to throw themselves into the sea, mistaking it for green fields or meadows” (Darwin 1801: 4.82). More recently, Jean Starobinski has cited Darwin as his authority for treating calenture as the nautical variant of nostalgia (Starobinski 1966: 86).

Joyce Chaplin defines calenture along with scurvy as a symptom of “earthsickness,” a somatic revolt mounted specifically against the sea rather than travel as such, expressing itself in disgust with the ocean and in an urge to return to a “whole-body experience of the whole Earth” (Chaplin 2012: 518–23; 2012a: xv). How the “whole Earth” can exclude two thirds of its surface and still be consistent with “humanity’s secular self-awareness on a planetary scale” (2012: 520) she leaves unclear, but scurvy at least has a serious place in her argument about this broader conception of nostalgia as an ecumenical yearning for land in general, not just home. This agrees with several accounts of calenture where home is the last thing the impetuous maritime pastoralist is interested in. Let the sailor “but heare the call / Of any Siren, he will so despise / Both wife and children for their sorceries, / That never home turns his affection’s streame” (Homer 1956: 210 [12, ll. 59–62]). Trotter noticed that for all their tearful longing for green fields, suggestive of former friends and childhood memories, his patients sometimes forgot “all old attachments, [shewing] utmost signs of dislike to those who had been most dear” (Trotter 1804: 3.364). When Wordsworth’s Leonard gets back to the rural scenes he saw pictured in the bosom of the deep, he finds it “a place in which he could not bear to live” (Wordsworth 1984: 167, l. 421).

The French call nostalgia “maladie du pais” and scurvy (on at least one occasion) “mal de terre” (Chaplin 2012: 518), the first a sickness arising from a yearning for the homeland, the other from an urgent desire to be at one with any substance that is not sea, and thus very like calenture. On landing, scorbutic sailors would have their faces pressed to freshly opened earth, or even be partly buried in it, so that they might incorporate its mysterious virtue. So it didn’t matter that the earth was not local, as long as it was freshly turned. Likewise for victims of calenture earth, any earth, would do, as long as it fulfilled the dream of resting on a solid element. “Mal de terre” therefore was not a longing for home but for the stuff on which homes may be reared: land covered in green growth, the elementary solace on which all bodies depend (517–23). Nevertheless, some vessels shipped soil from the home port as an antiscorbutic in the belief that only in the sod of the patria, packaged as a portable medicine, were effective effluvia to be found.

Thomas Melville, formerly a skipper of a convict transport and then a whaler, tried both remedies and found them useless without the addition of vegetables (Melville ML MS Q 36, 256). On the other hand, Richard Mead, the eminent physician, was certain there was a real efficacy in the smell of fresh earth, citing from Anson’s voyage the example of a man very close to death who was revived by having his face put into newly dug soil (Mead in Sutton 1799: 119). Philip Saumarez, an officer in Anson’s squadron, declared, “Nor can all the physicians, with all their materia medica find a remedy for [scurvy] equal to a turf of grass” (Saumarez in Williams 1967: 166). Sir Gilbert Blane, surely one of the most eminent authorities on the disease, agreed, recommending that the legs be buried in the soil of any available island, and the air be deeply inhaled (Blane 1799: 496–97). When Bering died of scurvy he was half-buried in earth, evidently a desperate last attempt at some relief. At all events, the sight, smell, touch, and even the taste of earth were believed in various applications to offer a cure calculated for scurvy, calenture, and nostalgia. A Russian general marching through Germany in 1733 promised that any man in his regiments suffering from nostalgia would be buried alive, a variation on the remedy of the earth-bath sufficiently terrible to keep at bay any reason for applying it (Starobinski 1966: 96).

However, it is wrong to assume that earth-bathing and its variants were universally admired and recommended, or that there was any real difference between sea-scurvy and land-scurvy. Cullen had decisively announced that scurvy was an identical disease, no matter on which element it appeared, “depending everywhere on the same causes” (Cullen 1827: 2.649). One of his epigones, describing a bad outbreak among Russian troops alluded by way of a joke to “this land sea-scurvy (if I may be indulged so whimsical a term)” (Guthrie 1788: 333). Dampier says bluntly that too rapid a shift from sea-air to land-air will kill a scorbutic mariner (Dampier 1999: 84). Nathaniel Hulme was convinced that the preference for landing scorbutic men as quickly as possible in order to get the benefit from land-air contributed to the high level of mortality on the Centurion when it reached Juan Fernandez, many of them dying in the boats or on the shore because they were not fit to be lifted from their hammocks. Much better rates of survival were maintained on the Gloucester, which had to be supplied with fresh food from boats because its crew was incapable of bringing it to anchor. “This opinion of the good effects of land-air,” Hulme wrote, “may appear, at first sight, harmless in itself; yet, being adopted, it may prove of the most fatal consequence, not only to a single ship, but a whole squadron, or fleet” (Hulme 1768: 44). Twenty years later, his dreadful warning was confirmed when the First Fleet arrived in Australia and the most inveterate outbreak of scurvy anywhere and at any time afflicted the settlements in Port Jackson, Tasmania, and the penal outposts of the new colony of Australia for upwards of forty years. So it is fair to say that the earth had no efficacy other than the herbs, vegetables, animals, and fruit thriving on its surface. If they were insufficient, nothing in the soil of Australia or anywhere else could supply the deficit.

Nor is distance from home any more certain a factor in the treatment of nostalgia than earth is in that of scurvy. In her study of the severe outbreak of scurvy among the British forces occupying Quebec in 1759–60, Erica Charters notes that nostalgia was most intense among the provincial troops operating in their own territory; it was the native Canadians who “got home in their heads,” not the British who were furthest away from their native land (Charters 2009: 24). The grounds of Goodman’s calculation of the ratio of nostalgia to remoteness from home, and of Chaplin’s correlation of the incidence of scurvy and calenture to the degree of distance from the earth, both begin to look disputable. If there is nothing in the soil of home or the substance of the earth that would account for a somatic reaction to their absence, then we are left with the imagination: Chambers’s “imaginary cool verdure,” the “depraved fantasy” of Digby’s sailors, and what Darwin calls the “mistaking [of the sea] for green fields.”

In the Odyssey, Homer describes all three conditions: calenture, scurvy, and nostalgia. The pastoral landscape of the sirens and the sweetness of their song spell the fatal attraction of calenture. The episode of the lotus-eaters celebrates the tryst between the cravings of appetite and the gratification of the palate, so frequently enjoyed amidst sea-celery, samphire, sorrel, and scurvy grass growing on the seashore. It is in fact Odysseus’s rampant nostalgia that brings a sudden end to this scene of gorgeous self-medication. As he manhandles his famished crew back into the ship, we are told they “striv’d, and wept, and would not leave their meate / For heaven it selfe,” crying like Trotter’s scorbutic sailors for the loss of their dream-food. Their captain tries to win them to a more powerful object, “Nothing so sweete is as our countries earthe,” he urges, mistaking their frenzied eating perhaps for an ill-judged remedy of mal de terre. But of course while they are cramming themselves with lotus his crew “did quite forget / (As all men else that did but taste their feast) / Both country-men and country” (Homer 1956: 154 [9, ll. 150–64). So maladie du pays goes by the board too and Odysseus drags them away to disappointments more worthy of true patriots, such as failing to recognize home when finally they get there. There can be no doubt that in preventing them from continuing their feast he is acting against scorbutic nostalgia on behalf of sheer nostalgia. For as long as they can feed, the lotus-eaters may be compared with the sailors of Anson’s Centurion, who wept with the cravings of appetite and the fear of death only to find themselves (the ones who survived being brought ashore, that is) charmingly situated on a littoral abounding in esculent vegetables where they gorged themselves back to health.

This oscillation between the absence of a desired thing and the full enjoyment of it is evident even in the scene of wine drinking described by Willis, or of fruit eating described by Mitchel. Corroboration consists in the meeting of a dream and an event that can never be fully consummated inasmuch as the turbulence of longing conspires with the extravagance of gratification to keep the encounter fluid: thus rapture is brutal and short, never lengthy and terminable, and has to be renewed from moment to moment. This forms an ellipse of loss and enjoyment that can alternate between privation and gargantuan refection typical of a long sea voyage, or it may be squeezed into the sudden coalition of delight and agony (shrieking at the smell of flowers) or into the more moderate pendulum-swing between imagining a taste and then finding it in one’s mouth. Either way, the negative shadows and defines the positive. Locke is a useful commentator here:

If it were the design of my present Undertaking, to enquire into the natural Causes and manner of Perception, I should offer this as a reason why a privative cause might, in some cases at least, produce a positive Idea, viz. That all Sensation being produced in us, only by different degrees and modes of Motion in our animal Spirits, variously agitated by external Objects, the abatement of any former motion, must as necessarily produce a new sensation, as the variation or increase of it; and so introduce a new Idea, which depends only on a different motion of the animal Spirits in that Organ. (Locke 1979: 133 [II, viii, 4])

The episode of the sirens reverses the interruption of the lotus feast, for now it is the turn of the crew to bind the intemperate desires of their captain, who would have thrown himself to his death if he could. At first sight, calenture justifies Darwin’s pairing of it with pure nostalgia, for it seems to lack the nuances that organize the elliptical dance of loss and fulfillment typical of scorbutic nostalgia. If nostalgia is an idol of home lodged in the brain, a hallucination so powerful nothing real can expel it, then calenture is similarly despotic in being an absolute devotion of the will to an irresistible and fatal embrace of what is not real. But in two respects it is different, for it is lodged not in the brain, as Wordsworth (a careful reader of Darwin’s discussions of reverie) is at pains to underscore, but in “the organs of the bodily eye” (Wordsworth 1984: 157; l. 57). Nor has calenture anything directly to do with home, for as Circe points out of the mariner besotted with the sirens’ songs, “He will so despise / Both wife and children for their sorceries, / That never home turns his affection’s streame” (Homer 1956: 210 [12, 60–63]). And insofar as calenture may not always, as in Leonard’s case, be a sudden and total capture of the eye and ear, either because of external restraint or the gradations by which it turns a blue sea into pasture, then it can collaborate briefly but very productively with scorbutic nostalgia.

Flinders experienced a palimpsest of a scorbutic fantasy painted on top of a calentural hallucination when, sailing off the northeastern coast of Australia, he stared at the coral visible beneath the ocean: “We had wheat sheaves, mushrooms, stags horns, cabbage leaves, and a variety of other forms, glowing under water with vivid tints of every shade betwixt green, purple, brown, and white; equally in beauty and excelling in grandeur the most favourite parterre of the curious florist” (Flinders 1814: 2.87). All but one of these so-called flowers is an edible fungus, cereal, or vegetable. He is thinking of the exotic and the familiar at the same time, blurring the colors of a fantastic submarine garden with the shapes of ordinary victuals as if not quite sure how to orient his taste until suddenly he is aware of the danger of his situation: “Whilst contemplating the richness of the scene, we could not long forget with what destruction it was pregnant” (ibid.). A measurable relation between the imaginary and the real, each adapted rather pleasurably to the demands of scurvy and calenture, is supplanted by the threat of total loss and feelings of dismay.

An alternation between homesickness and scorbutic nostalgia is to be found in the journal of Ralph Clark, a junior officer of the marines in the First Fleet to Australia of 1788. He is under the influence of competing fantasies that reckon, like a couple of sextants, the intervals between the place he is bound for and the one he has left behind. Observe how he swings between images of what he lacks, one anticipated (of green vegetables) and the other remembered (of sexual comfort). He is writing home to Betsey Alicia, his wife: “I would to God that we had got to Botany that I might be able to get Som Greens or other for I am much afraid that I shall get the Scurvy—oh that I was once more home to you my beloved Betsey how I would kiss and presse you to my Bosom” (Clark 1981: 82). Aside from “Botany Bay Greens” (boiled seaweed) there were very few salad supplements in the new colony, only rice, flour, peas, and salt meat—exactly the same diet that was making him worry about scurvy and later would prompt him to damn the land round Botany Bay and Port Jackson as “the poorest country in the world” (Walker and Roberts 1988: 2). Once settled there, Clark’s longing for greens yield to erotic dreams of Betsey Alicia (“dreamt last night of Seeing my Beloved Alicia again in Bed and I thought that I puld her towards me”; “Dreamt that I was with my beloved Alicia and I thought that I put my hand in her breast” [Clark 1981: 54, 76]). He places her in the dream-larder where scorbutic nostalgists would keep their images of food, but the upshot is the same, namely copious tears shed for the loss of what would make him feel better if only he had it. Soon he is waking up Captain Meredith with the noise of his weeping, and he reports, “Cryd very much in my Sleep on acount I thought that two men had taking [sic] my belovd Alicia a Way.” No greens, no Alicia, and tears begin to dominate his waking moments as well as his dreams. “I sat down and read part of the play of Jane Gray—oh what a deep Tragedy it is…. I wish that it was bed time that I might have a cry” (61, 47, 75).

It is interesting how talk of food, a tragic text, and dreams of sex are arranged in Clark’s fantasy life, for even the most secure mode of wish fulfillment is destined for the same disappointments that greet his pursuit of the right kind of aliment, directing him toward the formal consolations of literature and the resource of tears as means of keeping privation within the bounds of his patience. After he dreams of Alicia’s rape, imagination is found to be no better than waking life at providing him with what he wants, so instead of allowing himself to be accidentally thwarted, Clark arranges his hectic cravings as a nightly sacrament of misery before the altar of Jane Gray, “In whose blent air all his compulsions meet, / Are recognized and robed as destinies” (Larkin 1988: 59).

Captain Scott operates on a parallel axis. Having given an account of the disappointments of homecoming, he is equally illuminating about craving dreams that anticipate the disappointment of waking to an empty table by including some accident in the dream itself that spoils the feast. His companions start to dream of food not as the uncomplicated array of all they want but more like the dinners of Sancho Panza during his governorship of the island of Barataria where no sooner is a cover set in front of him than it is whipped away: “They are either sitting at a well-spread table with their arms tied, or they grasp at a dish and it slips out of their hand, or they are in the act of lifting a dainty morsel to their mouth when they fall over a precipice … something interferes at the last moment and they wake” (Scott 1907: 2.44). So an effort is made in the conscious lives of the company to observe the proprieties permitted by the food inside each individual’s stomach: “After supper, and before its pleasing effects had passed, some detachment was possible, and for half an hour or more a desultory conversation would be maintained concerning far-removed subjects; but it was ludicrous to observe the manner in which remarks gradually crept back to the old channel, and it was odds that before we slept each one of us gave, all over again, a detailed description of what he would now consider an ideal feast” (2.50). The social niceties slip into the same pattern as a dream, lasting only as long as the sensation of satisfaction and jettisoned as soon as hunger takes its place. The formal plan is too weak for the claims of appetite: it would have required the possibility of something as corroboratively real as the food on Anson’s nostalgic dinner plates. Otherwise all that is left is tears, and Cherry-Garrard said he never met anyone who wept so often as Scott. When he was found dead in his tent, the tears were frozen to his face.

Trotter lays a great emphasis on tears as one of the constant attendants of scurvy in all its stages; they are one of the first symptoms no physician should neglect. Thomas Melville, a close observer of the disease, agrees. In the third and last stage of scurvy, he noticed “sudden tremors … and very often involuntary Weepings” (Melville ML MS Q 36, 252). In an anonymous it-narrative of the early nineteenth century, Aureus; or, the Life and Opinions of a Sovereign (1824), there is a description of an old sailor in prison who keeps having dreams typical of scorbutic nostalgia (“I awoke, as I thought, in Elysium”) and then crying uncontrollably when he awakes to where really he is (Anon. 1824: 55–63). An intriguing short narrative of starvation aboard ship, accompanied by dreams of eating followed by convulsive weeping, is to be found in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). The female informant recalls her “earnest Wishing or Longing for Food; something like, as I suppose, the Longing of a Woman with Child,” followed by dreams of eating and the disappointment of waking: “I was exceedingly sunk in my Spirits, to find my self in the extremity of Famine…. I fell into a violent Passion of Crying” (Defoe 1927: 3.66–67). It is relatively seldom that weeping is reported of pure nostalgia, but Homer’s lotus-eaters weep, and Clark and Scott too, all under the pressure of scurvy. Colnett’s boatswain on the scorbutic Prince of Wales cried like a child when it got stuck on Banks’s island in Alaska; so did Robert McLure when he lost the location of a food-dump in the Arctic (Williams 2013: 135; 2009: 303; Dames 2001: 40). The end of the last two survivors of the Knight expedition was described to Samuel Hearne by an Inuk witness: after days of looking vainly for rescue “and nothing appearing in sight, they sat down close together, and wept bitterly” (Williams 2009: 93). In these examples, desire migrates from the imagination to the organ of the bodily eye, fruitlessly reconnoitering an empty space, and it is expressed purely as a physical event, like blushing. As Willis says, tears are an effluvial radiation, reaching out for some kind of corroborative reflex that often does not arrive.

From his youth, very prone to nostalgia, Coleridge wrote a fragment about weeping that takes place inside and outside a dream, doubtless a dream of the unavailable Sara Hutchinson and similar in its way to Clark’s of Betsy Alicia except that it offers no illusion of satisfaction, only of loss:

Oft in his sleep he wept, & waking found

His Pillow cold beneath his Cheek with Tears,

And found his Dreams

(So faithful to the Past, or so prophetic)

That when he thought of what had made him weep,

He did not recollect it as a Dream,

And spite of open eyes & the broad Sunshine,

The feverish Man perforce must weep again. (Coleridge 2002: 9.124)

Although Coleridge’s dream clearly recalls Caliban’s (“And then in dreaming / The clouds methought would open and show riches / Ready to drop upon that me, that when I waked / I cried to dream again” [The Tempest, 3.2.138–41]), it performs the double disappointment evident in the dreams of Scott, Clark, and Defoe’s informant, where an awakening confirms what was already missing from the dream, namely a loss that can by no means be supplied, neither by imagination nor by good fortune. This is when tears are redoubled; and the question is, whether they serve to emphasize the pleonasm of loss on loss suitable for the despair of pure nostalgia, or whether they conform to the corroborative or elliptical structure of scorbutic nostalgia, where tears upon tears offer an opportunity for privative solace such as that taken by Clark when he reads Rowe’s tragedy of Jane Gray in order to have a good cry. Although Coleridge wants to say that the dream is somehow continuous with the reality of the past and the future, that both show him an identical good cause for weeping, he doesn’t say what the cause is, or why it should make him so upset. As it is, he divides the scene of tears between the immediacy of a dream and the comparative and reflective powers of consciousness, as if the spontaneity of his grief were quickened and complicated by reflection. He gives an outline of what he might mean in his explanation of the “double touch”:

The soul never is, because it either cannot or dare not be, any [ONE] THING; but lives in approaches—touched by the outgoing pre-existent Ghosts of many feelings——-It feels for ever as a blind man with his protended Staff dimly thro’ the medium of the instrument which it pushes off, & in the act of repulsion…. As if the finger which I saw with eyes Had, as it were, another finger invisible—Touching me with a ghostly touch, even while I feared the real Touch from it. What if in certain cases Touch acted by itself, co-present with vision, yet not coalescing—then I should see the finger as at a distance, and yet feel a finger touching which was nothing but it, & yet was not it … an act of imaginary preduplication. (Coleridge 2002: 3217 f70)

It is a difficult passage, but it suggests that all imaginary endorsements of a sensation, or sensational corroborations of an image, whether these amount to an access of pleasure or a preduplication of pain, depend upon a collaboration between the nerves and mind, or one sense and another, that is productive of an emotion which is, as Erasmus Darwin would say, obedient both to inward and outward impulses. His grandson explained copious weeping as beginning with a reaction of the eye to a physical cause, triggering an association with sadness that reacts with the physical stimulus to sustain and intensify it, rather like Willis’s description of wine drinking. Darwin noticed “the length of time during which some patients weep is astonishing, as well as the amount of tears they shed” as if the traces of grief were a measurable quantity (Darwin 1904: 160, 178, 157). Wordsworth describes Leonard’s experience of calenture in this way: “images and hues” perceived by his organ of the bodily eye “that wrought / In union with the employment of his heart.” The corollary is that even the most serene enjoyment of a pleasurable fullness is laced with these residues of not quite coincident feelings—Mitchel’s “brutal rapture,” for instance—that do not lodge in consciousness but rather are found flowing into it or, as Coleridge puts it, “living in approaches” and then flowing out again.

It is likely that Coleridge derived his idea of the double touch from George Berkeley who, in his New Theory of Vision (1709), considered the alliance between sight and touch as forming a synesthetic perception of the material world without which the arrangement of colors, light, and shade would strike us as inchoate, for “there is no solidity, no resistance or protrusion perceived by sight” unless “visible figures represent tangible figures, much after the same manner that written words do sounds” (Berkeley 1972: 75, 77). In his Spectator papers on the pleasures of imagination, Joseph Addison gave his full endorsement to the proposition that sight is “a diffusive kind of Touch” (Addison and Steele 1907: 6.75; No. 411). And he, like Berkeley before him and Erasmus Darwin afterward, was fascinated by Robert Hooke’s claim for the tactile excitements of a prosthetic eye, namely that “the roughness and smoothness of a Body is made much more sensible by the help of a Microscope, than by the most tender and delicate Hand” (Hooke 2003: xii). Darwin said it is always possible to “compare our ideas belonging to one sense with those belong to another” (Darwin 1801: 1.157). This discussion of the synesthetic function of sight and touch glanced in two directions: on the one hand, toward the celebrated question proposed by William Molyneux to Locke concerning the ability of a man cured of his blindness to recognize shapes by sight alone; and on the other, toward Descartes, who initiated the doctrine of sensation that denied any resemblance between the nature of an object and the sensation it causes, proposing instead that light, for instance, is not a property of the sun but rather produced by a relay of signals taking place in the brain (Descartes 1998: 4). According to Thomas Sprat, this seduced Descartes into an exclusive reliance on “reflexion on the naked Ideas of his own mind” (Sprat 1667: 96), a danger which Locke, who likewise disputed the resemblance theory of sensation, did not avoid, according to Darwin, who said, “Mr Locke seems to have fallen into [an] … error, by conceiving, that the mind could form a general or abstract idea by its own operation, which was the copy of no particular perception…. The ingenious Dr Berkley and Mr Hume have demonstrated that such general ideas have no existence in nature” (Darwin 1801: 1.19). Perception according to Darwin supposed a much more direct coalition between the senses, based on what he took to be an exact resemblance between the body, the network of the nerves, and the structure of the medulla, so “when the idea of solidity is excited … a part of the extensive organ of touch is compressed by some external body, and this part of the sensorium so compressed exactly resembles in figure the figure of the body that compressed it” (1.151). What is seen looks like what is felt, and vice versa.

An apt scholium on the parallel between ideas resembling nothing in nature and the images that have no external cause, but yet are patrolled so obsessively by the imagination in volitional diseases such as reverie and nostalgia, is supplied in those sections of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) quoted rather miserably by Addison when obliged to jettison his aesthetic of mutually corroborative sensation owing to the “great Modern Discovery” that the smell or feel of a flower has nothing to do with the flower. It arises from what Locke has to say about privation and the possibility that a positive idea may be provoked merely by the withdrawal of a stimulus. He runs a parallel with the negative names of positive qualities, such as “insipid” and “silence.” He might have offered more dramatic examples, such as “innocence” and “immaculate.” But the point having been made, he goes on to say, “And thus one may truly be said to see Darkness,” as if the total absence of the medium of perception could trigger a perceptual event (Locke 1979: 133 [II, viii, 5–6]). Robert Boyle had marveled at the Dutchman Vermaasen who could distinguish colors by touch, or the man whose sight was so fine after an inflammation that he could see colors in the dark, but compared with those refinements of the senses to see darkness itself owing merely to the privation of light is literally and absolutely an unexciting achievement. We shall find that Margaret Cavendish has something tart to say about this in The Blazing World. Berkeley’s dispute with Newton about fluxions turned on the same issue, a calculus of indiscernible quantities differentiated “in an infinite Progression towards nothing, which you still approach, and never arrive at” (Berkeley 1734: 11). As for Addison, he exclaimed, “What a rough unsightly Sketch of Nature should we be entertained with, did all her Colouring disappear,” yet he was forced to admit that the soul’s last sight of the world, stripped of all sensory supplements, would be of just such a lightless cinder (Addison and Steele 1907: 6.64; No. 414). It seems that the oscillations between emptiness and fullness that describe the range of synesthetic perception can become, under the influence of certain principles or impulses, less ample, shrinking the ellipse into a line, and edging toward the sensory prison of pure nostalgia and extreme reverie where the patient, as Darwin puts it, “neither sees, hears, nor feels any of the surrounding objects” (Darwin 1801: 1.224).

I want to go back to the irradiations and corroborations of tears to suggest that they provide the occasion of that elliptical premonition of sensation, or its echo or after-touch, that Coleridge calls “imaginary preduplication.” I want to say that they have nothing in common with pure nostalgia because the scorbutic imaginary and the calentural sensorium build no shrines to images sequestered from the world. Sailors see a green earth beneath the keel of their ship because the organ of the eye is responsible, not the imagination, and it joins what is seen to what is felt. People weep sometimes because there is something almost voluptuous in the present sense of loss. What has gone missing is always specific and bears no resemblance to the fantastic inexactitude of homesick visions, or the privative basis of Locke’s pure darkness. The twin impulses inclining Clark to expect greens while remembering Betsy Alicia, or those that illuminate Flinders’s joint perception of coral as food and an undersea wonderland, are experiments in the possible mutuality of different images and different senses: the domestic and the strange, the beautiful and the fatal, the felt and the seen, the full and the empty. The dinner plates commissioned by Anson are diagrams of the same thing. So the tears of scorbutic nostalgia are linked not to an inactive grief circling a purely imagined good but to a reciprocal flow between contraries that corresponds to the circulation of effluvia discussed in the previous chapter, where damage to an organ is seen to specialize and refine its operation.

In the great epics of voyaging, tears are so frequent Dryden feels obliged to apologise for Aeneas’s frequent breakdowns in case he might be mistaken for “a kind of St Swithin’s hero, always raining” (Dryden 1808: 14.165). The celebrated lacrimae rerum of the Aeneid flow when Dido leads him to a temple where the epochs of Troy’s rise, siege, and destruction are depicted: “He stoppd, and weeping said, O friend! ev’n here / The monuments of Trojan woes appear” (idem 1811: 138 [I, ll. 680–81]). Yet Aeneas describes the sack of Troy to Dido dry-eyed, as if he has mastered the distraction he recalls: “Then, with ungoverned madness, I proclaim / Through all the silent streets, Creusa’s name” (14.294). Dryden supposes that Dido was impressed by the hero’s dealing thus soberly with the memory of the loss of his wife. When Odysseus on the other hand casts his mind back to these very scenes at Troy while listening to the song of Demodocus at the court of Alcinous, he cannot restrain his grief at a loss he not only witnessed but also largely organized and executed. He weeps like a child over destruction that never before cost him a tear but now, suddenly made present to his mind by the skill of the bard, provokes such a storm of tears it puts an end to the performance: “So this King / Of teare-swet anguish op’t a boundlesse spring” (Homer 1956: 147 [8, 736–77]).

Aeneas, we might say, weeps politely at a predictable prompt that in a formal, monumental way recalls the tragic day of the fall of Ilium, like a gravestone. Odysseus’s grief is far more complex owing to the various tributaries from which it flows. It was for example preceded by another fit of tears on the shore of Calypso’s island, where he sat and thought of home, “where twas his use to view / Th’unquiet sea, sigh’d, wept, and emptie drew/ His heart of comfort” (91 [5, ll. 109–10]). Between the two scenes lies the episode of Odysseus’s attempt to sail home on a raft, which for eighteen days he steers toward Ithaca until Poseidon sends a storm that wrecks the contraption and throws the hero into the sea, where for two further days he welters. In a curious anticipation of Ralph Clark’s divided passion for greens and Betsey Alicia, Odysseus enters the Phaeacian court famished and homesick, his body quite emptied by the salt water that gushed from his mouth and nose as he came ashore and with a heart similarly empty of comfort. Amidst a feast set in an orchard of ripe fruits, he confesses that his emptiness wears a double aspect, “Through greatest griefe the belly must have ease / Worse than an envious belly nothing is / … When most with cause I grieve, / It bids me still, ‘Eate, man, and drinke, and live’; / And this makes all forgot. What ever ill / I ever beare, it ever bids me fill” (125; [7, ll. 306–7, 311–14]). This ingenuous confession sets the stage for Demodocus who will renew the hydraulic evacuation of salt liquid that Odysseus has just restored with food and drink, operating an ellipse whose two foci are ill and fill. As a result “ill” has now changed its referent from sickness for an imagined home lodged vaguely in the past or the future, to scenes so vivid they are for the second time taking place in front of him.

His owne quicke powers it made

Feele there death’s horrors, and he felt life fade.

In teares his feeling braine swet: for in things

That move past utterance, teares ope all their springs.

Nor are there in the Powres that all life beares

More true interpreters of all than teares. (Homer 1956: 147 [8, ll. 718–23])

It is useful here to remember what Boyle says about effluvia, which he was adamant did not just bounce off the surface of our organs, but entered into them, changing their relations with each other and their sensitivity to outward objects. He believed that “effluviums are of a very piercing nature” (Boyle [1673] 1999: 7.260), and it was on the basis of this axiom that conceived of the human organism as an “hydraulo-pneumatical Engin” (idem 1996: 127) constantly absorbing and expelling effluvia, a process involving not just mutual material contact between the senses and their objects, but an actual and determinate exchange of inward and outward substances. He warned his reader, “We must not for the most part look upon Effluviums as swarms of Corpuscles, that only beat against the outsides of the Bodies they invade, but as Corpuscles, which by reason of their great and frequently recruited numbers, and by the extreme Smallness of their Parts, insinuate themselves in multitudes into the minute pores of the [body]” (ibid.: 7.261). Effluvia cut their way through to the vital core and stimulate it: “They make one part of a living Engin work upon another,” these parts being so nicely framed “as to be very easily affected by external Agents … yet capable of having great Operations upon other parts of the Body, they help to compose” (7.267). “The Operation of Effluvia upon particular Bodies … dispose and qualifie those Bodies to be wrought upon, which before they were not fit to be, by Light, Magnetisms, the Atmosphere, Gravity, or some other more Catholick Agents of Nature” (7.270). Among these great operations, Boyle records a vastly heightened reaction to sights, smells, and sounds, as we have observed: a lady who swoons at the smell of roses, a gentleman who can see colors in the dark, another who can hear whispers a long way off (7.282). In these last two cases, the extraordinary tenderness and projective power of the sensory organs were precipitated by the invasion of hostile effluvia, as it was with the man who recovered from plague and afterward could infallibly identify an infected person by a pain in his nose.

How may this be applied to the ellipse of illing and filling that causes Odysseus’s tears to switch from a fairly modest stream running in the direction of home to a torrent roused by the war at Troy? Illness in the shape of extreme hunger and the emetic effects of seawater function like the plague, the smell of candle snuff, or a fever in preparing the sensorium to react with extraordinary power toward a subsequent impulse, in this case, Demodocus’s powerful description of the ruin and slaughter Odysseus himself planned and wreaked. But the energy of his reaction—the vast irradiation of a remembered scene as real, with death so present that he knows as he never knew before how fearful it is, as if what he did has started to happen to him—corresponds to the elliptical movement of corroboration. The relief of filling himself with food and liquid supplies both the tearful output of the engine of his sweating brain and the fuel to make it work so mightily. The extent of the filling is the measure of his sense of ill as an event so engrossing that it makes him weep without restraint.

It is time to make some final discrimination between nostalgia proper, scorbutic nostalgia, and calenture, based on the discussion so far. In all three diseases something is missing that the imagination, the eye, or the stomach severally try to supply. In pure nostalgia the imagination alone is involved. The desire for home is the cause of the illness, but home so attenuated by the impossibility of its taking place that it cannot be represented, remembered, or realized. Unlike scorbutic craving for fruit and liquid, then, the longing of pure nostalgia keeps an exceedingly uncertain rendezvous with physical satisfaction, which may explain why tears are not inevitably an accompaniment of it. To the extent that the home of the homesick is an obsession with what isn’t there, it cannot truly be mourned or wept for. Illbruck calls it by its Greek name,pothos, the longing for what can never be (Illbruck 2012: 13).

Lacking this double structure, pure nostalgia takes place as an extreme reverie exhibiting “inaptitude of the mind to attend to external stimuli” (Darwin 1801: 1.319), a state of mind in which all awareness of exteriority is lost and the reality of corroboration, whether positive or negative, is set at an impossible distance. To this extent, it is an unequivocal state of feeling, typical of the total loss of position suffered in extreme situations: the vertiginous horror of seeing darkness itself, for instance. Scorbutic nostalgia, on the other hand, is always doubled or mixed because it is formed out of an alliance of the imagination and the senses in which various pairs—the feeling of emptiness and the image of loss, and the idea of food and the taste of eating it—perform a quadrille, alternately joining hands and changing places. Nostalgia is dominated by a single obsessive idea that Willis calls “an Idol of the Brain” (Willis 1683: 50). Charleton says this causes the soul to crowd itself into a single sense, at which point it loses itself, subject to “strange apparitions, and confused with delusory images” (Charleton 1670: 28–29). Erasmus Darwin defines this condition as a disease of volition in which “the whole sensorial power” is so preoccupied with its own motions it precludes “all sensation consequent to external stimulus” (Darwin 1801: 1.319). With the energy of the mind centered entirely on itself, the nerves are abraded by the trapped and bound energy that can find no outlet, resulting in what Hofer calls laesa imaginatio (Hofer 1934: 381; Illbruck 2012: 17). August Haspel was responding to the unaffiliated and unrelated state of nostalgia when he said that its cause is a breakdown at the core of being, “that is to say, that nothing began before it and that it is, at the very beginning, all the disease” (cited in Starobinski 1966: 100). The calenture described by Herman Melville, which cancels all sense of difference between the mind and the ocean, is fatal because it includes nothing that is really there. When Humphrey Davy was able to induce an artificial reverie by means of nitrous oxide, he found himself similarly without any sense of position or duration. “I lost all connection with external things…. I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas” (Davy 1800: 487). At the same time, his memory failed or became unhinged: either the sensations had vanished by the time he came to write them down, or his ideas arrived in such vivid and unusual trains they made no alliance with the ones he already possessed (479). Like Hofer, he called this wound in the mind’s organization a laesion (467).

It is curious therefore that a consensus of commentary on nostalgia finds it a disease conversant primarily about time rather than place. An eminent French physician insisted in the early nineteenth century that it arises solely from “memory of the past” (Roth 1993: 28). Svetlana Boym calls it a “historical emotion” (Boym 2001: 7). Jean Starobinski says it is an upheaval of the psyche owing to the workings of memory (Starobinski 1966: 89, 102). Although Helmut Illbruck describes himself as the narrator of “nostalgia’s modern history,” it is one founded on Hofer’s and Willis’s notions of a pathological ecstasy that causes damage to the cortex, “a local disease of the brain” that originates and terminates in its own wound, breeding a passion for a home that does not exist and a time that could never be or have been (Illbruck 2012: 12, 42, 56, 63). Kevis Goodman has shown how the aesthetics of nostalgia at the beginning of the nineteenth century coincided with the replacement of the craving for home with an obsession with the past. She suggests that (in Wordsworth’s phrase) the cleaving of the mind to a single image or idea is faithful to an earlier kind of nostalgia and does in fact introduce the same coincidence of extremes (here of joining and sundering) that I have been tracing in the tearfulness of scurvy and that Ian Hacking has found typical of niche diseases such as fugue (Goodman 2010: 199–203). This is an idea I shall return to shortly.

Calenture can occur early in a voyage (within a week of getting under way [McLeod 1983: 347–50]), there is no direct nutritional reason for its onset, and lives are still lost to it at sea. It is generally agreed that it begins with an individual staring for too long at the ocean. So it is not chiefly the need of food or home that transforms the sea into a landscape, although those desires might be blended with it. We might suppose further that it is not the imagination that is engaged in a case of pure calenture, so much as “the organ of the bodily eye,” in Wordsworth’s phrase. Here is a splendid specimen of calenture, taken from Moby-Dick:

These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie…. The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these there steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lie sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole. (Melville 1972: 601–2)

Notice that the techniques used by Melville to deal with the problem of delivering an experience of total absorption resemble those used by autobiographers of scorbutic ecstasy: A generalized sea rover—“he”—is sympathetically linked to a generalized reader—“you”—while the “seamless whole” of the hallucination is divided between the person thoroughly engrossed by the mirage and its various analogues—prairie, a summer’s day, and sleeping children with their posies by their sides—intended to bring it home to those who have never experienced anything like it. Ishmael is circling the individual in the grip of an image who cannot, on his own account, compare it with anything but itself: for him the sea is not like a meadow, a prairie, or a wood, it is all of them, clad in green and presently there at his feet. It is not a question of distance or time but of immediate access, whether he is to be on the inside or the outside of the scene of delight. Humphrey Davy pointed out the communicability of hallucinations depends upon analogy; so if “you” is to be included with “him” in the experience of calenture, analogy has to come later, inexact and congruent only with those lame expressions that mock the isolation of the sea journalist when things are very, very, very dreadful—or exquisitely delightful—and such as no tongue can declare. There are no analogies for scurvy either, as Trotter explained, nor any disease related to it “by any concourse of symptoms or method of cure” (Trotter 1792: 106); but the elliptical formation of its pains and pleasures means that there is something like a sensory reflexivity that prevents extreme feelings from being totally out of touch with the material world. Unless calenture collaborates with scorbutic nostalgia, there are no tears in it, for nothing is missing. What is wanted is there in front of you, an illusion created by an eye fatigued or damaged.

In this ecstasy of presence, there is always the danger of annihilation of which Andrew Marvell warns in The Garden (1681). Thinking of nothing but “a green thought in a green shade” is in effect to disappear into the “far other world and other sea” that the mind has created out of the glaucous light of a glade (Marvell 2007: 157 [ll. 45–48]). The illusion is done either in an annihilating blue or vegetable green. In this respect, calenture bids to incorporate all external stimuli as its own work, beyond analogy, where to think is to be thought and sensation is continuous with everything in view. It is like the pain that lingers in the vicinity of the moribund Mrs. Gradgrind, somewhere in the room, but she’s not sure it is hers. Long after his experiments with nitrous oxide were over, Humphrey Davy would fall into reveries as boundless as Melville’s masthead dreamer. One day in the Colosseum, he found himself so “perfectly lost in the new kind of sensation which I experienced, that I had no recollections and no perceptions of identity” (Davy 1851: 20). Melville knew how dangerous this state could be: “But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror … with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever” (Melville 1972: 257).

Melville’s Ishmael offers the reader a sort of totemic clue in the art of mastering the totality of calentural impressions. After he gives up the hopeless task of trying to decipher the Chaldean script incised into the White Whale’s brow, he talks equivocally of what it takes to “own” the whale: “For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter” (445). By owning the whale, he doesn’t mean putting an iron in it and calling it your property, as discussed in the chapter “Fast Fish and Loose Fish,” the sort of property Ahab was aiming to make when he lost his leg in the previous voyage. I think he means that owning the whale is a way of writing about it without representing or symbolizing it, but at the same time without sinking his identity into it. To accomplish this, he adapts Moby-Dick and whales in general for a variant of the calentural reverie that first absorbs the mind and then the body in a flow or drift where “every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undis-cernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it” (257). In a mood similar to this, where feeling is situational and thought is expressed in the roll and eddy of the swell, Ishmael dares to include the whale, not as an analogue or symbol but as a demonstration of how this dreaming is done. He perceives the whale’s spout as the physical emanation of its incommunicable thoughts, pulsing visibly in time to the rhythm of cetaceous meditations, rising and spreading into a notion and, in moments of inspiration, illuminated by the glory of iridescence (482). A whale seen in this state of refulgent rumination is the property of no one not fit to match it thought for thought. Its poet establishes his credentials as a medium of such splendor in a congruent image of creative thinking, for while writing of the whale he reports, “I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head … a certain semi-visible steam” (ibid.). It is his own spout, the steam of his brain-sweat rising as thoughts about whales that are thinking in spouts take visible and vaporous form. It is a fine example of transforming the singular and impenetrable intuition of calenture—“that which refuses all words … that, which … must be felt, be possessed, in and by its sole self” (Coleridge 2002: 3401.12 f27)—into the elliptical motion typical of scorbutic nostalgia. So vapor, liquid, and color, half tangible and half visible and all moving and changing, offer to variegate or even disturb the triumph of the organ of the bodily eye by introducing into it other angles of vision, alternative colors, and even other kinds of sensation.

I want to end this section of the chapter with another example of how this blending of calenture with scorbutic nostalgia is achieved, and first I need to discuss the vagaries of the organ of the bodily eye. In linking calenture to pure nostalgia, and offering both as specimens of reverie, Erasmus Darwin nevertheless left room for an alternative, physiological account of the disease that is much more obedient to stimuli from outside. He concluded the first volume of the 1794 edition of his Zoonomia with an essay by his son R. W. Darwin on ocular spectra (probably ghosted by himself), taken from the Philosophical Transactions of 1785. It is a thoroughgoing account of spectra (i.e., the print of shapes and colors on the retina) that distinguishes direct spectra from reverse spectra. Direct are those such as the circle of light made by a revolving firework or the glow of a bright spermaceti candle that lingers after the eye is shut, comparable with Newton’s image of the sun, a sort of retinal photograph. Walter Charleton, thinking no doubt of Lucretius’s picture of how theater awnings color the audience, gives the example of a direct green spectrum staining the clothes of someone resting in an arbor, like Marvell in the garden at Nun Appleton, “and this from no other Cause, but that the Images or Species of the Leaves, being as it were stript off by the incident light, and diffused into the vicine Aer, are terminated upon us and so discolour our vestiments” (Charleton 1654: 138). In the last chapter, we discussed Boyle’s interest in green, which he treated chiefly as “emphatical” and subject to modification by the eye and the angle of the light, rather than an intrinsic constituent of light warrantable by touch. Coleridge disagreed, remarking of the green of plants, “Unlike all other green bodies [it] is not divided by the Prism into blue and yellow Light; but is the Prismatic Green … the indecomponible Green” (Coleridge 2002: 3.3606.25.89). The absolute quality of green is the primary illusion of calentural reverie, so it will be interesting to see how it can be decomposed.

Colors or shapes produced by the eye that are different from those of the objects in front of it R. W. Darwin calls reverse optical spectra, the result of the organ replacing (in the case of colors) the one that is visible with the primary color on the other side of the spectrum: thus, blue is supplanted by orange, red with green, violet with yellow. In effect, the eye turns a color that has overexcited and fatigued it into its spectral opposite. Darwin repeats some of Boyle’s, Newton’s, and Priestley’s experiments, using red silk against white paper to show how, if one gazes at it intently in a strong light for a minute or more, and then closes one’s eyes, the red is changed to green. Darwin cites this as proof of the activity of the eye in modifying the stimuli of shapes and colors, reshaping and retouching its environment. This activity can result from an excess of sensibility, as when black shapes seen in very bright light turn red, or white ones turn blue. But reverse optical spectra generally arise when the eye, tired of gazing steadily at one color, goes to the yonder part of the prismatic palette for relief. It is not a deep or permanent need for something that is not there, so much as a function of the organ itself.

How precisely the sea is turned green by an eye seeking relief from blue is not altogether clear from Darwin’s account. Unless it begins by seeming green (the Ancient Mariner “viewed the ocean green”), it cannot change directly to green because the reverse spectrum of blue is orange, a mixture of red and yellow that could reverse into a gentle green if there were some plausible reason for the sea looking red, yellow, or orange. There were plenty of reports of seas green and red. In a paper called “The Colour of the Greenland Sea,” William Scoresby Jr. noted sharp differences between the clear blue ocean and the opaque green one in the Arctic. “The colour was nearly grass-green, with a shade of black,” he reported, but sometimes it was striped with olive, and he noticed that “the ice floating in the olive-green sea was often marked about the edges with an orange-yellow stain [which] I was convinced … must be occasioned by some yellow substance held in suspension by the water, capable of … combining with the natural blue of the sea, so as to produce the peculiar tinge observed” (Scoresby 1820: 11). Flinders came across a red sea at Point Culver, similar to the one spotted by Byron (Byron in Hawkesworth 1773: 1.12), which he was able to confirm was owing to microorganisms: “It consisted of minute particles not more than half a line in length, and each appeared to be composed of several cohering fibres which were jointed” (Flinders 1814: 1.92). En route for Australia, John Washington Price, surgeon of the Minerva, spotted a very red sea filled with flakes and lumps “of a spawn-like substance,” evidently krill (Price 2000: 131). Possibly the red shadow of the ship in which the Ancient Mariner beholds the sea snakes at play, “blue, glossy green, and velvet black,” is beholden to J. R. Forster’s work on the animalcules responsible for phosphorescence.

The most rigorously scientific account of how the sea can turn either red or green is given by Newton in the Opticks (1704) when he discusses the account of the different effects of absorbed and reflected light in seawater given by Edmond Halley, who on a bright sunshine day went underneath the ocean in a diving bell:

When he was sunk many Fathoms deep into the Water the upper part of his Hand on which the Sun shone directly through the Water and through a small Glass Window in the Vessel appeared of a red Colour, like that of a Damask Rose, and the Water below and the under part of his Hand illuminated by Light reflected from the Water below look’d green. For thence it may gather’d, that the Sea-Water reflects back the violet and blue-making Rays most easily, and lets the red-making Rays pass most freely and copiously to great Depths. For thereby the Sun’s direct Light at all great Depths, by reason of the predominantly red-making Rays, must appear red; and the greater the Depth is, the fuller and intenser must that red be. And at such Depths as the violet-making Rays scarce penetrate into, the blue-making, green-making, and yellow-making Rays being reflected from below more copiously than the red-making ones, must compound a green. (Newton 2003: 183)

This suggests that a vision of watery depths would be colored crimson provided the clarity of the medium and the angle of the light allowed a human eye to penetrate so far—Homer’s wine-dark sea perhaps—whereas the green landscape that seduces a sailor overboard is a hallucination provoked by light sent back from the surface, where blue, yellow, and green all compound as green. However, while Coleridge was staring at Saddleback Tarn, it appeared to him “blood-crimson, and then Sea Green” (Coleridge 2002: 3.3401.13.14), suggesting that there are other causes besides reflected light, algae, and little creatures responsible for these changes in color, and that staring for a long time at the surface of the water is probably the chief one in cases of calenture.

The condition called tritanopia is the result of damage sustained by the short wavelength cones of the retina owing to the action of ultraviolet light. Anyone suffering from this disease confuses pink and orange, and blue and green. When direct and reflected light strikes an unprotected eye, for example that of a sailor staring at the ocean, blue will appear green (Mollon 2013, personal communication; Lindsey and Brown 2002). J. R. Forster, a close observer of colors and phosphoric light in the Southern Ocean, has a number of useful observations concerning the compounding of green. The only ease he found for an eye oppressed by the load of “the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky” in the Antarctic seas were the sunsets, which he described as follows: “The setting sun commonly gilds all the sky and clouds near the horizon, with a lively gold yellow or orange; it is, therefore, by no means extraordinary to see, at sun setting, a greenish sky or cloud…. I had an opportunity to observe, in the year 1774, April 2d, in 9 deg. 30’ South latitude, at sun-setting, a beautiful green cloud, some others at a distance were of an olive-colour, and even part of the sky was tinged with a lively, delicate green” (Forster 1996: 86). The appearance of green is perhaps to be accounted for by the reverse optical spectrum activated by the attentiveness of Forster’s gaze; and to the extent that yellow and orange were reflected in the ocean, he would perceive that as green too, along with the clouds and the sky.

His son Georg painted a picture of icebergs in a sea whose horizon on the right hand is illuminated by iceblink, the bright white light reflected from pack ice in the clouds above it (Fig. 6 and Plate 2). Or at least this is what announced in the title of his painting, Ice Islands with Ice Blink. The consensus among eyewitnesses of the event, whose authentic date appears to be 23 February 1773, as opposed to the middle of March (the Forsters’ choice and Cook’s), was that they were seeing a display of the Southern Lights mounting from the horizon to the zenith, accompanied by extensive phosphorescence in the sea and a remarkable iceberg, shaped like a pillar with a hollow in it (Forster 1777: 1.117; idem 1982: 2.235; Cook 1961: 94–95; van der Merwe 2006: 34–45). William Wales said it was the most curious ice island he had ever seen: “Its form was that of an old square castle, one end of which had fallen into ruins; and it had a hole quite through it whose roof so exactly resembled the Gothic arch of an old Postern Gateway that I believe it would have puzzled an architect to have built a truer” (Wales MS Journal, 23 February 1773). He also reported very bright appearances of the southern lights for the latter part of February. Whatever phenomenon is responsible for the brightness in the distant sky to the right of the pictured scene, it seems to be compounded with the yellow tint of evening sunlight that contrasts dramatically with the dark cloud of indigo advancing from the opposite side of the composition. The coalition of natural light and the aurora is responsible for the specimen of a direct optical spectrum that invades the foreground of the picture, where everything is tinged with blue except that portion of the sky from which the light streams. It is likely that its brightness, echoed by the phosphorescence in the sea and by the reflected sheen of the icebergs, exhausted Georg’s eye as it tried to organize a scene of white shapes arranged on a blue ground, until the retina became “insensible to white light, and thence a bluish spectrum became visible on all luminous objects” (Darwin 1794: 551). That, at any rate, is what he painted, calenture in blue rather than green.

Fig. 6. Georg Forster, Ice Islands with Ice Blink. SAFE/PXD 11. Courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. See also Plate 2.

Fig. 7. William Hodges, Pickersgill Harbour. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Ministry of Defence Art Collection. See also Plate 3.

How this scene was transformed from blue to green makes a remarkable episode in the pictorial history of calenture and nostalgia, not to mention scurvy, which, by the time Georg lifted his brush, had made inroads on the health of most people aboard the Resolution. William Hodges painted the same two icebergs that appear in Georg’s Ice Islands with Ice Blink, the pillar with a hole in it and a sort of ruined pyramid, probably at the same time as Georg, using oils instead of gouache. For reasons that are not known, he decided, when he arrived at Dusky Bay a month later, to use the canvas for another picture, this time of Pickersgill Harbour, the site chosen for the Resolution’s temporary settlement (Fig. 7 and Plate 3). The picture we see now is one of domestic peace, with a sailor returning to his berth on the ship to cook his catch of fish, the warmth of the air evident in the clothes drying on the line, and the charm of the scene radiating from a little house (actually the observatory) nestling in a glade formed by the rich green of a temperate rainforest, and all illuminated by the evening light. It would be hard to think of a sweeter image of tranquil satisfaction, even though it could not be further from England. So nostalgia of some sort is present here; but also calenture, for even the sea has turned green, bordered with yellow.

Fig. 8. X-radiograph of Pickersgill Harbour. Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

The X-radiograph of View in Pickersgill Harbour (Fig. 8) shows not only the outlines of the icebergs and the southern horizon in the composition hidden beneath, it also reveals the brightness of the westering sun in the surface image to originate in the thick layer of white-lead paint used for the upper part of the pillar-shaped iceberg (Fig. 9). It shows in fact that everything strange, white, forbidding, cold, and blue in the original scene of Georg Forster’s spectral calenture was not just painted over, but converted into its opposite in a formal painterly exercise in the calenture of green. It seems to be a deliberate case of iconoclasm, or more precisely “iconoclash” in Bruno Latour’s terminology (Latour 2002: 14), that isn’t perfectly nostalgic, for in its own elliptical way it makes a palimpsest out of a scene of privation and another of enjoyment—ill and fill. Nor does it answer the immediate demands of calenture, for Hodges’s brush supplants and deploys for its own purposes the effects of tritanopia and reverse optical spectra. A View of Pickersgill Harbour is, I should like to suggest, an example of scorbutic nostalgia where the powerful idea of absent necessities, such as warmth, food, vegetation, safety, and the color green combines with the sensations of enjoying them all by means of modified calentural effects. It is a scene that is to say of corroboration, of which Hodges evidently intended the public to know only the half.

Fig. 9. Pickersgill Harbour and X-radiograph.

Imagining the scene of the drowning of one of the Centurion’s men at Cape Horn, William Cowper in “The Castaway” impersonated the exceptionalism Trotter said was characteristic of scurvy: “We perished, each alone: / But I, beneath a rougher sea, / Was whelmed in deeper gulphs than he” (Cowper 1854: 487). I have been trying to show that what divides scorbutic nostalgia from nostalgia proper, and at the same time links it at least to the purely optical aspects of calenture, are the tears, vapors, images, and colors that breach such solitary ecstasies by contributing to the elliptical structures of corroboration, synesthesia, and preduplication. I now mean to rely on Kevis Goodman for a demonstration of how Wordsworth does this for nostalgia by taking first for his subject a person adrift in an unnavigable situation, as Cowper tries to do in “The Castaway.” The experiment is not always successful because the adjustment between the isolation of the subject and the sympathy of the reader is not to be achieved by Cowper’s solipsism, nor by exact representation, nor by candidly confessing, as Wordsworth does in Tintern Abbey (1798), that his whole project of recollection is impossible: “I cannot say what then I was.” As Michel de Certeau says in his essay on utopian language, the embarrassed poet must head from “cannot say” to “can say” via “can say nothing” (de Certeau 1996: 29–47). That is to say, the difficulty of saying anything at all must develop sufficient figurative buoyancy to prevent nothing from overwhelming a minimal articulate discourse of something. Goodman finds in the pointless repetitions of a nostalgic craving—Ich will heim, Ich will heim [I want to go home, I want to go home]—the possibility of redeeming the involuntary nonsense of virtual tautology (“using different words when the meaning is exactly the same” [Wordsworth 1984: 594]) with the primitive ornaments of passion—iterations of the same words, their length and quantity varied solely by the surges of feeling—that were praised by Longinus and Robert Lowth, and flowed again in Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno (1759–63). In the stutterings of the old sea captain of The Thorn and the chiming of the word “alone” in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Goodman locates the lineal descendants of Trotter’s victims of “cravings of the mind” whose verbal resources were inversely proportionate to the turbulence of their feelings (Trotter 1804: 3.364). By means of the manifold figures sponsored by repetition—tautology, anadiplosis, hendiadys, and parallelism—“the effects of nostalgia are no longer just a subject of representation—they have become a defining principle of representation” (Goodman 2008: 206). That is to say that the medium installed by Melville in respect of calenture, and the elliptical modifications of scorbutic nostalgia I have been trying to analyze, are achieved for nostalgia by means of a formal transposition of “cannot say” into “can say nothing.”

Wordsworth is attracted to those who have lost house and family, or to travelers heading for the unpromising prospect of homecoming, because they have refined a form of reflection analogous to that of the poet such as himself, who manifests “a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; and ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events” (Wordsworth 1984: 603). Often this factitious form of nostalgia identifies as its object a person environed by memories and emotions that likewise have ceased to bear any resemblance to real events, such as Harry Gill racked by phantom chills or James Ewbank fatally deluded by a somnambulist reverie. No more than Cowper has the poet any interest in the conventional pieties of sympathy. He looks at these displaced folk as if avid for proof of their want of self-possession. “He was alone, / Had no attendant, neither dog, nor staff, / Nor knapsack—in his very dress appeared / A desolation, a simplicity / That appertained to solitude” (47, ll. 61–65). Their language likewise seems muttered or sung like an obbligato of loneliness, so that the mere sound of what once might have been articulate words takes its place as part of the scene, as much seen as heard, or as much tasted as seen. In “The Solitary Reaper,” he announces quite baldly his own version of illing and filling, “I saw her singing at her work, / And o’er the sickle bending; / I listened till I had my fill” (319–20, ll. 27–29).

Sometimes the radical disorientation of the person thus represented is not susceptible to fixture, and the scene spirals round a dissolving center that generally splits into three as repetitions pile up around it: “And wherefore does she cry?—/ Oh wherefore? Wherefore? Tell me why / Does she repeat that doleful cry?” The only response to these wild queries is to exhibit the location of the cries, “The spot to which she goes; / The heap that’s like an infant’s grave, / The pond—and thorn, so old and grey / … / But to the thorn, and to the pond / Which is a little step beyond, / I wish that you would go” (61, ll. 86–88; 92–95; 106–8). The intention behind the ventriloquizing of this voice, perpetually demanding news that can’t be had, is to emphasize the enigma of the three things: the mound, the pond, and the thorn. The technique is brought to perfection in the “spots of time” section of The Prelude, where each scene yields three contingent fragments expressive of the visionary dreariness engrossing the poet’s mind: a pool, a beacon, and a girl; a wall, a sheep, and a hawthorn. However, he returns to them, and by means of an ecstatic geometry, or trigonometry, sets the particulars of each triad in a position and a light of its own, “The naked Pool, / The Beacon on the lonely Eminence, / The Woman, and her garments vexed and tossed / By the strong wind” (ll. 313–16); “The single sheep, and the one blasted tree, / And the bleak music of that old stone wall” (566–68; Prelude 11.378–79). Protecting the poet from too tumultuous exposure to these bleak and noncorroborative objects is the same art used by Ralph Clark of framing his hopeless tears for Betsey Alicia with the tragedy of Jane Gray. Compulsions get robed as destinies, “the blank and solitude of things” is irradiated by “contingencies of pomp” (Excursion 3.848, 4.1061 quoted in Hickey 1997: 141). The “colours and words that are unknown to man” of which the poet despaired are suddenly supplied by means of emphatic repetition, cleaving to a tongue he thought had been cleft by the inexpressible. “All these were spectacles and sounds to which / I often would repair and thence would drink, / As at a fountain” (Wordsworth 1984: 568, ll. 383–85).

These redemptions of situational blankness are made possible first of all by the distinction Erasmus Darwin drew in his Zoonomia between the stimuli of external objects and those of reflection, will, and association. The figure of the poet in the landscape stands in an immediate relation to the random stimuli of the scene: the sound made by the wind whistling through a wall, the pressure of the wind against the body of the woman and the poet’s own, the look of a forlorn sheep caught by an eye already attuned to solitude. Synesthesia emphasizes the sort of effluvial exchange that Darwin explained in terms of sight as follows: “The immediate object of the sense of vision is light … none of the light, which falls on the retina, is reflected from it, but adheres to or enters into combinations with the choroide coat behind it” (Darwin 1801: 1.160). This is how a poet can have his eye filled by watching a woman sing or drink the sounds of spectacles. It is also how his disposition to be affected by absent things yields to what he calls “an atmosphere of sensation” or “carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself” (Wordsworth 1984: 606–7).

The rhetorical figure appropriate to these situational redemptions of the poet’s physical relation to matter is not just repetition, but repetition varied as congenial effects of redoubling are required by the milieu, some of which I have mentioned. However, the one most apt in terms of nostalgia, which threatens to annihilate all real experience of objects, is the one that redeems the negative by doubling it, known as litotes and sometimes as meiosis. It generally makes an appearance where a question of the poet’s “more than usual organic sensibility” is raised, either triumphantly (“I should be oppressed with no dishonourable melancholy, had I not a deep impression … of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon [the mind]” [600]); or doubtfully: “Not without reproach / Had I prolonged my watch, and now confirmed, / And my heart’s specious cowardice subdued, / I left the shady nook where I had stood / And hailed the Stranger” (47, ll. 83–87). In Tintern Abbey, the collision between the direct stimuli of present objects and their remoter charms supplied by thought reaches a kind of crisis that only a lengthy litotes can subdue, and even then not as adroitly as may have been desired: “That time is past, / And all it aching joys are now no more, / And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this / Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts / Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, / Abundant recompense … Nor perchance, / If I were not thus taught, should I the more / Suffer my genial spirits to decay” (Wordsworth 1984: 133–34 [ll. 84–113]). What seems to be denied by memory and positive terms is therefore conserved, at least technically, as a nothing made glorious by reduplication.

This is, I believe, a figure faithful to fits of passion resembling those I have discussed earlier, where the oscillation between privation and figuration that intrigued Locke and Coleridge produces some sort of unstable equilibrium. Whether it is abundance or destitution that greets the mariner who makes it ashore, it is often with two negatives that he expresses the interpenetration of loss or impediment with satisfaction or delight, a sort of hesitant refining of the elliptical foci of ill and fill, sky and earth, blue ice and green landscape. When Richard Walter arrives in paradise he reports, “No valley of any extent [was] unprovided of its proper rill … the water, too, as we afterwards found, was not inferior to any we had ever tasted” (Walter 1838: 111). At Dusky Bay, Cook says the same thing in the same way: “The shores and woods we found not destitute of wild fowl, so that we expected to injoy with ease what in our situation might be call’d the luxuries of life” (Cook 1961: 112). Of the Isle of Pines, Henry Cornelius van Sloetten writes, “All I shall ever say of it is, that it is [a] place … deficient in nothing conducible to the sustentation of mans life” (Neville 2011: 30). John Mitchel writes, “Nothing [but running water] in this land looks or sounds like home. The birds have a foreign tongue: the very trees whispering to the wind, whisper in accents unknown to me … all sights and sounds of nature are alien and outlandish” (Mitchel 1868: 257). Struck with beauty of the aurora, Scott wrote, “The suggestion of life, form, colour and movement is never less than evanescent, mysterious—no reality,” as if it were empty even of nothing (Scott 1966: 208). The Chattertonian 1798 version of The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere is heavily marked with examples of negative hendiadys that lay their emphasis by saying twice what isn’t there: a sun “ne dim ne red,” a ship becalmed “withouten wind, withouten tide,” a peaceful scene where “There was no breeze upon the bay, / No wave against the shore” (Coleridge 2004: 150, l. 93; 152, l. 161; 162, ll. 501–2). These litotes have in common with the standard phrase of journalistic exclusion (e.g., “No-one who has not witnessed such scenes can imagine”) the double negative structure belonging to affirmations made by denying their opposites, except that it seems necessary if the experience of ecstatic recognition, experienced only for a moment and no one knows quite where, is to be communicated. It can’t be poetically improved by another hand, remaining peculiar to the first-person singular, therefore litotes is not adaptable to third-person narrative: you cannot report that a person found something not unpleasant. Like scurvy, it is the singular property of a sentient individual.

Of nostalgia generally Starobinski remarks that the barrier it places between words and experience is insuperable. He sees the problem as arising first of all from “the elusive, the unobjectifiable ‘object’ of our search” and then from the historical distance that the over-confident modern interpreter feels sure of narrowing (Starobinski 1966: 83). “The history of emotions,” he concludes, “cannot be anything other than the history of those words in which the emotion is expressed” (82). By resituating the agon of nostalgia round the idea of home rather than the past, Goodman has found an energy in nostalgic language that serves at least to add another angle to Trotter’s exploration of the novelties of scorbutic nostalgia. If this depends on a close and living link between words as things and the sensations with which they are consubstantial, then it cannot be the principle of semiosis that governs Descartes’s and Locke’s arbitrary and colorless alliance between objects and the ideas standing for them. Like tautology and its cousins, litotes is a figure dedicated to the active implication of words with feelings and events which, while being not entirely like themselves, are at the same time not like any others.

Beddoes wrote to Darwin, “I cannot perceive any probability in the opinion that ideas resemble external objects…. I cannot at present conceive how a motion of an organ of sense can imitate extension, or colour, or any primary or secondary quality of bodies…. I am equally unable to comprehend how the stimulated part of the retina can exactly resemble the visible figure of [a] whole tree in miniature.” Darwin replied, “If you allow an idea of perception to be a part of the extremity of nerve, of touch, or sight stimulated into action, that part must have figure, and that figure must resemble the figure of the body acting on it” (Stock 1811: xl, xliii). As I have pointed out, this was a debate that divided theorists of perception throughout the eighteenth century. At stake was the importance of what Locke called secondary qualities, (i.e., the immediate impression of objects upon the sensorium). If nostalgia were not to be the prison of the imagination then it was important to jettison the notion that the mind could make ideas out of nothing, no thanks to the senses—ideas of pure darkness, for instance, or quantities adding up to nothing. Scorbutic cravings and those of the homesick could be normalized only if an image or an idea could be aligned with the real and substantial excitement of an organ of sense, often the eye and the skin, and occasionally the ear, but more definitively the tongue and the throat. What seems to unite the work of Trotter with that of Cullen, and of Wordsworth with that of Darwin, is the recognition of the importance of this solid addition of outness to the exclusive interiority of the sick and the miserable. Scorbutic nostalgia was a nomenclatural novelty vindicated in medical practice, in the science of perception, and in poetry, as well as in the exigencies of seafaring.

Plate 1. Henry Mahon, Scorbutic limbs. TNA, ADM 101/7/8. Courtesy of the National Archives of the United Kingdom.

Plate 2. Georg Forster, Ice Islands with Ice Blink. SAFE/PXD 11. Courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

Plate 3. William Hodges, Pickersgill Harbour. © National Maritime Museum Greenwich, London, Ministry of Defence Art Collection.

Plate 4. Nicolas-Martin Petit, Aboriginal Dwelling. No. 18013. Courtesy of the Muséum d’histoire naturell, Le Havre.

Plate 5. Joseph Lycett, Aborigines Spearing Fish. No. 2962715. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia.

Plate 6. Port Jackson Painter, Aboriginal Woman Curing Her Child. Watling Coll. 62. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.

Plate 7. Port Jackson Painter, Grotto Point in the Entrance of Port Jackson. Watling Coll. 7. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.

Plate 8. Port Jackson Painter, Portrait of Balloderree. Watling Coll. 58. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.