On the subjective side of things, early transatlantic seafaring can be described as an informal technique of ecstasy whereby discoverers, like shamans of an undefined religion, acquired information from a significant realm beyond. This was no longer to be envisaged as a heavenly ‘above’, but rather as a terrestrial ‘yonder’. Like all former transcendences or quasi-transcendences, this modern hazardous beyond came at a price. Early intercontinental travellers not infrequently had to pay for access to distant shores by enduring bitter asceticisms. These included involuntary fasts and passages drawn out by weather conditions, or the torture of boredom from calm at sea and sluggish sailing. Frequent sleep deprivation as a result of heat, cold, stench, cramped conditions, noise and fear on a heavy swell also wore away at the irritable and delirium-prone crews. Every ship on the high seas placed the travellers in constant connection to what one could here, more fittingly than anywhere else, call the last things. The alternative of port or death was the formula for mediating at sea on the precariously goal-directed nature of human action. As an examination of the end, Ignatian exercises could not be any more explicit than an Atlantic crossing. No group of ascetics on the seas, admittedly, bore the brunt of the maritime law ‘port or death’ more harshly than those who searched for the most difficult passages on earth, the Northern Sea Route between the Norwegian Sea and East Siberia and the Northwest Passage between Greenland and Alaska. By the turn of the twentieth century, the delusional systems and idealized fantasies of numerous researchers and adventurer-merchants had foundered on these nigh-impossible routes. In both of these northern passages, the Modern Age's campaign against the notion of ‘impossible’ claimed its exemplary victims.
If one characterizes the current civil world, in terms of its mentality conditions and immune constitutions since the eighteenth century, as a therapy and insurance ‘society’ – a formation that differs clearly from the preceding ‘society’ of religion – one usually overlooks the fact that an intermediate world had grown between the religious and therapeutic regimes which was involved in both systems, yet based on practices of its own. Seafaring constituted an autonomous third force between religion and therapeutics until the nineteenth century. Countless people sought healing from the frustrations of the mainland at sea. Perhaps the Nautilus of Captain Nemo was the last ship of fools on which a great, lonely misanthrope could act out his rejection of the disappointing land-dwelling humans in a sovereign fashion. For Herman Melville, it was quite self-evident that the open sea is the most reliable remedy for both melancholy and manic moods. Thus he was able to make the narrator of Moby Dick – published in 1851, barely twenty-five years before Jules Verne's literary forays into terran and subterranean, marine and submarine globalization – begin his tale with these words:
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.1
The message is easy to decipher: next to the monastery and suicide, seafaring offers itself as the third option for throwing away a life that has become unliveable on land. In nautical globalization, everything undertaken by restless Europeans to tear away from their older spheric anchorings and local inhibitions would flow together for an entire age. What we here term restlessness (the keyword of older emigration research) encompasses entrepreneurial spirit, frustration, vague expectation and criminal uprooting without any distinctions between them. The unrest of money mingles with the unrest of ‘uprooted existences’.2 Like a different kind of purgatory, the sea now offered a chance to escape the disappointing inhabitants of the homeland and the mainland. In this group, people aged quickly beneath the wind and hopelessness. An observation by Victor Hugo about Gilliatt, the hero of his third great novel The Toilers of the Sea (1866), was true of them all: ‘He wore the sombre mask of the wind and the sea.’3
The new entrepreneurial-nautical yonder was constituted as an experiential beyond open only to those who ventured out with total commitment. One cannot go halfway to sea, any more than one can be halfway in God. Whoever steps on deck has laid aside their attachment to the terran concepts of death and life. One does not know, however, how many of these men who died in advance would have been able to follow the words of the commander Pescara, the victor of Pavia, who explained the secret of his cold-bloodedness in battle thus: ‘My guardian God has stilled the storm that tossed about my helm.’4
But regardless of whether the new restless ones board ships or travel in their imaginations to distant worlds from a fixed business location, glancing up from a travel account, the desire of the Europeans who learn to listen aims at a wondrous transatlantic transcendence. The European dream of the good and better life is caught up in the maelstrom of a totally other overseas. These notions have nothing in common with the panic-stricken legends and superstitions of sailors and fishermen; the yonder is no longer the edge of a cosmic shell but another coast – the Caribbean, which would later be the American.
It was only this displacement of transcendence to the horizontal plane that made utopia possible – as a school of thought, a mode of writing and a mould for wish plasmas and immanentized religions. The literary genre of utopia that suddenly appeared in the sixteenth century organized a wish culture geared towards progressive explication, and later the matching politics, where alternative worlds could be constructed without the need for a context – according to the taste of the terrestrially discontent, but always based on the primal fact of the Modern Age, namely the real-life discovery of the New World in the inexhaustible diversity of its insular and continental manifestations (not least in the countless Pacific islands, where it was supposed that the experimentum mundi could be undertaken once more from scratch). As any glance at the relevant documents shows, the empirical and the fantastic were inextricably intertwined in the early Age of Discovery. By means of its rapidly effective new media – whether chapbooks, travel accounts, novels and utopias or broadsheets, globes and world maps – thoughts of the genuine New World and its imaginary variants produced a post-metaphysical wish regime which believed that its fulfilments were perhaps not within reach, but at least in the not-too-distant future. This set in motion a form of self-fulfilling wishful thinking that learned to steer a course, both in fantasy and in reality, towards distant worlds and their fortunes in happiness, as if their supposed appearance at some distant point already held the promise of their imminent appropriation.