I’ve been sick of work, sick of school, and sick of even showing up, but I have never been seasick, what the French call “mal de mer,” or “sickness of the sea.” Fortunately, I’ve never been air sick, car sick, motorcycle sick or train sick, either. I guess I have dull senses, a dullard. I do know when I’m hot, when I’m cold, when I’m hungry, and when I’m lonesome.
Informed studies show that an estimated 30% of the population are considered highly susceptible to seasickness, but almost anyone can fall victim under the right circumstances. Oddly enough, older adults over 50 years of age are shown to have more resistance to motion sickness of any type. Simply put, seasickness is caused by conflict in the inner ear, where the human balance mechanism resides, and results from your platform’s erratic motion on the water. If you do suffer from what is euphemistically called “motion sickness,” you are in illustrious company.
You can find evidence of seasickness in literature as far back as you care to go. For example, Homer’s “Odyssey” (750 BC to 650 BC) evokes the physical state of the hero, Ulysses, washed up on the beach as he tried to return home from the Trojan War: “So he lay breathless and speechless, with scarce breath to move; for terrible weariness had come upon him.” I assume his “weariness” was seasickness. In fact, the word, “nausea,” most often associated with seasickness, comes from the Greek “nautia,” which originally meant “seasickness” (Greek naus = ship).
Although William Shakespeare had probably never traveled outside of England, and never been seasick, he perhaps heard of it from sailors in pubs along the London riverfront. In any event, in the last act and last scene of one of his most famous plays, “Romeo and Juliet” (1597), Romeo takes leave of Juliet, who he mistakenly believes is dead, by saying:
Come, bitter conduct, come un-savory guide!
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary barque!
Here’s to me love!
He drinks!
In his despair over the hopeless love affair, Romeo identifies with the “weary barque” [ship] that itself is seasick. Its pilot, the poison, crashes it onto the rocks, destroying it and extinguishing his sorrow at the loss of Juliet.
I have recently turned my den into a library, four walls of books, a 70-year collection. I love to sit in the center of the room, surrounded by 360 degrees of my self-educated history. Pride of place in my collection belongs to the complete works of Joseph Conrad, which I picked up in used bookstores literally all over the world. Some are in languages I can’t read. Among the best-known writers about the sea, along with Melville, Conrad, the consummate seaman himself, seldom, if ever, wrote of seasickness, but I do remember this passage from “Le Miroir de la Mer” (1906), the “Mirror of the Sea,” which speaks to the ship’s power over man: “Yet the answer was clear. The ship had found out the momentary weakness of her man. Of all the living creatures on land and sea, it is ships alone that cannot be taken in by barren pretenses, that will not put up with bad art from their masters.”
Of course, there are also examples in history where seasickness can get you killed. Most everyone knows about the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. which led to the dissolution of the Roman Republic. Collateral damage caused by his death directly led to the murder of one of his supporters, the noted orator, Cicero. When Caesar died, the men of the second triumvirate (Octavian, Mark Anthony, and Lepidus) took power. For Cicero, this meant that Caesar’s enemies were now his enemies and that he had to flee the country. Traveling by ship as that was the fastest means of travel, Cicero suffered repeated bouts of seasickness until weary of life, he felt his will power broken. He could no longer flee Rome, returned home, and took to his bed where he was assassinated by Anthony’s soldiers in 43 B.C.
More recently, the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English in 1588 has been attributed by some to Spanish seasickness because the Spanish foot soldiers had never fought on the sea before. A peculiar form of motion sickness is even associated with the defeat of Napoleon’s camel corps, his “dromedar” regiment, during the Egyptian campaign of 1798/1799, a sickness induced by riding on a camel, often called the “ship of the desert.” An interesting sidenote: when Jefferson Davis, later to be the first and only president of the Confederacy during the Civil War, was serving as Secretary of War during the administration of President Franklin Pierce (1853-1857), he formed an army “camel corps” in the American southwest. While the experiment ultimately failed, it is said that herds of abandoned, and now wild camels roamed the western deserts of the United States for years. More recently, Lawrence of Arabia was said to get violently seasick riding his camel while fighting against the Ottoman Turks in the deserts of Arabia during World War I. Ironically, he died in a motorcycle crash in his native England (1935).
Terrible seasickness was among the many horrors endured by slaves on the “Middle Passage.” A surprising number of naval men suffered from seasickness, and it is frequently mentioned in 18th and 19th century naval records. For example, Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson, the British naval hero who was killed at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) and whose body was sent home to England in a barrel of brandy, was a chronic sufferer. In our own country, Richard Henry Dana, the Boston blue blood and the author of “Two Years Before the Mast” (1840) writes of the horror of working aloft at the top of the sailing ship’s masts in “an ugly, chopping sea, which heaved and pitched the vessel about.”
Not surprisingly, there were a number of 19th and early 20th century attempts to develop anti-motion sickness devices, including an “anti-motion sickness belt,” manufactured by a Canadian company; a vibrating, anti-seasick chair, “in which the sitters imagine they are driving motor cars” (I think I saw one of those in the mall last weekend), advertised by the Hamburg-American Steamship Line; and, my favorite, the “Bessemer Saloon,” a ship’s cabin modeled on the movement of a compass and designed to maintain its stability independent from the movement of the ship.
In my experience, those seasick in the Navy didn’t get much sympathy. It was simply an occupational hazard, and you were expected to “get over it,” and carry on with your duties. I saw both extremes: I saw officers who were so sick that they were unable to perform their duties at sea to the ultimate detriment of their careers, and I once had a captain who delighted in telling those who were obviously sick that it was “all in their heads.” When he got sick one night in the North Atlantic, we all laughed to ourselves. There was one unwritten rule, however. No matter your rank, if you lost your supper, you were expected to clean up your own mess. No exceptions.
Some who will never get seasick are the dead. And the Lord knows, I’ve seen enough of those. Every veteran of military service has a legal right to burial at sea, and I’ve conducted dozens of such ceremonies. The bodies come aboard in two forms: cremains, or cardboard boxes filled with the ashes of those who have been cremated; and remains, those who are encased in the standard, government-issued metal coffin.
The Navy won’t get a ship underway just to conduct a burial at sea; cremains and remains are collected and held until a ship leaves on a regularly scheduled exercise or deployment. I once sailed from San Diego on a nuclear-powered cruiser with fifteen boxes of cremains stacked in my stateroom. The weather was bad, and the Old Man waited until we were halfway to Hawaii before we had the committal service. In the meantime, it got so rough that, in Navy jargon, “everyone was walking on the overhead.” In the middle of the night, the stack of cremain boxes, which had been securely tied down, or so I thought, broke loose, scattering their contents all over the deck of my stateroom.
I had a dilemma. I had the ashes of Mr. A, mixed up with the ashes of Mr. B, mixed up with the ashes of Mr. C, and so forth. What to do? I called my clerk, Jesus, a smart Hispanic kid from Alice, Texas; we conferred, and here was our solution: we swept all the ashes up into one large pile in the center of the room, and then carefully, and respectfully, repackaged them equally into the fifteen empty boxes. No one complained, and you are the first to know. A word to the wise: when distributing the ashes into the sea, always stand on the lee side of the ship and throw the ashes DOWNWIND, especially when wearing whites.
When I was sailing, everyone had their own “home remedy” to prevent or deal with seasickness. I usually dismissed most of them as just “scuttlebutt,” or gossip, with “scuttlebutt” being slang for shipboard water coolers where gossip is often transmitted. For your information, here’s a list of ten of the more “orthodox” cures that I remember, and some of them might work:
... eat crackers to soak up the liquid sloshing around in your stomach.
... stay on the leeward side of the ship, sheltered from the wind.
... face the direction the ship is going, to disconnect the visual sense from the inner ear.
... keep your eyes on the horizon.
... change positions often; stand, then lie down.
... drink carbonated beverages like ginger ale but skip caffeinated drinks.
... distract with music or conversation.
... don’t eat greasy foods.
... avoid cigarette smoke and other strong smells.
... avoid confined spaces (which is impossible on a ship).
... if you do go cruising, the best advice I can give is to get a stateroom amidships on the lowest possible deck. It will be the “calmest.”
Most of the above methods are far better than some in antiquity that I’ve read about. How about trying one of these the next time you are at sea and your head starts spinning and your stomach does flip flops:
... drinking the urine of small boys.
... collecting and drinking water drops from a bamboo stick.
... grinding up a mixture of wormwood, mint, olive oil, and wine vinegar and rubbing it frequently on your nostrils.
... drink copious amounts of vermouth and wine before setting off.
... use a reliable helmsman who is able to reduce the ship’s motion by skillful steering maneuvers.
... fast one day before setting off on a sea voyage.
Frankly, I would only recommend the final two options above.
Some of the more “enlightened” methods that might mitigate motion sickness that I often heard about were acupressure, at the P6 point, which is three-finger-widths above the wrist, roughly in the middle of the forearm; and aromatherapy, using certain scents, especially peppermint. In fact, a 2016 study found that exposing patients to peppermint scent helped reduce post-operative nausea, so why not seasickness? I suspect that most travelers, however, depend on antihistamines, or other over-the-counter drugs or prescriptions from their doctors which are all above my paygrade.
Today, modern cruise ships go to great lengths to prevent or at least minimize seasickness among the passengers. Most ships have vertical stabilizers which prevent side-to-side motions and are so large that they literally “plow” through all but the largest waves. Using the latest weather information, their daily sailing schedules are carefully planned so that they sail around potential storms.
A few weeks ago, a certain news item caught my attention. The passengers on a New York City-based cruise ship were up in arms that their Caribbean cruise had been diverted to Boston and to a destination in Canada because of storms. I thought to myself: “How much more would those passengers have complained if the ship had stayed the course, sailed into the bad weather, and hundreds of them had gotten seasick?” Had I been onboard, I would have been much more worried about catching Covid on the elevators, which I did in 2022 and my son-in-law did on our cruise last month. While I’ve been lucky, I do have the utmost sympathy for those who have felt what Mark Twain said about seasickness: “At first, you are so sick, you are afraid that you will die; then you are so sick that you are afraid that you won’t.”
Light a candle for me.
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Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
