Path in the Mighty Waters

This vivid and revealing portrait of shipboard life as experienced by eighteenth-century immigrants to the New World explores the transformative journey undertaken by the thousands of Europeans who journeyed in search of a better life. Stephen Berry shows how the ships, on which passengers were contained in close quarters for months at a time, operated as compressed "frontiers", where diverse groups encountered one another and established new patterns of social organization. As he argues that experiences aboard ship served as a profound conversion experience for travellers, both spiritually and culturally, Berry reframes the history of Atlantic migrations, giving the ocean and the ship a more prominent role in Atlantic history. The ocean was more than a backdrop for human events: it actively shaped historical experiences by furnishing a dissociative break from normal patterns of life and a formative stage in travellers' processes of collective identification.