This horrifying and engrossing book could scarcely be improved upon. In this age of HRHs Harry, William and Kate-led openness about our mental health, I declare an interest: diagnosed as cyclothymic, and having known more than two attacks of depression and hypomania in the past 30 years, I would have been disqualified from passage as an emigrant to New York by the 1907 US Immigration Act, which prohibited ‘All idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons and persons who have been insane within five years previous….’
Unfortunately, no Act would necessarily have been enough to prevent me or them from embarking (or being forcibly embarked) on such a ship, and going loopy aboard, according to Nic Compton’s Off the Deep End: A History of Madness at Sea.
Grotesqueries deriving from such regular misadventure, exacerbated by shipwreck, starvation, sinking, scurvy, calenture (heat madness), alcohol or seawater-drinking are partly the plot of this book.
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