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.
Compton’s subject is mental peril and catastrophe. His book is a lightly-worn but gripping contribution to the field, well researched and full of anecdote and comparison. (You know about Darwin and FitzRoy, but have you heard of the ‘Curse of the Beagle’?) Compton — raised on a variety of boats by his naval officer father, who was torpedoed in 1941— has set himself to study men’s and women’s minds under pressure at sea. As readers of Conrad, Melville and Alistair MacLean will know, the waves reveal the mental processes of mankind like nowhere else.
Advances in mental health care concern many. Treatments have ranged from incarceration in irons and faeces (reported aghast by Dr Burnett, for the Royal Navy, 1840) to ‘the moral management of the patient’ (Burnett again, 1824). On land, we have progressed from Bedlam to Prozac and counselling.
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