Atlantic Voyages - The East India Company and the British Route to the East in the Age of Sail - John McAleer

Aug 2, 2026

Atlantic Voyages explores the East India Company’s Atlantic-to-Asian connections through the lived experience of travellers onboard East Indiamen. In the Age of Sail, long crossings produced cramped, uncomfortable routines marked by illness, boredom, limited food, and restricted privacy. Drawing on historical testimonies—including a nineteenth-century memorial encountered during pandemic-era research—the book frames the voyage as both a geographical journey and a transformative passage that shaped perceptions and responses. It also situates the study within wider scholarship on the company’s impact at home.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryStory & Novel

FormatPDF

Pages331

Reading Time8 h 30 min

AccessFree to download

Preface

Shipboard life and the Age of Sail

Pandemic-era research and altered access

Personal encounters and archival connections

Atlantic Voyages Jan Brandes, View from the Deck of an East Indiaman near the Great Mast (Dekzicht van een VOC-schip naar de grote mast), c.1780 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, NG–1985–7–1–144) [https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/NG-1985-7-1-144](https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/NG-1985-7-1-144) [OceanofPDF.com](OceanofPDF.com) Atlantic Voyages The East India Company and the British Route to the East in the Age of Sail JOHN MCA LEER [OceanofPDF.com](OceanofPDF.com) Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © John McAleer 2023 The moral rights of the author have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022950604 ISBN 978–0–19–289474–8 ebook ISBN 978–0–19–264760–3 DOI: 10. 1093/oso/9780192894748 .001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. [OceanofPDF.com](OceanofPDF.com) Preface When I began the research for this book, it was quite a struggle to imagine the experiences of travellers on board East Indiamen, those wooden worlds that carried officials, soldiers, and their families to the East India Company’s Asian empire. Scenes of shipboard life—with its sickness and boredom, its cramped living conditions, its limited dining fare, and its severely restricted privacy—were a historical abstraction for most of us. A global pandemic changed all of that, making at least some of the themes explored in this book feel uncomfortably familiar. One traveller, sailing from Port Glasgow to Bombay in 1828, reflected on the effects produced by the situation.‘The perfect and unbroken uniformity’ of the days cast ‘a sort of sleepy gloom’ over the traveller ’s faculties: When he gets up in the morning he wanders about casting many a wistful eye to the breakfast table and giving a passing hint by way of quickner to the drowsy steward. Till dinner he wanders from the forecastle to the stern. He takes up a book or a pen but cannot set his mind either to read or write. He is continually munching biscuit tho to the certain destruction of his dinner for which notwithstanding he longs more eagerly than any starving wretch on shore and he yawns away the evening and retires to bed with the chilling feeling that he must rise the next morning to the same dreary and monotonous kind of life—or rather if I may use the expression death in life. Such is the faithful transcript of my general feelings during the passage.1 Experiences of twenty-first-century lockdown, with our technologically enabled ways of working and staying in touch, can only give a dim sense of what it must have felt like to be on board a ship in the Age of Sail. But as with most aspects of life, some specific plans for this book wer

FAQs

What central experiences does the book focus on in East Indiamen voyages?

It emphasizes shipboard life—sickness, boredom, cramped living conditions, limited dining, and severe restrictions on privacy—alongside how these conditions shaped travellers’ days and moods.

How did the COVID-19 pandemic influence the author’s research plans?

The pandemic made visits to archives and libraries nearly impossible, shifting research toward online meetings and teaching preparation, and changing the author’s access to materials and locations.

What example does the author use to connect historical evidence to the present research?

The author describes finding a memorial in Southampton Old Cemetery to Mary Eliza Doherty, linking her inscription to her travel account used in writing the book.

Aug 2, 2026

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