Atlantic Voyages: The East India Company and the British Route to the East in the Age of Sail

As he prepared to embark for India in 1774, Alexander Mackrabie's   excitement at the sights to be seen and novelties to be experienced was   palpable. Mackrabie's journey was conducted under the auspices of the   London-based East India Company and was one of the many thousands of   Company voyages that brought Europeans into contact with Asian countries   and cultures, as well as numerous people and places along the way.  Atlantic Voyages tells the story of travellers like Mackrabie as they   navigated the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, reflecting on who and what   they had left behind in Europe, looking forward to new challenges in   Asia, and evaluating the sights and smells, sounds and tastes, hopes and  expectations, fears and regrets, that regaled their senses and played   on their minds as they sailed along the way. It charts the tension   between tedium and terror on the one hand, and exhilaration and   excitement on the other, attempting to understand the maritime space of the Atlantic as it was experienced by the people who traversed its waters.

The lives of the people carried by East Indiamen were deeply affected by their Atlantic experiences. They confronted the reality of shipboard life: its seasickness and boredom, its cramped living conditions, its questionable dining fare, and its severely   restricted privacy. They acclimatised to the rhythms of the ocean and   the vicissitudes of the weather. They encountered rites of passage and   ceremonies of initiation on the high seas. They prepared themselves for  cultural disorientation and a host of unusual sights and sensations. And they wondered at the extraordinary beauty of the elements around   them - the sea, the sky, the islands - and the strangeness of their   inhabitants, human and animal alike. The ship's passage played a crucial   role in shaping the responses and experiences of those individuals surrounded by its wooden walls. Their words bring to life this maritime   journey, illuminate the experiences of the people who undertook it, and   contribute to our understanding of the place of the Atlantic Ocean in wider histories of the East India Company and the British Empire in this period.