I had been told, by persons who ought to have known better, that a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean was a sublime and ennobling experience, the kind that expands a man's soul and makes him fit for polite society. I can report, after fourteen days aboard the steamship *Empress of the Adriatic*, that the ocean did attempt to expand something in me, though the ship's surgeon had a different word for it and charged me four dollars for the diagnosis.

We departed from New York harbor on a Tuesday morning with three hundred and twelve passengers, all of them fully convinced they were going to Europe to be improved. I counted them at breakfast on the first day, before the weather turned, and they were a confident and well-fed assembly. By Wednesday evening there were perhaps forty of us left at the dinner table, and we sat there in the cavernous dining room with the solemn, hollow-eyed dignity of survivors, passing the bread rolls with the careful deliberateness of men who had made their peace with eternity and were prepared, on the whole, to eat something.

The sea off Newfoundland is not a pretty thing. It is gray and enormous and deeply indifferent to human ambition, which I respect in a body of water, though I respect it from a horizontal position in my bunk, with a damp cloth on my forehead. The waves were the height of modest buildings. They rose up with a kind of theatrical grandeur, hung there a moment in the way that a comedian pauses before delivering the worst possible news, and then dropped the ship into the valley beyond with a violence that rearranged my internal organs in ways the good Lord had not originally intended. I lay in my cabin and reflected that Columbus was either a very brave man or a very stupid one, and that history has a way of being kinder to the stupid than they deserve.

Among my fellow passengers was a Mrs. Horace Babcock of Cincinnati, who had read seven books about European culture and considered this a thorough preparation. She wore her knowledge the way some women wear a new hat — conspicuously, and at all times, and with a slight aggressive tilt that dared you to comment. She informed me on the third morning, when I was still faintly green and clutching the railing, that the cliffs we had failed to see in the fog were reminiscent of the works of Turner. I said that was very interesting. She said that of course one needed a cultivated eye to appreciate Turner properly. I agreed that one did. She looked at me in a way that suggested she had already assessed my eye and found it wanting, which was fair, because I could not at that moment have told Turner from a railroad timetable.

There was also a party of twelve from a church in Massachusetts who had organized what they called a Holy Land Extension Tour, and who had already begun, in the middle of the North Atlantic, to argue about the precise location of things none of them had yet seen. Their leader, a Reverend Simmons, carried a leather-bound itinerary of such ambition and specificity that it amounted to a kind of theological document, prescribing not only where they would stand but what they would feel upon standing there. I found myself hoping that Jerusalem had been notified.

What struck me, traveling among my countrymen in their holiday arrangements, was the tremendous energy Americans devote to not actually experiencing anything they have come to see. A man will cross an ocean, ride a train for nine hours, hire a local guide, walk a quarter mile up a hill in unsuitable boots, stand before one of the oldest and most magnificent structures in the known world — and then immediately produce a small notebook and begin writing down what the guidebook told him to think about it. He has not looked at the thing. He is transcribing a reaction to a description of a thing. The thing itself stands there in the sunlight, vast and patient as geology, waiting to be noticed, and he is bent over his notebook confirming his prior arrangements with himself.

The ship's entertainment, meanwhile, was provided by a Mr. Delaney of Philadelphia, who played the piano in the saloon every evening with an enthusiasm that bore no particular relationship to accuracy. He played with the tremendous confidence of a man who has been told he has a gift and has never thought to verify this with a second opinion. The passengers applauded warmly, which is what passengers do when they are three days from land in any direction and gratitude expands to fill the available space.

By the tenth day the ocean had settled into something resembling manners, and the full complement of travelers reappeared on deck, restored in body and somewhat diminished in theory. Mrs. Babcock had temporarily misplaced her opinions about Turner. The Reverend's itinerary had been revised. A young man from Georgia who had boarded the ship declaring he intended to drink wine in every country of Europe had by this point narrowed his ambition to a desire for plain water and a chair that did not move.

There is something instructive in this, if you are the kind of person who finds instruction where other people find only inconvenience. The Atlantic Ocean does not care about your itinerary. It does not care about your cultivated eye, your guidebook, your notebook, your certainty that exposure to superior foreign culture will make you a finer human specimen. It will conduct its business regardless, with its gray and monumental indifference, and you will conduct yours as best you can, horizontal, humbled, and grateful for whatever solidity eventually presents itself beneath your feet.

We sighted land at last on a pale morning, the coast of Ireland appearing like a rumor on the horizon, and a great many people pressed to the rail and declared it beautiful, which it was. I stood among them and I thought: here we are, three hundred and twelve Americans, convinced that Europe will improve us. Europe has had the same conviction about itself for two thousand years and is still working on the evidence.