Charles Darwin on discovering seasickness

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/26/charles-darwin-discovering-seasickness-weatherwatch

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Late in September 1836, a five-year voyage came to an end, and a young naturalist stepped ashore at Falmouth on 2 October and looked back in rueful contemplation of the severe privations that he – unlike Captain Cook’s men – never faced.

“A yacht now with every luxury of life might circumnavigate the globe,” Charles Darwin wrote in his conclusion to Voyage of the Beagle (1839). But – the want of room, the lack of small luxuries, the missed comforts of civilisation, domestic society and even music aside – he had a serious reservation.

“If a person suffer much from sea-sickness, let him weigh it heavily in the balance. I speak from experience: it is no trifling evil which may be cured in a week.”

Furthermore, he found that time dragged at sea. “And what are the boasted glories of the ocean? A tedious waste, a desert of water, as the Arabian calls it. No doubt there are some delightful scenes.

“A moonlight night, with the clear heavens and the dark, glittering sea, and the white sails filled by the soft air of a gently-blowing trade wind; a dead calm, with the heaving surface polished like a mirror, and all still, except the occasional flapping of the sails.

“It is well once to behold a squall with its rising arch and coming fury, or the heavy gales of wind and mountainous waves. I confess, however, my imagination painted something more grand, more terrific, in the full grown-storm.” The strife of the unloosed elements, he decided, was “an incomparably finer spectacle when beheld on shore.”