1. Real-World Seafaring Details in the Odyssey

Though much of the business of sailing itself goes unremarked in the poem,Footnote ³ details of many aspects of seafaring recur. Homeric nautical vocabulary specifies a variety of gear, tackle, and trim.Footnote ⁴ Terms are used without explanation, carefully and not interchangeably: for example, when Odysseus's boat is wrecked before his second encounter with Charybdis, the forestays have torn and the mast has fallen backwards as a consequence (12.409–10), but there is no reason why the backstay should have been ripped in that incident, and it has not—it is still attached to the top of the mast (422–23). Equally precisely: Polyphemos’ new staff is in length and thickness like the mast of a particular size and type of boat (9.321–24).Footnote ⁵

There are similar particulars of geography. Odysseus (9.80–81), Menelaos (3.287–88), Agamemnon (4.514), and Odysseus in his Cretan tales (19.187) are all blown off course at mountainous Cape Maleia (4.514), at the south-eastern point of the Peloponnese and north of Kythera (9.80–81). This is no random cape, but an exceptionally stormy one, where the prevailing south-westerlies meet the northerly of the Aegean.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, it is a northerly that does for Odysseus (9.81). The routes from Crete to Egypt (14.252–57) and from Phoenicia to Libya (14.291–301) reflect real-world winds and currents.Footnote ⁷ Pharos (4.355–56) is plausibly a day's sailing from Egypt.Footnote ⁸ Amnisos is truly a difficult anchorage (19.188–89): it is just a river mouth.Footnote ⁹

There are details of navigational techniques. By day, sailors could rely on making identifiable landfalls, still the most obvious navigational method.Footnote ¹⁰ So, at the end of Odysseus's journey from Ogygia, Phaiakia reveals itself as a distinctive landmark: it is like a shield (5.279–81; see also 3.171–72, 278; 9.80; 15.294–99). Note the sly variation at 12.265–66: Odysseus knows Thrinakia by the sound of the cattle. By night, Odysseus orientates himself by Ursa Major (5.270–75), a reliable constellation for Mediterranean navigation.Footnote ¹¹

Observations of life at sea recur. Cold land breezes blow at the end of the night and early morning (5.469), as they do, as land and sea cool at different rates.Footnote ¹² Waves behave differently in different contexts; for example, they are stilled by headlands around bays (10.87–97; 13.96–101).Footnote ¹³ Knowing his waves, when trying to get to shore on Phaiakia, Odysseus seeks salvation in shore that is oblique to the force of the waves (5.418) and finds that obliquity in the mouth of a river.Footnote ¹⁴ Sea fish, specific seabirds with different behaviours, and shipbuilding tools appear in similes.Footnote ¹⁵ κορῶναι ɛἰνάλιαι nest in noisy colonies in trees near the sea (5.65–68): they must be cormorants.Footnote ¹⁶ Seals gregariously haul out for the night—and their colonies stink (4.404–6, 413, 441–42, 449).

As Odysseus's ship is destroyed in a storm, the mast falls straight backwards and smashes the helmsman on the head (12.409–413). This is not just dramatic and bad luck for the helmsman: with the mast set into the notch of the μɛσόδμη,Footnote ¹⁷ once the forestays part, it would fall straight backwards, onto the stern of the boat. This is an accurate detail, and anyone who worked with these boats would have seen masts accidentally dropped in this way, just as any sailor today knows how booms swing and crack the heads of the inattentive. Even Odysseus's fabricated shipwreck (9.283–86) is plausible.Footnote ¹⁸

Stopovers are, for the Homeric seafarer, as much a part of the voyage as sailing.Footnote ¹⁹ The episodes of departure and arrival by boat are fertile ground for formal analysis,Footnote ²⁰ but their details also reveal realistic seafaring practices: cargo stowed so it doesn't interfere with the oars (13.20–23); the two phases of launching a beached boat—pushing it into the water and then setting up the mast and oars—that can be done in stages to save time later (8.50–55; 4.779–86); cutting the mooring ropes for an emergency exit (10.127; casting off, for example at 9.562, is more usual); securing the oars with leather straps (8.53);Footnote ²¹ stashing kit in caves if the boats are likely to be beached for a while (10.404, 424); dragging them right up the beach in bad weather (12.317).

Consider the routine on landing:

The priority is fresh water, and then food. Formally, this pattern of finding water and preparing a meal is part of the landing type-scene after a tiring journey; practically, it is good and real seafaring routine: the formulae echo the sailor's checklist.Footnote ²³ We can see a discipline like Odysseus's when Captain Cook, on his second voyage, enters Dusky Sound in New Zealand after four months at sea. He first sends out a fishing and hunting party and then his lieutenant to look for a place to drop anchor. The hunters provide a fresh meal from a seal and ‘as much fish as all hands could eat for supper’, and his lieutenant finds ‘a good harbour with every other conveniency’—in other words, it is safe, provides wood for fuel, and a ‘fine stream of fresh water’.Footnote ²⁴ Always, for Cook and other early European navigators, the priorities are wood and water.

It follows that the availability of water is an important feature of a good anchorage.Footnote ²⁵ Odysseus imagines the harbour that could be made on the island of the goats: not only is it sheltered, but there is fresh water there (9.140); Menelaos says the same of Pharos (4.358–59), and it is one of the features of Phorkys (13.109).

There is a similar play between formal aspects, etiquette, and practicalities in hospitality type-scenes.Footnote ²⁶ Steve Reece analyses twelve such scenes in the Odyssey to illuminate the aesthetics of oral poetry, how details of each play off against each other, and how their variations are significant.Footnote ²⁷ At the same time we can remark that episodes of hospitality were essential to the early Mediterranean traveller in an age of brigandage and piracy, and remain so in more recent times.Footnote ²⁸ A voyage as long as Odysseus's involves a great deal of hospitality. Just because the acts of hospitality have become ritualized,Footnote ²⁹ it does not mean that the actors are not being hospitable: the guest is safe, and ends up clean, fed, and with a bed for the night. And the last element in the type-scene, where the host escorts the guest to the next destination, is, in its weakest form, the voyager receiving onward sailing instructions from the local—an obvious, and still used, technique for the navigation of unknown waters.Footnote ³⁰

The Phaiakians’ arrival on Ithaka gives us another example of how realistic details appear in type-scenes. The voyage ends with a flashy piece of seamanship: their boat goes straight to the right place and

There are two interesting points here. First, while this magical return has parallels in folktale,Footnote ³¹ it is also an appropriate and significant variation on the realistic landfall navigational technique: the Phaiakians, master navigators, go straight to Phorkys, πρὶν ɛἰδότɛς (113). (Even more wonderfully, their boats know everywhere, 8.560–61—a magical extension of the theme, just as Alkinoos’ dogs at 7.91–94 are the magical extension of the Dog at the Door theme.) Secondly, this presages contemporary practice: anyone who has beached a small boat knows that the perfect courtesy is to enable one's passengers to go ashore without getting their feet wet. It is a very cool trick, and at the same time another significant variation: the Phaiakians are such expert sailors that they do without the standard elements of mooring.Footnote ³²

Finally, some incidents have parallels in the lore of later sailors. William Hansen found in the strange prophecy of 11.121–29, in which Tiresias tells Odysseus to walk inland with an oar until someone mistakes the oar for a winnowing shovel, a transformed seaman's tale—still being told by sailors to sailors in the twentieth century—of the old sailor, sick of the sea, who vows to walk inland carrying an oar until he meets someone who doesn't know what it is, and there spend his retirement: he's far enough away from the sea now.Footnote ³³ Aiolos’ bag of winds (10.19–55) recalls various magical devices sold to sailors and promising to give control over the wind.Footnote ³⁴ There are parallels to the petrification of the Phaiakian ship (13.163) in the aetiologies of rock formations in the Faeroes and Kerkyra/Corfu.Footnote ³⁵

In summary, there is within the Odyssey an array of details of seafaring equipment, experiences, practice, and lore, which appears to be true to life, not just because it is plausible and precise (though it is), but because it bears comparison with later parallels. That array suggests a poem that reflects a real seafaring world.

2. Beyond the Details: Three Larger Episodes

Given these details we might ask whether any of the larger episodes of Odysseus's voyage might reflect incidents from a real world of seafaring. M. L. West's discussion of the attack by the Laistrygones at Lamos, combining particular details and later parallels, illustrates the validity of the question.Footnote ³⁶ The attack is an ambush in an inviting harbour, which gives shelter from all wind, but also leaves boats dead in the water and unable to escape. West points out that the topography locates the episode in Balaklava, where pirates operated in later years, ambushing sailors who had sought refuge there (Str. 7.4.2). This later parallel suggests that real-world experience informed the episode: as West says, the episode ‘originated as an epicized account of an unpleasant experience of Greek seamen in the bay of Balaklava’.Footnote ³⁷ There is no difficulty in the assertion that accounts of witnessed or experienced episodes should appear in oral traditions.Footnote ³⁸

In what follows I consider three episodes: the visit to the Lotos Eaters, the escape from Skylla and Charybdis, and the encounter with Ino / Leukothea. Each of these Odyssean episodes has a parallel in more recent maritime experience.

During the visit to the Lotos Eaters (9.82–104), three of Odysseus's men, sent to scout on shore after a long leg of sailing (nine days, 9.82), are so entranced by the welcome they find on shore that they desert their duties.

For the navies and shipping companies of the great age of sail, reliant on manpower, deserters—known as runners—were a fact of life. ‘If a ship were bound for Heaven and should stop at Hell for wood and water[,] some of the crew would run away’, wrote the captain of the whaling ship Florida in his log book in 1859.Footnote ³⁹ For many runners, jumping ship was not a serious attempt at desertion, but a temporary disappearance in a friendly port; this was known in the eighteenth-century Royal Navy as ‘rambling’.Footnote ⁴⁰ And this seems very like what happens during the visit to the Lotos Eaters.

To paraphrase: after a nine-day leg of what is already a gruelling voyage, the boat stops in a nice place with hospitable inhabitants, and three of the crew take advantage of being sent ashore by running. Odysseus finds the ramblers and drags them back to the boat.

If we read the episode as one of sailors beguiled by the pleasures of shore leave, how should we weigh the psychotropic power of the fabulous lotos? No drugs are necessary to explain νόστου … λαθέσθαι: that forgetfulness is implicit in the exhortation to any dallying traveller to remember their destination or journey (10.472; 11.110; 12.137; cf. 15.3; 3.142).Footnote ⁴¹ Gregory Crane, discussing the spectrum of forgetfulness induced by feast plus drug that we are shown in the Odyssey—Helen, the Lotos Eaters, Kirke—concludes ‘there may well have been a conventional dichotomy between good φάρμακα which cause a beneficial forgetfulness and bad φάρμακα which produce a sinister forgetfulness’.Footnote ⁴² And this reminds us of the completely clean feast when Odysseus first lands on Thrinakia. So long as they are feasting, the crew forgets their grim experiences,

This respite is even more short-lived than that given by the drugs Helen administers to Menelaos and Telemachos (4.223). Finally, though Kirke first mixes with the sailors' Pramnian wine a drug that makes them forget their homeland (10.235–36), it is the feasting that makes Odysseus forget his home—for a year (10.472). In this nexus, with no clear distinction between the effects of feast and pharmaka, the lotos seems less pharmaceutical. And indeed, Page comments that it was originally a staple (though exotic) food.Footnote ⁴³

The second episode is Odysseus's first encounter with Skylla and Charybdis (12.73–110, 222–59). Skylla and Charybdis have long been located in the Straits of Messina, where turbulence is caused by the asynchronicity of the tides at the northern and southern ends of the strait.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, the situation described in the Odyssey is nothing like the strait of Messina: Kirke describes two cliffs facing each other, an arrow's shot apart (12.102), one so high that its peak is always encircled by cloud (12.73–75). The strait of Messina is wider and the terrain flatter.

More interesting than the attempt to locate the whirlpool is the general topography of the situation. Homer's narrow strait has cliffs on both sides (12.73, 101), though one is higher than the other (101). Such a landscape might well cause turbulence: the narrowness of the strait is one factor; the existence of some deep water, suggested by the high cliffs, another.Footnote ⁴⁵ Both may well amplify the effects of tidal or other currents; we may compare the topography of the great Corryvreckan whirlpool, in the strait between Jura and Scarba.Footnote ⁴⁶ (It is a happy coincidence that Charybdis is compared to a cauldron on the boil (237–38), for Corryvreckan is named from the Scots Gaelic coire bhreacain, ‘the speckled cauldron’.)Footnote ⁴⁷ Faced with such a navigational challenge, a sailor must avoid the whirlpool, by hugging the far cliffs as closely as possible (but without, of course, striking any rocks). And this is what Odysseus tells his helmsman to do:

This encounter seems, then, partly an anecdote about a navigational challenge in a turbulent strait, a stratum that has been overlaid with the monstrous.Footnote ⁴⁸ And, as with the risk of rambling crewmen, that realistic layer reflects a genuine seafaring experience.

The third episode I discuss is more unusual, though it springs from the common experience of shipwreck. Towards the end of his wanderings, and after seven years on Ogygia, when Kalypso finally allows Odysseus to leave, he builds a small boat (5.228–261),Footnote ⁴⁹ and manages to sail for seventeen days, reaching sight of Phaiakia (278–81). But Poseidon notices him and sends a storm that dismasts his boat (316–17). He is washed off the hull and, weighed down by his clothing, barely manages to swim back (313–25). From this predicament, he is saved by the nymph Ino / Leukothea,Footnote ⁵⁰ who appears from the depths and advises him to swim for it:

This does not seem like sensible advice to Odysseus—the land he saw was too far away—and so he decides to stay on the boat unless it is wrecked, and only then swim (360–64). And this is what happens: when the boat is smashed, leaving Odysseus astride a single plank, he throws off the clothes Kalypso gave him, wraps Leukothea's veil around himself, and swims for it (370–75).

In this episode, then, a wonderful figure appears out of nowhere to a sailor whose boat is being wrecked in a storm and advises him how to escape (345). This narrative has a close counterpart in the experience of modern adventurers who, in extremis, believe they are joined by a comforting and advising figure, who in some way points to their salvation.Footnote ⁵² The mountaineer Reinhold Messner, alone in his tent at altitude during his 1980 ascent of Everest, dehydrated and disorientated, heard someone tell him to get on with the cooking—which he did, and kept himself alive. Another Everest climber, Steve Swenson, forced to spend two nights at 8000 metres, an altitude impossible to survive for more than forty-eight hours, saw a kindly woman who kept him from falling asleep and ensured he brewed tea: ‘every piece of advice I was getting, was exactly what I needed to do’. Joshua Slocum, like Odysseus a single-handed sailor, ill and delirious during a storm, believed that someone else actually took the helm; he felt that he ‘had been in the presence of a friend and seaman of vast experience’.Footnote ⁵³

Such experiences of a sensed presence typically occur in an extreme environment, in a context marked by isolation and monotony, such as the solitude of the single-handed sailor, and are triggered by a combination of stresses—a mountaineer suffering an accident while short of oxygen at altitude, or a sailor, cold, dehydrated, and under-nourished after shipwreck.Footnote ⁵⁴ Those who witness the sensed presence are by character open to experience, a trait of the imaginative and independent; they tend to be optimistic of their survival.Footnote ⁵⁵ It seems that this sensed presence is conjured up by some part of the survivor's brain to cut through the noise of the crisis and ensure the right thing gets done.

The context of Odysseus's encounter with Ino / Leukothea corresponds with this pattern. Odysseus has been at sea, alone in a small boat, for seventeen days. He is now in the midst of a storm; he has already been washed off his boat and, while he was able to swim back, now his boat is breaking up. At this moment, πολύτροπος, independent, resourceful, and a survivor, he encounters an adviser who tells him how to escape. It is a psychologically acute (and practically accurate) tale of the traumatic experience of escape from a shipwreck in a small boat in a storm, which has been fitted, most appropriately, to Odysseus at this moment.

It is counter-intuitive that our contemporaries and a Homeric hero should be able to share such an experience, but the alternative, that the Odyssey describes a scenario that happened to fit a psychology that did not exist at the time but did later, is vanishingly unlikely. This remains the case even though Homeric heroes frequently encounter the divine in less traumatic circumstances; the wonderful fact is that people of our own time can, in this intense situation, share this Homeric experience.

These three Odyssean episodes, then, all have parallels in real-world seafaring experience. It is easy to overlook those parallels: the rambling among the Lotos Eaters is less dramatic than a feast of magic food, and the navigation of the turbulent strait less dramatic than sea monsters—just as the piratical ambush in Lamos is overshadowed by the fact the ambushers are man-eating giants. The sensed presence is a rare phenomenon.

Nonetheless, the parallels obtain. The most economical explanation for this pattern is that these episodes in the Odyssey were informed by the real-life experience of such episodes, just as the pattern of correlation at the smaller scale described in the first part of this paper suggests that it was informed by the objects and practices of that seafaring life.