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For most people, the constant rocking movement of a ship under way brings about queasiness of greater or lesser intensity, so-called seasickness, a form of kinetosis (motion sickness) which can lead to the victim's complete collapse accompanied by the violent longing for death. For Petrarch, seasickness was worse than death. It is not surprising that a phenomenon such as this one, from which there is no escape, is found reflected in a wide variety of guises in literature from antiquity to the present. Examples from "high" and "low" literature illuminate the main aspects of the discussion: Seasickness is regarded unmanly, for example; "tough guys," especially sailors, play it down to an absolute minimum (Lukian, Gerstäcker, Thomas Mann). Others delight in detailed humorous descriptions (Rehm, Thoman Mann again, Kishon), which in certain nihilist works can reach a positively nauseating level (Céline). For anyone not suffering from the affliction himself, it is easy to regard the plight of others with malignant glee (Gerstäcker, Rehm, Pastor Bardey and popular ballads). It is not possible to present more than a very rough outline of this topic, nor to provide anything remotely close to a complete catalogue of the various remedies allegedly to be taken before, during or after the journey, from pickled herring (Heine) to red wine and white bread (Goethe). Overcome with seasickness, drowning in self-pity and the desire for delivery through death, one is hardly in a position to appreciate such advice anyway.

"In 1998, with the support of the Bremen foundation Waldemar-Koch-Stiftung, the German Maritime Museum was able to purchase a highly unusual 'Takelure' or manually operated foghorn of the kind in use during the sailing ship era. Consisting of a wooden box, a 'Takelure' is generally painted brown or reddish-brown; the new acquisition of the German Maritime Museum, however, is intricately painted and bears brass decorations. It belonged to an inland waterway vessel of the F. Wolff & Sohn company,
which proudly had its name, its headquarters Karlsruhe and its Vienne branch on the Rhône as well as the date 1851 painted on the device. The Wolff & Sohn company was a manufacturer of perfumes and soaps and - in the tradition of the guild symbols - documented its international connections with a three-master, its inland shipping activities between Karlsruhe and Vienne with an inland vessel. An intricate pictorial programme, painted in the Biedermeier style, turns a simple practical device into the prestige object of an aspiring enterprise." (author's abstract)