Stephen R. Berry’s A Path in the Mighty Waters is an important new book that contributes to historians’ understandings of American religion, the eighteenth-century passenger trade across the Atlantic and the lives of sailors. Driven by the simple observation that most Atlantic history has very little of the Atlantic Ocean in it, Berry successfully recaptures the human experience of crossing the ocean for passengers who migrated to North America in the eighteenth century. Using ships’ logbooks but mostly passengers’ and sailors’ private diaries and journals, Berry shows us how early Americans lived while at sea and argues that their Atlantic experiences profoundly influenced how they ordered their lives on American shores. Put boldly, he states that, “The ship served as the spiritual womb that brought forth colonial America” (6).

Religion is the thread that runs throughout this book. Religious migrants are its subjects and their spiritual relationships—with other passengers, with the divine and with nature—while on the water are its primary concerns. Though Berry draws some evidence from voyages not religiously motivated and includes significant discussion of slave ships, he makes plain that, “The purpose of this book is to study religious life and its possibilities on the eighteenth-century ship as depicted in the textual residue of those voyages” (9). His story centres on the London-to-Georgia expedition undertaken by James Oglethorpe and 227 other passengers on board two merchant vessels during the winter of 1735–36. Each passenger adhered to one of four Protestant traditions and most—like Methodist leader John Wesley, on whose journal Berry relies heavily—were either British evangelicals or German Moravians.

The rhythm of the Atlantic crossing forms the book’s organizational structure. Each chapter reveals a new aspect of the Oglethorpe voyage. Arranged in roughly chronological order, the narrative is meant to stand for a “typical” passenger trip across the ocean. The book opens in Europe, as passengers gather from England and Germany, grow accustomed to the cramped quarters aboard ship and then sit becalmed in English waters before heading into the open sea. After the ships set sail in chapter two, the passengers spend most of their time vomiting from motion sickness while getting used to life at sea. In chapter three, the voyagers interact with each other and with the ships’ crews, forming a loose community based on mutual tolerance, if not understanding, acceptance or affection. They reflect on the natural environment of the ocean in chapter four, upend cultural norms while longing for far-off loved ones in chapter five and grow bored of the monotony of sea life in chapter six. Closer to their destination—in this case, the new colony of Georgia—by chapter seven, the ships’ denizens weather meteorological and interpersonal storms that threaten to destroy their entire enterprise. Upon sighting land in the final chapter, anxieties of falling ill, falling prey to privateers or falling into the ocean in a shipwreck are forefront in passenger’s minds until the vessels finally anchor in harbour.

Berry argues that each of these eight aspects of the Atlantic crossing had implications for the passengers’ future lives in America since “the ship accustomed travelers to the religious flexibility and independence that life in America would require of them” (256–7). Here he makes much of the fact that strangers of different nationalities and Protestant traditions occupied the same maritime space for a time and, because “the ship was not part of a defined parish”, had to negotiate how and whether to practice their religions in cramped quarters (46). Though he clearly states: “The eighteenth-century sea passage did not create pluralism”, he does want to signal that being at sea changed spiritual lives in a way that early Americans reproduced in land-based institutions (5). “The demographics of the ship”, for example, “mirrored the heterogeneous populace found in eighteenth-century taverns, during community festivals, or on election days, but the Atlantic passage reproduced these exceptional communities over a much longer period” (111). And again, “a combination of factory and inn, the ship provided for public labor and leisure, but it made religion a matter of individual conscience” (169). Berry convinces the reader that the crossing was spiritually important for his subjects and one wonders whether passengers in other periods or of other religions had similar experiences. Future work might be able to draw on a wider source base to offer a more complete picture.

Berry pairs his observations of white Protestant voluntary migrants with insights about the Middle Passage endured by enslaved Africans. It is not hard to see why he includes the slave trade in his account: nearly as many slaves as Europeans voyaged to North America in the pre-revolutionary eighteenth century and sometimes the same ships were used to ferry slaves as free people. Also, Berry reveals that, “Seamen openly discussed distressing slave ship conditions as they circulated through other trades in the Atlantic labor system” (68). White passengers heard tales of much more gruesome voyages while they undertook their own. In attempting to connect our understandings of the shipboard lives of voluntary and involuntary migrants, the author is doing necessary work but remarks like “sailors faced the same difficulty in regard to Sunday as did plantation slaves” seem like forced comparisons (65). Moreover, Berry misses a chance to include his Middle Passage research in his conclusions. His final analysis about religious life in America draws only on the experiences of the voluntary migrants and results in Black voices being excluded from what he posits as colonial America’s “spiritual womb”.

However, Berry’s most original insights are not about the slave trade or the religious life of Atlantic passengers. This book, like few others, humanizes maritime history when it discusses passengers’ encounters with professional sailors. In chapter three, Berry weaves together secondary and primary sources to question historians’ assumptions that seafarers lacked spirituality. Stereotypes about sailors that persist today, Berry claims, are due in part to cultural misunderstanding and confirmation bias aboard eighteenth-century passenger ships: “Ministers attacked the ungodly activities they suspected of sailors; in turn, the prickly reaction of sailors fulfilled those irreligious expectations” (91). Chapter five explores passengers’ surprise when sailors performed ribald rituals upon crossing into tropical waters: “Some witnesses recoiled at the bawdy aspects of the ceremony, which might include cross-dressing and heavy sexual undertones” (140). Tracing this familiar ritual from the observer’s perspective allows Berry new ways into the culture of the wooden world, which maritime historians should not ignore.

The eighteenth-century migrant’s experience of crossing the ocean forms a crucial piece of Atlantic history and in Stephen R. Berry’s well-written book it finally receives the attention that it deserves. Berry gives the Atlantic a role in early American culture, makes valiant attempts to connect our understandings of voluntary and forced migrations and points new directions for putting the origins of American spiritual identity out to sea.