Tuesday, 6 August

Our morning position was 49-48-38 N, 21-19-32 W. That’s slightly farther north than we were last night.

The morning sky was intermittently overcast, with enough breaks to see patches of blue in the vicinity of the ship, and patches of sunlight on the ocean farther away.  And the temperature had risen noticeably since yesterday; it was almost balmy.  Later it cleared up entirely, and I expected to spend some time on deck that day enjoying it all.

Looking forward over the bow on a clear day

“…you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of common-places never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks…” – Herman Melville, “Moby Dick”

What was true of whaling ships in 1851 is true for passengers of cargo ships today (or at least this cargo ship).  Although the ship has radio contact with the outside world, and the crew has Internet access of sorts, we passengers woke up and went to bed each day with no knowledge of what was happening in the world.

When you've been in a situation like that for several days, your mind can do funny things.

In my case, I was reminded of an essay by a (predominantly) 19th-century French mathematician, Henri Poincaré.  His essay was essentially about the psychology of mathematical creativity.  In a nutshell, he talked about having worked on a problem for several weeks while following the same routine.  Then one night he changed his routine, and his mind exploded with ideas.  He stayed up all night proving exactly the opposite of what he had originally attempted to demonstrate.

The complete disruption of my own daily routine -- and by that I mean, my online habits -- caused a similar outbreak of creative thinking after a few days.  Unlike Poincaré, I did not prove the existence of a mathematical class of Fuchsian functions.  But I had been wrestling with some issues related to how I was going to proceed with things over the long-term once we were back in Paris.  And I had basically worked myself into a mental rut and gotten stuck.

I found that at about this point -- after about four days without any online activity or input from the outside world -- my own mind began to churn out a raft of fresh ideas about how to organize certain things, how to prioritize certain things, how to proceed with certain things, etc. It felt the way Henri Poincaré had described his own experiences, as though my subconscious mind had been working on the issues all along, and it took this break in routine and relative isolation to put it all together in the background and bring it to the fore.

Not that I promise this to anyone else, but for me it was one of the pleasant benefits of the voyage.

(As an aside, I majored in mathematics as an undergraduate, and always thought Henri Poincaré was one of the more interesting mathematicians in the math pantheon.  I was absolutely delighted to find that he is buried in Montparnasse cemetery, not too far from where my wife and I live in Paris.)

Henri Poincaré's grave in Montparnasse cemetery  

Lunch was a glorious affair: there were (relatively) fresh vegetables.  Sautéed eggplant, zucchini, green peppers, carrots, and onions.  Whoa!  Not only did I ask the Steward to relay our appreciation to the Chef, but after lunch I poked my head into the kitchen and thanked the Chef personally.  (It turned out, that paid off in spades.)

Apparently the Master had determined that we could not make Liverpool for the morning high tide on Thursday, and so are arrival was scheduled for approximately 17:30 pm.   

After dinner the passengers’ lounge was swinging: Ellen, Anne, and Sebastien were busy working the jigsaw puzzle, and Hans, Wilke, and Roland were deep in conversation.  I was surprised the Master didn't send one of the crew members by to tell us to calm down a bit.

Again we advanced the clocks an hour.  We were then in the same time zone as London, and our evening position was 50-23-55 N, 16-39-23 W.