Mental Illness and Suicidal Tendencies in Early Modern Oceanic Voyages

Between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modernity, madness emerged as the great bogeyman of European societies, and since the fifteenth century, the character of the madman was associated with the image of the Ship of Fools (Stultifera Navis/Narrenschiff). This boat was as much symbolic as it was material. In fact, urban populations used to physically remove those with mental health problems by entrusting them to sailors and river merchants passing through their cities.

However, at the same time the image of the boat taking the fools away exorcised their fear using the symbolic power of water, which was a religious symbol both of purification (baptism) and separation (Exodus across the Red Sea). At the beginning of the Modern age the belief that the sea—a real prison of water and a symbol of chaos, irrationality and evil—could exert an influence on human temperaments was so deep-rooted as to suggest, during the Elizabethan age, that it was the basis of the melancholic nature of the English people, who lived precisely on an island in the middle of the ocean.

The end of the Middle Ages was also the time when the first long-distance oceanic voyages began, thanks in particular to the monarchies of Portugal and Spain. During these voyages, Europeans were able to experience for the first time the effects of prolonged isolation in the midst of veritable deserts of water, with the psychological consequences that this could entail, up to the most extreme limit, namely suicide. During one of the most extreme and memorable of these journeys, the first circumnavigation of the world initiated by Ferdinand Magellan and completed by Juan Sebastian Elcano, there were several cases of suicide.

During the winter spent in the bay of San Julian, in southern Patagonia, before finding the coveted passage to the west, the Italian sailor Antonio da Varese, the French Rogel Dupret, the Spanish Pedro Perez, and the Italian Filippo da Genova, committed suicide respectively on April 29th, June 2nd, June 18th, and July 2nd, all by drowning. The first one had been caught months earlier in homosexual practices with another older sailor, who had been hanged, but not Antonio. It was perhaps due to a case of conscience, driven by the uncertain situation of that winter, that the sailor committed suicide.

As for the other three cases, we do not know of any reason for their desperate action, but it is perhaps no coincidence that out of the four suicides, three were committed by non-Iberians. Spanish and Portuguese seamen, in fact, came from the maritime traditions that were more psychologically prepared for that type of voyage. These, of course, are simple conjectures, but it is possible that early modern oceanic voyages, with their terrible vastness, exerted on the European collective psyche a lasting sense of estrangement that made madness emerge as one of the dominant problems of modern global societies. [David Salomoni]