For this subject in particular, it is difficult to identify places and dates: but, on the other hand, the sea is always the sea, and it matters little if the photos of the games that played on board to pass the time or to celebrate the passage of the Equator were made at this longitude or at that, or whether the nun whom we see absorbed in embroidering was headed for a mission in Libya or was returning from Mozambique: what we are offered is a glimpse of a world that, even if not chronologically very far from our own, nonetheless presents enormous differences, differences that we tend to forget with surprising ease.

Here are the steamships with travellers who went out of their way to find pastimes, harbours, sail boats and row boats, the adventurous landings of passengers where docks didn’t exist, in short, the “everyday” life of the nineteenth-century traveller.