Page - 193 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Nataša Rogelja | The sea: place of ultimate freedom? 193 to an imaginary man at the helm, “how does she head, there?” and again, “Is she on her course?” But getting no reply, I was reminded the more palpably of my condition.” Joshua Slocum (2004 [1900]) In the course of the 20th century, the idea of self-reliance, together with the anti-consumerism movement, found its way to many sea travelogues, with the sea once again serving as a sanctu- ary for fugitives. One of the most popular examples from the period of the student uprisings around 1968 and followed mostly by the younger french generation, was the french sailor Bernard Moitessier, who sailed on a boat named Joshua, in honour of Joshua Slocum. Apart from his books, where he writes about distancing himself from consumerism and environmen- tal destruction of the West (Moitessier 1995 [1971]), he became almost a legend with his public gesture of “stepping out”. In 1968 he participated in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, which would reward the first and fastest sailor to circumnavigate the Earth solo and non-stop. Although Moitessier had a good chance of winning, he quit the race and continued on to Tahiti rather than returning to England. In the second part of the 20th century, long term cruising on small sailing boats was no longer connected just with “heroic actions”, sportive achievements or short-term amateur sailing excursions, but was, also due to technological advances, sup- plemented with long-term living and/or traveling on sailing boats. Although my interlocutors travelled on fully equipped modern sailing boats, they also sailed through the sea of stories; they obtained their experience of the sea as human beings, while the sea itself probably hasn’t changed much in all these centuries. Place of ultimate freedom? In the conclusion I will bring to the fore three questions: What can we learn about the relati- onship between people and the sea on the basis of an ethnography of liveaboards, what is the significance of the sea (for my interlocutors) in the contemporary context of late modernity, and how does my ethnography link to notions of liminality? In the subchapter entitled Geographies of Meaning in the collection of studies Lifestyle migration – expectations, aspirations and experiences, editors Michaela Benson and Karen O‘Reilly wrote about the importance of speci- fic geographic places which hold certain meanings for the migrants in terms of their potential self-realisation (2009). Lifestyle migrants seek literal and figurative places of asylum or rebirth. […] These rep- resentations of the destinations chosen were drawn from both personal experiences of the places through prior tourism and travel but they also derive from wider cultural narratives. They can be categorised under three main headings: the rural idyll, the coastal retreat and the cultural/spiritual attraction.” (2009:6) Although the sea partly fits in all three proposed frameworks, it could also be listed as a spe- cific sub-field, stimulating lifestyle migrants with its own culturally specific meanings derived from a long history of colonialism and politically imposed ideas about the “sea of freedom”, evident for example in the treatise Mare Liberum (1916 [1608]) by hugo de Grotius and used later on to legitimise a Dutch expansion to the caribbean. It can also be found in the Roman- tic landscape of Byron‘s poems, in the ideas of anti-consumerism as expressed in the life and