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 Last week, on November 7, my colleague Jesper Jakobsen invited me to a seminar at the Saxo Institute (University of Copenhagen).   In this seminar, Dr Catherine Beck was presenting her work “Understanding madness at sea in the eighteenth-century British Royal Navy”. After working on a project about superstitions surrounding shipbuilding at the Arquivo Municipal de Vila do Conde in 2015, I was very excited to get in touch with sea-related research again.  In her presentation, Dr Beck discussed how the idea of “madness at sea” was portrayed in surgeon’s logs and court martial transcripts of the late-eighteenth-century British Royal Navy. Discipline, obedience, and self-care were crucial to survival in the context of a Navy vessel, especially due to the limited space and only occasional access to land. Life at sea was tough, and sailors were generally perceived as being resilient, but also superstitious and naïve. At the shore, sailors represented almost the opposite of the Enlightenment ideals, being associated with drunkenness and absence of “reason”. In a certain way, to the world outside the ship, sailors were already “mad”. So what would constitute “madness” at sea? Night Alarm, Prepare for Action, 19th-century caricature Looking at her medical and legal sources,Catherine Beck could identify different “marks of insanity”. Acting ininexplicable ways, incoherent speech, and non-conforming appearance wereassociated with madness, but also physical signs like red eyes, indigestion,and fevers could be indicators. Interestingly, these marks alone would notnecessarily be correlated to insanity at first glance. Madness at sea was lessa matter of the “acts”, and more a matter of the “actor”. Similar symptomswould be understood differently depending on the ranking, responsibilities, andsocial background of the individual. The accumulation of several “marks ofinsanity” was crucial to a sufficient diagnosis. These contingencies ofdiagnosis were also related to the individual’s usefulness within the ship.Official diagnoses of madness were mostly used for temporary discharges aftertrial, in order to avoid executions that would waste experienced sailors.These sources, however, have their limitations. The cases that came to court were the ones in which the individual’s actions became too extreme, and some trials show that the person’s mates usually managed the symptoms by themselves, creating dynamics to protect the “mad” person and each other. This idea of social dynamics within the ship being a critical factor in how the individual was treated led me to think that these dynamics probably played a massive role in the creation of privacy at sea. Gabriel Bray, “Four Marines Eating Pease” While high-ranking officials would have their own quarters, most of the crew had to share their space. As someone who lived for almost a year in a student commune that was just a large room filled with bunk beds to accommodate people, I can imagine that the sailors would find ways of creating privacy, just as us students did. While the materials (or lack thereof) onboard imposed difficulties, sailors improvised walls with sheets and created spatial definitions for themselves. Even in crowded sleeping quarters, one’s own hammock became their private space. Ship deck, 1768, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London  In his work “Boys at Sea: Sodomy, Indecency, and Courts Martial in Nelson’s Navy”, B.R. Burg describes how sailors would use the ship’s space to try to conceal acts of sodomy. Efforts to keep sodomy as private as possible in the Navy would take place especially due to article 29 of the Articles of Wars, which dictates: “If any person in the fleet shall commit the unnatural and detestable sin of buggery and sodomy with man or beast, he shall be punished with death by the sentence of a court martial”. But given the spatial constraints, where would people engage in sodomy? Sodomy trials show that members of the fleetwould take advantage of any chance of seclusion, using any spatial nooks thatcould conceal them. A particularly important element of privacy at sea wasdarkness. Burg describes how the trials regularly mention the need to “grab alantern” when people suspected of being committing sodomy were found. “Hiddenplaces” were a bit harder to come by. Usually, the spaces described are betweenthe ship’s guns, behind chests, or in burrows between shipboard gears (p. 66). However,the information we have at hand are of those cases in which people failed toconceal themselves. Or more importantly, they failed to conceal themselves fromthe wrong people. It is safe to assume that just as crewmates accommodatedtheir mentally ill colleagues, they also found ways of providing privacy forother acts as well. Privacy was not (and could not be) a matter of isolation from the others. Privacy was the systems created to allow everybody “their space” – not necessarily physical, but also mental. These dynamics of privacy did not depend only on spatial definitions, but of intentional acts that enabled one’s privacy: to turn one’s back, to avoid looking at something, to use one’s own body to become the “wall” for someone else, to ignore or keep secret information about others. I am by no means a specialist in maritime history, so I would love to hear from my fellow historians about what kind of dynamics of privacy at sea they see in their sources. Any comments are more than welcome, but please bring your best “privasea” puns or keep them at bay.