Chapter 1 examines the status of the transatlantic voyage in James’s writing, as a constant yet often absent event neglected by critics of the so-called international theme. Taking as a starting point the author’s description of the crossing – in his essay ‘Chester’ – as ‘an emphatic zero’, this chapter considers how the paradox contained in James’s phrase reflects the ontological insecurity of the nineteenth-century crossing itself: widely felt to resist record, but also scrutinized as an event of social and cultural importance. Such inconsistencies haunt James’s tale ‘The Patagonia’ – in which a passenger vanishes during a crossing from Boston to Liverpool – and The Ambassadors, in which the voyage is closely associated with the narrative impulse. As I argue, the ‘emphatic zero’ can be considered both as a Jamesian and as a maritime phenomenon, as the author dramatizes the peculiar effects of the voyage through affirming his interest in narrative omission and absence. Alongside detailed readings of the two named texts, I draw upon James’s letters, autobiographies, and essays on (other) sea-writers such as Pierre Loti, as well as contemporary guidebooks and newspapers, to demonstrate the author’s sensitivity to the material and psychological conditions of ocean travel.