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.

This chapter treats the marketing of transatlantic passenger shipping companies from the post-Famine period to the emergence of amphibious aviation at the end of the Free State era. It explores the use of evolving advertising, marketing and public relations techniques, collectively commercial propaganda, in the USA on the transatlantic passenger shipping trade. It compares and contrasts the commercial propaganda of American shipping lines with that of their British and Irish counterparts to determine the degree to which American marketing techniques influenced domestic marketing, shaped consumer tastes and stimulated desire for an American life experience that was grounded in participatory civic consumerism. The chapter suggests that the reverse flow of knowledge and practices, stimulated by temporary and permanent reverse migration, and correspondence with Irish-America, led to the post-Famine modernisation of commercial promotional activity, with attractive communications from America copied by shipping lines and agents in the Irish market to create a domestic, Americanised form of marketing, more sophisticated and polished than previously seen.