Have you noticed wherever a few travelers gather together, one or the other is sure to say: “Do you remember that smell at such and such place? (…) Then the company begin to purr like cats at Valerian, and, as the books say, conversation become general.

In March 2020, at the start of Covid pandemic, Professor Julian Tang, in an interview with the New York Times, recommended that we must be wary of the smell of our contemporaries’ breath.² He said: “If you can smell what someone had for lunch — garlic, curry, etc. — you are inhaling what they are breathing out, including any virus in their breath.”³ Through measuring social distance by smell, he evokes nineteenth century practices and prejudices concerning social interactions. In those days, social distance — both in the sense of today’s usage and the difference between social classes — was often regulated by corporal emanations and olfactory sensitivity; for example, explaining the fear of crowds. Among the many examples of olfactory phobias in the context of social promiscuity is a line attributed to Joshua Reynolds about the French painting exhibition in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, a line that was often repeated in the following century: “At the Salon, the Savoyard elbows with impunity the cordon bleu; the fishwoman (sic) exchanges her odours of brandy with the perfumes of the woman of rank, who is often obliged to hold her nose.”⁴ But if the sense of smell encouraged to keep one’s distance, it could also invite to reduce it. Indeed, many novels depict an eroticization of the perception of discreet scents captured during unexpected encounters.⁵ Regulating one’s distance from others thus seemed to be one of the social practices based on the knowledge provided by olfaction.

Thus, just as McLuhan noted in his book Understanding Media ⁶ that, in ancient China and Japan, incense was used to measure time, it would seem that, in the nineteenth century, the diffusion of odor could be a means of measuring distance. Although social problems are particularly present in the arts and culture of that time, this conception of smell in relation to measuring distance is far from being limited to social relations. For example, it can be read in architecture treatises dated as early as the eighteenth century, in which the manufacture of certain building materials was forbidden within city walls in order not to inconvenience the neighborhood. Furthermore, this concept of smell nuisance in terms of distance was incorporated into the French law as early as 1810, when the first decree came into force to regulate the establishment of factories that “spread an unhealthy or inconvenient smell” ⁷ — not only factories emitting acid and chlorine fumes but also tanneries, triperies, etc. The establishments were classified into three categories according to the unpleasant odors they emitted and had to respect a more or less significant distance from private houses. However, the recommended distance was not specified and was left to the discretion of local governors. According to scientists who contributed to the drafting of the decree, the assessment of this distance between malodorous industries and private dwellings depended on the wind.

The wind thus undermines the olfactory measurement of distances and the control of odor nuisance. In the same way, a breeze would have prevented the calculation of time through the burning of incense by fanning the combustion. By displacing odors in space, the wind also disrupts the olfactory identity of particular places, making the systematic olfactory associations that are common in literature uncertain.⁸ Thus, in the design of her olfactory maps, the contemporary artist Kate McLean sometimes includes the wind among the olfactory characteristics of the city. For example, her map of Edinburgh, which is swept by sea winds, considers potential odor transfers. In the same way, nineteenth-century hygienists had to observe the prevailing winds to decide where to locate industries.

As a sense of proximity, the sense of smell provides us with valuable indications of distance at the scale of social interactions, but the wind makes it less reliable at the scale of cities. What about the oceans? Can we measure distances by smell in a space of this scale? Can we find our way around by smell in this immensity where no topography stops or directs the wind? The cultural, scientific, literary, and artistic motifs of wind-borne smell in the nineteenth century provides us with insights into the reflection that these questions raised at the time, and on the role of wind in the emerging conception of a geography of smell.

In fact, the olfaction of the sea does not seem to be a generic smell. Although marine odors do not have the diversity of scents produced on land, particularly by human activity, they appear to be complex and changing, as we can see in nineteenth-century accounts underlining their health benefits. Changes in the smell of the sea can also give mariners useful navigational clues. In his autobiography The Astonished Man, Blaise Cendrars defends the idea that sailors have a specific olfactory knowledge rooted in an ancient tradition. He develops his hypothesis as follows:

…there is a culture of the nose surviving in the Occident, namely amongst seamen, above all among the old Portuguese navigators whose log-books are full of olfactory notes for the use of pilots and explorers. I believe some very interesting observations could be made, if one picked out the references of this nature from the accounts of the earliest navigators, for, without benefit of compass, maps or portolans, (…) men in the days of sailing-ships made use of their sense of smell…⁹

Apparently, the most important olfactory indications for sailors come from the land. In some stories, a particular smell, such as that of wrack, carried by the breeze, may signal to the sailor an unseen reef. But, more often, the smells borne away by the wind from the land are a sign of the end of a voyage. Jack London’s character explains to a child, “After you’ve been on the water a good while you come to feel the land. And if your nose is any account, you can usually smell it.”¹⁰ The scents that reach the sailors are usually full of nostalgia and memories. They evoke a particular olfactory recollection based not only on a knowledge of odors acquired through experience but also a familiarity with certain scents rooted in personal history.

Literature provides numerous examples of anticipated reunions with the land of origin, which are often very gendered. One such example can be found in Maupassant’s novel A Woman’s Life. As Jeanne travels to Corsica by boat:

“Can you smell my lady over there?” he asked Jeanne, in a voice that thirty years of command, and shouting above the noise of the wind, had made hoarse. She had indeed noticed a strong, peculiar odour of herbs and aromatic plants. “It’s Corsica that smells like that, madame,” went on the captain. “She has a perfumed breath, just like a pretty woman. I am a Corsican, and I should know that smell five miles off, if I’d been away twenty years. Over there, at St. Helena, I hear he is always speaking of the perfume of his country; he belongs to my family.”¹¹

Smells from the earth sometimes evoke a return to a familiar and comforting world, but they can also suggest something new when, for example, plants with an unknown or characteristic smell are involved. During the colonial period, the winds could also carry, along with these smells, the promise of future profits. As Holly Dugan puts it:

Faced with ‘oceans’ of forests and the ‘roar’ of the sea, explorers increasingly relied on sense of smell, which offered a proximate way through unfamiliar terrain. As the English search for sensible, and merchandisable, matter in these realms, they learned that their failure and success depended on new strategies of ‘discovery,’ including olfaction. One smell in particular symbolized for the English the potential for success in the new world – the smell of sassafras.¹²

Spices and vanilla are among the legendary scents often found in travelogues and disseminated through the popularization of science. An encyclopedia article even makes the ability to travel on the wind a characteristic of the smell of cinnamon — a way of describing the power of its scent: “The smell of the cinnamon tree is admirable when it is in flower, and when favorable winds blow from the land, the scent of it is carried far out to sea, so that, according to the report of some travelers, those who are then sailing in these lands smell this sweet odor a few miles from the shore”¹³

Conversely, another popular science book describes the ability to carry odors as a characteristic of certain winds:

Why does scent rarely lie with a north or east wind? Because those winds being generally dry, and frequently cold, are unfavourable to the retention of scent, which becomes diffused and weakened instead of retained, as it were in solution. (…) Why is scent generally good when the wind is southerly? Because the south wind is generally humid and warm. For a similar reason, a westerly wind is, next to the south wind, in its favourable condition.¹⁴

Often exploited by literature and travel accounts, these experiences of olfactory perception geographically displaced from the source of the odor seem to be so much a part of the European olfactory culture that they sometimes fuel reflection on the nature and functioning of odors. For example, according to the very popular Larousse French dictionary of 1866, the non-molecular but vibratory nature of odors is even more evident as they move rapidly over the sea, a phenomenon supposed to confirm this widespread theory. The author concludes his scientific demonstration with a historical anecdote as follows: “These waves of odor travel a great distance and with marvelous rapidity; travelers sailing the tropical seas meet them on their way, and it was these odors that revealed to Christopher Columbus the approach of land.”¹⁵

A commonplace in the history of navigation, traces of which can be found as early as Antiquity (in Pliny or Lucian for instance), ¹⁶ the smell carried by the wind is often evoked in the nineteenth century, when it takes on a new meaning as the promiscuity of cities and new hygienic standards link smell and distance. These sailors’ anecdotes are re-examined in light of the scientific questions that odor raises about its nature and the speed at which it travels through space. But these odors carried by the wind also take on a particular significance in the middle of that century, when the comparison between sounds and smells occupied a prominent place in science and the arts, and the emergence of an artistic reflection resulted from the scientific discovery of synesthesia.¹⁷

Indeed, thanks to the wind, which makes the odors travel, the sailors’ sense of smell can detect the presence of land before any of the other senses — but without being able to assess how far away it is. As Andrew Kettler has well shown, the nineteenth-century perfumer Piesse created the myth of a botanist — Mercutio Frangipani — whose “nasal heroism” saved the crew of Christopher Columbus in 1492 by detecting the smell of the New World.¹⁸ Likewise, without even seeing the land, the sailors can identify the vegetation on it. However, travelers remain unable to verify their olfactory sensations and identify the source of the smell by means of a sense considered more reliable: sight or hearing. The knowledge of ancient sailors about the wind — and their ability to identify its speed, its source, and the circulation of pools of warm air — probably enabled sailors to use these olfactory clues to navigate. However, the changing nature of the wind makes the experience difficult to analyze without experience of atmospheric phenomena that condense olfactory perception over more or less short periods. Thus, for the uninitiated, the prospective nature of smell, which allows one to smell before tasting or to smell before seeing, vacillates between knowledge, intuition, and hallucination.

From this perspective, the experience of smelling odors without seeing their origin is not a source of reliable knowledge conducive to navigation but, instead, the trigger for a poetic reverie. That is the case in a short travel story by Maupassant where the narrator has a powerful sensory experience at sea, off the coast of Italy obscured by night, as he perceives the sound of a concert beginning in the gardens of San Reno: The sound, he recalled,

seemed so near that I peered into the darkness excitedly, and suddenly I was bathed in a hop breeze fragrant with aromatic plants, the strong perfume of the myrtle, the mint, and the citron, with lavender and thyme scorched on the mountain by burning sun.

It was the land breeze, overcharged with the breath of the hills, that was carrying toward the sea, intermingled with the Alpine odour, these harmonious strains of music.

I was breathless, intoxicated with delight, pulsating in every sense. I could not tell whether I were hearing music or breathing perfumes, or sleeping in the stars.¹⁹

Blaise Cendrars was probably right when he said that sailors of the past had a specific olfactory expertise, a knowledge that helped them to navigate. But the retelling of these stories in the nineteenth century highlights how olfactory knowledge was reconsidered in that period. The anecdotes of sailors are used to support scientific theories on smell and play an illustrative role in encyclopedias. These anecdotes also inspire literary accounts of very personal and singular moving experiences. The capacities attributed to the sense of smell for navigation in social space seem no longer to have a place in the discovery of the world. While geographical maps have been increasingly standardized since the very beginning of the nineteenth century, the olfactory knowledge transmitted by the wind has disappeared from the navigation manuals and seems to have been devalued. What remains of these stories-turned-anecdotes is their poetic potential, which would be highly exploited during the fin de siècle period, and as a motif featured in some perfume advertisements.