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The Seafarer in the Age of Sail

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People, Place and Power on the Nineteenth-Century Waterfront

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Abstract

The entanglement between the seafarer and the shipping industry was at the heart of sailortown. This chapter analyses the representation and self-image of the seafarer, and the danger and fragility of maritime work. This was a time of extreme economic and industrial disruption, as the seafaring workforce made the transition from sail to steam. The national and ethnic diversity of maritime labour increased, while sailing-ship mariners became ever-more marginalised. Although often envied for their freedom, seamen faced harsh labour laws and could be imprisoned for breaking their contracts. The expendable, footloose image of the seafarer set much of the tone for exploitative, controlling relationships with employers, and with individuals and institutions on shore.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Eric W. Sager, Seafaring Labour: The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada (Kingston, 1989); Daniel Vickers, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven, 2005).

  2. 2.

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  3. 3.

    Liverpool Mercury, 5 Dec. 1859.

  4. 4.

    North-Eastern Daily Gazette, 28 July 1883.

  5. 5.

    Southwestern Advocate, 22 Apr. 1875.

  6. 6.

    Boston Daily Advertiser, 27 Oct. 1899.

  7. 7.

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  8. 8.

    TNA, MT 9/362, Application by the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics for Renewal of Licence; Letter from A. Godley, 4 Mar. 1890.

  9. 9.

    Western Mail, 13 June 1894.

  10. 10.

    Letter in Liverpool Mercury, 14 Oct. 1869.

  11. 11.

    Liverpool Mercury, 17 Oct. 1876.

  12. 12.

    Henry Moffat, From Ship’s Boy to Skipper, With Variations (Paisley, 1910), 63.

  13. 13.

    BPP, Report for the Year 1900 on the Trade of the Consular District of Marseilles, 1901 (Cd. 429), no. 2668, p. 5.

  14. 14.

    Frank T. Bullen, With Christ in Sailor Town: What the Seamen’s Mission is Doing (London, 1901), ix.

  15. 15.

    Glasgow Herald, 30 Jan. 1885.

  16. 16.

    Liverpool Mercury, 24 Mar. 1882.

  17. 17.

    Craig J. Forsyth, “The Creation and Maintenance of a Stigmatized Occupation: An Historical Analysis of the American Merchant Marine,” Maritime Policy & Management 14 (1987): 99–108.

  18. 18.

    Liverpool Mercury, 17 Oct. 1876.

  19. 19.

    TNA, MT 9/26, Social Condition of Seamen, 1866.

  20. 20.

    Morning Chronicle, 19 Nov. 1856.

  21. 21.

    Liverpool Mercury, 29 Oct. 1864; Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 6 Apr. 1864.

  22. 22.

    BPP, Select Committee on Theatres and Places of Entertainment, 1892 (240), q. 5407.

  23. 23.

    Gerald S. Graham, “The Ascendancy of the Sailing Ship, 1855–1885,” Economic History Review 9 (1956): 74–88; the transition was the subject of a special issue of Scandinavian Economic History Review 28 (1980).

  24. 24.

    LSE Archives, Booth Collection, Testimony of London Sailors’ Home Official, B138, 35–37.

  25. 25.

    Leeds Mercury, 31 Mar. 1888.

  26. 26.

    Roland Barker, The Log of a Limejuicer (London, 1934), 131.

  27. 27.

    Morning Chronicle, 20 Apr. 1857.

  28. 28.

    TNA, MT 9/44, Crimping: Memos on Question of Crimping at Marseilles and in the United Kingdom, 1869.

  29. 29.

    Graphic, 20 Sept. 1879.

  30. 30.

    Sarah Palmer, “Seamen Ashore in Late Nineteenth Century London: Protection from the Crimps,” in Seamen in Society (Bucharest, 1980), part 3, 55–67.

  31. 31.

    Robert D. Foulke, “Life in the Dying World of Sail, 1870–1910,” Journal of British Studies 3 (1963): 105–36; Eric W. Sager, “Labour Productivity in the Shipping Fleet of Halifax and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, 1863–1900,” in Working Men Who Got Wet, ed. Rosemary Ommer and Gerald Panting (St John’s, Nfld, 1980), 157–84.

  32. 32.

    BPP, Select Committee on Merchant Seamen Bill, 1878 (205), qq. 1616, 1707.

  33. 33.

    James Fell, British Merchant Seamen in San Francisco, 1892–1898 (London, 1899), 55.

  34. 34.

    Glasgow Herald, 22 Feb. 1892.

  35. 35.

    Arthur Marsh and Victoria Ryan, The Seamen: A History of the National Union of Seamen, 1887–1987 (Oxford, 1989), chapter 2.

  36. 36.

    Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 22 Mar. 1886.

  37. 37.

    Sari Mäenpää, “New Maritime Labour? Catering Personnel on British Passenger Liners, 1860–1938,” Ph.D. diss., University of Liverpool, 2002.

  38. 38.

    Alston Kennerley, “Stoking the Boilers: Firemen and Trimmers in British Merchant Ships, 1850–1950,” International Journal of Maritime History 20 (2008): 191–220; Liverpool Citizen, 17 Sept. 1890; “Report on Sanitation at Sea,” The Lancet, 20 Sept. 1890, 635–36.

  39. 39.

    Heide Gerstenberger, “The Disciplining of German Seamen,” International Journal of Maritime History 13 (2001): 37–50.

  40. 40.

    Bullen, With Christ in Sailor Town, 88–89.

  41. 41.

    Morning Post, 6 Jan. 1899; more generally, see Bill Luckin, “Revisiting the Idea of Degeneration in Urban Britain, 1830–1900,” Urban History 33 (2006): 234–52.

  42. 42.

    Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, 1971).

  43. 43.

    Morning Oregonian, 4 Oct. 1895; 5 Oct. 1895; 15 Dec. 1896.

  44. 44.

    Michael B. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth Century History (Cambridge, 2014).

  45. 45.

    Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, “The Mobility Transition Revisited, 1500–1900: What the Case of Europe Can Offer to Global History,” Journal of Global History 4 (2009): 347–77; Christof Dejung and Niels P. Petersson, eds., The Foundations of Worldwide Economic Integration: Power, Institutions, and Global Markets, 1850–1930 (Cambridge, 2013).

  46. 46.

    Peter Alexander and Rick Halpern, eds., Racializing Class, Classifying Race: Labour and Difference in Britain, the USA and Africa (Oxford, 2000).

  47. 47.

    G. Balachandran, “Conflicts in the International Maritime Labour Market: British and Indian Seamen, Employers, and the State, 1890–1939,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 39 (2002): 71–100; Daniel Vickers, “Beyond Jack Tar,” William and Mary Quarterly 50 (1993): 418–24.

  48. 48.

    L. R. Fischer, “International Maritime Labour, 1863–1900: World Wages and Trends,” The Great Circle 10 (1988): 1–21; L. R. Fischer, ed., The Market for Seamen in the Age of Sail (St John’s, Nfld, 1994); Paul C. van Royen, Jaap R. Bruijn, and Jan Lucassen, eds., Those Emblems of Hell? European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570–1870 (St John’s, Nfld, 1997); Charles Kindleberger, Mariners and Markets (London, 1992), 83–84, 90; Frank Broeze, “Militancy and Pragmatism: An International Perspective on Maritime Labour, 1870–1914,” International Review of Social History 36 (1991): 165–200.

  49. 49.

    For example, Gordon Boyce, Information, Mediation and Institutional Development: The Rise of Large-Scale Enterprise in British Shipping, 1870–1919 (Manchester, 1995); Robin Craig, British Tramp Shipping, 1750–1914 (St John’s, Nfld, 2003); Gelina Harlaftis, A History of Greek-Owned Shipping: The Making of an International Tramp Fleet, 1830 to the Present Day (London, 1995); L. R. Fischer and Evan Lange, eds., International Merchant Shipping in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (St John’s, Nfld, 2008).

  50. 50.

    Peter N. Davies, “British Shipping and World Trade: Rise and Decline, 1820–1939,” in Business History of Shipping: Strategy and Structure, ed. T. Yui (Tokyo, 1985), 39–85.

  51. 51.

    S. G. Sturmey, British Shipping and World Competition (St John’s, Nfld, 2010), 13–19.

  52. 52.

    David M. Williams, “Crew Size in Trans-Atlantic Trades in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Working Men Who Got Wet, ed. Rosemary Ommer and Gerald Panting (St John’s, Nfld, 1980), 107–53; Richard Gorski, “‘Purely a Question of Policy’: Undermanning and the Late Victorian Merchant Marine,” International Journal of Maritime History 19 (2007): 1–34.

  53. 53.

    V. C. Burton, “Counting Seafarers: The Published Records of the Registry of Merchant Seamen, 1849–1913,” Mariner’s Mirror 71 (1985): 305–20.

  54. 54.

    David Brandon Dennis, “Seduction on the Waterfront: German Merchant Sailors, Masculinity and the ‘Brücke Zu Heimat’ in New York and Buenos Aires, 1884–1914,” German History 29 (2011): 175–201.

  55. 55.

    Jaap R. Bruijn, “Seafarers in Early Modern and Modern Times: Change and Continuity,” International Journal of Maritime History 17 (2005): 1–16.

  56. 56.

    Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century (Baltimore, 1998), 55–62; David Kirby and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen, The Baltic and the North Seas (London, 2000), 194.

  57. 57.

    Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative at Sea (London, 1981), 220–24, 470.

  58. 58.

    Morning Chronicle, 20 Apr. 1857.

  59. 59.

    Glasgow Herald, 21 Apr. 1898.

  60. 60.

    W. Jeffrey Bolster, “‘To Feel Like a Man’: Black Seamen in the Northern States, 1800–1860,” Journal of American History 76 (1990): 1173–99.

  61. 61.

    Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen, “Expressions of Longing, Sources of Anxiety? The Significance of Contacts with Home for Finnish Sailors in London and Hull in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in People of the Northern Seas, ed. L. R. Fischer and Walter Minchinton (St John’s, Nfld, 1992), 63–79.

  62. 62.

    Dennis, “Seduction on the Waterfront.”

  63. 63.

    TNA, MT 9/555, Employment of Foreign Seamen, Letter from Shipmasters’ Society, 11 Apr. 1896.

  64. 64.

    Liverpool Mercury, 5 June 1886.

  65. 65.

    Ravi Ahuja, “Mobility and Containment: The Voyages of South Asian Seamen, c.1900–1960,” International Review of Social History 51, supplement (2006): 111–41.

  66. 66.

    David A. Chappell, “Kru and Kanaka: Participation by African and Pacific Island Sailors in Euroamerican Maritime Frontiers,” International Journal of Maritime History 6 (1994): 83–114; Marion Diamond, “Queequeg’s Crewmates: Pacific Islanders in the European Shipping Industry,” International Journal of Maritime History 1 (1989): 123–40; Michael H. Fisher, “Working Across the Seas: Indian Maritime Labourers in India, Britain, and in Between, 1600–1857,” International Review of Social History 51, supplement (2006): 21–45; Alan Cobley, “Black West Indian Seamen in the British Merchant Marine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” History Workshop Journal 58 (2004): 259–74; Ray Costello, Black Salt: Seafarers of African Descent on British Ships (Liverpool, 2012).

  67. 67.

    Janet J. Ewald, “Bondsmen, Freedmen, and Maritime Industrial Transportation, c.1840–1900,” Slavery and Abolition 31 (2010): 451–66.

  68. 68.

    BPP, Tables Showing the Progress of Merchant Shipping, 1912–13 (Cd. 6180), table 28.

  69. 69.

    Balachandran, “Conflicts in the International Maritime Labour Market”; John T. Grider, “‘I Espied a Chinaman’: Chinese Sailors and the Fracturing of the Nineteenth Century Pacific Maritime Labour Force,” Slavery and Abolition 31 (2010): 467–81.

  70. 70.

    Sari Mäenpää, “Galley News: Catering Personnel on British Passenger Liners, 1860–1938,” International Journal of Maritime History 12 (2000): 243–60; Elliott J. Gorn, “Seafaring Engendered: A Comment on Gender and Seafaring,” International Journal of Maritime History 4 (1992): 219–25.

  71. 71.

    G. Balachandran, “Recruitment and Control of Indian Seamen: Calcutta, 1880–1935,” International Journal of Maritime History 9 (1997): 1–18.

  72. 72.

    Ahuja, “Mobility and Containment.”

  73. 73.

    Burton, “Counting Seafarers.”

  74. 74.

    Grider, “‘I Espied a Chinaman.’”

  75. 75.

    Standard, 3 Aug. 1899.

  76. 76.

    Liverpool Mercury, 5 June 1886; Charles Protheroe, Life in the Mercantile Marine (London, 1903), 179; Frank Coutts Hendry, Down to the Sea (Edinburgh, 1937), 99.

  77. 77.

    James Johnston Abraham, The Surgeon’s Log: Being Impressions of the Far East (London, 1911), 94.

  78. 78.

    Robert Brown, Jack Abbott’s Log: A Yarn of the Merchant Service (London, 1890).

  79. 79.

    Western Mail, 22 Apr. 1884.

  80. 80.

    Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 22 Mar. 1886.

  81. 81.

    Morning Post, 6 Jan. 1899.

  82. 82.

    Liverpool Mercury, 5 June 1886.

  83. 83.

    Stefan Kühl, For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene (Basingstoke, 2013), 12–14.

  84. 84.

    Standard, 3 Aug. 1899.

  85. 85.

    Morning Post, 6 Jan. 1899.

  86. 86.

    G. Balachandran, “Cultures of Protest in Transnational Contexts: Indian Seamen Abroad, 1886–1945,” Transforming Cultures eJournal 3 (2008): 45–75.

  87. 87.

    Ahuja, “Mobility and Containment.”

  88. 88.

    Keith Matthews, “Recruitment and Stability of Employment in the British Merchant Marine: The Case of C. T. Bowring & Company,” in Working Men Who Got Wet, ed. Rosemary Ommer and Gerald Panting (St John’s, Nfld, 1980), 79–103.

  89. 89.

    Morning Chronicle, 7 Mar. 1850; 11 Mar. 1850.

  90. 90.

    Western Mail, 24 Feb. 1894.

  91. 91.

    Michael Quinlan, “Precarious and Hazardous Work: The Health and Safety of Merchant Seamen 1815–1935,” Social History 38 (2013): 281–307.

  92. 92.

    Richard Gorski, “Employers’ Liability and the Victorian Seaman,” Mariner’s Mirror 95 (2009): 62–75.

  93. 93.

    Northern Echo, 31 Oct. 1890.

  94. 94.

    BPP, Merchant Service: Return Showing the Number, Ages, Ratings, and Causes of Death of Seamen Reported as Having Died in British Merchant Service During the Year 1866, 1867 (346).

  95. 95.

    Glamorgan Archives, DCONC/4/1/1, Inquest Book, 1892–95.

  96. 96.

    Glasgow Herald, 30 June 1874; Examiner, reprinted in Dundee Courier & Argus, 11 Oct. 1875.

  97. 97.

    Gorski, “Employers’ Liability.”

  98. 98.

    TNA, MT 9/31, Distressed Seamen, 1867.

  99. 99.

    David M. Williams, “Advance Notes and the Recruitment of Maritime Labour in Britain in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Market for Seamen in the Age of Sail, ed. L. R. Fischer (St John’s, Nfld, 1994), 81–100.

  100. 100.

    BPP, Select Committee on Merchant Seamen Bill, 1878 (205) q. 678.

  101. 101.

    Calculated from TNA, MT 9/743, Engagement of Seamen at the Mercantile Marine Office, Poplar During 1901.

  102. 102.

    TNA, MT 9/26, Social Condition of Seamen, 1866; Fraser’s Magazine, reprinted in Liverpool Mercury, 8 Sept. 1869.

  103. 103.

    Alex Hurst, quoted in Spencer Apollonio, ed., The Last of the Cape Horners: Firsthand Accounts from the Final Days of the Commercial Tall Ships (Washington, DC, 2000), 119.

  104. 104.

    Yrjö Kaukiainen, “Seamen Ashore: Port Visits of Late Nineteenth Century Finnish Sailors,” in Sail and Steam: Selected Maritime Writings of Yrjö Kaukiainen, ed. Lars U. Scholl and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen (St John’s Nfld, 2004), 141–50.

  105. 105.

    L. R. Fischer, “A Dereliction of Duty: The Problem of Desertion on Nineteenth Century Sailing Vessels,” in Working Men Who Got Wet, ed. Rosemary Ommer and Gerald Panting (St John’s, Nfld, 1980), 53–68; David Mackay, “Desertion of Merchant Seamen in South Australia, 1836–1852: A Case Study,” International Journal of Maritime History 7 (1995): 53–73; Jari Olaja and Jaakko Pehkonen, “Not Only for Money: An Analysis of Seamen’s Desertion in Nineteenth Century Finland,” International Journal of Maritime History 18 (2006): 25–53; Jari Olaja, Jaakko Pehkonen, and Jari Eloranta, “Desertions in Nineteenth-Century Shipping: Modelling Quit Behaviour,” European Review of Economic History 17 (2013): 122–40.

  106. 106.

    Morning Chronicle, 11 Mar. 1857.

  107. 107.

    “Sailors, Crimps and Consuls,” Shipping World, 28 Sept. 1898, 309.

  108. 108.

    Dennis, “Seduction on the Waterfront.”

  109. 109.

    Felix Riesenberg, Golden Gate: The Story of San Francisco Harbour (London, 1942), 53; Frank Soulé, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet, The Annals of San Francisco (Berkeley, 1999); Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld (London, 1934), 54.

  110. 110.

    Rex Clements, A Gypsy of the Horn (London, 1924), 143; TNA, FO 61/271, Crimping and Desertion of British Seamen in Callao and Valparaiso, Report of Valparaiso Vice-Consul, 12 Nov. 1870; TNA, MT 9/81, Crimping at Callao, 1872.

  111. 111.

    Kirby and Hinkkanen, The Baltic and the North Seas, 206–07; Jonathan Hyslop, “Steamship Empire: Asian, African and British Sailors in the Merchant Marine, c.1880–1945,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 44 (2009): 49–67; Balachandran, “Recruitment and Control of Indian Seamen”; Ewald, “Bondsmen, Freedmen, and Maritime Industrial Transportation.”

  112. 112.

    Morning Chronicle, 11 Mar. 1850.

  113. 113.

    North-Eastern Daily Gazette, 7 Aug. 1900.

  114. 114.

    Standard, 16 July 1898.

  115. 115.

    North American and United States Gazette, 25 Sept. 1874.

  116. 116.

    Hampshire Advertiser, 19 Jan. 1867.

  117. 117.

    TNA, MT 9/26, Destitute Seamen in Calcutta, 1866, 8, 16.

  118. 118.

    Morning Oregonian, 5 Nov. 1893.

  119. 119.

    Leeds Mercury, 21 Oct. 1890.

  120. 120.

    Glasgow Herald, 10 Feb. 1894.

  121. 121.

    Western Mail, 14 May 1897.

  122. 122.

    Morning Oregonian, 20 Mar. 1888.

  123. 123.

    Bangor Daily Whig, 12 Dec. 1892.

  124. 124.

    TNA, MT 9/427, Alleged Abuses by Masters and Boarding Masters, letter from W. Barnett, 15 Jan. 1892.

  125. 125.

    TNA, FO 5/2511, Crimping in US Ports, vol. 4, San Francisco Consul, 2 June 1902.

  126. 126.

    TNA, BT 15/57, Payment of “Blood Money,” San Francisco, 1908.

  127. 127.

    BPP, Select Committee on Merchant Seamen Bill, 1878 (205), qq. 3276, 3283

  128. 128.

    North-Eastern Daily Gazette, 28 July 1883, reprinted from Daily Telegraph, 23 July 1883.

  129. 129.

    TNA, MT9/250, Seamen, Lodging Houses, letter from William Graffunder, 23 July 1883.

  130. 130.

    TNA, FO 5/2511, Crimping in US Ports, vol. 4, US Treasury Department, 14 Apr. 1902.

  131. 131.

    TNA, MT 9/710, Crimping at San Francisco, Report from San Francisco Consul, 2 June 1902.

  132. 132.

    TNA, MT 9/725, Buenos Aires Consul: Deserters from Merchant Ships, letter from Andrew Carnegie Ross, 7 Mar. 1902.

  133. 133.

    Broeze, “Militancy and Pragmatism.”

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    Graeme J. Milne

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Milne, G.J. (2016). The Seafarer in the Age of Sail. In: People, Place and Power on the Nineteenth-Century Waterfront. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33159-1_2

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