War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750-1850

Wa r, Nationalism , and the Br itish Sailor, 17 50–1850 This page intentionally left blank Wa r, Nationalism , and ...

Author: Isaac Land

185 downloads 988 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Wa r, Nationalism , and the Br itish Sailor, 17 50–1850

This page intentionally left blank

Wa r, Nationalism , and the Br itish Sailor, 17 50–1850

Isaac Land

WAR, NATIONALISM, AND THE BRITISH Copyright © Isaac Land, 2009.

SAILOR,

1750–1850

All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-61591-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data. Land, Isaac. War, nationalism, and the British sailor, 1750–1850 / by Isaac Land. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-230-61591-0 1. Sailors–Great Britain–History–18th century. 2. Sailors–Great Britain–History–19th century. 3. National characteristics, British– History–18th century. 4. National characteristics, British– History–19th century. 5. Great Britain. Royal Navy–Sea life. 6. Great Britain–History, Naval–18th century. 7. Great Britain– History, Naval–19th century. 8. Sailors in literature. I. Title. DA87.L36 2009 359.10941’09033–dc22

2009006420

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan Publishing Solutions First edition: September 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Stephanie


Contents

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

List of Abbreviations

xv

Introduction

1

1

Will the Real Jack Tar Please Stand Up?

13

2

Impressed: Becoming Jack Tar

29

3

Well Rigged: Cross-Dressing, Patriotism, and Parody

57

Married to Britannia: Musicals, Mutinies, and Manhood

77

Behold Our Empire: Loyalists, Reformers, and Radicals

105

Ships Without Sailors? Nostalgia for Jack Tar in the Industrial Age

131

4 5 6

Conclusion

159

Notes

171

Bibliography

213

Index

239


List of Figure s

2.1

3.1

4.1

4.2

4.3 4.4

4.5

6.1 6.2 6.3

C.1

“Jack in a White Squall.” Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 811.8.16.1 “The Sailor and the Ghost.” Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 805.3.25.4 “Britain’s Rights Maintain’d.” Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 755.8.11.1 “Accommodation: or Lodgings to Let at Portsmouth.” Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 808.6.30.1.1 “An English Jack-Tar giving Monsieur a Drubbing.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress. “Lord Howe They Run.” Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 794.6.25.1 “Admiral Nelson Recreating with his Brave Tars.” Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 798.10.20.1 “Britannia and the Admiralty,” Punch, 1849. Courtesy of Indiana State University. “Mr. Punch’s Industrial Exhibition,” Punch, 1850. Courtesy of Indiana State University. “St. Andrews, Fishergate, Women and Children Baiting the Lines.” Courtesy of the University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1971/2.141 Purchase made possible by Friends of the Museum of Art “Joseph Johnson.” Courtesy of Indiana State University.

49

71

79

82 92

93

100 133 141

143 165


Acknowledgments

This book is a much-revised version of my Ph.D. dissertation, “Domesticating the Maritime” (University of Michigan—Ann Arbor, 1999). Some portions of the dissertation were published as articles or book chapters and do not appear again here. “Bread and Arsenic,” “Sinful Propensities,” and “Humours of Sailortown” should, perhaps, have found a home between these covers instead. Their omission inevitably leads to a change of emphasis, but my hope is that readers who find this book of interest will eventually seek out those other publications. I moved in new directions after the dissertation was finished; the third and sixth chapters in this book, in particular, are the fruits of that process. On the financial side, this project has benefited from several grants. In 1994, pre-dissertation grants from the University of Michigan’s International Institute and Columbia University’s Council for European Studies, in addition to funds from Rackham School of Graduate Studies, enabled me to scout out the British archives. My year in Britain (1995–1996) was made possible by a Fulbright grant. While in London, I stayed on Mecklenburgh Square in housing subsidized by the William Goodenough Trust. The Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities supported me during my first year of writing. Later support was provided by the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas A&M University—Commerce and, in both the Spring and Fall of 2008, generous course reductions courtesy of the Department of History and the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana State University, which has been my academic home during the completion of this manuscript. I wish to acknowledge the wisdom and patience of three exceptional Department Chairs—Marc Kruman, Judy Ford, and Chris Olsen—and one exceptional Dean, Tom Sauer. Thanks to Kali Israel and to the rest of the dissertation committee (Sue Juster, Julie Ellison, and John Carson) for their unflagging support and confidence in this project. This, of course, is only the beginning of a considerable list of people who have offered important assistance and moral support over a very long period. In London,

xii

Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts

Mary Conley was an inspiring comrade in arms. Anna Davin showed me the potential of the ballad literature. Anna Clark encouraged me, on more than one occasion, to write about women sailors. I met Antoinette Burton at a conference in Baltimore in 2002, and I am most grateful for her kindnesses then, and subsequently. The year 2004 was an especially difficult period for me, and I will never forget the people who offered support for me, and this project, when I most needed it: Linda Colley, Ian Duffield, Pamela Scully, Michael Fisher, Peter Stearns, Dana Rabin, and (again!) Kali Israel. To this I must add Glenn Clark and the rest of the Winnipeg crew, whose “City Limits” conference in that same year was a turning point in my career and in the development of what became this book. In January 2007, crossing paths with Tim Hitchcock in Oxford proved serendipitous in a number of ways. Mac Dixon-Fyle and his colleagues at DePauw offered warm support and stimulating feedback when I lectured there on a happy occasion in September 2007. At Palgrave Macmillan, my editor, Chris Chappell, and his assistant Samantha Hasey were supportive and helpful. Daniel Vickers offered advocacy at a crucial stage, as well as insightful advice on how to improve this manuscript. Two additional, anonymous reviewers also supplied valuable input. Constraints of space do not permit me to reproduce the list of names that appeared in my dissertation or acknowledge everyone who lent a helping hand, but I certainly must thank Brenda Assael, Annaliese Bateman, Paul Clemens, Chris Fischer, Anne Foster, Craig Koslofsky, Judi Jennings, Patricia Lin, Peter Messer, Fiona Paisley, Elana Passman, Susan Pedersen, Susan Pennybacker, Lisa Phillips, Marcus Rediker, Andy Schocket, Julius Scott, Barbara Skinner, and Bob Tittler. Errors large and small remain my own. I would like to thank the staff of the following libraries, archives, and museums: in Ann Arbor, the Hatcher Library and the Clements Library; in London, the British Library (including the Oriental and India Office Collection), the British Museum Prints and Drawings Department, the Public Record Office (Kew), now renamed the National Archives, the National Maritime Museum, the Institute for Historical Research, and the University of London Library (Senate House); in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the Tyne & Wear Archives Service and the Newcastle Central Library; in Manchester, the John Rylands Library; in Dundee, the Dundee City Archives; in Edinburgh, the Scottish Record Office; in Glasgow, the Mitchell Library (History and Glasgow Room) and the Glasgow City Archives (formerly Strathclyde Regional Archives); in Greenock, the MacLean Museum and the Watt Library; in Washington, DC, the Library of Congress; the

Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts

xiii

Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; at Indiana University, the Wells, Fine Arts, and the ever-welcoming Lilly Library. At Indiana State University, David Vancil at Special Collections went above and beyond the call of duty, as did our interlibrary loan department. In the final days, Mary Stuart, who enjoys the happy title of Head of the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, helped me get to one last book before the deadline. It is not always an easy matter to obtain permissions to use pictures, as I have learned to my dismay. It seems to be more difficult, not less, in this digital age. I am grateful for the exceptional institutions, such as the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University, that are fully cooperative with historians and their publishers. Sue Walker at the Walpole deserves special thanks, as does Gabrielle Ganther at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their support through this long process. My sisters, Barbara and Celeste, have shown an interest in everything I have done for as long as I can remember. Celeste brought me to History long before anyone else did. In Terre Haute, Stephanie, McKenzie, and James tolerated long absences and absentmindedness with love and good cheer. They will be as relieved as I am to finally see this project brought safe into the harbor and tied up at the dock.


L ist of Abbreviat ions

ADM BL BMC

HO NMM OIOC ODNB POB SRO T TWAS

National Archives (PRO), ADM documents (Admiralty) British Library British Museum Catalogue: M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, vols. 5–11 (London, 1935–1954. Reprint.London: British Museum Publications, 1978). National Archives (PRO), HO documents (Home Office) National Maritime Museum British Library, Oriental and India Office Collection Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online resource) Proceedings of the Old Bailey (online resource) Scottish Record Office National Archives (PRO), T documents (Treasury) Tyne and Wear Archives Service


Introduction

J

. E. Cookson, in the opening pages of his book The British Armed Nation, 1793–1815, concedes that he spends little time on sailors, but excuses this neglect on the grounds that “the navy does not seem to have impinged on politics, government, and society to nearly the same extent as the land forces, perhaps mainly because of the physical remoteness of seamen in comparison with soldiers and auxiliaries.”1 This is an extraordinary claim. At the height of the struggle with Napoleon, the Royal Navy reached its peak at around 140,000 men.2 To appreciate the scale of that mobilization, in this same time period a town of just 10,000 people was considered a substantial urban conglomeration. Although London—the great exception—was passing the one million mark, just a few other cities in the British Isles had more than 50,000 inhabitants. Nelson’s sailors were drawn from a constellation of occupations—fishing, whaling, and merchant shipping—each of which was a major national industry in its own right. It is hard to see how such a vast mobilization of maritime workers would not “impinge” on society, or would appear in any way “remote” from the daily life of a nation in which the largest cities were, almost without exception, ports. These conscripts and volunteers formed an integral part of a war effort that necessarily centered upon defending islands and maintaining contact between those islands and a far-flung seaborne empire. The presumption that seafarers were somehow peripheral has deterred work on sailors and nationalism. Another not very plausible, but still influential, assumption is that a degree of nationalist fervor in the context of military service is self-explanatory. Certainly war loomed large in the experience of sailors for most of the long eighteenth century. H. V. Bowen has remarked that “from 1739

2

Wa r , N at i o n a l i s m , a n d t h e B r i t i s h S a i l o r

the frequency of war was such that periods of peace could almost be regarded as exceptions to the wartime norm.”3 The thrill of serving on the winning side obviously boosted morale, although participants—facing the vicissitudes of battle—could not know in advance that Britannia would rule the waves. It is striking, however, that historians of the French army in revolutionary and Napoleonic France—another military force with a long string of victories to its credit—have found a high degree of draft-dodging and desertion.4 With that in mind, it is surprising that neither John Brewer, in his work on Britain’s fiscal-military state, nor Linda Colley, in her searching analysis of British patriotism, inquired closely into impressment (the Royal Navy’s method of conscription) or into the broader problem of the sailor’s loyalty.5 In fact, many sailors fought the press gang, ran away, or went into hiding, aided by sympathetic members of their communities. Consider the events of August 15, 1811, on the Isle of Man. Thirty-three Manxmen had just been seized by a press gang in the town of Douglas. Following the usual procedure, the gang confined the conscripts in a small holding vessel known as a tender. Lieutenant Commander Thomas Hawkes reported that his tender came under attack from the population of the town. Five hundred people advanced on the pier, armed with sharp sticks and shouting “burn her, sink her, burn her.” The tender was immobile in low water, so Hawkes ordered his men to fire into the crowd.6 The Admiralty and the Home Office could hardly believe that the townspeople had the audacity to assault a King’s ship. The people of Douglas, however, believed they were righting an injustice, and sought to retrieve their own kin and family members, which is why the community easily united to confront the officers of the Crown. On the Isle of Man, “tradesmen of all kinds” left their work in the summer for the herring fishery and subsisted on preserved fish through the winter months.7 The islanders had explained, in repeated angry petitions over a period of 20 years, that they were only occasional fishermen who did not meet the legal definition of someone who “used the sea.” Indeed, they had been considered exempt from the attentions of the press gang in the past. When the Navy ignored this local consensus, the community united against it.8 The crowd of 1811 believed it had sent enough warnings and was ready for action. At Douglas, the men of the herring fleet appeared not as peripheral seamen but as neighbors in trouble, whose injuries were also an insult to the community at large.9 The correspondence between the Home Office and the Admiralty contains many additional examples of communities that offered sympathy and outright aid to sailors on the run.10 The Royal Navy’s

Introduction

3

dilemma, then, had much in common with the French army described in Alan Forrest’s Conscripts and Deserters. Many sailors, once pressed, later jumped ship, setting off new rounds of impressment to fill their places. We know that most ships in the Navy were manned below their complement.11 Britain’s Old Regime was fighting for its survival; revolutions were toppling monarchies on every side. Increase the already evident reluctance to man the nation’s “wooden walls,” and George III could well have ended his life in exile. Historians have sometimes taken note of British attitudes toward “the Navy” in general terms. This approach often has the effect of obscuring the kinds of conflicts and tensions that I have been describing. The title of Margarette Lincoln’s book Representing the Royal Navy begs the question: Are we talking about the Navy of the admirals or of the press-ganged conscripts? Lincoln, in fact, is principally concerned with officers of the highest rank (the trial of Admiral Byng for cowardice is a recurring topic, for example); although she includes a chapter on naval chaplains and one on surgeons. When she discusses representations of the common seaman, it is generally from the officer’s perspective. Here, Lincoln is discussing the problem of giving orders in an authoritative voice: The officer had to get the attention of the men by some such word as “prepare” and then wait for them to reply “ready” before giving the order. This may help to explain why seamen often preferred aristocratic officers since they were more assured in giving commands and instilled confidence.12

Perhaps such sailors did exist. We are not, however, going to learn much about sailors who thought differently if we proceed from the assumption that Britain was a hierarchical, deference-driven society where the best officer was one who knew his place instinctively, and knew how to “assure” others that they could expect to stay in theirs. We might expect that some of the most thoughtful assessments of the sailor’s potential disloyalty would come from the historians of British plebeian and working-class culture. Yet magisterial works such as E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class and Jonathan Rose’s Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes make little effort to tell the story of the “working men who got wet.”13 The notable exception has been the work of Marcus Rediker, often in collaboration with Peter Linebaugh.14 The difficulty here is that their body of work presents sailors as estranged from the land, belonging more to an Atlantic world than to any particular terrestrial locality.

4


I have discussed Rediker’s ideas at length in Chapter One, but his approach does not lend itself to a deep analysis of how seafaring people might have related to the nation-state, either as its proponents or even as its antagonists. We are left instead with the historians of the Royal Navy, who have been inclined to approach mass mobilization from the officer’s perspective, as an administrative detail or a “manpower problem.”15 N. A. M. Rodger invokes victory itself as evidence that sailors were both loyal and enthusiastic. Some historians have pushed that logic even further, presenting the mere fact of the sailor’s service to the nation-state as an unanswerable demonstration of nationalist fervor.16 Reasoning backward from the outcome in this way is replete with hazards. Have there not been superb fighting forces that actually throve on the terror that they inspired in their own rank and file? To eighteenthcentury writers, the Roman legions were a favorite example of this; tragically, the modern world has supplied us with many others.17 I agree with Rodger that there is an interesting story to be told about how the Royal Navy enlisted the cooperation and complicity of its sailors.18 However, it is often hard to disentangle the choice to cooperate from the thread suspending the sword of coercion over one’s head. Roughly half of the sailors who served during wartime volunteered, and took an enlistment bonus.19 How many of these volunteers were anxious to serve the Crown, and how many had simply resigned themselves to service and decided to accept payment as a way to sweeten the inevitable? A similar point could be made about the sailors who, themselves conscripted, later press-ganged other sailors into the King’s service. They could savor a moment of power over others rather than reflecting on their own weakness, or as one sailor put it, kicked themselves, they looked around for someone else to “kick in turn.”20 It is a truism that war and nation-building go well together, but those who made an active choice to serve in the Royal Navy did not necessarily step forward out of enthusiasm for the current King, his ministers, or their laws. As Stephen Conway has wittily observed, the defense of “country” was often a thinly veiled defense of “county.”21 Despite their sometimes nomadic lifestyle, sailors did have hometowns, and Napoleon’s threatened cross-channel invasion was only the latest in a series of French attempts to turn France’s comparatively large population into a battlefield advantage. At such moments, a captain could inform his crew, without exaggeration, that they were the last best hope against imminent foreign conquest. Such thrilling episodes, like the distracting glitter of parades and illuminations, could elicit outbursts of enthusiasm. Contingent patriotism of this kind, however, could dissipate as quickly

Introduction

5

as it arose.22 It is also not clear that Britons stationed overseas, guarding imperial possessions whose names and histories eluded them, could draw on homeland defense as a convincing rationale for their wartime service. Moreover, the British Isles were not exactly under continuous siege in this period. Unveil a month and year picked at random, and we are likely to find no armada gathering in the English Channel. To nonetheless command the loyalty of large numbers of sailors over long periods of time, the nation-state had to persuade them of its own continuing relevance beyond the time and place of undeniable crisis. Defenders of Britain’s Old Regime liked to contend that prosperity (“the roast beef of Old England”) and cherished freedoms were safe only as long as the 1688 settlement was preserved. This old standby unexpectedly gained fresh relevance in the years following 1789, when the French alternative began to look positively unsettling. Seizing this opportunity, George III and his ministers grew more sophisticated and systematic in their efforts to court public opinion.23 Deliberate attempts to foster conservative populism could, however, have unintended consequences. Claims that the war with France was necessary to avoid a foreign tyrant trampling on familiar laws and customs could not have been reassuring to many of the inhabitants of Douglas, for example. The violence and seeming arbitrariness of impressment—however justified by wartime expediency—forfeited one of the nation-state’s best arguments, that it was the best guarantor of domestic tranquility. If, as the proverb put it, “the Englishman’s home is his castle,” then the press gang trampled on sacred liberties every time they crossed a threshold. When the regime overreached itself, it sought to compensate sailors for their present troubles by promising them tranquility in the future. The press gang’s apologists were quick to bring up the benefits of naval service, notably Greenwich Hospital, where disabled or “superannuated” veterans could find shelter and support. In the 1790s, William Pitt commissioned the popular songwriter Charles Dibdin to write sea songs assuming the voice of a patriotic and grateful sailor. These songs were performed to packed houses in London theaters and also circulated widely as cheap illustrated broadsides.24 However, Dibdin’s promises of a berth in Greenwich Hospital for the nation’s wounded heroes must have rung false to sailors who had met one of the many naval veterans who had been unable to persuade the authorities that they were, indeed, eligible for entry there. The nation-state, then, faced a difficult challenge; if it relied on naked force to man its fleet, it risked open conflict with entire communities, as well as alienating many of its own frontline defenders. If, however, it drew in enthusiastic volunteers by making sweeping

6


claims and ambitious promises, it was setting itself up for a backlash from disillusioned sailors. In 1797, resenting their low wages, the sailors at Spithead (Portsmouth) refused to sail, even though both the Dutch and the French had assembled invasion fleets. Demonstrating superb discipline and coordinated action, the sailors mutinied all at once, sent the officers on shore with a minimum of bloodshed, and proceeded to negotiate for redress of their grievances.25 If—as at Spithead—the spirit of wartime solidarity could actually be mobilized against the government, then perhaps the prudent course was to replace the dangerous rhetoric of the collective good with appeals to individualism and self-interest. A prime example of this tactic was awarding “prize money,” granting sailors a share of the cash value of any enemy vessel that they helped to capture. Adam Smith called it “the lottery of the sea”; some sailors would make a calculated decision to serve their country, gambling that the chance for personal enrichment outweighed the discomforts of life on a King’s ship in wartime, not to mention the risks of dismemberment or death.26 Prize money, like Greenwich Hospital, was billed as another fine benefit of national service, but this practice was also a candid admission that some sort of immediate incentive to fight, and fight well, was necessary. Sailors, like other Britons, were not indifferent to what they could do for their country, but they were at least equally interested in what their patriotic service could do for them. Linda Colley’s famous analysis of British identity, of course, takes this insight as its point of departure. 27 In the spirit of Adam Smith’s calculating volunteers, Colley proposed that war was the great unifying force behind Britishness, which she argued had emerged only in the eighteenth century, following the formal union with Scotland. She portrayed a nation composed of rival factions (the Scots prominent among them), each of which sought to further its own interests by advancing its own claim to be the greatest contributor to the patriotic struggle against Britain’s rivals for global supremacy. Colley proposed that this model of Britishness showed why diverse groups (such as the Scots, or the nascent middle class) might prefer to collaborate with the government rather than dwelling on past grievances or fomenting rebellion. Colley acknowledged that Britishness remained beyond the reach of most Irish Catholics—the struggle against France was often expressed in terms of a Protestant holy war against the Continent’s Papists—but argued that her thesis did help to explain why an oligarchic and sometimes repressive regime could command a broad enough base of support elsewhere in the British Isles that it was able to survive in an age of revolutions. Colley suggested that a wide variety of activities, even

Introduction

7

humble ones, were accepted as useful contributions; women raised funds and made clothes for soldiers; merchants founded philanthropic institutions. However, the patriotic cause remained, in essence, a military project: Britain was a nation forged in war, and the sine qua non of “Britishness” was a more or less direct contribution to the war effort. By this logic, sailors should have been among the first and most enthusiastic Britons. Conscription removed them from whatever local or provincial milieu they knew before. They mixed with other people from around the British Isles and shared the hazards of battle and storm with them. Above all, the common seaman’s relationship to the nation’s war effort was exceptionally straightforward; it did not require any intuitive leaps to understand his relationship to British victories. While many of the would-be Britons in Colley’s book went to great lengths to argue that they would fight if called upon, sailors really had fought. Similarly, the clusters of ships in every prosperous harbor attested to the sailor’s contribution to Britain’s commercial success over her rivals. The period covered in the present volume, between 1750 and 1850, was the era in which British national identity was perhaps most closely identified with the Royal Navy. In one sense, this celebration of sailors and seafaring would seem entirely consistent with Colley’s thesis. Margarette Lincoln has recounted the numerous amusing ways in which this adulation was expressed, including ship launches attended by as many as 100,000 spectators and battles reenacted by model ships in an “Aquatic Theatre” holding 8,000 cubic feet of water. She also takes note of commemorative fans, painted lockets, tea sets, and even trident-andanchor-themed window treatments.28 In the 1850s, an incredulous Charles Mackay saw fit to include this maritime passion in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, meriting mention alongside the witch craze and the tulip mania. “It mixes with their daily thoughts,” Mackay wrote, “they celebrate it even in the market-place; their street-minstrels excite charity by it; and high and low, young and old, male and female, chant Io paeans in its praise.”29 Colley’s central and most original point, however, was that Britishness was not “an extraordinary popular delusion”; rather, British patriots exhibited sound reasoning and could expect a return on their investment. Forcefully rejecting the “condescension” directed at past patriots, she argued they had made a cool appraisal of the situation and calculated that “securing British victories could be the means of securing their own.”30 It remains to be seen, then, whether—after the trident-and-anchor-themed window treatments fell out of fashion and made their way to the dustbin—the memory of all those Io paeans translated into tangible benefits for the common seaman. Here, the evidence is less in Colley’s favor.

8


Consider the fate of the Scottish sailor John Nicol. Around 1821, 20 years after leaving the Royal Navy, Nicol was penniless and desperate; a relative gave him enough money to make the trip to London so he could claim his place at Greenwich Hospital. Upon arrival, Nicol discovered that his old captain had died six weeks earlier. I then went to Somerset House for the certificate of my service ... I was ordered to go to the Admiralty Office first, and then come back to Somerset House. When I applied at the Admiralty Office, a clerk told me I had been too long of applying ... It was of no use to remain in London, as my money wore down apace.31

Lacking a patron, Nicol got the runaround. For many sailors, the story would have ended there, but Nicol was resourceful. Back in Edinburgh, he wrote and published The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner in the hopes of earning enough money to fend off starvation. In this autobiography, Nicol related how he had served in two wars and remained loyal to the government despite the carping and criticism of his newspaper-reading friends, who admired Tom Paine. Nicol’s autobiography, and his dilemma, is all the more interesting precisely because he understood himself to be a Briton and a patriot. He needed food to fill his stomach, but he also yearned for a form of recognition for his service, recognition that he had been led to believe Britain owed him as a sailor. By reminding the nation of its debts, he hoped to rectify that problem. How was Nicol’s patriotic testament received? In January 1827, J. G. Lockhart, editor of the Tory periodical the Quarterly Review, lamented how “the circle of readers has widened strangely in these times,” resulting, among other things, in the recent outpouring of autobiographies written by persons of a lowly social station.32 “Hide your diminished heads, ye Pitts, Burkes, Cannings!” the Tory journalist exclaimed in sarcastic consternation. Modern primer-makers must needs leave confessions behind them, as if they were so many Rousseaus. Our weakest mob-orators think it is a hard case if they cannot spout to posterity. Cabin-boys and drummers are busy with their commentaries de bello Gallico.33

Number seven in the list of ten autobiographies nominally under discussion in Lockhart’s essay was “Memoirs of John Nicol, Mariner (Edinburgh, 1824).” Lockhart did not deign to discuss it; Nicol’s autobiography seems to have been thrown in to humiliate Major Cartwright and the dramatist Frederick Reynolds with his lowly

Introduction

9

company. With foreign threats in abeyance, the Quarterly Review could safely mock this veteran’s audacity in inflicting his autobiography on the public. John Nicol would have empathized with this poem, which was found scrawled or scraped into the glass window of a country inn: Our God and sailors we alike adore, Just on the brink of ruin, or before: After deliverance they’re alike requited, Our God neglected, and our sailors slighted.34

This anonymous poem is interesting as a record of dashed hopes, but also as a fierce effort to try, one more time, to force the nation-state to own up to its debts. There is ample evidence that Nicol was not alone. He was part of a larger ongoing dialogue between sailors and the society that alternately celebrated and spurned them. Such situations, and such sentiments, are strangely absent from Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation. Colley, in her analysis of how Britain avoided revolution, seems more interested in how self-described Britons were recruited—to help fend off the immediate French threat— than with how their claims to Britishness were actually received by groups already standing within that charmed circle, and she seems even less interested in how the would-be Briton’s love for the nation-state was, ultimately, requited.35 Nicol’s story teaches us that the meaning of Britishness should be considered diachronically, over a lifetime, not just measured on the day of enlistment or at the hour of victory. Was securing British victories the way to secure your own? Like Adam Smith’s lottery, the decision to play was really only rational if the odds were substantially in your favor. Nicol, and the anonymous sailor who wrote the poem quoted above, had gambled on Britishness and lost.36 In this book, I argue that the final assimilation of the common seaman into the pantheon of British heroes only occurred in the mid-nineteenth century. It parallels the rehabilitation of the Scottish Highlander, who was embraced by the royal family only after the Highlands no longer posed any political or military threat. By the 1840s, ships that sailed under canvas were a comforting reminder of the time before steam technology and the unsettling transformations that it had wrought. With Chartist agitation, industrial unrest, and urban crime dominating the headlines, it was easy to wax nostalgic and sentimental about the veterans of Nelson’s Navy. If sailors were among the last Britons rather than among the first, then we are left with a puzzle. We need to reexamine the cultural politics surrounding sailors and inquire

10


why their assimilation to Britishness was so slow, so uneven, and so difficult. The chapters that follow will examine that problem from many different angles. War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor is not a work of maritime history. Nor is it, in any conventional sense, a military history. My emphasis is not on sailors as the nation-state’s manpower problem, but rather the reverse: I consider the nation-state itself as the problem that sailors confronted. How did sailors respond to the Navy’s attempts to control their bodies? To what extent did sailors believe the tantalizing promises made in the name of the nation? What part did sailors play in the intense debate that unfolded concerning their mind, temperament, and loyalties? How did sailors feel when they discovered that their officers, their government, or the British public were not particularly impressed by their wartime service? How did sailors of different backgrounds learn, despite this resistance, to appropriate and manipulate Britishness to their advantage? Individuals who violated expectations about what a sailor should look like—such as women who cross-dressed and went to sea and sailors of overseas origin like Olaudah Equiano— encountered additional obstacles, and their ultimate relationship to British nationalism was, predictably, complex and ambivalent. As we have already seen, even loyalist white male autobiographers like John Nicol were greeted with disdain; those whose books criticized the Navy or promoted socialism met with even greater disapproval. Sailors on strike at the great coal port of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1815, facing a declaration from the Home Office that their actions were illegal, arranged a kind of floating parade down the Tyne, “with flags flying, and the inscription, ‘England expects every man to do his duty.’”37 The government met them with marines, and the strikers learned quickly that even sailors who emblazoned Nelson’s words from Trafalgar on their banners could be portrayed as disloyal or inauthentic if they had the temerity to ask for meaningful reforms. I concur with the skeptics, like Nicholas Rogers, who direct our attention to the ways that naval service could be a “profoundly alienating experience which only confirmed [sailors’] status as petty subjects of the realm.”38 Yet the continuing attraction of patriotic phrases and concepts to individuals who had good reason to be skeptical of them says much about the influence that patriotism could exercise even in supposedly “peripheral” parts of the British population. Sailors—precisely because they experienced so much difficulty in claiming their Britishness— illustrate an entirely new, and useful, dimension to Colley’s conceptual model. While it is painful to contemplate many of these individual stories,

Introduction

11

it was the very difficulties that frustrated the sailors, or set them at each other’s throats, that inspired them to assert their identity in unusual and creative ways. We can watch them talking back to the nation-state and negotiating the contradictions of patriotism in an imperfect and often extremely unfair society. In doing this, even against the odds, they still have more in common with Colley’s Britons than with Marcus Rediker’s transnational pirates. Even when they critiqued it, sailors did not dismiss Britishness as irrelevant to their lives and struggles. This book, however, is not so much an account of “how sailors became Britons” as it is an analysis of the uneasy dialogue, sometimes conciliatory, sometimes reproachful, between sailors and British nationalism.


Chapter 1

4

Will the Real Jack Tar Please Stand U p?

A

n early edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica found sublimity in herring, marveling at the way they sparkled “like a field of the most precious gems” in fine weather. These tiny fish migrated in vast shoals, “delighting to be near the shore.” A column of herring would be three to four miles wide and five to six miles in length, shadowed by screaming sea birds. Whales also pursued the herring, causing the schools of fish to retreat into even shallower water that was extremely convenient for the fishermen.1 Finding and catching such fish required little skill and attracted many part-timers from other trades who supplemented their income during the migration season. Similarly, in Cornwall, miners took to the water when shoals of pilchard came into view; a sentry would signal from a watchtower when the great reddish mass appeared offshore.2 If this was the face of everyday seafaring, it has serious implications for the social, cultural, and political history of maritime life and labor. We might use a phrase popular at the time and say that these men “used the sea” for a living, but they used it gently. There has been great interest in recent years in oceanic history, long-distance trading routes, and protracted voyages, but the example of the herring fishery raises the question: What would we discover if we shifted our focus from oceans to bays, sounds, straits, and estuaries?3 Even deepwater voyages could be quite short, permitting frequent returns to the port of origin and regular contact with family and friends. In Britain, the largest single employer of sailors in this period was the coastal trade in coal from Newcastle upon Tyne, in

14


the north of England, down to London. The round trip took four to six weeks.4 Routes across the Irish Sea, the English Channel, and the North Sea (notably the timber trade with Norway) occupied many other seamen. These maritime workers certainly took on substantial risks and might be away from home for long periods, but these would be measured in weeks or months rather than years.5 To use John Mackenzie’s phrase, it is time for us to seek “a greater understanding of smaller ships, smaller trades, and smaller people” rather than expecting seafarers to be globetrotting cosmopolitans.6 Marcus Rediker chose to frame his influential account of maritime culture and politics—Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea— around a different set of sailors and circumstances. He acknowledged the “short and predictable” voyages of coastal and regional trades, but preferred to focus on more extended voyages, and crews whose thoughts and feelings were shaped by long isolation in the “lonely ship.”7 He was, in fact, inclined to dismiss entire categories of seafarers—such as fishermen—as really not sailors at all. He stated that the importance of fishing was in decline, and “relatively few seamen beyond the small coastal communities of Massachusetts, Canada, and England worked as fishermen.”8 At the very least, we would have to add Scotland to this list; in any case, the three locations named by Rediker accounted for a very large proportion of the sailors in the Anglo-American world. We are left with a sense that fishing and other short voyages were common, even typical, but are somehow beside the point. In certain ways, my book is not strictly comparable to Rediker’s. He dealt with an earlier period, and with merchant vessels and pirate ships rather than with the military. However, his award-winning work has been so widely read that it is often invoked as shorthand for “who sailors were” and “how sailors were,” that is to say, what they were like. It is necessary to make clear, then, where my emphasis and priorities differ from his, and how my conclusions differ as well. Rediker began by taking note of the appearance of separateness. On the streets of any town facing the sea, you could spot “Jack Tar” from some distance away by his rolling gait and outlandish outfit, though the tarry waterproof trousers that earned him his nickname were usually replaced by something cleaner and whiter on shore.9 Rediker’s focus was on the ways that life at sea stripped away the social and political conventions of life on shore. Far from the institutions that maintained terrestrial order, sailors and merchant captains had to work out new arrangements in the power vacuum characterized by the “absence of family, church, and state.”10 Part of that

Wi l l t h e R e a l Jac k Ta r P l e a s e Sta n d U p ?

15

vacuum was filled by the sometimes ruthless work discipline imposed by captains, but the crews also developed their own creative ways to fill the gap. The constant dangers of a hostile environment forced sailors to rely on each other. The confined living spaces of a ship made special demands on the community: To be socialized anew into the ways of the deep-sea craft was necessarily to be weakened or stripped of previous attachments to local and regional cultures and ways of speaking. The ship thus served as a mechanism of cultural dispossession, but it simultaneously created new bonds among those who went to sea, one of which was a common language.11

What did sailors talk about in that common language? The day-to-day workings of the ship would have dominated, but they also found ways to articulate a code of values organized, according to Rediker, around collectivism, antiauthoritarianism, and egalitarianism. Rediker integrated classic attributes of the seaman, usually taken for granted or dismissed by most writers with a humorous anecdote, into his analysis of maritime culture. Habitual drunkenness reflected the stresses of proletarianization. The “non-accumulative ethic” was a rejection of the capitalist ethos, while cursing and swearing were a mark of defiance.12 Maritime culture, in this analysis, is a superstructure determined almost point-by-point from a base: the maritime experience of proletarianization. There was little room in this model for a gray area between the cultures of sea and shore. Authentic maritime space, for Rediker, required distance from everything else. This is ironic given his warnings against the “romance of the sea,” which allowed earlier historians to represent maritime life as a heroic contest with nature without addressing conflicts of interest between crew, captains, and shipowners. Rediker reminded us that his sailors faced not only the “awesome dangers of the deep” but also the twin tyrannies of the captain and of the mercantile masters of the Atlantic System. Jack Tar was “between the devil and the deep blue sea,” as Rediker’s title suggested.13 The sequence of Rediker’s chapters took the narrative form of a voyage out. The port symbolized the injustice of the propertied classes, refined and focused in capitalist exploitation.14 In chapters two through four, Jack Tar signs a contract and leaves port, struggling with the captain and forming connections with the crew. We progress deeper into the maritime experience, culminating in the chapter on pirates, in whose liberated existence as “masterless men”

16


we seem to have escaped the constraints of port life.15 To complete Rediker’s heroic narrative, Jack Tar returns to port as “the spirit of rebellion” to help incite or support uprisings around the Atlantic in the aptly titled conclusion, “The Seaman as Worker of the World.” Rediker’s narrative, then, was about mobility and escape. His promising treatment of port life suffered from its subsidiary place in his narrative. The port was a place where sailors were exploited and where they lived in squalid housing, a place one would be eager to leave. These feelings are reciprocated by urban historians; sailors occupy a marginal place in the Cambridge Urban History of Britain, even in the chapters dealing with ports.16 Yet the imposing list of cities that were also ports suggests that “maritime” culture may have been more susceptible to outside influences than we thought. According to Rediker, Jack Tar led a life of “mobility, fluidity and dispersion” between voyages, circulating among jail, tavern, and brothel. The implications of the “non-accumulative ethic” for sailors’ partners or dependents were not addressed. The maritime family found no place in his analysis, although Rediker himself identified a number of references to sailors’ efforts to provide for their loved ones.17 We are to believe that sailors had few commitments or involvements on shore and that the place of women in maritime culture is, by definition, a marginal one.18 Rediker even suggested that the prevalence of swearing owed much to the “all-male environment” of the ship at sea.19 However, the so-called sailortown neighborhoods, where sailors spent a good deal of time, were hardly an “all-male environment.” Women maintained lodging houses and sold provisions to anchored vessels. As Margaret Hunt has shown, they also hammered away at recalcitrant merchants and naval bureaucrats for their husband’s unpaid wages.20 A study of sailors’ tattoos concludes that seafaring did not preclude strong “bonds with family and friends on land”; loved ones and other sentimental attachments were often commemorated on the sailor’s body. Most sailors were themselves the sons of sailors, which by itself implies that women were something more than bystanders. It seems implausible that barmaids, sex workers, landladies, and assorted family members did not play a role in the production, and reproduction, of maritime language and culture.21 London’s Billingsgate fishwives were known for their extravagant profanity; perhaps, pace Rediker, sailors learned a thing or two from them, rather than the other way round. Rethinking the “where” of maritime culture, then, is likely to lead us to a reconsideration of the “what” as well. If sailors lived both in the ship’s “wooden world” and in port cities, if they associated both


17

with their shipmates and with a motley assortment of sailortown residents and transients, then portraying sailors as indifferent to the conventions and fashions that prevailed on shore becomes less credible. What should we make, for example, of Rediker’s conclusion that sailors were largely indifferent to the claims of nation-states or empires upon their loyalties? “Early-eighteenth-century seamen,” he argued, “whether formally residents of Bristol, Port Royal, Glasgow, Boston, London, New York, Liverpool, or Philadelphia were part of the same maritime culture and society.”22 He quoted Ned Coxere, who related his naval service in a tone that Voltaire would have appreciated: I served the Spaniards against the French, then the Hollanders against the English; then I was taken by the English out of a Dunkirker; and then I served the English against the Hollanders; and last I was taken by the Turks, where I was forced to serve then against the English, French, Dutch, and Spaniards, and all Christendom.23

If Coxere had a home, it was the ship, although unlike a conventional “homeland,” it might change with every voyage. Rediker was inclined to see his late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century sailors as the sort of people who would regard national identities with detachment and even a degree of amusement, much as they dismissed Christianity. They mistrusted authority figures of all sorts, and they had good reason to do so.24 I am sympathetic with elements of Rediker’s approach. Like him, I refuse to portray seafarers as insulated from the conflicts and tensions of British society.25 When we characterize wartime mobilization as nation-building, or at a more administrative level as resolving a manpower problem, we miss the sensibility of sailors who did not consider themselves as anyone’s building blocks. In that spirit, my focus in this book is on the forecastle, not the privileged space of the quarterdeck. My intent is not to caricature all naval officers as diehard conservatives; their number, after all, included reformers like Lord Cochrane and even bolder thinkers like Lieutenant Thomas Hodgskin, who condemned the Navy’s “universal system of terror” and whose later publications on political economy influenced Karl Marx.26 However, referring to everyone on a ship indiscriminately as a “sailor” (as in the book title Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers, a biography of several admirals) would be misleading. If officers did the sailing, and perhaps also the fighting, then crews are left over as an extraneous management problem or perhaps as colorful “eyewitnesses” to others’ achievements. 27 When people from the forecastle wrote about themselves,

18


they eschewed the officer’s term for them, “ratings,” preferring names such as “Jack Tar,” “sailor,” or “common seaman.” I follow their practice in this book. I am not persuaded, however, that sailors were estranged from all forms of legally sanctioned authority, or that they were natural revolutionaries. Rediker and Linebaugh have drawn attention to a 1768 incident on the Thames, in which rebellious sailors “struck” sail, expanding the English vocabulary with a new term for an organized work stoppage that is still with us today.28 Yet not all of the maritime contributions to the English language suggest radical sentiments. Indeed, the hazardous and highly technical nature of seafaring requires a degree of deference to those with expert knowledge (they “know the ropes”) and also encourages crews to keep conflict to a minimum (“don’t rock the boat”). Men accustomed to this manner of thinking might welcome a proposal to change course or increase the daily rations, but talk of turning the world upside down would have been quite unnerving. If “we are all in this boat together,” then violent inversion evoked shipwreck and drowning rather than safe arrival at a destination. The word revolution contains within it a sense of overturning or upsetting, which did not translate happily into seafaring metaphors. Rediker cited the lyrics of sea chanties as illustrative of the “profoundly collective nature” of maritime work, but that same reverence for collective endeavor and the greater good could also prime sailors to identify with a larger common cause or an identity beyond that of “shipmate.”29 Consider the admiral who shamed his drunken crew by threatening that he would move his flag to another ship, to “share the danger and honour of facing the enemies of his country in the company of those on whom he could place dependence.”30 When we consider that the number of at least superficially loyal crews in the Royal Navy far outnumbers those who rebelled, we are left with a choice: Are obedient sailors somehow inauthentic, or did their actions make sense in terms of an affection for their commander, for the ship as a whole, or their allegiance to a larger political unit?31 Perhaps Rediker’s emphasis on rebellion and piracy has made obedience more surprising than it should be. The roving transnational rebels celebrated in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and The Many-Headed Hydra do not seem to have ever given much thought to the ways that they might need to negotiate with the hard realities of state power. This has to be an incomplete picture. Sailors, perhaps more than any other group of workers, lived in almost continual awareness of the nation-state. Sailors moved across national jurisdictions,


19

an exercise that may have bred a degree of contempt for authority, but also offered regular reminders of how important variations in the law could be. They paid tax at customs houses or risked punishment by flouting the law as smugglers. Legislation and regulation had an impact on their daily lives, whether in the form of state subsidies for the fisheries, certificates of exemption from impressment, or the Navigation Acts that stipulated the ratio of domestic to foreign seamen on a merchant vessel. They knew that which flag a ship flew mattered. Sailors were immediately on the front lines whenever a government declared war, and they were expected to fight whether they signed up for it or not. Experiencing “the Atlantic world” may have expanded their consciousness, but it is less clear whether even pirate ships offered an “Atlantic” flag to fight under. There was certainly no “Atlantic” pension plan for the elderly or disabled sailor. As veterans, it would—once again—be the nation-state that had the power to provide them with a hospital bed, or deny their claim. Analyzing how sailors related to state power is a more useful approach than relying on a common occupational culture to explain their behavior. Every seaman knew how to “hand, reef, and steer,” and a thing or two about the weather, but given the diversity of maritime work, it is hard to see what occupational identity would have been common across all those varied pursuits. Consider the enormous diversity of the workplaces, the ships themselves. Small vessels that pursued fishing, smuggling, and small-time piracy—as opportunity permitted—had little in common with a crowded, cannon-studded man o’ war or a gigantic East Indiaman.32 Likewise, a whaling vessel hardly provided the same work environment as a ship custom-built as a floating prison for enslaved Africans. The culture and experience of sailors would have varied also, since some ships (like the herring fleet) barely left the harbor, while other sorts of ships might carry Jack to the ends of the earth. It is, of course, true that the same sailor, over the course of a five- or ten-year career at sea, might serve on a number of different types of vessels, broadening his experience.33 The one thing that virtually every sailor did have in common in this period was an experience with impressment. Rediker acknowledged that even in the early period that he covered in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, impressment had become so common that it would be “impossible to separate” the experiences of the Royal Navy’s sailors and those of the merchant service.34 As he noted, by 1700, the basic skill set was sufficiently similar across the seafaring trades for the Navy to consider anyone who “used the sea” to be worthy of the attentions of a press gang.35 No one who “used the sea,” even a part-time herring

20


fisherman, was likely to escape at least a period in the King’s service.36 About half of the Royal Navy’s wartime complement was made up through this form of conscription. Random vagrants and criminals were sometimes foisted on the Navy by mayors and magistrates, but the Admiralty knew that what it really needed was trained men with relevant experience.37 However, they refused to match the high wartime wages offered to sailors in the merchant service. Many men who were qualified for those jobs felt cheated and promptly deserted, setting off new waves of impressment as warships struggled to fill their empty hammocks. The demand for sailors increased with each war over the course of the eighteenth century, resulting in a vast mobilization and amalgamation of seafarers from a myriad of provincial backgrounds and different maritime occupations. This expansive, and disruptive, exercise of governmental authority forms the backdrop for most of the cultural and political developments that I will discuss in subsequent chapters. Impressment is too important to be left to the naval historians. Displacing people on this scale had to have cultural consequences. “When one goes into Rotherhithe and Wapping, which places are chiefly inhabited by sailors,” wrote John Fielding in 1768, “a man would be apt to suspect himself in another country.” Not for the last time, an observer of London characterized the East End as an alien enclave within the nation’s capital. There was an important difference, however. Fielding sensed that Jack Tar was not exactly an immigrant, and that this “manner of living, speaking, acting, dressing, and behaving … so very peculiar to themselves” was therefore not an import but something characteristic of the great city itself, in that particular neighborhood and at that moment in time. “The seamen here,” he wrote, “are a generation differing from all the world.”38 This sentence, perhaps intentionally, was kept open to many different readings. Perhaps Fielding meant that this cohort was simply a generation unlike the sailors that the author recalled from his youth. The word “generation” would also have reminded many readers of sexual reproduction, a favorite topic of political debate in the warridden eighteenth century. Frequently embattled and invariably outnumbered by the French, Britain relied upon generation to replenish its population. What, however, generated Jack Tar? He differed from all the world; he was neither wholly foreign nor obviously domestic. If he was “born” into an all-male community of shipmates (or a socalled nursery of seamen), this violated the heterosexual metaphor of a national family. Or was Jack Tar a spontaneous generation—like a mushroom or a maggot—sprouted in the alleys of Wapping? Whatever the British sailor’s peculiarities might be, they could have


21

consequences for British manhood generally. As Fielding confessed, entering sailortown, a man would be apt to suspect himself. If sailors were not family men, it was disputable whether they were men at all. Ideas about sexuality, and about sailors, changed considerably between 1700—roughly, the middle of the period covered in Rediker’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea—and the beginning of the nineteenth century.39 In Charles Shadwell’s play The Fair Quaker of Deal (1710) some sailors with free time on their hands turn quickly to thoughts of pillage and rape. When an officer tries to dissuade them, they threaten to rape him. 40 When did the sailor’s image change? The novels of Tobias Smollett and the enormously influential songs of Charles Dibdin established a strong tradition of praising the sterling moral and martial qualities of the sailor. The quarter century between 1750 and 1775, then, was perhaps the decisive period of transition for Jack Tar in British culture.41 I do not wish to suggest an abrupt break between Rediker’s period and my own, but rather a gradual transition. For example, the writings of sailors themselves show at least some thematic continuity across the long eighteenth century. Consider one of Rediker’s sources, Edward Barlow’s journal. This handwritten document dates from the late 1600s. Barlow strikes many notes that also appear in later autobiographies. He lamented the damage done to families when husbands and fathers were seized by the press gang. He criticized the greed of pursers and stewards who cheat sailors of their due. He roundly condemned captains (and other worthies) who looked down on sailors just because they looked ragged and had little money. Barlow had a sense of pride and grew tired of being asked “what prison I had come out of.”42 (He made the eloquent astrological lament that he had been born under a “three penny planet.”43) He was furious that well-heeled gentlemen luxuriated in safety back home while their repose was protected by “some poor true-hearted seaman that goes to sea for want of means.”44 Barlow’s sense of his relationship to the nation-state also has at least some affinities with later writers. He wrote of his affection for England, the country of his birth, and experienced homesickness at the thought that he might die abroad or otherwise never return to it. He repeatedly stressed that he and his shipmates in the Dutch Wars of the 1660s had been fighting for their country. When he heard the Dutch utter contemptuous boasts about their past defeats of the English, Barlow and his fellow sailors had—literally—a gut reaction: it went “against our stomachs,” he wrote.45 Even Ned Coxere, whose blithe summary of his many masters was quoted by Rediker, wrote about how he balked at converting to Islam, although his captors

22


suggested that they might make him a captain if he would only renounce his Christian faith. Coxere, a gifted “linguister” who could pass himself off as Dutch or French as the occasion required, was not willing to sever that last bond to the land of his birth.46 I am inclined to agree with H. M. Tomlinson, who wrote in his foreword to Coxere’s narrative that “he understood loyalty, but not nationalism.”47 What is most notably missing from both Barlow and Coxere, however, is not the nation, but the sailor. Later authors were far more self-conscious. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, autobiographers identified themselves as sailors, writing almost as if this were a distinct religious or ethnic group. In contrast, Coxere was an individual looking out for himself, and Barlow wrote about “we poor seamen,” deploying—in effect —“poor” as the noun and “seamen” as the adjective. The adjective sometimes dropped away altogether. Lamenting a lean Christmas Day in 1668, he mentioned “poor men” four times in a short passage: [T]he officers having the first choice always, nothing was left for the poor men but the surloin [sic] next to the horns, and they have Hobson’s choice; and if they do but speak against it, then they are in danger of being drubbed or beaten with twenty or thirty blows on the back, and a poor man dare not speak for that which is his right, for the captain and purser and other officers, having the best of all things, a poor man is not to be heard amongst them, but must be content to take what they will give him, they many times putting that into their pockets which is a poor man’s due.48

What differentiated a sailor from other “poor men”? He must endure the elements, and the closed-off environment of a ship did offer extra opportunities to cheat him on provisions, as the passage above reminds us. But we are still waiting for Jack Tar to take the stage as an interlocutor. In my view, what distinguishes the autobiographies from the 1750–1850 period is their high degree of self-consciousness. Neither Barlow nor Coxere ever saw their writings in print, although they do seem to have written with some audience in mind; Barlow warns young boys that they should never go to sea. The writings of sailors after 1750, however, show an increasing awareness that there was a market for books about sea adventures and battles. They make much of the distinct ethos, language, dress, and behavior of sailors, and of one specific nationality in particular, to the point of narcissism. This is true of both the petitions of mutineers and the earnest and lengthy conversion narratives of teetotaling Methodists. Sailors deployed a


23

web of cultural references, showing a sophistication about what their readers might already have seen in the theater or read about previously that concerned Jack Tar and his attributes. Sometimes their aim was to endorse that viewpoint, in other cases to rebut it, but the awareness is unmistakable. The post-1750 writers were also acutely aware of the nation-state. This Jack Tar was constituted by, and was continually in dialogue with, British state power. It was state power that hoped to foster him in subsidized “nurseries,” state power that bribed or conscripted him to serve in wartime, state power that resorted to various expedients to motivate his enthusiastic service at sea, and state power that he would turn to when he was too old, or too disabled, to work any longer. It was also, as I suggested in the introduction, state power that sailors would talk back to in their petitions and autobiographies, assuming the voice (not by accident) of the British sailor. It is true that the sailor’s occupation always left the great, interconnected world-ocean open to him, a sprawling body of water that could carry him to any climate he desired. Compared to many land dwellers, it was exceptionally easy for sailors to follow their whims, jump ship, or change sides. Some of them took full advantage of this “liberty,” seizing whatever opportunity offered the most fun, the most cash, or the most adventure.49 Coxere expected to drift from one flag to another, and even Edward Barlow articulated a thinly veiled threat when he remarked that ill-treatment “maketh many poor men so unwilling to sail in His Majesty’s ships, and many to abandon their country, finding better entertainment in another.”50 Serving in the British military—then, and later—did not automatically produce a sense of Britishness, and it could just as easily produce the opposite. The spirit of Coxere did not die out quickly. Even in the shadow of invasion scares, a small industry in forged papers flourished; after 1783, claims of American citizenship were much in demand.51 During the next war with the United States (1812–1815), enough Britons were fighting in the U.S. Navy that stories circulated about one American frigate that possessed two guns, one nicknamed “Nelson” and the other “Victory,” manned entirely by veterans of Trafalgar and Nelson’s other battles. Of course, many of these individuals soon learned that the Royal Navy had a long, and lengthening, reach and it would not hesitate to pluck them off the decks of American ships.52 For a variety of reasons, then, the options entertained by Barlow and Coxere seemed—if still inviting—less credible one hundred years later. A new and ambitious set of bureaucratic initiatives gradually

24


asserted a more recognizably modern version of border controls. Out of 289 out-of-work seamen on the Thames catalogued by the Home Office in April 1817, 7 claimed that they had been “Born at Sea.” This smacked of cosmopolitanism, or at the very least a refusal to inhabit a national identity on the bureaucrat’s terms. However, identifying as a son of the ocean, while not impossible, carried a cost. Within that same group of 289 sailors, there were 43 sailors identified as from the British West Indies, 11 from the British East Indies, and 2 from Malta. Even these sailors, who were acknowledged as subjects of George III, simultaneously paid the price for being a foreigner. According to the Home Office, they were not at home.53 These colonial subjects found themselves confined on floating prisons anchored in the Thames with the other unwanted “foreign” seamen, their hammocks slung next to Russians and Swedes pending “repatriation.” (The men who said they had been born at sea met the same fate, although exactly where they were sent is unclear.) In this situation, sailors who made a convincing case for their own Britishness could expect material benefits, dignity, and security. In contrast, sailors who found themselves unable, or unwilling, to position themselves as Britons could expect adverse consequences. Did sailors believe in these categories, or did they just go along with the legal niceties when it suited them? There is no simple answer. Sailors worked and fought as shipmates, but in the post-1750 period, at least, they did not forget their origins in the way that Rediker proposed that they should have. Crews liked to toss around nicknames that reminded everyone of the various “nations” represented on deck.54 In the Royal Navy, those so-called nations would have been, predominantly, from within the British Isles: self-described Cornish, Manx, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and English individuals. Among the roughly 15 percent drawn from beyond the British Isles, significant numbers were from Britain’s enemies—57 Frenchmen, presumably royalists, fought on Nelson’s side at Trafalgar—and an even larger contingent from Baltic countries such as Sweden that had little reason to get excited over the Union Jack.55 The proportion of sailors from Asia, Africa, and the Americas would have varied depending on the port of origin, but African-Americans and “lascar” seamen from the countries surrounding the Indian Ocean constituted other groups whose relationship to Britishness would be, at the very least, complicated. On some voyages, the percentage of black sailors may have been considerable, although recent scholarship casts doubt on the higher estimates.56


25

Rediker, particularly in his collaborations with Peter Linebaugh, has drawn attention to instances of cooperation between sailors and slaves when their paths crossed in taverns, jails, or ships around the Atlantic world.57 The evidence for this kind of solidarity needs to be balanced against the evidence of indifference and even of antipathy. In the 1780s, antislavery activists who interviewed common seamen just off Liverpool slavers learned that some had joined the Africa voyage against their will, but others offered the blunt explanation that they had worked on every other kind of ship and were just ready to see something new.58 When Liverpool’s member of Parliament William Roscoe returned to his city after voting in favor of abolishing the slave trade, he was attacked by a mob that included unemployed sailors.59 What sort of thinking lay behind this behavior? Frederick Marryat’s novel Peter Simple (1834) suggests one possibility. An antislavery campaigner manages to get on board a naval vessel; he goes below where the common seamen are resting, and begins “distributing prints of a black man kneeling in chains, and saying, ‘Am I not your brother?’” One sailor becomes belligerent and confronts him: “Do you pretend to insinivate [sic] that this crying black thief is my brother?” “To be sure I do,” replied the methodist. “Then take that for your infernal lie,” said the sailor, hitting him in the face right and left, and knocking the man down into the cable tier, from whence he climbed up, and made his escape out of the frigate as soon as he was able.60

Marryat was writing fiction, but there is ample evidence that such attitudes were not uncommon. Anna Maria Falconbridge, visiting Freetown, Sierra Leone, in the early 1790s, observed how, when three sailors from a passing ship killed a duck belonging to one of the settlers, a swiftly summoned judge and jury sentenced them for the crime, imposing a stern penalty of 39 lashes on the worst offender. “Poor Jack,” Falconbridge wrote, “was dreadfully mortified at being whipped by a black man.”61 These self-identified white sailors perceived Britishness as a zero-sum game with clear winners and losers, and they intended to win it. When sailors set out their views on what the nation-state meant to them, then, it was not an abstract exercise. It was state power that could marginalize or exclude, denying the Britishness of entire categories of sailors. Likewise, when sailors agitated for reforms like the elimination of flogging or impressment, it was once again the nation-state

26


that could grant these wishes, and as I will show later in this book, a number of campaigners against the lash did not hesitate to propose that white sailors deserved privileged treatment by virtue of their “British” identity. That version of Britishness, however, could flourish only if the inclusion of some sailors was complemented, and completed, by the exclusion of other people, even of their own shipmates.

Conclusion The battle over which sailors were authentic, and which were somehow not the real thing, is with us still. It takes on additional urgency when historians try to describe what sailors thought or felt. It is not easy to decide which, if any, of the surviving voices are representative. By definition, sailors who wrote books were not typical sailors. Indeed, their writings often contain testimonies about how they felt misunderstood—not just by the general public—but by their own shipmates. None of this is unique to sailors, of course. Most ordinary people live and die while leaving behind very limited records of their attitudes and opinions. The nineteenth-century autobiographies by British sailors, however, have been subjected to special and, I would argue, disproportionate skepticism. On the left, David Vincent, in his study of working-class autobiography, is inclined to exclude what he calls the memoirs of Napoleonic service: “In the face of a re-born and more vigorous movement of popular radicalism, the middle class public was only too anxious to read accounts of loyal working men risking their lives to defend their country against the heirs of the French Revolution.”62 Vincent’s appraisal is shrewd; in the era of the Peterloo Massacre and widening agitation for suffrage, anything that hearkened back to the period when the threat of French invasion had fostered a spirit of national unity must have appeared welcome to moderates and conservatives alike. Yet sailors who published books were a diverse lot, politically and otherwise. Many were animated by religious zeal—another cause for skepticism in some quarters—but the books by self-described reformed sailors were among the most eloquent advocates of other kinds of reform. At a more general level, it is worth observing that if the autobiographers had simply wished to sell more copies by painting a rosy picture, their books would be considerably more upbeat than they actually are. On the right, meanwhile, N. A. M. Rodger has long been a critic of historians who, in his view, “treat the Navy as a blank screen onto which to project a favourite plot.” He urges attention to the naval archives, which he proposes will enable sailors to be “understood in


27

their own terms”; thus, a ship’s log or a muster roll is a trustworthy source.63 In contrast, Rodger has little respect for the “didactic” memoirs, which he argues are “less impartial chronicles of time past than contributions to the religious, social, or political debates of the 1830s and 1840s.”64 There are some obvious difficulties here (not least that the same books set aside by Vincent as insipid or at least insufficiently political are being rejected by Rodger as heated polemics). Each source, archival or otherwise, has its own characteristic strengths and weaknesses. A ship’s log will present one self-interested and idiosyncratic portrait of a press gang’s activity, for example, while a letter in the Home Office papers about that same gang on the same day will reflect a different set of priorities and may take notice of an altogether different set of events. Implicit in Rodger’s faith in the naval archives is a faith in the officers who produced those documents, and a receptive ear for their version of reality. Rodger’s opposition between authentic, archive-based research and what he likes to call, derisively, the “attempt to impose interpretations on events” is a false choice.65 Every archive is full of self-interested and partisan documents. The notion that a petition, song, or autobiography with religious, social, or political content is alien to the lived experience of real sailors makes very little sense. Even Marcus Rediker, who argued that sailors were defined primarily by the exceptional circumstances of their maritime work environment—an environment that was so powerful that it erased prior identities—was willing to allow sailors to have opinions on these matters. Rodger insists that we seek to understand sailors “on their own terms,” but he seems even more ideologically constrained than Rediker when he considers what those terms should have been. War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor does not aim to replace the bold generalizations made in Rediker’s work, or in Rodger’s, with new ones devised by me. Both of those historians propose a degree of uniformity among sailors that I do not believe existed. It is not my suggestion that I have found the single “authentic” voice for the sailor. Rather, illustrating the diversity of voices is part of my point. If I mention authenticity, it is to offer an appraisal of what rhetorical purpose such a term was serving, and to inquire in whose interests it was deployed. Several decades ago, Peter Bailey wrote an article entitled “Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up?” in which he concluded that working-class people, like most other human beings, could speak to different constituencies as the situation required, and assume roles that they thought would best suit their purposes of the moment.

28


I propose that sailors are no different, and this underlies many of the questions that I pursue in this book. Such artful role-playing does imply a degree of self-consciousness—and a sensitivity to the intended audience—that goes against our preconceptions about Jack Tar as a “simple,” “natural,” or “honest” character. If the resulting portrait is fragmented, inconsistent, and even at times reveals hypocrisy, this should not be seen as a loss. Rather, it is a sign that sailors are finally becoming a normal subject for historical inquiry.66

Chapter 2

4

I mpressed: Becoming Jack Tar

C

harles Pemberton, describing the thrill of a battle at sea, likened the experience to a destructive drunken spree. In the heat of combat, the sailor felt “like a fellow in a tavern, who, when he is in the third heaven of jollity, smashes tables and chairs, dishes and glasses—dashes his fists through the door-panels and the windows, all senseless of the scarifying and bruises he inflicts upon himself in the indulgence of his fun.”1 If Pemberton confused war at sea with revelry in port, sailors also had trouble differentiating between amorous pursuits and armed combat. Women were ships that had to be “taken”; money was a form of ammunition, as the sailor’s common expression for cash at hand, “shot in the locker,” indicated. A shot locker on a ship was where the cannon balls were stored. It was in St. Catherine’s Bay, where Jack he roll’d it night and day, While one shot in the locker lay, he did sing, rant and roar, Fiddler play up brisk, landlord what’s to pay? The last shot shall fly to-day, and then to sea for more.2

Sailors arrived on shore with pockets full of money (“his gold and silvery store,” as one song put it), but “there’s no one can get rid of it so soon.”3 The militarized language of these songs and stories should supply us with a hint that we are not dealing simply with the timeless verities of maritime occupational culture here. If Jack Tar was quick to spill his cash and semen, and hastily retreat to sea, this says more about the anomie of a conscript in a strange town than about the inability of sailors in general to participate meaningfully in urban life. In this chapter, I examine the methods that sailors used to carefully cultivate

30


the appearance of difference and estrangement. On shore, sailors liked to move in groups. The Navy had not issued them with a uniform, but they organized promenades of Jack Tars all dressed exactly alike.4 Many of these men had “used the sea” only in limited ways before, but now they affected an extravagant nautical slang. In this sneering parody, they spoke as if they were true sea-men who could know no other vocabulary. A growing body of texts and pictures tried to “explain” Jack Tar to the British public, or find the humor in his quaint behavior.5 Just beneath, anxiety lingered. Expecting a stalwart defender against threats from across the Channel, his countrymen looked into his face and saw a stranger. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the Royal Navy relied on impressment—violent and unannounced conscription—to man its warships. By law, only those who “used the sea” for a living were liable to impressment. Many men, however, considered sailing a handy source of income at certain times, but not necessarily as a distinct vocation or work identity. The press gang drew fishermen and coastal traders out of their insular, localized backgrounds and confronted them with larger political and cultural formations.6 “Impressment” was an appropriate term to describe this process physically, but also culturally and politically. The Royal Navy acted like a gigantic machine, drawing in conscripts and imprinting or stamping them with a new identity: Jack Tar. They would now work on much larger ships, range over greater distances, and encounter unfamiliar ports that were swollen with wartime expansion. Surviving as Jack Tar meant adapting to the special conditions aboard a warship, but equally, it meant coping with the often hostile environment of a big city. To the extent that impressment succeeded, it forged a new community out of the conscripts. The “press” or pressure, however, did not operate only in one direction. One thing they now shared was a set of grievances. Many had fled or resisted the gang before their capture. Once in the King’s service, sailors learned to resent the government bureaucracy that delayed their wages, arrogant midshipmen half their age who peered down at them from the privileged space of the quarterdeck, bullying boatswain’s mates who “started” them with rope’s ends just for fun. How would sailors respond to this situation? What form would their resistance take?7 George Orwell once wrote: “[I]n all societies the common people must live to some extent against the existing order. The genuinely popular culture of England is something that goes on beneath the surface.”8 In societies where the overt expression of grievances was dangerous, plebeians seized upon opaque references, cloaking their protests in the disguises of carnival costume, Christmas

B e c o m i n g Jac k Ta r

31

carols, blackened faces, or anonymous threatening letters.9 It is possible to describe this as “secrecy,” but of course such gestures only communicate if there is some framework of shared meaning. Indeed, some of the most pointed protests were veiled in symbolic language as a way of flaunting the message (at least to the initiated), rather than hiding it “beneath the surface” in Orwell’s phrase. For example, in eighteenth-century Bristol, Jacobites “wore rue and thyme on 28 May, because they rued the day King George was born, and longed for time to pass until the morrow.”10 Plebeians learned to become masters of parody. In 1718, some Berkshire “bumpkins” seeking to mock King George I carved a huge turnip like a jack o’lantern and lit it up with candles to commemorate the anniversary of his coronation. This stunt served to ridicule the “turnip-farmer” from Hanover, but it also turned on its head the tradition of holding illuminations (placing candles in every window) to honor royal anniversaries and victories in war.11 Through the use of the secret languages of symbolism, it was possible to turn the privileged knowledge of a group into a political weapon. These instances of vegetable satires (rue, thyme, and turnips) also illustrate the importance of humor in popular political expression. The names attached to threatening letters were often puns that conveyed a message about the rightness of the cause. The tollgate-smashing Rebecca rioters seized upon a passage from Genesis 24:60 (“And they blessed Rebekah … let thy seed possess the gates of those which hate them.”), while the Luddites invoked Robin Hood.12 Secret associations in Ireland were so numerous that giving them all names turned into a sort of word game. There were Whiteboys, Steelboys, Oakboys, Carders, Rockites, Caravats, Blackfeet, Magpies, Jays, Terry Alts, and Shanavats. This torrent of mysterious names, of course, served to confuse and intimidate the authorities.13 Robert Darnton’s famous essay “The Great Cat Massacre” has shown how humor veiled in secrecy could enable ordinarily weak people to assume considerable power.14 These studies of plebeian resistance offer us a new way to approach the flashy yet cryptic displays put on by sailors in port. An awareness of impressment helps supply some valuable context here. Tradesmen and ploughboys mistakenly seized by the gang took their newly learned sea jargon and spat it back, flaunting a sort of exaggerated, parodic nauticalism.15 Given the high rate of desertion, many sailors just come ashore should not have wanted to draw attention to themselves. Looking and sounding like a sailor invited the gaze of the press gang and its many paid informers. Deliberately injecting nauticalisms into conversation about everyday topics—much like wearing a brightly

32


colored sailor suit—was either very foolish or very brave. The more prolonged, and the more elaborate, the nautical patter, the greater the risk. It is helpful to consider the analogy to graffiti, another art form that endangers the artist. In Los Angeles, graffiti artists who use a gothic script are considered worthy of special respect, not only because gothic lettering is elaborate (and beyond the skill of a novice) but because it takes longer to complete and therefore heightens the probability of discovery and arrest.16 Such a performance may deliver a vicarious thrill even to a bystander. Pressed themselves, conscripts sought to “impress” their officers, bystanders on the street, and each other with their own unique subcultural style.17 It is difficult to reconstruct the tone of voice, but the statement, “Here is something you can’t understand” is a taunt at least as much as it is an act of discretion.18 They enjoyed dressing alike, marching through town in mass promenades. Shipmates took pride in their tight-knit brotherhood, espousing loyalty to each other, regardless of background or ethnicity. They also loved what they called “liberty,” as men only could who had seen it taken from them.19 Another experience that helped shipmates to bond with each other was the confrontation with vast, unfamiliar, and threatening urban spaces. Many sailors came from small seaside communities such as Douglas and had little experience with the great ports. Special “sailor town” districts arose in response to the great wartime mobilization, but these were not necessarily safe havens; indeed, Jack Tar described them in language redolent of war. Sailors filled their songs with cautionary stories about the women, and men, who “used the sea” in a new manner, by making a living by providing services to transient sailors. Some truly offered a port in a storm; others might cheat or rob. A stay in port was too often synonymous with being fleeced. Deracinated from their communities of birth by the protean forces of war and commerce, the same men who boasted of their honesty and generosity in dealings with fellow sailors also took pride in their love-‘em-and-leave-‘em approach to women. Theft and even sexual violence were countenanced. Sailors, unable themselves to resist the violence of the British nation-state, boasted of how they inflicted their own injustices and outrages on the women of port communities. This behavior, like so many other aspects of “Jack in Port,” emerged from the context of violent conscription. Paul Gilje has shrewdly observed that Jack Tar’s vaunted “liberty” consisted of freedom of movement, but little else.20 Strutting processions of extravagantly dressed sailors might taunt the press gang,


33

but they were not a threat to the established order. That is not to say that sailors did not harbor resentment and even rage over conscription, the harsh conditions at sea, and the horrors of war, but arguably much of that anger was vented at the easy and convenient target: the women of sailortown. Sailors contrasted the trust and companionship of the homosocial male shipboard life with the adversarial and cold-hearted world of the port city. They claimed to relish the prospect of returning to sea. Yet the freedom of the wanderer was a freedom that men could enjoy in ways that were not so accessible to women. Sailors defined and exercised their liberty consciously, to an extent, in opposition to women; certainly many of them exercised it at women’s expense, in ways that merit the term “misogynist.” Clearly, the libertine ethos was not unique to sailors. However, the social consequences of deracination, the atmosphere of naval stations, and the pervasive violence of wartime only worsened and intensified elements that were already present. Moreover, the sanctions that a smaller, more face-to-face community might have imposed on men who behaved particularly badly were not a serious threat in the socially chaotic atmosphere of wartime. I discuss some of the implications of this in the concluding section of this chapter.

Sea Legs: Finding Your Bearings Wars are often presented as great moments of national unity, but many sailors—whether volunteer or conscript—experienced disorientation and disillusionment when they joined the Royal Navy. This took place even though they had been exposed beforehand to patriotic songs, stories, and theatrical productions to prime them for the experience. Indeed, some of the most bitter complaints arose from young men who grew up far inland and had formed their impression of sea life from books, songs, and poetry that glorified “England’s Wooden Walls” or the heroic Jack Tar.21 Among those who were brought up to “use the sea,” horror stories about life in the Royal Navy circulated widely, and most young boys would have had fairly low expectations, but the curious and idealistic volunteer had much further to fall. We are the beneficiaries of their disillusionment, however, because many of these bookish sailors went on to write autobiographies that recount and anatomize their difficult period of transition to sea life. The typical autobiographer began as a boy of modest background but great imagination. Several refer to their “fancy” or “caprice” in choosing to board a King’s ship. John Nicol, a cooper’s son from

34


a village near Edinburgh, confesses that “the first wish I ever formed was to wander”; William Robinson also sought to escape his father’s trade (of shoemaker)—his “roving mind” impelled him to volunteer for the Navy, and he promptly found himself imprisoned aboard a tender with pressed men all around and rats crawling over him.22 Charles McPherson grew up in the Glasgow area (which he considered “an inland quarter of the country”), but he was fascinated by the distinctive dress of the man-o’-war’s man, “who appeared to me to be the only individual in the world worthy of envy.”23 Once on board, he was appalled at the cursing and jibing of his new shipmates: My blood boiled at such unprovoked indignity, and I felt it the more acutely from having formed, from the works of Smollett, Cooper, and others, the most exalted notions of the generosity of British sailors.24

McPherson’s feeling of alienation was common. Charles Pemberton’s description of his first ship’s crew is too long to reproduce here in full, but some of his adjectives (“squalid, dirty-bearded, matted-haired wretches”) should give some of the flavor. John Nicol simply makes the dry remark: “I was surprised to see so few, who, like myself, had chosen it for the love of that line of life.”25 The horrors of the tender were not, of course, the end of these young men’s travails. Hay describes his first bout of seasickness (“It was here I first repented of having gone to sea”), and all of the new sailors had to undergo a rough period in which they were “shown” their duties, which involved a great deal of being hit, shouted at, and struck with rope’s ends for any failure or dereliction. George Irwin was shocked by the cold, filth, and privation (“we had a sail as a temporary bed … [but] the strongest hands always got the best share”) and was a stunned spectator at the most brutal beating he had ever witnessed.26 The process of initiation was rough.27 A ship’s crew had a firm notion of how a sailor should dress, walk, and talk, and any newcomer who did not conform to it could expect abuse, violence, and ridicule. Landsmen who came aboard wearing long coats had their tails cut off (converting the coat into a socially acceptable jacket). Jonas Hanway’s Marine Society discovered that their street urchins, however well-trained, were harassed by the sailors, who would not “mix” with them unless they were dressed like sailors; the Society gave in and began outfitting the boys accordingly.28 An initial period of hazing would be followed by “adoption” by an older member of the crew who protected them, sponsored them, and helped to orient them to


35

life at sea. Barker referred to his mentor as “my nautical father,” and this relationship had a special warmth and intensity because (unlike an apprenticeship on shore) it was voluntary and informal, an adoption into the company of shipmates as much as an initiation into a new world of work. A sailor might hail from almost anywhere in the world, although the preponderance of most Navy crews would have been from the British Isles. The community of shipmates did not replace the dozens of distinct regional dialects and provincial origins of a crew. Rather, it added a new, common speech: sea talk. At one level this was simply the shared language of sails, ropes, yards, masts, and anchors that formed the common work environment.29 More broadly, of course, sea talk described a whole world of experience: it was exuberant, and its scope was total, encompassing every aspect of life from food to fate. For the initiate, of course, sea talk was an art form. It was simultaneously a highly precise and efficient way of issuing reports and commands on a ship at sea, and a delightful way to mystify outsiders. Jargon was a message, as well as a medium: it delimited the boundaries of the authentic maritime, and it confirmed its practitioners as “real seamen”—whatever other languages they happened to speak.30 One could take Charles Bretherton Jr.’s engraving of 1772 as an emblem of this attitude: it shows a sailor riding a horse that he has rigged like a ship.31 Devotion to shipmates implied that all prior loyalties ceased to matter at sea. As I noted in the previous chapter, some historians have written as if this were the case. Regional and ethnic identities, however, did not disappear. Neither did differences in language. Robert Hay marveled at the Babel-like “hubub” aboard his first man o’ war: “Irish, Welsh, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Swedish, Italian and all the provincial dialects which prevail between Landsend and John O’Groats.”32 Rambling Jack spent his early childhood at Plymouth and was sent to sea for disobedience at the age of eight, but he remained a “West-country-man” to the end. He refers to one important character in his memoir only as “the North Cuntry man” (from Newcastle), while a Cornish man was recognized, even half a world away in the city of Boston, as “my countryman.”33 Sailors distinguished between English, Irish, Welsh, and Scottish shipmates, and took note of Germans, Danes, lascars, mulattoes, and “men of colour.” They made jokes about ethnic or regional backgrounds, gave each other nicknames, and sometimes came to blows over them.34 Amid Hay’s Babel of tongues, he also heard “poetical effusions … mutterings, execrations, songs, jests, and laughter.”35 Music was everpresent at sea: the piping or beating of particular tunes announced

36


meals, assemblies, punishments, and the daily rhythm of labor. Officers prized a good singer as a boost to morale. Music played an important role in warding off pain, melancholy, and boredom. William Robinson remarked on the role of “nautical wit” in keeping sailors’ spirits high. This humor sometimes had a rueful side, as in the joke about the ship that would never reach its home port because the wives “had not got hold of the tow-rope”—they were amusing themselves with other men and were not eager to see their husbands just yet.36 Wordplay was one of the most popular forms of humor among sailors, encompassing everything from swearing (and other ostentatiously foul language) to elaborate puns.37 Indulging in alcohol at sea was a more hazardous form of entertainment. It could compromise the health of a crew, impair the competence of sailors on duty, and disturb the harmony of men who would necessarily live at close quarters. Eliminating alcohol altogether, however, remained unthinkable. It formed part of the medical pharmacopoeia, and many people viewed it as an important article of diet as well. One authority suggested that since the disease of scurvy seemed to kick in when the beer supply ran out, beer itself was the obvious nutritional remedy. In a more sentimental vein, homesick sailors saved up their brandy so that they could celebrate holidays “like Christians.” No wonder that stopping the grog ration (a mixture of brandy and water) was a punishment that many considered worse than flogging. Despite the occasional challenge to authority posed by drunken sailors, manipulating the alcohol supply figured prominently in the short list of rewards and sanctions available to a sea captain.38 Even a paternalist captain like James Cook, who won a medal from the Royal Society for his exceptional care of his crews and his meticulous attention to their health and nutritional needs, was unable to dispense with the grog ration. He preferred to tolerate the disruptive influences that arose from it, ordering floggings for drunkenness and for the theft of liquor, not to mention additional floggings for insubordination or neglect of duty, some of which undoubtedly occurred under the influence of strong drink.39 On his first Pacific voyage, Cook recorded how one of his sailors actually killed himself with alcohol: Fresh gales and Clowdy with rain on the latter part. At 10. AM, departed this life Jno Radon Boatswains Mate, his death was occasioned by the Boatswain, out of mere good nature, giving him part of a Bottle of rum last night, which it is supposed he drank all at once, he was


37

found to be very much in Liquor last night, but as this was no more than what was common with him when he could get any, no farther notice was taken of him then to put him to Bed where this morning about 8 oClock he was found speechless and past recovery.40

Cook’s laconic summary of how his boatswain’s mate died offers little further insight on the topic of responsibility. The bottle of rum had been passed “out of mere good nature.” Nor did the ship’s company, who “put him to Bed” and forgot about him, engage in much soulsearching. Cook’s journal even makes the man who put the bottle to his lips and drained it appear as a sort of bystander at his own suicide, a drunkard whose past behavior afforded comic relief and then, unaccountably, resulted in death. To a degree, Cook’s log reflected the fatalism that was popular with seafarers of all sorts. Samuel Leech declared: “Little thought, indeed, does your true tar take of the morrow.”41 Sailors believed they should laugh at misfortune, and much of their humor reflected this imperative. A sailor whose legs were amputated exclaims “to the devil with all the shoemakers!” and the man who had lost one eye would “never see double again,” so he could drink all the liquor he desired.42 The claim to toughness was inseparable from one’s status as a “real” sailor. Leech noted with disapproval the belief held by many of his shipmates that “swearing and drinking are necessary accomplishments in a genuine man-of-war’s-man.”43 Matthew Barker, writing against the temperance movement in the Navy, insisted that the “ardent spirits” contained in liquor and the virile courage that animated Jack Tar were one and the same thing.44 Not surprisingly, “authentic” sailors were also experienced and skilled at their work. Matthew Barker describes sailors who could run out upon the yards, keeping their balance high above the deck, “as if they were hanging on by their eyelids!” Rambling Jack called such men “artists.”45 Yet the education of a seaman was cultural as well as vocational. Without exception, the autobiographers believed that certain values and behaviors were absorbed along with “learning the ropes.” This is particularly evident in their descriptions of landsmen volunteers, or conscripts (such as the Lord Mayor’s men), otherwise known as the “King’s hard bargains.” Such men are portrayed as unintelligent and dishonest, “just fit to sweep the deck,” ne’er-do-wells who smuggled and stole. Samuel Kelly was embarrassed by shipmates who walked out of a Jamaican tavern with the glasses from which they had been drinking. Men like that had “never learnt manners in a man-of-war.”46

38


Once the crew accepted the new man as a true shipmate, he enjoyed membership in a proud, tight-knit community. The bond between shipmates lasted long after a crew had been paid off. The autobiographers’ descriptions of battle help to explain this apparent contradiction: they combine a fierce dedication to cooperation and fulfilling one’s duty, with a much weaker sense of country, King, or cause. Loyalty to a “good” (respected) officer was common, but the highest loyalty was to one’s own shipmates. Jack Cremer related how “we all turned freemasons” on one occasion to protect a shipmate from the captain.47 The bond of secrecy helped to maintain cohesion and loyalty within the group.48 Those who fell within the circle of “shipmates” were entitled to a degree of generosity and kindness that amazed outsiders.49 Bechervaise, in particular, dwelt on the intense homosocial bond between shipmates, whose “intimacy,” he claimed, was “more powerful, more lasting, than among any other class of men,” and whose reunions on shore resembled those of longseparated lovers: “Observe the grasp of each other’s hand; the delight that glows on their countenances as each looks at the other.”50 Of course, facing death together was the most powerful catalyst for forming bonds of trust and affection between shipmates. Charles Pemberton described the sounds and sensations of combat at sea, the “clattering of ropes, and grumbling of blocks”51 not to mention the hellish fury of the cannon: “ ‘Fire!’—and a thousand pounds of iron is rained from her twenty-three sulphur fountains; round-shot, grape, and canister, all hissing and banging together; the huge bulk recoils, and every mast, rib, and beam in her quakes at the thundering weight of the blow she has given.”52 A “true British seaman” displayed courage in the face of danger, and an indifference to the consequences, even if the odds were plainly against him. In the face of death, many of Leech’s shipmates refused to pray, but would only curse into the storm. Sailors who prided themselves on their courage and toughness felt profound shame if they were ever made to appear less than heroic. Jack Cremer explained his fight with two officers on shore with the blunt remark: “[H]e is not an Englishman who will part with his hoar, if first come.”53 The culture of toughness—swearing, drinking, fighting, and taking punishment—figured prominently in a seaman’s education. A boatswain told the young Jacob Nagle that he would become a man-o’-war’s man once he had received three dozen lashes with the cat-o’-nine-tails, “and not before.”54 Despite his vigor and resourcefulness, Jack Tar cultivated fatalism until it was almost an art form. Rather than seeking solutions, sailors learned to feel pride in their


39

ability to “take it,” whether the “it” in question was flogging, privation, or danger. The Royal Navy’s difficulty in obtaining willing recruits tells its own story. Resistance to the press gang was common. When that failed, conscripts often deserted at the first opportunity, obliging the Navy to send out fresh press gangs in search of replacements. The Navy was not above negotiating with shipowners, merchants, and community leaders, urging them to keep the peace by offering cash bonuses to any seafarer who would volunteer.55 This effort at conciliation illustrates the political costs of the alternative, a “hot press” that would involve pursuit through the streets, confrontation with angry crowds, and civilian casualties. Many sailors relished these encounters. The mad chases and rough-and-tumble clashes with the press gang served as another rite of passage in the maritime fraternity, although sailors also liked to brag about their skill at assuming disguises that might fool the gang’s informers. The extravagant promenades and verbal displays undertaken by sailors in port constituted yet another form of defiance, particularly since such taunts might precede, or precipitate, another round of combat with the gang. This dance of evasion and confrontation is the subject of the next section.

Street Smart: Talking Back to the Press Gang There were many descriptions of how sailors appeared on shore. Here is a representative example: When left to himself at sea, [the sailor] becomes careless of his person, dirty and indolent. When on shore, however, few like to appear smarter.—A blue jacket, silk handkerchief round the neck, white trousers, and silver buckles, shew him off to the best advantage. Happy then in his mistress, fiddle, and grog, Jack Tar cares not a fig for the rest of the world.56

Commentators vacillated between this image of a carefree exhibitionist and the prudent, deferential subordinate who would freely choose to serve in the Royal Navy in anticipation of Greenwich Hospital and a share of prize money. Perhaps this is not such a paradox; as I suggested in the last chapter, sailors knew a variety of roles and could shift between them when they thought it appropriate. They knew how to play the part of “Jack in Port.” What is less well known is that when the need

40


arose, they proved quite capable of dropping the act, shedding the distinctive clothes, and adopting civilian camouflage. John Nicol, seeking to evade the press gang, assumed a new identity. He wore “long clothes” instead of the outfit he wore at sea. He bribed an officer at the Custom House for the loan of a cocked hat, powdered wig, and long gilt-headed cane. At the inn I called for a pint of wine, pens and ink, and was busy writing any nonsense that came in my head until the coach set off. All these precautions were necessary. Had the waterman suspected me to be a sailor, he would have informed the press-gang in one minute. The waiters at the inn would have done the same.57

Nicol was not the only sailor with a knack for disguise. While in the Royal Navy, John Bechervaise kept a set of “gentleman’s” clothes for shore leave, which he wore whenever he got the chance, and wrote gleefully that he was never once made to “suffer” for it.58 Given that press gangs were paid a bounty for each sailor they captured, these impostures would have failed quickly if they had consisted of nothing more than a simple change of clothes. Supposedly, Jack Tar had “sea legs”; this distinctive rolling gait could be spotted at some distance, even before bystanders could hear the bizarre nautical jargon spouting from his lips. Yet Nicol and Bechervaise were, obviously, capable of suppressing both of these habits. When they chose to, they knew how to blend in. Similarly, George Irwin jumped ship in the Thames to escape impressment and ended up working as a gardener in Highgate for an entire summer before finally being turned in by an informer.59 Jack Tar, then, was a skilled chameleon. Yet, at the same time, we are left with the undeniable appearance of separateness. If commentators came away with the impression that Jack Tar was a “man apart,” it is probably because sailors—when they were not in hiding —behaved in ways that seemed to justify that conclusion. It helped that sailors on shore liked to move in groups, and they contrived to dress alike. There were no standard-issue uniforms for common seamen in the Royal Navy until the middle of the nineteenth century, but sailors improvised an outfit for themselves that ensured that they would stand out on shore.60 The basic elements of this costume were chosen with practical needs in mind—sailors wore comfortable trousers rather than tight-fitting breeches, and preferred short jackets to long coats on similar grounds. But in port, where no one would send them aloft to work in the rigging, they chose to dress in this


41

outlandish manner as well. The “shore-going rig” was an expensive version of these work clothes that Jack Tar kept clean and dry for his promenades on shore. The autobiographies contain a number of loving, and sometimes lengthy, descriptions of these extravagant outfits. They were meticulously accessorized with silver buckles, brass buttons, colored tape, and ribbons to decorate the hat. The same informal “uniform”—white trousers, a blue jacket, a red waistcoat, and a straw hat—prevailed from the Seven Years’ War through the Napoleonic era. It was variations in small details that made the difference: perhaps striped pants or a neckcloth artfully arranged to look artless.61 Charles McPherson recorded how “we sallied through the town in a body, all dressed in white trowsers, white shirts or frocks, and straw hats with black ribbons on them.”62 While it is true that the purchase of “slops” sold by a particular ship’s purser might create a degree of accidental homogeneity among that crew, there was nothing sloppy or accidental about the way sailors looked when they promenaded on shore.63 In the absence of standard-issue uniforms, this level of coordination could not happen by accident. McPherson’s shipmates had gone to some trouble, and even some expense, to arrange this eye-catching display. Was this not making the press gang’s job easy? If the walk, the talk, and the flashy outfits were all—to some degree—artful affectations, for whose benefit were they orchestrated? There are many possible answers to this question, and individual sailors may well have understood its purpose in different ways. Setting a high standard of conformity would have been a way to patrol the borders of group membership. Just as the Marine Society boys were rejected by their new shipmates until they had adopted the correct clothes, fresh conscripts and other newcomers could be expected to master a particular speech, stance, and style before acquiring full acceptance as “authentic” seamen. When Jack Tar opened his mouth, he took pains to sound as if he were a new arrival from another world. Most occupations had a special jargon peculiar to their work and their daily descriptive needs. What contemporaries found so striking about sailors is not that they possessed such a cant or jargon, but that they insisted on using it in inappropriate social contexts. This was not simply a matter of using a few colorful metaphors (like calling an attractive woman “well-rigged” or a “fast going clipper”); sailors insisted on systematically replacing common nouns and verbs with uncommon, and often unlikely, maritime referents. When in port, Jack Tar would “set sail” for the tavern around the corner. He nauticalized his own body to the point

42


of absurdity, referring to his arms as “fins” or “flippers.” A passage from Tobias Smollett’s 1748 novel Roderick Random shows how far this could be taken. Here, a sailor is describing an ailing man: “His starboard eye is open, but fast jammed in his head; and the haulyards of his under jaw are giving way.”64 Thomas Trotter, a naval surgeon who published the authoritative work Medicina Nautica in 1797, devoted a lengthy passage to an analysis of this verbal art. The sailor’s “conversation, commonly, turns upon his own profession, and his animadversions are almost confined to a ship, her various properties, such as sailing, rigging, &c.” To achieve this, Jack Tar filled his “narrations ... full of hyperboles similies and comparisons.” 65 The naval surgeon interpreted this habit (which he called “translation”) as an expression of pride. When they applied “the language of seamanship to every transaction of life” with a “pedantic ostentation,” Trotter explained, this showed how they looked upon “all landmen, as beings of an inferior order.”66 The sailor Matthew Barker demonstrated how this could work in a long passage that, tellingly, begins with a self-correction: Jack Junk was a man-of-war’s man every inch of him. He was brought to bed—no, no, I mean born in an arm-chest, cradled in a frigate, rocked by the billows, and nursed by the captain of the forecastle.67

Telling it like a sailor meant speaking as if you had never encountered such a thing as a “bed.” The community of shipmates was so selfsufficient that it boasted it was capable of reproducing itself, as the strange reference to a man “nursing” Jack indicates. Trotter was right to characterize extravagant sea talk as a form of “ostentation.” Simple ostentation is unlikely to be the full explanation, however. These displays were enacted on the street, and it is difficult to imagine them without that urban setting to act as a stage and to supply an audience of onlookers. The dazzling processions in port may have served as a courtship ritual to catch the admiring attention of the right lasses (or lads). Not all onlookers would have been benign or admiring, of course. The press gang was a perennial problem, and it is not immediately obvious how to reconcile the fascination with disguise and evasion with the unmistakable outfits that actually advertised the sailor’s identity and his presence. “Sallying through the town” in groups, as McPherson and his shipmates did, would have lessened the danger to some extent; if you and your friends outnumbered


43

the gang, the hated “body snatchers” might shy away from a fight. However, they might also go and obtain reinforcements. Perhaps sailors did not care whether they were caught or not. Yet there are many anecdotes about the extreme measures that Jack Tar would take in order to foil the gang, including evasion, desperate resistance, and hand-to-hand combat. A carpenter in Hull leapt out of a window to escape the press gang.68 William Robinson could not resist leading the press gang a merry chase even though he had legitimate papers: [B]eing aware that a press-gang was lurking about that neighborhood, I felt very much inclined to give them a little trouble: I had gone nearly through the town unobserved by them; but at length the alarm was given, that a sailor was making good his way in full sail toward London; when two members of that worthless set of body snatchers set out in pursuit. I could, by keeping a good look-out, observe their movements, and I walked sharply on; they commenced running, I did the same, and kept well on until I arrived at an inn by the road-side, where I thought proper to stop, and let them come up with me; I did not take any notice of them, nor shew any appearance of alarm; but, supposing I was a prize, one of them grappled me on the starboard, and the other on the larboard side, by the collar of my jacket, demanding the name of the ship I belonged to; when on coolly shewing them my liberty ticket, they showered a broadside of curses on me for giving them such a run, and quietly left me to pursue my journey.69

It is fair to say, at minimum, that conspicuous processions of sailors constituted a taunt directed at the press gang. The “louder” or more ostentatious Jack Tar was—in speech, in staggering (or swaggering) sea-legged gait, and in bright-colored clothing—the bolder the challenge would appear. Here, it is easy to imagine multiple audiences for the display. The chases through the streets, and the sometimes violent clashes between sailors and press gangs, were witnessed by many onlookers in the port city. Likewise, when Jack Tar came out to flaunt his defiance, he did so in front of what he hoped was an appreciative and supportive public. From the Isle of Man to Liverpool, Hull, and London, crowds often took the sailor’s defiance as their cue to step in and back him up. This interpretive insight may also offer a new way to approach what Trotter called the “pedantic” habit of translation. If the press gang or its paid informers might be listening in, using any nautical jargon whatsoever might put you at risk. Consider this lengthy oration, “The

44


Sailor’s Description of a Hunting,” an anonymous prose passage that was published in The Jovial Songster, or Sailor’s Delight in 1792. Going to see my father the other day, he ax’d me to take a voyage a hunting with him—so when the swabber had rigg’d the horses, they brought me one to stow myself on board of, that they told me was in such right and tight trim, she would go as fast upon any tack as a Folkstone Cutter; so I got up aloft and clapt myself athwart ship, this’n, and made as much way as the best on ‘um—and to the windward of a gravel-pit we espied a hare at anchor; so she weighed and bore away, and just as I had over-taken her, my horse came bump ashore upon a stone, the back stay broke, she pitch’d me over the forecastle, came keel upwards, and unshipp’d my shoulder, and damme if I ever set sail on a land privateering again.70

The reference to the “hare at anchor” is mildly amusing, but it is interesting to read this long passage not so much as a comic recitation, but as a defiant performance in a crowded tavern near the docks, which might be interrupted at any moment by the press gang. Spinning a yarn about a battle or storm at sea would have required all the nautical language. Instead, a hunting expedition on land is chosen for the topic, thus making every piece of jargon “louder” and more obviously deliberate. Far-fetched metaphors like the horse’s “forecastle” or the sailor’s “unshipped” shoulder were not especially witty in themselves, but the real point was to demonstrate courage by prolonging the recitation. Only the best, and bravest, could sustain the longest translations (and then, perhaps, stand and fight, or outrun the gang). Sailors, who were street-smart and equally skilled at both camouflage and ostentation, drew attention to themselves not because they could not help looking and sounding different, but because they set out deliberately to impress the denizens of sailortown with their courage. Strutting, noisy processions in port cities formed one of the rites of passage, marking membership in the proud, tough maritime fraternity.

The American Stranger: Jack Tar as Misogynist Like the other behaviors discussed in this chapter, Jack Tar’s promiscuity should not be understood simply as a natural urge seeking an immediate outlet when his ship arrived in port, akin to binge drinking after weeks or months of tight rationing. Everything that takes place in an urban environment is, more or less, for public consumption as well. It is worth asking what message Jack’s pursuit of women sent


45

to bystanders and onlookers. The legal and social consequences of a sodomy accusation had grown much more serious over the course of the eighteenth century. The earlier model of the male libertine, with a prostitute on one arm and a catamite (young boy) on the other, had been replaced by a rigorous division of all males into a homosexual minority and a self-consciously heterosexual majority. The new, heterosexual identity required that a man prove his exclusive interest in women; beginning around 1730, sodomy became a favorite pretext for blackmailers. If, as Randolph Trumbach has argued, every male now needed to demonstrate an exclusive sexual interest in women in some public way, no one was in a worse position than Jack Tar. 71 His occupation made him automatically suspect, and for weeks or possibly months at a time he had no chance to engage in these heterosexual displays. Concerning seamen one and all, When they first come on shore, The first thing is a public house, Where they can find a whore.72

In fact, sailors did not even wait that long, as the prevalence of “bumboats” in harbors like Portsmouth illustrates. Jack Tar’s libertinism, then, should not be understood as a timeless quality of the roving seafarer but as a historically specific phenomenon. The newly sharp dichotomy between heterosexuals and the widely despised “molly” alternative prompted a celebration of the male “need” for penetrative, procreative sex. Fastidious captains who permitted only the wives of sailors to board the ship found that a surprisingly large proportion of the crew pronounced themselves married. In the words of the song: Just Comeing from Sea, Our Spouses and wee, we punch it, we punch it, we punch it, we punch it, we punch it a Board with Couragio, Wee Sing Laugh and Cling and in Hammocks we Swing, and Hay, Hay, Hay, Hay, Hay my brave boys Bonviagio.73

When combined with a plebeian libertine ethos that increasingly ignored the traditional checks on intercourse outside of marriage, the result was a nationwide plague of unwanted pregnancies.74

46


Sailortown, for those who did not have to live in it, often appeared to be a joyous place where the party never ended. Pierce Egan exulted in this freedom, praising the way that the dancers at ALLMAX, in London’s East End, “paired off ” not in accordance with social convention, but entirely “according to fancy.” His famous and much-quoted list of the participants implied many different kinds of mixture: “lascars, blacks, jack tars, coal-heavers, dustmen, women of colour, old and young, and a sprinkling of the remnants of once fine girls.” 75 Egan admired what he took to be a harmonious plebeian community organized around the pursuit of pleasure. Since Egan, a well-connected socialite, was slumming and would not stay, he did not have to confront the less egalitarian power dynamics of sailortown. One “merry” night could have particularly serious consequences for a woman. The line between a blossoming beauty and one of Egan’s “once fine girls” was alarmingly slim. The libertine ethos that so many sailors embraced tended to have misogynist overtones. A song entitled “The Sailor’s Resolution,” which was published in 1797, has this refrain: “Woman ne’er shall conquer me.” The song contrasts the freedom of bachelorhood (and by extension, the roving sea life) with the “tyranny” of female dominance. The possibility of an equal partnership in marriage is not contemplated. Instead, “he that lets a woman him controul/Ne’er must enjoy his bowl.” Marriage means surrendering male prerogatives such as the bowl of punch, itself a symbol of autonomy and masculine conviviality. The following stanzas relate a series of disappointments with women. The first proved to be “an arrant scold”; the second was a beauty, but the sort who might “prove common” and cuckold her husband (leaving him to “wear the horns”); the third was “proud” and “tugging for the breeches.” These familiar misogynist tropes, similar to those described by Anna Clark in her study of plebeian sexual politics, lead the song to its climax, a description of the sailor’s gravestone: Here lies one that ne’er was tied To any proud ambitious bride; Reason was his rule and guide, Free he liv’d, and free he died.76

Women could join the party at ALL-MAX, but it is difficult to see how a woman could concur with this particular definition of liberty. Indeed, there was often an inverse relationship between male sexual freedom and a woman’s well-being. “Gone to sea” and “impressed” were among the most common responses recorded by the Foundling


47

Hospital to questions about the father’s whereabouts.77 No wonder a song offered this advice: Come all you pretty fair maids, a warning take by me: Never trust a sailor boy one inch above your knee.78

Jack Tar’s “merry life” was the theme of many songs and ballads. Debates between mothers and daughters, as in the song “Tarry Trousers,” took note of the “jolly sailor” with his “roving” lifestyle.79 Another song, “The Newfoundland Sailor,” spells this out in excruciating detail, emphasizing Jack Tar’s pleasure in taking what he wants and leaving his lover to pay the consequences. As a Newfoundland Sailor was walking in the Strand, He met a pretty fair maid and took her by the hand. Will you go to Newfoundland, fair maid, he did cry, But all her answer was, Oh! no, not I, my love, Oh! no, not I!80

The premise of the song (drummed in by the “no, not I” chorus) is that the woman considers herself too socially elevated to marry a sailor. This is meant to excuse the unalloyed delight at her “overthrow.” In later stanzas, we are invited to watch the progress as her belly swells week by week. When she sends for the Newfoundland sailor, his response goes far beyond a simple refusal: If I should marry you, folks would think I was mad, What pleasure can I have more than what I’ve had; When I asked you to marry, you did me deny, And answer me scornfully, Oh! no, not I, my love, Oh! no, not I! The very best thing I can advise you to do, Is to take your baby on your back, and a begging you may go, And when you are weary, pray sit down and cry, And curse the very hour you said, Oh! no, not I, my love, Oh! no, not I!

She humiliated him, but he has left her an utter outcast, evidently rejected by her family as damaged goods, uncertain where her next meal is coming from. A man and a woman could each freely enter into a sexual relationship, but the consequences after that point diverged brutally. Similar lyrics could have been penned about a man from any occupation, but his seafaring life and North American origin marked him as someone who enjoyed the characteristic male prerogatives in spades. As

48


a sailor, he could expect freedom of movement, and comparatively few social repercussions or community retribution for sexual escapades. Sailors themselves might escape unscathed, although feeling compelled to rush after the first available prostitute often led Jack into places where he could be robbed. Losing one’s possessions was not the worst of it, as these lyrics suggest: When poor Jack awoke, and found that she was missing, He said damn this whore, she’s made me pay for kissing, She’s pox’d me, which is ten times worse, Surely I lie under a curse.81

There was, in fact, an extremely high incidence of venereal disease among sailors.82 A “herd of quacks and itinerant practitioners” thronged to the waterfront, charging sailors as much as five guineas, generally for ineffective remedies. Naval surgeons became quite expert in treating the symptoms of such diseases, if not at curing them; one claimed that many sailors actually joined the Royal Navy simply to obtain some relief.83 Decades before Manchester gained renown as a “shock city” and emblem of the age, Portsmouth and other naval stations ranked not far behind London as reputed dens of iniquity. At best, they were cities of strangers, and it was difficult to know if anyone could be trusted. In his autobiography, Robert Hay painted a disturbing picture of the waterfront as a deceptive and predatory world: Watermen’s skifs, Merchantmen’s yawls, War-ships, Launches, Pinnaces, cutters, gigs, etc., were every moment landing. Porters were trudging along under their ponderous burdens, Women of pleasure flirting about in all directions watching for their prey, jews stalking about with hypocritical gravity hunting for dupes.84

The historian Daniel Vickers put it more succinctly: sailortown was “long on character but short on community.”85 Undoubtedly, Jack Tar presented an appealing target. The threat came from women and from men, but it was women who were singled out as the real threat to the fruits of Jack’s liberty, starting with his money. This could take the form of coy requests, like that of the young woman in the song “Portsmouth Jack”: “If I go with you, kind Sir, I must be marry’d:/And if I go with you, kind Sir, I must drink claret.”86 Similarly, in “The Sailor’s Return,” the whore “can’t drink common beer” and demands (expensive) wine and


49

punch. Ships newly arrived in port would be immediately besieged by fleets of bum-boats (or “bomb-boats”) selling a variety of goods at extremely inflated prices. The object of these enterprising vendors was to make as much money as possible from the sailors before they had a chance to spend it on shore. Sometimes these “bum-boat women” would actually set up shops and stalls on deck. These waterfront peddlers were known for selling questionable merchandise, including watches that did not work and rings that were not pure gold. Bumboat women would sometimes extend lines of credit to seamen, and appear on board as soon as the ship returned to collect their cut from the sailor’s pay.87 Making purchases on credit at inflated prices left sailors with a serious debt problem. The consequences of debt could be quite serious. They left seamen at the mercy of “crimps,” publicans, or lodging-house keepers who would sell the sailor’s services to a merchant captain, or a press gang, in return for a commission. Many men participated in this waterfront culture, selling shoddy goods and encouraging sailors to run up debts, but a humorous print of 1811, “Jack in a White Squall,” shows a sailor surrounded by angry, shouting, and exclusively female creditors: a gin-shop keeper points to a reckoning chalked on the wall of her shop, a landlady waves a long bill enumerating his debts, and a younger woman is about to bring a fiddle crashing down on his head (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 “Jack in a White Squall.”

50


In the background, a night watchman approaches with his rattle, drawn by the tumult. Jack meets our gaze and addresses us directly: “What a squall, how it whistles through the ratlines; I must brail up, and scud under bare poles.” He is in trouble, but his fanciful and inappropriate nautical “translation”—the speech of the women is a howling but inarticulate wind in his ears—makes their demands for money, and even their personhood, seem trivial. His verbal art finds a form of humor in the awkward situation, but it is also an expression of estrangement; he doesn’t want to be there, and weathering this particular storm may well involve walking away with his debts unpaid. It was particularly easy for sailors to make promises and then disappear. In songs, sailors on their way out the door frequently try to buy off indignant women with a “handful of gold” to care for the child. In “The Basket of Eggs,” a woman left penniless and pregnant by a sailor later tricks him into walking off with the baby in a basket. When he offers fifty guineas to anyone who will take this unexpected burden off his hands, she steps forward, accepts the money, and tells him who the father was!88 Beneath the libertine bravado of sailors in port, we can also discern a deep anxiety about women turning the tables and somehow playing the libertine themselves. One of the well-known sea songs in this period was “The Sailor’s Will and His Power,” referring to the last will and testament plus a power of attorney, which sailors could leave with their loved ones before embarking on a voyage. The song begins in a hackneyed sentimental vein with a tearful farewell at the dock, but after four-and-a-half stanzas of tender lover’s talk the sailor finally leaves, at which point Molly exclaims: There he goes! that’s a good job; He’s [been gone] this quarter of an hour: My eyes! that the bullets may scuttle his nob, For I have his Will and his Power.89

In “The Distracted Sailor’s Complaint,” a seaman is so upset to find his sweetheart has married someone else in his absence (even after they had broken a gold coin together, a traditional plebeian pledge of marriage) that he has to be committed to Bedlam and kept in chains.90 This appears to be a double standard, but sailors themselves justified their inconstancy by dwelling on the certitude that women were already being unfaithful to them: “From all your Joys set free,/She’ll get another Love,/To enjoy her fair Body.”91


51

Misogynist feelings were particularly strong against “gallows whores” who could leave the sailor diseased and penniless. “Rounding the Horn,” a sea song praising the women of Valparaiso in South America, makes this rueful comparison: They love a jolly sailor when he spends his money free; They’ll laugh and sing and merry, merry be, and have a jovial spree. And when your money is all gone, they won’t on you impose; They are not like the Plymouth girls that’ll pawn and sell your clothes.92

Theft could make up an important supplement to a sex worker’s income; typically, a prostitute who did not steal would remain quite poor.93 This fact provides some context for a cryptic, vaguely supernatural song called “The Maid on the Shore.” The maid is a siren-like creature who boards a ship and is seemingly at the mercy of an entire crew of amorous sailors. She lulls them all to sleep with a bewitching song, and then robs them blind. Once she has escaped from the ship, she taunts the sailors from a place of safety, remarking that she is still “the maid on the shore.”94 Anxieties about women, sex, disease, and betrayal blurred together. Many sailors, convinced that they were about to be victimized, did not hesitate to become victimizers themselves, and their songs did not always discriminate between one sort of woman and another, as if women—collectively—were the enemy. “The Sailor’s Advice to his Brother Sailors” predicted that while Jack Tar fought for his country at sea, his sweetheart would be “unconstant”; “The Sailor’s Return” spoke of beating up women that lied and stole.95 It was hard to settle a score with the Admiralty or with the Crown, but Jack Tar could mete out his own form of rough justice against the women of sailortown. Jacob Nagle related, with glee, how his friend was robbed by a whore in London, but Nagle successfully turned the tables on the thief by discovering where she hid her money and cleaning her out entirely. Next, he got another sailor to masquerade as a constable and frighten her into admitting her guilt by “arresting” her. Nagle returned everything he had taken except what belonged to his friend, but a number of sea songs praised the cleverness of sailors who simply rob women and run for it. “If you meet with a girl that’s kind and free,” as one song put it, “she’ll do a wiggle and you must do the same.”96 It became conventional to write about relationships in port as if they were all characterized by heartlessness, but intimacy left broken

52


promises and emotional scars that were not always acknowledged by the racy bravado of the sailortown culture. The double-edged nature of port life is captured in a song entitled “American Stranger.” It begins: I am a stranger in this country, from America I came, Here is none that knows me nor can tell my name.97

The stranger strikes a wistful note. Friendless, he is potentially a victim, but perhaps instead he is a villain who has left his misdeeds behind him, and plans to repeat the process. Later stanzas show the stranger protesting his loyalty, but then, it seems, gleefully confessing sotto voce his serial infidelity: Some say I am rakish and some say I’m wild, Some say I’m shifty my friends to beguile, But to prove myself loyal you shall come along with me, And I’ll take you to America my darling to be. Give my love to Polly, she’s the girl I adore, Likewise to my Susan, altho’ she is poor, Give my love to Betsy, she’s my joy and delight, I’ll clasp her in my arms on a cold frosty night.

At this point, of course, even his American origin is up for question. The pressures of war, conscription, and urban growth only lengthened the tally of wrecked marriages, abandoned lovers, and inconvenient pregnancies. There was also outright violence against women. Sometimes this took custom-bound and carefully circumscribed forms, as when the sailors exacting revenge on a bawdy house in 1749 refused to allow anyone to steal the furniture. It had to be burned in the street. A desire to publicly humiliate, but not to physically injure, is apparent in the punishment of “docking,” which sailors inflicted on prostitutes whom they blamed for infecting them with venereal disease. Docking meant “cutting off all their clothes, petticoat, shift and all, close to their stays, and then turning them into the street.”98 However, a steady diet of misogynist song and story primed sailors to vent their fury on women, sometimes at a slight provocation, and on other occasions simply because they were upset about something else. One day in June 1815, Thomas Bedworth sat brooding and talking to himself, clutching a knife or razor until his hand bled, making threats against the son of Elizabeth Beesmore, the married


53

woman with whom he “cohabited.” He also had some form of grievance against the Navy, since he threw his pension ticket into the fire. Bedworth took out his rage against neither the son nor the Navy, but on the woman who lived with him. He locked her head under his arm and cut her throat with a “shoemaker’s knife,” applying so much force that only a finger’s breadth of tissue remained connecting her head to her body.99 A woman who confirmed a sailor’s worst suspicions about her fidelity often found herself in the middle of a dangerous altercation when he returned from sea. Susannah Dell was married to a sailor, John Dell, who returned from half a year’s absence at sea to find her living with another man, Bob Anderson. Reputedly, “she liked one as well as the other.” The three attempted a sort of coexistence for a time, but on May 8, 1792, the two men came to blows, and Susannah, who was trying to protect her husband, was mortally wounded with Bob’s knife. On the witness stand in his murder trial, Bob Anderson stated that John Dell “went and laid with a common prostitute the very night his wife was buried, and lives with her now.” Dell did not rise to dispute this allegation. He may even have felt that this flamboyant act, dishonoring the memory of the woman who had just died trying to save his life, was a fit recompense for her sexual infidelity.100 On 12 May 1811, John Colley returned from a month at sea and exclaimed: “Here I come, it is my wedding day and I am come to make a murdering day of it.” With those words he plunged a knife into his wife’s bowels, fatally wounding her. He then attempted to kill Thomas Ferguson, another sailor, who reputedly had been living with his wife for some time. A long procession of witnesses appeared at Colley’s murder trial to relate how he was “melancholy” or “a man comical in his senses,” who was given to pacing on the deck, muttering, and avoiding the company of his shipmates. On an East India voyage five years earlier, he had been discovered attempting suicide. When the ship’s surgeon, “with great difficulty,” sewed up the gash Colley had made in his own neck, the distracted man spent most of the night trying to reopen his own wound and had to be watched closely. Colley himself admitted at the trial that he was “troubled with fits” and had “a fracture on my skull.” He added pointedly, however, that if he had been “out of his mind at times,” it was from the mistreatment he had suffered at the hands of his wife and Ferguson. The witnesses, and ultimately the jury, seem to have agreed with him that murderous violence directed against this woman was excusable; he was acquitted as “insane at the time.”101

54


Such sensational court cases obscure, to some extent, the larger patterns of daily violence and abuse directed against women in port cities. For example, the sailor John Taylor stalked a married woman named Sarah Wood, importuning her again and again to “go with him” to a ship in the harbor. We only know about his persistent and intrusive behavior over a period of five months because finally he stabbed her after one of her refusals. She survived the wound, and testified at his trial that she “always kept myself with the greatest distance from him” and “always refused” his requests. Taylor, however, was convinced in his own mind that “she promised to go down with me on board an Indiaman” and that “she asked me to get her things out,” presumably from her husband’s house. If Taylor had not been so foolish as to assault her in the presence of witnesses, the case might never had ended up in court. Even with eyewitness support, Sarah Wood was subjected to a stern and skeptical line of questioning about her drinking, employment, and other habits.102 The dramatic incidents that I have recounted were, surely, far outnumbered by unreported cases of violence and particularly of rape. For women, bringing an accusation of rape before a court was an expensive and not very promising proposition. Judges were unsympathetic at best, and often cast aspersions on the virtue or conduct of the accuser. A more effective sanction was community action against the transgressor; as with sodomy cases, the angry mob waiting outside the courtroom posed a more serious threat than the judge’s verdict.103 It was precisely this sanction, in which acquaintances or kin exercised their powers outside of the law, that was absent or attenuated in the sprawling port cities where so many strangers, “American” and otherwise, crossed paths.

Conclusion I am not, of course, suggesting that song titles like “The American Stranger” or “The Newfoundland Sailor” were entirely fictional, or fanciful; maritime workers did come to Britain from all corners of the globe. What I have shown in this chapter, however, is that many British-born seamen chose to position themselves, and often viewed themselves, as strangers in a strange land. Floating free from the constraints of kinship, custom, and their community of birth, sailors considered themselves foreign even if they had only journeyed a short distance, and acted as if their behavior had no consequences. Treated roughly by the press gang, and fresh from the dangerous sea, they may have felt entitled to take their pleasures where they could,


55

and “serve” others, as they liked to put it, as they had been “served” themselves. It is fair to conclude that women also suffered from the effects of impressment. Their communities of origin were disrupted, and if they migrated to a bigger port, they experienced disruption of another kind in the sailortown slums. Women did not, however, receive the same level of recognition and compensation for these sacrifices and traumas. When they tried to look out for their own interests, they were often labeled as greedy or predatory. In contrast, the men who sailed—even as unwilling conscripts—in the Royal Navy’s ships could position themselves as supporting players in a great patriotic enterprise, even if their commanding officers generally received the credit for victories at sea. Women in port clearly lacked even this indirect access to martial glory, and as we have seen, they were too often portrayed only as land sharks who threatened sailors at their most vulnerable moments. At worst, they were identified as traitors who deserved the most severe punishments for their sexual infidelities. The next chapter concerns some intrepid women who decided to challenge this unequal appraisal of the true costs of war by assuming the clothes and the persona of Jack Tar. In the process, they also challenged the idea that women could be patriots in wartime, but only as supporting players.


Chapter 3

4

Well Rig ged: Cross-Dressing, Patr iotism, and Parody

Mary Anne Talbot was in her late twenties when she became a

domestic servant in the household of the publisher R. S. Kirby.1 Talbot had a remarkable tale to tell. In her mid-teens, she had been forced to dress as a male so that she could accompany the lecherous Captain Essex Bowen overseas, first as a footboy, later as a drummer. After many complicated adventures, she became a sailor, still passing as “John Taylor,” experiencing storms and battles at sea. Perhaps the most extraordinary part of her narrative, however, was her continued cross-dressing in London. Talbot now lived as a woman, but “took excursions as a sailor,” meeting up with “messmates I had known on board the Brunswick” at the Coach and Horses pub across from Somerset House. She enjoyed “smoking, drinking grog, &c.” with these “brave fellows.” On another occasion, she put on her “seaman’s dress” in order to march in a victory parade that commemorated the naval triumphs of the Admirals Howe, St. Vincent, and Duncan. Her participation would have surprised George III and the rest of the admiring throng in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, but she was there to accept the cheers for victories that she claimed to have participated in herself. 2 The one-sex model of human physiology, only slowly declining in the eighteenth century, held that all women contained male potentiality within their bodies.3 According to this logic, a woman like Talbot who excelled at manly pursuits was an overachiever rather than a failure, and cross-dressing in no way implied a sexual interest in women. Fraser Easton has argued that for plebeian women, passing as a man is best understood as a pragmatic path to superior wages,

58


and cross-dressing episodes were received in this spirit by contemporaries, as a form of “worthy industry.”4 In a similar vein, Dianne Dugaw—the author of the authoritative book on woman-warrior ballads—has emphasized that the heroines of these songs were not in any way presented as “unwomanly.” The cross-dresser knew that society usually indulged an episode of passing, but on the understanding that the charade would end upon discovery. Women who adopted artificial methods to penetrate another woman’s body were also considered to be acting out a part, but were treated with considerably greater hostility, as frauds, thieves, or worse. These individuals were known as “female husbands.” Easton proposes a clear-cut contrast: Most cross-dressers assumed only the vigor of the male “sexed body,” but did not make inroads on the virility of the male “sexual body.”5 According to this analysis, passing as a sailor would not in itself challenge male virility (as the feared or hated “female husbands” did) and should have been relatively uncontroversial. There is certainly some evidence to support that interpretation. Sailors who were unmasked as female were sometimes cheated of their pay and often experienced intimidation and harassment—they had been “caught out” breaking the rules and were viewed as vulnerable—but there is little reason to believe that their behavior was interpreted as particularly sinister, sinful, or criminal. Mary Anne Talbot, as we have seen, carried herself with pride rather than shame. She even applied to the Admiralty for a pension—under her real name. Where female sailors are concerned, however, the distinction between “sexed” and “sexual” bodies was not always straightforward. Mary Lacy, who served in the Royal Navy and in the dockyards, devoted much of her autobiography to elaborate tales of her flirtations and assignations with women during the period in which she dressed, and worked, as a male.6 Many songs about cross-dressers also appear to cross the line. “To sport among the fair maids I always was inclin’d,” the “Rakish Female Sailor” declares, fending off an amorous captain.7 In “The Female Cabin Boy,” both women and men show an interest in the cross-dresser.8 Few of the ballads fully exploit the possibilities here, although “The Pimlico Tar” is reminiscent of Lacy; she would “smoke and joke with girls and boys” and even makes a marriage proposal to a woman.9 Playing the rake could mean more than play, and cross-dressing might involve something more profound and daring than a change of clothes, as the abrupt, breathless opening line of one song implies: “I am a rakish fair maid, who dare not well be seen.”10 Scholars have speculated whether these cross-dressers are

C r o s s - D r e s s i n g , Pat r i o t i s m , a n d Pa r o dy

59

best understood as lesbian pioneers, as figments of heterosexual male fantasy, or even as the first transgender activists.11 My focus in this chapter, however, is less on the female sailor’s status as a specifically sexual dissident, and more on her role as a practitioner of gender politics on the broadest scale. There has been a great fascination with the eighteenth-century predilection for shapeshifting and gender-bending.12 It is time to move beyond this to consider the commentary inherent in impostures and masquerades. Talbot and her fellow cross-dressers have been analyzed as women who passed as men, but not as women who passed as sailors. Going to sea was a way to earn money, but it was also a culturally and politically charged action. The female tar joined the front lines of her country’s defense. Women, as women, could display courage in their private lives, but the woman who rushed into a burning cottage to save her infant did not receive the same accolades as the man who performed an act of valor in a war.13 Historically, male prerogatives in the home, the community, and—gradually—on the national scene had been built upon a male monopoly of violence. It is worth remembering that one wartime recruiting tactic sometimes used in London theaters involved dressing an actress in a soldier’s uniform, who would taunt men in the audience who refused (or were unable) to “stand” when their country was in danger. Pace Easton, it seems that vigor and virility were not so easily disaggregated. Sustaining the idea that men alone could fight, of course, already required selective amnesia about who was present on real battlefields. Women marched with the army, sharing in its adventures and hardships.14 In the Navy, the wives of warrant officers (such as carpenters and gunners) sailed with the ship. Such women sometimes worked as powder monkeys, helping to service the cannon. Yet—to take an extreme example of the double standard—the (male) baby born during the battle of the Glorious First of June, 1794, received a medal for his presence at that great naval victory; the woman who birthed him did not.15 Going to war may have been, in a sense, a “recognized tradition” for women in early modern Europe, but in such a hierarchical society, the figure of the woman warrior was inevitably a provocation.16 Likewise, when Talbot boasted how fire from her ship scattered the French sailors “like mice upon the ocean,” she is describing something beyond what Easton characterizes as “worthy industry.” In this chapter, I argue that it was not possible to enact female courage in a military context without making some form of commentary on the value that society placed on male courage.17

60


“Female husbands” threatened male prerogatives because they serviced a woman in bed; female sailors, as sailors, presented a different sort of challenge, but not necessarily a lesser one. The woman sailor, through her feats of valor, offered herself as a consort, a “female husband,” to Britannia herself. I also consider what it meant that women sailors had chosen to impersonate not just any male, but one of the era’s most notorious misogynists. We know that among female cross-dressers, the identity of a sailor was a popular choice.18 Yet passing as Jack Tar was, arguably, more difficult than most impostures. When sailors described a woman as “well rigged,” they meant that she was dressed (or “carried her canvas”) in a becoming and conventionally feminine way.19 Would male sailors not detect, and resist, a presumptuous outsider who flew false colors? As I showed in the last chapter, sailors went to unusual lengths to set themselves apart with their distinctive walk, jargon-laden conversation, and carefully composed costume. Women who “rigged” themselves as sailors claimed to have cracked that code. When they also boasted of how quickly and easily they had gained proficiency in what was still known as “seamanship,” they cast doubts on Jack Tar’s high estimation of his own skill, and his own years of training. The female sailor’s act of imitation—whether real or fictional as in the case of the ballads—constituted a kind of flattery, but it verged dangerously on a parody of masculine military prowess and the honors conferred on that prowess by the government and by society more generally. It is this political, and parodic, aspect of the female sailor that I will emphasize in this chapter. I discuss the ways in which any performance of martial valor by a female, real or fictionalized, undermined the masculine monopoly on violence, and by extension male claims to supremacy in any number of legal and cultural arenas. Ballads about women warriors accentuated how female sailors stepped forward when the men around them failed. The mere fact that any woman could do a sailor’s job was itself an ironic commentary on Jack Tar’s swaggering public persona. Today, we are disposed to believe that it is difficult for women to pass as men (and vice versa). It is worth beginning by clarifying under what circumstances cross-dressing could take place, and how it could be sustained over the long haul. Ferdinand Mount has observed that “[t]he impostor’s hidden weapon is the belief of conventional society that to keep up a false personality must be impossibly difficult.”20 This is an important insight; it is also helpful to recognize that some women started small, managing the transition from occasional escapades in disguise to long-term “passing” or imposture.


61

“Pretty Sally Tied Back Her Hair”: The Mechanics of Cross-dressing Sailor suits were a common sight on the streets of London, but not all who wore them had any plans to go to sea. Prostitutes routinely stole from their customers in order to make ends meet, and clothes were one of the few items that everyone would carry on their person; the market in used sea clothes, then, would have been a large one. “Pretended sailors”—often sporting additional props such as toy ships on wheels that they would drag behind them—solicited charity from passersby, having learned that an illness or disability incurred in the King’s service would earn them more than their actual story of woe. For these mendicants, naval paraphernalia served as just another gimmick to differentiate them from the next beggar.21 The proceedings at the Old Bailey contain many depositions about persons “dressed as a sailor.” One man claimed he had adopted the disguise temporarily in order to evade a woman who wanted to hold him responsible for her pregnancy.22 Thieves and highway robbers favored the sailor’s outfit because prospective witnesses were left with a vivid memory of the clothes, but only a vague impression of the individual’s face.23 One group of men even dressed as sailors to masquerade as a press gang, taking advantage of the victim’s uncertainty and frightened passivity to commit their crime, and then vanish away.24 A person with stolen goods to fence also had uses for this sort of disguise. In 1783, the Tower Hill pawnbroker Thomas Anthor obtained a silver watch worth 40 shillings from “a person by the name of James Ferguson, to all appearance a seaman.” Anthor testified that he believed James Ferguson had really been a woman “disguised in sailor’s clothes,” although his confidence faltered when he was asked to identify a specific person in court. It was Anthor’s “opinion” that the sailor’s voice belonged to Mary Smith, a woman who had spent the night with Richard Harrison, the watch’s true owner. Smith’s friend and codefendant Margaret Pearson claimed that Ferguson was a real person, “an East India soldier.” For her part, Mary Smith flatly denied Harrison’s accusations and Anthor’s suspicions. Both women were acquitted.25 If Anthor really suspected that Ferguson was a cross-dresser, and therefore presumably no sailor either, then Ferguson’s “plausible story” about prize-money payments delayed at the Navy’s Pay Office had also been a lie. None of this stopped the pawnbroker from accepting a valuable watch from the stranger. If Mary Smith did indeed pass as a sailor, she did so for the briefest time and in a sympathetic no-questions-asked atmosphere. Her brief

62


cross-dressing stunt was only slightly more demanding than the improvised ruses of male beggars and thieves. There is a difference between this kind of casual cross-dressing and a true imposture. This chapter concerns women who assumed a male identity and passed as sailors not for an hour or a day, but for a prolonged period of months or years. These women subsequently claimed, almost without exception, that they had lived as female sailors without arousing suspicion, and without being unmasked. Even allowing for some exaggeration, we are left with the question of how they managed to postpone the inevitable for a long time. A partial answer, undoubtedly, is that many people were not very observant, or not motivated to inquire too closely. As the Old Bailey evidence suggests, the spectacular outfits themselves did have a way of making all sailors look interchangeable. Mary Smith was not the only person acquitted because a witness remembered the sailor suit, but little else. And for the sophisticated, clothes were not the only component of the disguise. Any big port city would have contained thousands of young women who mixed with sailors at work, in their leisure time, or in both. Precisely because sailors chose to flaunt their signs of identification, to wear their subculture “on their sleeves,” it would have been easy to pick up, at least for anyone possessing a knack for mimicry. Practice makes perfect, and brief episodes of cross-dressing may have been more common than we think. Ann Williamson, caught stealing while dressed “in man’s habit,” explained that someone had told her she “was a prettier boy than a girl; I only did it out of a joke.”26 It would be interesting to know how many of the great impostors got their start by doing Jack Tar impressions in jest, perhaps putting on a show for their friends, rising to the challenge of a “dare,” or (as in the cases of Smith and Williamson) engaging in a crime. A woman who knew how to wear her kerchief knotted in the right way, who could imitate the seafarer’s rolling gait and pepper her speech with a smattering of nautical slang, could sustain the act at least a few minutes longer. A loud, swaggering persona might actually pay off in this context; people may have been in the habit of choosing not to listen to the effusions of sailors in the street or in drinking establishments, much as urban dwellers today learn to “tune out” the background noise of booming car stereos. It is not, then, so incredible that some talented women could pass as sailors for a while, particularly around people who had limited firsthand knowledge of the seafaring community. These spontaneous, short-lived performances


63

would, in most cases, have carried little risk, and left behind no record for historians to ponder. They would, however, have emboldened some ambitious artists to take their “act” to the next level and try to join the Navy. How did they pull it off? Recruiting officers did not insist upon prior experience, particularly in wartime, but the appearance of fitness and courage counted for a great deal. Dressing the part could not hurt, either. Ballads about women who passed as sailors rely heavily on color vocabulary (the jacket was blue, the trousers were white). Other lyrics simply emphasize the “shew,” the “hue,” or the brilliance of the garments, as if the apparition of a sailor in the street resembled a butterfly or a gaudy tropical bird. A few songs emphasize the thoroughness of the disguise, which was complete and correct from head to toe. The heroine of “The London Merchant” does such a flawless job of accessorizing (“with pumps on her feet and a cane in her hand”) that her own father runs her through with a sword, mistaking his daughter for her sailor-boy lover.27 The clothes were only the beginning of the challenge, of course. Enough boys and young teenagers went to sea in this period that a smooth chin and a higher-pitched voice would not have been conclusive evidence of cross-dressing. However, sustaining the act even for a day, let alone months or years, posed new problems. Suzanne Stark has speculated that since sailors suffered from various diseases that might result in bleeding, stains from menstruation were not necessarily a dead giveaway. She adds: “To urinate a woman could go to the ‘head’ (the toilet facilities at the bow of the ship overhanging the water) when no one else was there,” so even at sea there was a possibility for a little privacy. Sailors seldom bathed or changed their clothes.28 Some women presented themselves as green recruits with no prior knowledge of ships or the sea, a sensible strategy. However, many females would have had opportunities to spend time on and around ships as women, experiences that would have primed them for any cross-dressing adventure that lay ahead. Gender conventions in this period did not bar women from heavy labor; in Newcastle, they unloaded ballast from ships.29 “Bum-boat” women sold supplies and souvenirs, rowing from vessel to vessel in every large harbor. Naval vessels in port were commonly filled with visiting women—whether spouses, kin, or sex workers—since the crew was not always permitted to go ashore. These visitors sometimes remained aboard the ship during a coastal voyage, although they had to leave once the vessel was ready

64


to put to sea in earnest. Some women, of course, were themselves the offspring of sailors, and could have acquired a wealth of information from the parent. This transmission of culture normally went on “under the radar” from the historian’s viewpoint, although in 1791, Mary Bryant—the daughter of a Cornish sailor—led a small group of Australian convicts in a spectacular escape by sea. They stole the governor’s six-oar cutter and sailed 3,254 miles from Botany Bay, over the treacherous Great Barrier Reef, to Timor in the Dutch East Indies.30 Mary Bryant, who sailed under her own name, was an exceptional case. As escaping convicts, Bryant—and later, Charlotte Badger—had perhaps reached a point where they had nothing left to fear, even from fellow prisoners. In contrast, the notorious Anne Bonny and Mary Read—flamboyant Caribbean pirates of the early eighteenth century—were slow to reveal their secret and did not stop crossdressing after the truth came out. According to A General History of the Pyrates—our principal source of information on Bonny and Read—both women had spent unusual childhoods in boy’s clothes, and each continued to pass as a male upon maturity (periodically confessing to selected men that they wished to take as lovers) before turning to piracy. The emphatically “out” female images of Bonny and Read that circulate today owe much to the attention that their gender received in newspaper reports and court proceedings, and especially from artists who chose to imagine them with flowing hair, prominent bosoms, and unbuttoned shirts.31 If Mary Read—who by all accounts was lethal with a sword or pistol, and did not brook contradiction—still felt the need to join the pirates under a false, male, identity, then it is hardly surprising that the cross-dressers who penned famous autobiographies (Hannah Snell and Mary Anne Talbot) also sailed under assumed names (James Gray and John Taylor, respectively). This poses an immediate interpretive problem, however. If we take such women at their word, then we are accepting each narrator as a highly proficient liar who sustained a fraudulent identity for a very long period. How credible are the details after that? Anticipating this, Snell’s book began with an affidavit sworn by the author in the presence of the Lord Mayor of London, and closes with a note from the publisher stating that the volume was “done in a Hurry from Hannah Snell’s own Mouth,” as if a fresh story must be a true story. Talbot adopted a different authenticating strategy, structuring her narrative around the many wounds and scars on her body. Her tale explained how she had received each one and her listeners, like Doubting Thomas, could measure her


65

credibility by probing them. The stories of the highly specific wounds and the traces they left on her body leave a vivid impression even on a reader, and they must have been more compelling in person, with Talbot displaying different parts of her battered body as she reached a new point in the story. Snell, who said she had served in the army as well as in the marines, took to the London stage and demonstrated her proficiency in infantry drill. Like Talbot, she had undoubtedly faced down many skeptics. The two women encountered their greatest skeptic only centuries after their deaths. In 1996, Suzanne Stark—who had attempted to verify the exploits of Snell and Talbot by checking the relevant archival evidence—dismissed Snell’s narrative as “packed with fictional embellishments” and concluded that Talbot “never went to sea.”32 Elements of Snell’s story attracted disbelief even in the eighteenth century, notably the punishment of 500 lashes that she supposedly survived before her desertion from the army, and later the episode in which she performed surgery on her own groin wound.33 Stark argues that both women’s publishers had insisted upon melodramatic incidents, famous battles, and terrible storms in order to boost sales. In Talbot’s case, this meant “placing” the heroine in a whole series of regiments, ships, and other circumstances that do not check out. Stark found ships headed to the wrong destination, regiments not yet in existence, and muster rolls that contained no one with the name Talbot claimed that she had used.34 Without knowing the exact relationship between these women and their publishers, it is difficult to decide what to make of these defects in the narrative. Publishers or their hired collaborators may have fleshed out a vague story with false details in an effort to lend it verisimilitude, without seeking the permission of the book’s nominal author. Stark’s conclusion that Talbot never went to sea at all may be unduly vindictive. It is possible that she was involved in something at sea that she wished to keep quiet, and she developed an alternate story to supply a socially acceptable explanation for her wounds and the missing years in her life. We do know that both Snell and Talbot were cross-dressers who assumed false identities; catching them, or their publishers, in another fabrication should not surprise us too much. It is possible that both women led lives that were more interesting and adventurous than the published version. At minimum, it would be interesting to know more about the mysterious sailors that hailed Talbot as a drinking companion, and accepted her as a former shipmate.

66


My chief concern in this chapter, however, is not to determine exactly how many women really went to sea, but what sort of message or meaning was invested in dressing up as a sailor, or in telling stories about women who defended the nation. These questions are best addressed through an examination of the most widely circulating stories of all, the popular songs about women warriors.

“O! Curse upon the Press Gang”: Women Strike Back Broadside ballads received a less-than-flattering treatment at the hands of the early historians of popular literacy. In The English Common Reader, Richard Altick acknowledged them as the ancestors of the mass-circulation newspaper, but mocked their “crude language and cruder woodcuts” churned out by “hole-in-the-wall printers.” As the cheapest form of printed literature, ballads could be purchased for a penny on city street corners; while “in peddler’s packs,” Altick wrote, they reached “county fairs and markets, and through the mired lanes to the cottages of peasants and handicraftsmen.”35 Besides sensational murders and political events, the broadsides kept legendary figures like King Arthur and Robin Hood in circulation well into the nineteenth century. They also embraced more contemporary heroes and heroines. One of the most popular was the female sailor, a figure who would have been familiar to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Britons. Even those who could not read would probably have heard these ballads performed, particularly since singing from the inventory was the standard sales pitch of the itinerant ballad hawker. The songs appeared under many different titles, according to the whims of the various broadside publishers, but most recounted a highly generic story with just a few deviations. The story begins with a male lover’s departure. In some variants, such as “Lovely Nancy,” he chooses to go to sea and the lovesick heroine fears for his safety. More often, he does not wish to go to sea, but the heroine’s wealthy father sends the press gang to abduct him in order to prevent their wedding. Most songs about woman warriors, including the best-selling “Bristol Bridegroom,” follow this version. An alternate plot (“The Faithless Captain”) involves a pregnant heroine who voyages in disguise but then gives birth on the ship in front of the man who abandoned her, and the assembled crew. Across all of these versions, the heroine does the same things: she dresses like a sailor, passes as a male aboard ship for an extended period of time without discovery, and excels in all her duties, especially during storms and battles. Typically, she serves


67

as a seaman, though in a few versions, she saves the day as a surgeon’s mate, a cook, or a servant. Upon discovery, her accomplishments are recognized by the captain and crew, and her valor is rewarded in some form. Her imposture is never punished, and most of the songs supply a happy ending to the romance as well, either with a wedding to her grateful and admiring male lover or, in some versions, to a captain that she has dazzled with her exploits.36 Scholars have not drawn sufficient attention to the near ubiquity of the press gang in the ballads about female sailors. The role of the press gang suggests that it was the woman’s community that was under attack, not just her male lover. The ballads, then, are not merely love stories; they are making a statement about the relationship of these women to their communities. Consider “Pretty Sally,” who lived “hard by” her sailor-sweetheart in Wapping.37 A woman who mixed with sailors on an everyday basis would, of course, have had the least difficulty in imitating the walk, the talk, and the wardrobe. She was also much more likely to identify with them and their interests. The community context for female sailors is even more evident in another song: Poll Pennant’s father was a tar, Her uncle smuggled tea, And her relations, near and far, Had bus’ness with the sea. She married Jack, pride of the crew, One to her bosom dear; And ‘mongst these sailors quickly knew To hand, and reef, and steer.38

This unusually lengthy explanation of Poll’s origins does serve to explain why she would have little left to learn aboard a ship, but it also places her at the center of a large family in which every one of the male members would have been liable to the attentions of a press gang. Her uncle, the smuggler, would have had an additional reason to worry about the officers of the Crown. There was, in fact, an entire ballad about Jane, a swashbuckling female smuggler. Jane went armed to the teeth, but her motive was to care for her aged father, who could no longer smuggle himself (or by implication, he was no longer up to the challenge of evading the Customs officials).39 These female warriors, then, all had a crucial element in common. Women dressed as men, and took up arms, in response to the emasculation of male lovers or male family members by the minions of state authority.

68


“The Female Sailor” drives home this point with particular fervor.40 The (unnamed) heroine begins by twice cursing and exclaiming against the “cruel” press gang. She has been deprived of her “true lover” who was “good-natured, kind, and free.” Dressed as a sailor, she finds him again in the Caribbean. Sustaining her disguise, she ensures that he joins her ship. Severely wounded in a victorious engagement with two Spanish vessels, she parlays her new status as war veteran into freedom for her lover: This maiden’s loss we must deplore, by a shot from her one leg was tore, To Plymouth harbour straightaway they brought this prize without delay, To a hospital they sent this maid before she never was betray’d [sic], She wrote a letter out at large to the Queen for her true love’s discharge.

Only the attentions of surgeons could reveal the female sailor’s identity. Instead of an accidental setback, however, the ballad presents this revelation as timely; the now one-legged female sailor is ready to turn her sacrifice into political capital. The ballad concludes by describing the Queen’s reward. The female sailor will wed her lover, finally freed from the Navy’s clutches, and she will enjoy a generous pension. The captain and the ship’s crew celebrate her achievements, drinking her health for three days. Significantly, her victory was not complete without the rescue of her lover from the Navy. Popular outrage over the press gang’s behavior often resulted in riots. I noted one example in the Introduction to this book. “The Female Sailor” does not advocate open resistance of this kind, and royal authority supports the heroine in the end, but her career in itself challenges the manner in which the Royal Navy approached its “manning” problem. The gang was only empowered to take men who “used the sea,” but in the ballad literature—at least—its record was miserably unfair. Lovers swept away by the gang include ploughboys, weavers, and other inappropriate men. Overprotective parents routinely summon the press gang as a device to separate lovers, casting the Navy in a role that would have been played by a dragon or a wicked enchantment in a fairy tale. The woman warrior does not set out to eliminate impressment in general, but rather to rectify the effects of impressment on one community and in one particular case. To achieve this, she walks into the dragon’s mouth, defeating the Navy by exploiting its own indiscriminate appetite for warm bodies.


69

Herself an “inappropriate” person, the female sailor experiences no difficulty joining the crew of a man-o’-war. As one ballad put it: Come all you bold seamen and see what is done, See how a bold woman will fight for a man.41

The woman proceeds to contribute more to the ship than the males who are supposed to be there, thus exposing the Navy’s recruiting strategies to ridicule from a new angle. In the face of the press gang’s malign monstrosity and the impotence of the community to defeat it, the seemingly effortless achievements of the fearless woman warrior stand as an almost supernatural deliverance. In this sense, the female sailor’s feats constituted a critique of impressment in the same way that John Henry—the unstoppable hammer-swinging hero of the American folk song—would later embody popular resentment of industrialization. In the ballads, the woman warrior even gets the happy ending that is denied to John Henry. If there had been no press gangs, however, it is not clear that the ballad heroines would ever have gone to sea. This particular method of mocking and defeating the Navy may have also served as an indirect commentary on the violent and often futile crowd actions that would have been familiar to anyone living near the coast. These mobs met the violence of the fiscal-military state with violence in the name of the community. Chase away one press gang today, however, and another will come tomorrow. Instead, the woman-warrior ballads “rescue” the community by drawing on an untapped resource: female valor and initiative. I am not suggesting that every author who penned a woman-warrior ballad was a plebeian Mary Wollstonecraft, intent on a comprehensive revision of women’s status in society. In these ballads, the superlative abilities of female sailors arose to meet a particular crisis, a poorly understood outside challenge of horrific proportions that called forth an unexpected response from inside the community in the form of a larger-than-life heroine. A related subgenre of ballads also arose from the disruptions of war and conscription, which had produced a subculture of “merry,” or misogynist, Jack Tars. In these songs, pregnancy and abandonment provoke the woman to follow her lover to sea. The press gang normally plays no role here; the problem is that the man chooses to leave. However, his betrayal of the woman’s trust caused a different kind of crisis in gender relations, leaving a woman to care for an unborn child on her own. This was, of course, the same situation (appraised from the male’s point of view) in ballads like “The American Stranger”

70


discussed in the last chapter. Once again, ballad heroines rise to the challenge. In “The Faithless Captain,” the woman pursues her false lover by dressing as a sailor, joining his crew, and confronting him about his broken promises and her pregnancy. He responds by plotting to betray and abandon her once again, and she drowns, although the ballad closes with his remorseful suicide.42 The abrupt appearance of a forsaken woman in the middle of the ocean, seeking restitution, must have seemed like a miraculous or hellish development (depending on one’s point of view), and “The Gosport Tragedy” makes this supernatural dimension more explicit by having the woman appear in the form of a ghost (see Figure 3.1).43 The ship’s carpenter has murdered his pregnant lover. She then haunts his ship, threatening it with storms until the crew willingly turns him over to the vengeful spirit. This story ends, unlike “The Faithless Captain,” with retribution of the most direct kind: “She ripped him, she stripped him, she tore him in three, / Saying, ‘William, remember my baby and me.’” In a variant, “The Sailor’s Tragedy,” the pregnant woman takes her own life, thus dying in sin. She leaves a note to ensure that her corpse will not be buried in hallowed ground, deliberately creating the conditions for her restless spirit to haunt the faithless lover.44 What called forth all these superhuman and supernatural accomplishments? As with the press gang ballads, female action was preceded by a clearly defined male failure. Dianne Dugaw, in her pioneering study of this ballad literature, argued that it presented the women warriors not as exemplary, aberrant, or unwomanly, but as typical of the abilities and temperament of women in general. This is true in a sense, but the ballads emphasize that this is what “typical” women might rise to under very extraordinary and trying circumstances. The woman’s goal was to correct the imbalance caused by a male’s disastrous inaction or absence, or at minimum to make a spectacular statement about the wrong that had been done. These demands for restoration or restitution, however, had little to say about the need for a new gender dispensation; the heroines take to the seas to satisfy their outraged sense of propriety. The woman-warrior ballads, almost without exception, position themselves as voices of tradition protesting the disruptive consequences of modernity. The “Faithless Captain” ballad and its variants served two immediate, practical purposes: they warned the vulnerable, and kept duplicitous men on their toes. The threat of pregnant sweethearts (and even pregnant ghosts) who tracked down their fickle lovers must have had a deterrent effect, at least on a few anxious or superstitious men.


71

Figure 3.1 “The Sailor and the Ghost.”

“Playing the Rogue”: Mocking Misogyny These ostensibly conservative ballads about cross-dressers did carry a radical critique within them. By her very existence, the cross-dressed warrior questioned the logic of a society where only men could be sailors under their own name, only men were entitled to defend

72


the nation, and men continued to enjoy their formal monopoly of violence, no matter how much they abused it at the individual or institutional levels. The female sailor did not—and could not—leave the traditional order as she found it. She had laid claim not merely to vigor but to valor, assuming a public role as one of the nation’s defenders. In this final section of this chapter, I examine how crossdressers, at their most challenging, used the Jack Tar masquerade to present themselves, through patriotic wartime service, as a kind of “female husband” to Britannia herself. One of the pleasures of narration, for speaker and audience alike, is the chance to embellish and exaggerate. This may help us “hear” Hannah Snell differently when she tells us that she dug the musket ball out of her own groin wound with her fingers. Mary Anne Talbot spun her own superlative yarn, in this case about a terrible gale in which she suspended herself over the raging sea to catch a loose jib-sheet, despite the “lunging” of the vessel beneath her, a feat that no one else on the ship dared to attempt. Even Mary Lacy, the less glamorous carpenter’s servant, made sure to regale her shipmates with a good story about how bravely she would acquit herself if they ever came under fire from an enemy vessel. “Though I could not play the rogue much at first,” she wrote, “yet in a little time afterwards I learned to do it very completely.”45 Lacy knew she was learning not just an occupational identity but an entire style of self-presentation, one that relied upon colorful language and boastful bravado. Yet, when the rogue in question was a woman, the message changed. When female tars—real or fictional—“played the rogue,” it implied that a woman just might play the man’s game and beat him at it. This is evident in one of the most popular ballads—“Billy Taylor”—where we find a pointed revision, or re-citation, of earlier ballads such as “The Gosport Tragedy,” in which a murdered pregnant woman returns as a ghost and crosses the sea in order to tear apart her false lover.46 In “Gosport,” the ghost, by definition, can look forward to no happy ending. For her, exercising agency can only mean inflicting revenge and bringing his life to an end, as hers has already ended. The heroine of “Billy Taylor,” in contrast, wins admiration at first for dutifully following her lover to sea when he is kidnapped by the press gang, but goes on to win still greater acclaim for her bold action in shooting down the manifestly unworthy Billy when she catches him in the arms of another woman. It is Billy’s life alone that comes to an end; the nameless female sailor is not only permitted to continue at sea, the captain “very much applauded her for what she had done” and promotes her to lieutenant. She will sail


73

the ocean in “the glorious Thunderbomb,” without marrying anyone and seemingly without any further need for the gender charade. The anonymous heroine of “Billy Taylor” has out-rogued the rogue, and has won the right to take the rogue’s place. There is no indication at the end of “Billy Taylor” that her story is over, and the listeners are permitted to imagine as many sequels as they please.47 Lyrics that appeared under the title “Britons Strike Home” assume the female tar’s voice, address women directly, and urge them to join her : Come all you young virgins attend to my plan, How boldly I ventured and fought for a man, Then like me take up arms and a solider [sic] become.48

“Britons Strike Home” was a variant on “The Fair Maid’s Adventure for her Sweetheart,” one of the bloodiest and most provocative of the ballads. The beginning is conventional enough, with a pressganged lover and a cross-dressing woman who follows him. The lyrics shift abruptly to a graphic description of combat: “Our ship set sail with full nine hundred men / And out of that number five hundred was slain.” The female tar, once again anonymous, fights hard, but on the bloodstained deck she spies three corpses: her captain, her lieutenant, and her lover. In the plotlines of most other ballads, these are the three characters on the ship who were most likely to discover the woman’s secret, so with their deaths, this heroine is entering uncharted territory. What will happen next? Undaunted, she continues to fire at the enemy until a shot “took off my right breast and also my arm.” The woman warrior survives even this, there is a thunderous exchange of broadsides, and finally the French “like base cowards from us ran away.”49 As in “Billy Taylor,” death has eliminated the lover; the heroine of the “Fair Maid’s Adventure” is left, unambiguously, her own woman. The swashbuckling “Fair Maid” was not the only cross-dressing heroine to incur a serious injury, but significantly she suffers her chest wound only after the significant male characters have been dispatched. Her wound will not enable her to seek the Queen’s special dispensation for her sweetheart, as in “The Female Sailor.” Her need to seek medical attention is not a literary device to force her exposure (and explain why her cross-dressing had to come to an end), as it is in so many other woman-warrior ballads. From a plot perspective, there is no one left to help, and no one to tell her what to do. Indeed there is no indication whatever that the “Fair Maid” stops dressing as a sailor. The song simply ends “But recover’d of my wounds to Old England

74


I am come.” Her missing breast and her lost arm perform a different kind of work here. So-called female husbands were ridiculed because they lacked a part, but here, the female sailor’s missing part seems to be proof that she can perform. The “Fair Maid” is now a battlehardened war veteran, with a special claim to the country’s respect. Female impostors could expect mockery and intimidation if they were caught, but when women “played the rogue” with success, it was they who got the last laugh. This is especially clear in cases where groups of women cross-dressed as a press gang. Three young women of Somerset, after hearing some tough quarry workers proclaim that they would lay low any press gang that dared attack them, dressed in men’s clothes and provoked 60 quarrymen to flee in panic.50 Instead of reenacting the ballads, in which a woman dressed as a man rescued her male lover from the clutches of the gang, these women took on the role of the emasculating gang itself. It would be difficult to determine how common this kind of escapade was, but in 1773, the Gentleman’s Magazine reported a similar incident in London: Tuesday, [May] 18. This evening nine women, one dressed in the uniform of a captain of a man of war, another like a lieutenant, and of the other seven in the dress of common sailors, with cockades, went about this city as a press-gang, and frightened several young fellows, who ran from them; but at length the pretended lieutenant was taken into custody, and carried before the sitting alderman, who, on her declaring that nothing more than a frolic was intended, dismissed her, with a severe reprimand.51

Scaring men may have been fun in itself, but once women start appearing in groups like this, it suggests the possibility that these nine “frolicsome” cross-dressers (or “cosplayers,” to use a twenty-first century term) may be just the tip of the iceberg. How many women went on a “cruise” as sailors in the great portcity? No one disputes that Snell, Talbot, and several others appeared on the London streets in male outfits even after their cover had been blown. Talbot, in particular, describes her male “character” as a habit that was hard to break.52 If, as Suzanne Stark has argued, Talbot never went to sea, is it conceivable that Talbot’s drinking companions at the Coach and Horses, the “brave fellows” who welcomed her as an old messmate, were cross-dressing women as well, women who had “sailed” the London streets with her in the past? It is fair to conclude from the evidence we have that women who donned sailor suits in this frolicsome or sociable way could well surpass the number of


75

women who actually worked as sailors. We could dismiss them. But rather than deleting “false” women sailors from the historical record, we could instead add a whole subculture that is intrinsically interesting in its own right, a group of cross-dressing women whose behavior mirrored, shadowed, or mocked the strutting processions of Jack Tars. The historian of sexuality Randolph Trumbach has lamented that he could find no public face of sapphism in eighteenth-century London equivalent to the molly subculture developed by men.53 The evidence, as ever, will be scarce and equivocal, but we may not have been looking in the right places.

Conclusion Female sailors did something more than just emulate or endorse masculinity. By appropriating Jack Tar, in particular, they were instead— as women—making a bid for forms of recognition that were normally barred to them. Female sailors should be understood as rivals or critics of male sailors, never more so than when they undertook to master the joking camaraderie and solemn rituals of shipboard life. The songs about woman warriors, however fanciful, also asked tough questions. Female tars redressed the wrongs of the government (notably, the depredations of the press gang) and the pregnancies left behind by unfaithful “roving” sailor lads. Many songs justified the female tar’s adventure as a quest to find a lost (male) lover. Others, however, celebrated women who fought—and suffered grave injuries—for their country. Was a peg-legged female sailor any less entitled to the nation’s adulation (and a pension) than a peg-legged male veteran? This offers a new way to think about Mary Anne Talbot. Let us suppose that Suzanne Stark is right: Talbot never went to sea, and invented, or helped to invent, a detailed story about adventures in faraway lands. This does not make her an irrelevance. Arguably, her observations on gender politics had more bite if her sensational story was founded on nothing. Talbot emerges not, perhaps, as the rugged female sailor that we once imagined, but as a daring and politically charged performance artist. She walked the streets of London dressed as Jack Tar, even after it became generally known that she was a woman. She displayed her wounds, which may have come from everyday accidents or from domestic violence, but presented them as evidence that she was a woman warrior. She continued to tell her stories in taverns, and, presumably, faced down anyone who challenged her. This said something to men in general, and particularly to

76


men with their own scars and war stories. If Talbot was a fraud, she was neither the first nor the last. What of the men and their litanies of “service” and grog-inspired tales of valor? These tales, too, were told in the near certainty that no one in the room could prove them false. Courage was the coin in circulation, the currency of valor that enabled sailors to purchase respect and, potentially, to legitimate their political voice. Mary Anne Talbot was surely not the only one to put forged notes on the table.

Chapter 4

4

M arr i ed to Br itannia: Musicals, Mutinies, and Manh ood

J

ack Tar appeared an enviable figure to some, yet many common seamen felt that they did not receive their proper share of the credit for victory at sea. This was certainly not the result of a national indifference to naval triumphs; in the course of the eighteenth century, admirals quickly became celebrities on more than one occasion.1 What, then, was the difference between Jack Tar and his officers? Patriots feared that the common seaman did not seem to care much about where his cannon pointed, as long as he found an opportunity to empty his shot locker. This implied not only unorthodox sexual behavior, but also the possibility that the sailor might turn his bellicose energies against Britain. Jack Tar ruled the waves, but until he could master himself, he would remain a suspect figure. The debate, then, would focus at least as much on the sailor’s character as on his specific deeds. Two virtues appear repeatedly in this chapter: heroism, or what one commentator called “cool intrepidity,” and reproductive virility. Heroism differed from simple bravery or fighting prowess, which, after all, many animals possessed. It mattered that you knew what you were fighting for. The “British hero” was a character who would not be found fighting for some other side. The hero also remained composed and thoughtful even in the heat of action. To some extent, this was an observation of an obvious truth: Battles were not won on mere enthusiasm. Victory required an intelligent and prudent mind that would not lose itself in the fog of war or the heat of battle. The physical expression of this attitude could be found in the ancient sculpture of Laocoön, whose face remained

78


serene although he was fighting for his life against the giant serpents wrapped around his torso.2 Laocoön’s famous composure was a far cry from the contorted, caricatured faces that artists bestowed on Jack Tar, whose restless physiognomy betrayed his immersion in the passions of the moment. Heroism, defined in this way, was also gendered masculine—even if some men could not quite attain it, moderation and gravitas were, supposedly, not feminine qualities. Another strongly gendered virtue was reproductive virility. Pronatalists had become convinced by the 1750s that sailors needed to curtail their wandering ways, engage in procreative sex acts more often, move in to model villages built at government expense, and help raise healthy children to maturity. In a strange way, this, too, worked to discredit the occasional valiant female sailor by appropriating for men the reproductive mystique traditionally associated with women. If Jack Tar could both fight for the nation and foster future seamen, then he was truly the complete patriot. This was the formula promoted by the immensely influential songwriter Charles Dibdin. Beginning in the 1770s, Dibdin glorified characters like “Poor Jack” and “Tom Tuff,” whose softer, more conventional masculine persona promised a union of civic and epic virtues. Dibdin described his ideal sailor as “a lion in battle, afterwards a lamb.” Many sailors were ambivalent about Dibdin, but they appropriated his message of dignity and heroic, dutiful restraint to considerable effect during the great mutinies of 1797. Their demand for an increase in wages so that they could support their families was particularly astute. I examine the mutineers’ conduct, and the rhetoric of their petitions, in the final section of this chapter.

Profiles in Courage: Physiognomy and the Classical Ideal A patriotic print published on the eve of the Seven Years’ War, “Britain’s Rights Maintain’d, or French Ambition Dismantled,” commemorated the victories of George II’s reign and featured comments from six full-sized human figures, a Native American boy, and two allegorical animals (see Figure 4.1). Britannia, positioned on the far left and holding up the cap of liberty, says: “Maintain your Rights: Be Britons, and be Brave.” Her face is turned to emphasize her laurel wreath and austere classical profile, evoking perhaps a face from a Roman coin. This personification of the nation, strangely, faces away from the cluster of British subjects in the far background, who are holding a revel around a pillar capped with the name of George II.

M a r r i e d to B r i ta n n i a

79

Figure 4.1 “Britain’s Rights Maintain’d.”

Instead, she is addressing two deities—Mars and Neptune—who impale a map of North America with their weapons to the great dismay of a female figure, “The Genius of France,” and a male figure, “Monsieur le Politiciene.” This defeat is reenacted around the feet of the gods, where a lion routs the Gallic cock, remarking, “I’ll pluck your feathers for you in plain English.” The Native American, standing like a child at Britannia’s knee, joins the lion in mocking the bird. The figure labeled “Jack Tar” stands at the far right of the ensemble. This placement is, in itself, significant. He stands apart from the other Britons in the picture, who form a crowd around the pillar. He is also remote from George II (the pillar), the nation (the Britannia figure), and even from the god Neptune, who avoids his gaze and makes a speech about “nobly-spirited Anson,” a victorious admiral. Jack Tar does not strike the symbolic blow to the map of North America. Nor does he get credit for any particular victory; the names of battles appear on the pillar and also at the feet of the lion, the ferocious animal consort who crouches close to Britannia’s side. What, then, is his role in the picture? He stands close to the effete French politician, placing a hand on his shoulder. The precise alignment of their feet accentuates the association between the two men; Jack’s shoe is even in the same style as the Frenchman’s. Jack mocks

80


the French, exclaiming, “Was that your Map of North America? … pity the Right Owner should take it from you.” Without a caption, however, the sailor’s placement and body language might have suggested that he was a friend, or otherwise offering consolation to the foreigner. This sailor is an important but ambivalent figure, more intimate with men than with women, moving easily and unpredictably across lines of nationality. Even his foppish choice of footwear suggests a divergence from the classical rigor of Britannia, her loyal lion, and her war gods. By including and simultaneously excluding Jack Tar, “Britain’s Rights Maintain’d” illustrated the common seaman’s ambiguous relationship to his own victories, and indeed to the nation in whose name the victories had been won. No one, of course, denied that it was the common seaman who clambered about in the rigging, fired the cannons, and formed swashbuckling boarding parties that wrested vessels from the enemy at a terrible cost in blood and lost limbs. What is striking is the insistence on a deliberate distinction in patriotic discourse between the sailor on the one hand, and the “hero” on the other. Consider George Alexander Stevens’s Lecture on Heads, an extraordinarily popular one-man comic routine with papier-mâché props, first performed in 1764. The Lecture on Heads vulgarized contemporary theories of physiognomy, the art (or science) of reading a person’s character through the study of their facial features.3 The head of a “British tar” was not added to the show until 1780, when Lee Lewes had replaced the aging Stevens as the master of ceremonies. “Here is a man who despises anger, wounds and death,” Lewes intoned. Yet Jack Tar’s head displayed the characteristics of animal courage, “as if, like a salamander, his element was fire,” and exhibiting the “spirit of a lion.”4 This choleric vigor, however, was not the same as the “noble enthusiasm” or “cool intrepidity” of a head displayed later in the Lecture, the head of a “British hero.” The form of this head, the audience was instructed, “resembles the immortal WOLFE.”5 The Lecture on Heads, then, moved Jack Tar to the center of the action, but his virtues were those of the bestial lion in “Britain’s Rights Maintain’d,” not those of the military genius who masterminded the taking of Quebec, a hero who would have merited the praise of Mars and Neptune. The papier-mâché bust of Wolfe used in the Lecture was undoubtedly inspired by Benjamin West’s famous and widely reproduced painting of the general’s death. West had provoked the disapproval of tastemakers such as Joshua Reynolds, who believed that representing the British general and his attendants in their actual uniforms lacked the dignity and “universal” appeal of the Roman toga. Yet


81

West’s approach to bodies and particularly to faces remained very much within the beau ideal conventions beloved by Reynolds. In this view, it was the artist’s duty to improve upon nature, rather than merely imitating what presented itself to the eye. General Wolfe’s face, which Simon Schama has compared to that of a ferret, was rearranged by the painter until it conformed more closely to the graces of the classical ideal.6 West’s Native American—who holds a vigil by the expiring general—is also a noble character. We know this because his physiognomy is crafted to resemble the profiles on antique coins. In arranging his figures, West observed that Wolfe could not be shown dying like “a common soldier under a bush” but like a “Hero.” Meanwhile, he edited low-ranking participants out of the death scene. Presumably, the rank and file lacked the noble qualities of West’s protagonists.7 William Hogarth’s progression of dancers in his influential artist’s manual, the Analysis of Beauty, illustrated the relationship between facial profile, bodily proportion, and temperament with great precision. The series begins with a man and a woman who dance slowly and decorously; according to Hogarth, “placidity” was the best way to represent dignity and grace.8 The man’s profile, which resembles West’s idealized version of General Wolfe, is angular in the manner of a classical statue. From left to right, we can follow the progression—or rather the decline—of the figures, indexed by the movement of the dancers’ faces away from the classical proportions as they became increasingly at the mercy of their own passions and appetites. Passions and appetites are also emphasized in Thomas Rowlandson’s “Accommodation,” a strolling sailor arm in arm with a woman encounters a welcome sign above a doorway. 9 It says: “Lodgings for single men and their wives.” The sailor exclaims, “Why Nan—this is the very berth we have been so long looking after.” Besides this obvious verbal joke, Rowlandson has included a sly visual joke in the carefully observed profiles of the sailor and his “wife” (see Figure 4.2). The posture of the two figures and even angle of their headgear are aligned to invite comparison of their silhouettes, as if they were scientific specimens under the magnifying glass of a naturalist. Caricaturists often mocked the fashionable hats favored by women, but here Jack Tar’s fascination with accessories is equated with his female companion’s frivolous necklace, bonnet, and umbrella. Their sexual promiscuity and their interest in fashion both fell under the eighteenth-century rubric of “luxury,” which was considered the antithesis of heroic self-denial.

82


Figure 4.2 “Accommodation: or Lodgings to Let at Portsmouth.”

Rowlandson’s approach to Jack’s face reflects an effort to discriminate between plebeian and aristocratic temperaments as expressed in an imaginary, and exaggerated, contrast of facial characteristics. Physiognomy was not universally accepted. Many eighteenth-century observers remarked that faces were the result of muscular habits, not a birthright; in any case, muscles could be trained to dissimulate. However, as Hogarth observed in the Analysis of Beauty, nature supplied the artist with shapes and lines to show blemishes of mind, but none for perfections of mind.10 Jack Tar’s tendency to follow his impulses demonstrated a lack of classical restraint, and artists like Rowlandson represented this physiognomically, distending his nose, mouth, chin, and jawline into swollen, convoluted forms to suggest animal vigor, but also animal appetites. In the following section, I discuss the debate over Jack Tar’s luxurious habits and the remedies devised by pronatalist patriots.


83

Men Behaving Badly: Wooden Walls and Wandering Tars Like the ancient Greek city-states in their confrontation with the far more populous Persian empire, Britons continued to enjoy their liberty only by virtue of their “wooden walls”—the ships of the Royal Navy. A breach in those wooden walls would lead to catastrophe, a fate narrowly averted in 1756 and again in 1759. Boyce’s well-known song “Heart of Oak” was first performed in the latter year: Heart of Oak are our ships, Heart of Oak are our men, We always are ready, Steady boys steady, We’ll fight and we’ll conquer again and again. 11

The confidence of these lyrics belied growing anxiety over the supply of two renewable, but slow-growing resources: trees, and people. At the most basic level, Britain’s fleet could not exist without a prodigious supply of high-quality timber for repair, replacement, and new construction. Each part of a ship required wood of a particular type. For masts, which had to be resilient in a storm, only exceptionally tall, straight, and supple trees would do; for the curved frame timbers of the hull, the part of the ship that had to withstand the impact of cannonballs, shipwrights demanded tough, crooked hedgerow oaks. Using inferior woods, or cobbling together a composite part from smaller pieces, would result in potentially disastrous structural weaknesses. The frenzy of shipbuilding that made possible the maritime victories of the Seven Years’ War almost stripped the southern counties of England of their gnarled oaks.12 One earnest patriot wrote in 1758: “Let each gentleman … reflect upon horses and dogs, wine and women, cards and folly and then upon planting. Will not the last engross his whole mind and appear worthy of employing all his attention?”13 Sailors grew faster than oak trees; by popular consensus it required seven years to train a boy to “hand, reef, and steer” with proficiency. Still, a nursery of seamen resembled a nursery of trees in that it had to be established well before the outbreak of war. Worse, a rootless seaman, by virtue of his occupation, could easily travel to foreign lands and might choose to remain there. The French response to these twin challenges was central regulation. They maintained a national inventory of trees reserved for the Navy’s requirements, and also instituted a registry of seamen in anticipation of future conscription needs.

84


In Britain, a mistrust of government meddling led to reliance on private initiative. The Crown advertised the profit potential of forestry and awarded gold and silver medals for large plantations, prompting landowners to seed millions of trees in the eighteenth century.14 Similarly, Britain’s much-discussed nursery of seamen was never an actual building or registry, but rather an aggregate of the ways in which the fisheries and the merchant fleet recruited and trained boys. The government might legislate to protect or foster British maritime enterprise, but the “nursery” would take care of itself. In practice, as N. A. M. Rodger has put it, the Royal Navy found itself trying to draw a quart out of a pint pot during wartime.15 There were not enough British seamen to supply crews to both the merchant service and the military. By the mid-eighteenth century, this problem had forced British strategists to contemplate experiments with central planning, beginning with efforts to project the numbers of able-bodied male recruits using the new discipline of “political arithmetic.” Reports of a low birth rate prompted a spate of pronatalist agitation. That term does not capture the full ambition of these reformers, who argued for a new and expansive role for government in the campaign to improve maternal health and child welfare. Through encouraging marriage, they hoped to increase births, but also to reduce the number of unwanted or neglected babies. Some advocated forcing the fathers of illegitimate children to marry the mothers.16 In the 1750s, bold new philanthropic endeavors such as the Foundling Hospital sought to reduce the rate of infant mortality in London. Parliament even initiated a short-lived policy of paying for all the children brought to the Hospital. Sailors attracted special attention from pronatalist thinkers. As one remarked, the question of what became of the sailor’s offspring was a “puzzle beyond most questions in algebra.”17 “Philo Nauticus,” in 1758, advocated a program to create a real nursery that could identify and care for Jack Tar’s children. Both boys and girls would be, in effect, wards of the state; sailors who married a young woman from this pool would get a free house.18 If Britain could, in Jonas Hanway’s phrase, create “a race of seamen,” it would no longer be necessary to rely on foreigners to make up the shortfall in wartime.19 Hanway became the nation’s favorite philanthropist when he founded the Marine Society. His elegant strategy, far less expensive than the Philo Nauticus proposal, was to take poor boys from the city streets and train them to become sailors.20


85

Virtually every pronatalist author emphasized that the Roman Empire passed laws to promote marriage. This had to be a wise policy, since a nation’s populousness was its chief source of strength and wealth, and decline would come only when procreation faltered.21 Promiscuity, in this view, was any sexual activity not intended to enlarge the population—or which, in the event of pregnancy, did not establish a family unit that could raise the offspring to maturity. Pronatalists observed that the irresponsible conduct of sailors was not superior to that of a prostitute. Both lived in “luxury,” a word that connoted both sexual gratification and the temptations of an increasingly urban, commercial, and consumer-oriented society. Opposed to “luxury” were the imagined virtues of an agrarian world ignorant of the vices, social and sexual, brought by trade and cities. In this view, sailors had gone from barbarism to decadence without a civilized stage in between.22 Pronatalists associated the agrarian ideal with clearly defined gender roles, a strong family, fertile women, and “masculine” men, while they blamed the luxurious urban environment for effeminacy, gender ambiguity, venereal disease, and weak offspring. Physicians warned that the mixture of many different “genital liquors,” or simply excessive sexual activity, caused both women and men to become barren. According to this theory, the members of society who had the most intercourse would produce the fewest children.23 Books and pamphlets on the population issue often referred to sexual behavior that did, or did not, result in procreation, but they were extremely circumspect about mentioning any specific sexual acts. Instead, the pronatalist writers (and later, their critic Malthus) filled their texts with vague references to luxury, debauchery, sensuality, excessive venery, unnatural passions, vicious customs, irregular amours, and unnatural or unlawful gratifications. 24 These euphemisms suggest a concern with masturbation and sodomy, not just heterosexual excess or indifference to the duties of fatherhood. Anxieties about the “wandering tar” in the middle decades of the eighteenth century focused more on the sailor’s spilt seed than on ways he might be influenced by foreigners or recruited into their navies. 25 It was quite typical of the period to discuss managing the nation’s supply of sailors as if it were a form of animal husbandry. “No nation can have a navy, where there is not a fund of business to breed and employ seamen,” the Encyclopedia Britannica remarked.26 Unlike sheep or cattle, however, Jack Tar could not be trusted to follow his instincts. Prosecutions for sodomy seem to have increased,

86


on land and sea alike, during periods of national crisis. Sodomy was construed as a supreme act of disloyalty; its conflation with other unforgivable betrayals, including piracy, apostasy (“turning Turk”), and cannibalism, confirms this.27 It is easier to learn about the fear of sodomy than to document its actual incidence. As a capital offense, this crime was probably underreported. The small number of prosecutions for sodomy in the Royal Navy has been variously interpreted. Some historians argue that prosecutorial neglect tells us that it was a common, and largely ignored, practice. Others contend that it was “strongly abhorred” and rare.28 The most explicit evidence for an antisodomy dimension to the pronatalist campaign is the large number of schemes to “settle” the sailor, up to and including arranging marriages and building model towns as literal nurseries of seamen.29 As the Seven Years’ War wound down, the influential Gentleman’s Magazine made room on its pages for a proposal to grant plots of land to unemployed sailors along the southern coastline of England, and in the western isles of Scotland. Each sailor-smallholder would have a little cottage of his own, and no alehouses would be allowed. Another idea was to marry them off and settle them in the new territories just won in Canada.30 Jonas Hanway suggested a still more ambitious program, which like his Marine Society would tackle two social problems in one stroke: penitent and reformed prostitutes would be ideal spouses for “sailors just landed.”31 The urgent problem of generation, which put national survival at risk, prompted these proposals of unprecedented state intervention. Jack Tar’s disordered gender identity also jeopardized Britain’s aspirations to show the world a form of imperialism that would unite military might with moral uplift. Contemporaries looked, in particular, to James Cook’s Pacific voyages to demonstrate that Britons were humane and beneficial, unlike the greedy and lustful Spaniards who had debauched the Americas. Cook himself seemed to fulfill these expectations; he was venerated in life and all but canonized after his death in Hawaii in 1779. Meanwhile, George Forster—a young German naturalist who had accompanied his father, the irascible Johann Reinhold Forster, on Cook’s second Pacific voyage—published an account that excoriated the common seamen on board the Resolution. According to Forster, the danger to the natives was written plainly across Jack Tar’s face: [T]hose [South Seas] communities have been the least injured, who have always kept aloof from us, and whose jealous disposition did not


87

suffer our sailors to become too familiar among them, as if they had perceived in their countenances that levity of disposition, and that spirit of debauchery, with which they are generally reproached.32

Cook might himself represent the highest values of European civilization, but he could go nowhere without his sailors, whose physiognomy embodied imperial culture at its worst. Scientific inquiry justified, and redeemed, British expansion into the Pacific, yet Forster wrote that Cook’s crew seemed uninterested in the wonders unfolding around them and alarmingly apathetic when the ship encountered hazards at sea. Proponents of a kinder, gentler imperialism liked to highlight the spirit of discovery and treat conquest as if it were a grant of liberty, but Forster emphasized that Cook’s vessels were part of the Royal Navy; violence was inherent to them. Governed in a “tyrannical” fashion on board, was it any wonder that the common seaman would “breathe nothing but war” and seek to abuse others, as he himself has been abused and spiritually disfigured? With “obtuse” nerves calloused by a rough life and insensible of their own safety, Forster proposed, sailors could hardly develop a concern for others. An empire built by such men would bring Britain shame, not glory.33 Ironically, some of the specific behaviors that disgusted Forster may well have been efforts by sailors to reassure themselves—and others—that they were orthodox and civilized. For example, Forster’s indictment of Jack Tar’s apathy and spiritual disfigurement was provoked by the drunken revelry on Christmas Day, 1773. The sailors had saved up their allowance of brandy for months so that they could celebrate the day “like Christians.” Forster was mindful that the Resolution was drifting among icebergs and might collide with one at any moment, but the crew seems to have been more concerned with observing the holiday correctly, even when far from home—or precisely because they were far from home. Similarly, the seamen’s efforts to copulate with native women, sometimes in public view, may well have been an effort to affirm their heterosexual allegiances in the face of suspicion. To Forster, however, their indiscriminate pursuit of women evoked the rape of Mexico and Peru. Forster was witnessing culture, but ultimately he chose to explain the sailors by appealing to nature. He speculated that the human body—placed on a seagoing vessel and tossed about on “the imperious element” for too long—might develop a coarsened sensibility. Gradually, their humanity had been washed away.34 Forster inquired closely into the attainments of the Pacific Island civilizations that he

88


encountered, but felt no need to subject Jack Tar to the same philosophical scrutiny. He had reduced the British seaman to a bit of sea spray, an epiphenomenon of the ocean itself. Johann von Archenholz, a visitor to London, may have been paraphrasing Forster’s famous account when he wrote that sailors “never fail to become as boisterous as the elements with which they have become familiar.”35 In 1778, William Wales—the astronomer aboard the Resolution— published a rebuttal to Forster’s account of the voyage. What is remarkable about Wales’s book, particularly in light of later developments, is his failure to mount a patriotic defense of the common seaman. There are no references to jolly Jack Tar or the wooden walls of Old England. Forster’s complaints about the sailors are adduced as evidence of the German scientist’s general ill-temperedness (“who does not know that sailors will sometimes both sing and swear?”), but not as slights to British honor that should provoke righteous indignation. Forster’s inaccurate portrayal of the sailors is taken as a sign of his poor observational skills, a devastating flaw in a scientist on a voyage of exploration. Wales’s objective was to catalogue as many errors of observation as possible; he describes with delight how Forster recorded the color and texture of the stone in the Easter Island statues inaccurately. On the subject of the crew, Wales simply notes that Forster’s observations of “insensibility” are not confirmed by other eyewitnesses, perhaps a deadly riposte in Wales’s own discipline of astronomy but, in the absence of a vigorous vindication of Jack Tar’s virtues, a weak response to a controversy over morals.36 Wales despised Forster; he was not pulling his punches. There was simply no nationalist case to be made, no affinity between Jack Tar and John Bull. By 1778, however, Wales’s lukewarm defense of the sailors must have made his book read like an artifact from a bygone era. The author had been on the other side of the world during the crucial years when Jack Tar’s relationship to Britishness changed decisively.

“A Lion in Battle, Afterwards a Lamb”: Domesticating the Maritime In the 1770s, a new fashion for the simple, the authentic, and the “natural” prompted an abrupt reappraisal of the sailor and his eccentricities. A fascination with the wisdom and integrity of noble savages (such as the Gaelic bard Ossian, whose best-selling epics were fabricated by James Macpherson, or the happy inhabitants of Tahiti, as interpreted from afar by Denis Diderot) gave way to a search for similar admirable figures closer to home.37


89

The manservant Humphrey Clinker in Tobias Smollett’s novel of 1771 was one of many plainspoken, salt-of-the-earth characters celebrated by a public hungry for sincerity. In Scotland, the “Heaventaught ploughman” Robert Burns began to compose his dialect poems. The same qualities that had made sailors seem brutish and misanthropic to earlier generations of polished Britons now made Jack Tar look like a redeeming primitive, a homegrown antidote to the effeminate “fops” and “macaroni” who had overdosed on imported drolleries from France. Many people attributed the new vogue for Jack Tar to the efforts of one man, Charles Dibdin (1745–1814). This songwriter, performer, and impresario is sometimes referred to as Dibdin the Elder to distinguish him from his son Charles, who was also active in London’s theater world. Dibdin was an aggressive proponent of “natural” comportment and plain speaking, in life and in art.38 His songs, with their conversational tone, their heavy use of colloquialisms and slang, and their diamond-in-the-rough protagonists (sailors, soldiers, chairmenders, coach-drivers, lamplighters, and tinkers), mark him as a metropolitan analogue to Burns’s celebration of Scottish rustic virtues. In his autobiography, Dibdin described his decision to “give my labours a decided character,” breaking new artistic ground by reinventing the sea song: “[A]lthough we have had some poetic specimens of nautical praise, the character of the British tar[,] plain, manly, honest, and patriotic, had not very pointedly been put forward.”39 According to Dibdin, his best-selling songs such as “Poor Jack” and “Tom Bowling” were drawn from nature, or more precisely from Dibdin’s assiduous observation of the speech and conduct of real sailors—although the rumor that the songwriter went to sea in order to perfect his knowledge of nautical jargon was not true.40 Dibdin wanted the public to believe that he had discovered Jack Tar, rather like James Macpherson had purportedly discovered the writings of Ossian. In truth, like Macpherson, the songwriter was more creative than he chose to acknowledge. It is fitting that Dibdin’s artfully artless songs were sometimes performed in fashionable “pleasure gardens” such as Ranelagh and Vauxhall, which invited Londoners to admire paintings and listen to musical performances while strolling in a carefully landscaped network of tree-lined paths.41 Dibdin’s lyrics, too, pandered to a connoisseur’s affection for the natural. Dibdin liked to emphasize the novelty of his Jack Tar character, although contemporaries would have recognized that many elements of it were not new. Tobias Smollett’s influential description of sea life in his novel Roderick Random (1748) included sailors

90


who display much of the cheery, colloquial fatalism that would later reappear in Dibdin’s songs. It is more difficult to find antecedents in theatrical productions, where sailors were not particularly appealing characters, but a “true English tar,” presumably a sympathetic figure, appeared at Bartholomew Fair as early as 1759.42 A whimsical Lecture on Hearts from 1767 included “the heart of a British sailor,” made of “solid English oak” and having four chambers containing, respectively, courage, honesty, prodigal exuberance, and love for “his Wapping landlady’s daughter.” The Lecture on Hearts also attempts the kind of comical patois (“Unship all my teeth that I may never shiver a biscuit again”) that Dibdin would later deploy to greater effect.43 It was an outside stimulus, an act of political theater, that brought Jack Tar into his own as a stage character. In June 1773, George III reviewed the fleet at Portsmouth, involving several days’ worth of thunderous 21-gun salutes, nightly illuminations, and an “incredible multitude” of onlookers.44 This spectacle generated a buzz even in London, where theater managers seem to have gone hunting for plays with maritime content; they staged an expurgated version of The Fair Quaker of Deal (a play from 1710), replacing the drunken rapists in Act III with a new character, Dick Binnacle, a lightly comical sailor who threatens to go on a violent spree “in honour of his Majesty,” but is easily convinced to turn in for the night instead. The Trip to Portsmouth, a comic opera that was similarly intended to cash in on public fascination with the King’s visit, featured music by Charles Dibdin. The text, however, was supplied—not by Dibdin—but by George Alexander Stevens, noted earlier in this chapter for his Lecture on Heads. The Trip to Portsmouth marked an important transition in representations of the sailor. Stevens created Buck, a sailor who, significantly, now stands for conventional masculinity. [Enter a young fellow, ridiculously dressed, in the present mode … ] BUCK. This must be some French Hair-Dresser, or Rope-Dancer, or some such a sort of an outlandish Merry Andrew; no, ‘tis Jack Inkle, by all that’s comical: give me your hand, if you are he, and we’ll have one bottle together. INKLE. I beg, my dear Bumper, you’ll excuse me: I cannot touch a drop of strong liquor: I am quite reform’d. BUCK. Ay, and transform’d too. For you look like— [walks around him] I don’t know what you look like, except it is a sugar figure, made all of painted sweetmeats, upon the top of a twelfth-cake. Are you, Jack Inkle, or are you not?45


91

Rather than staring at the sailor’s outlandish costume, we are invited to join Buck in ridiculing the foppish Inkle. Buck and his successors on the London stage cast their irreverent gaze on the unmanly elements within British society—macaroni, “man-milleners,” hypocritical Methodist preachers, and corrupt aristocrats—and had the audacity to propose that joining the Navy would do them good. Reversing the older idea that sailors themselves were sexually suspect, comedies such as The Trip to Portsmouth presented “using the sea” as a cure for ailing masculinity.46 The Trip to Portsmouth played well to London audiences, and was later performed in Belfast, Dublin, and Newcastle.47 The reappraisal of Jack Tar’s “natural” virtues was echoed by the new vogue for the picturesque, rather than for the beautiful. The followers of the picturesque sought after the irregular, the rough, and the unconventional. This movement began as a rejection of the manicured symmetry favored by eighteenth-century landscape designers, but the aesthetic was rapidly generalized to apply to animals, natural scenery, and people. The irregular cow, for example, would be more picturesque than the sleek outline of a race horse or a swan.48 In Thomas Rowlandson’s illustration, “Dr. Syntax drawing after nature,” the doctor remarks on his own picturesque qualities: lanky limbs, craggy features, and a scrawny horse.49 Rowlandson, by this point, was making fun of artistic conventions that had been fashionable for too long, but the fascination with crooked, damaged, impoverished, or degraded persons and scenery had always been part of the picturesque, and as such, the observer’s fascination was always capable of lapsing into derision. Calling someone picturesque, or drawing them in ways that accentuated or exaggerated their picturesque qualities, was a double-edged compliment. However, it is important to emphasize that “picturesque” and “eccentric” were not synonymous; Buck’s salt-of-the-earth vigor was not the same as Inkle’s highly artificial affectations. It was in this partly admiring, and partly condescending, spirit that prints commemorating naval victories now began to experiment with placing Jack Tar front and center. “An English Jack-Tar giving Monsieur a Drubbing” (1779) presents the contest with the French fleet as a brawl on the cobblestones outside a drinking establishment (see Figure 4.3). A heavyset sailor has already shattered the sword of an outmatched Frenchman wearing an oversized wig. This is a reprise of the contrast between Buck and Inkle, expressed as a sadistic fight to the finish. “Monsieur” shrieks and clasps his hands in supplication, but Jack grins and raises his cudgel again to floor his opponent. At the bottom of the picture, this uneven match is echoed by a tussle

92


Figure 4.3 “An English Jack-Tar giving Monsieur a Drubbing.”

between a sturdy English dog and a French poodle that appears to have already died between its jaws. The action unfolds beneath a pub sign—the “Admiral Keppel”—that nods to the commander, but the actual fighting belongs to Jack Tar.50 In contrast to Figure 4.1, in which Jack resembled the French fop in clothing and posture, now the stout sailor clobbers the skinny foreigner. In Isaac Cruikshank’s “Lord Howe They Run,” a print celebrating the Glorious First of June victory 15 years later, war at sea was again depicted as a brawl on dry land (see Figure 4.4).51 The punning title acknowledges Admiral Howe, but the subtitle—“The British Tars Giving the Carmignols a Dressing”—indicates the subject of the picture. As in the 1779 print, the emaciated French (now wearing sea clothes and cockaded liberty caps) are no match for Britain’s fierce sailor-pugilists, who do not even bother with cudgels, but batter down their enemies with blows of the fist. A British bulldog, lacking


93

Figure 4.4 “Lord Howe They Run.”

a poodle this time, sinks his teeth into the rear end of one fleeing French sailor. The faces of the British sailors are the most arresting element in this picture. They are caricatured with pug noses and exaggerated lips; their mouths snarl, showing teeth, as if their bare fists and their ally the bulldog were not sufficient to suggest a bestial analogy. The nose and cheeks of the tar in the center are disfigured with a profusion of smallpox scars, or perhaps by the pustules associated with venereal disease. “Lord Howe They Run” presents Jack Tar as a sort of eighteenth-century football hooligan, reminding us that in Stevens’s Lecture on Heads, the sailor was brave, but did not possess the face of a hero. Physical vigor had to be tempered with other attributes. This was where Dibdin made his contribution. In certain ways, he was an unlikely hero-maker; as a boy entering the London theater world, Dibdin had set the pattern for the rest of his professional life by specializing in the comic caricature roles. His acclaimed portrayal of the slave Mungo in “The Padlock” (1768) inaugurated a long tradition of blackface performance. For a time, the teenage actor’s lines “Mungo here, Mungo there; Mungo everywhere” became a familiar catchphrase. After a long period of mixed success, writing sentimental and humorous light operas for the pleasure gardens and an unfortunate stint as the impresario of an equestrian circus, Dibdin

94


sought to improve his financial situation in 1787 by undertaking a tour of provincial towns as a one-man show. These “Table Entertainments” proved tremendously successful, and he would continue them for almost two decades.52 In his show, Dibdin hit upon a winning formula, mingling his popular songs with impersonations of a variety of stock characters ranging from Speculators and Poets to Blacks, English Sailors, and Jews. The result was rather like Stevens’s Lecture on Heads with the addition of catchy tunes.53 He accompanied himself on an unusual composite instrument: a piano and an organ that could be played from the same keyboard, with attachments for “a set of bells, a side drum, a tambourine, and a gong.”54 Inevitably, Dibdin’s sailor would be not merely brave or fierce, but also funny. It is not difficult to imagine a sailor character whose mannerisms and dialect would elicit amused contempt from the audience, rather than admiration. Dibdin’s success in the blackface role of Mungo proved that he was capable of this kind of cruel caricature, and his portrayal of “the Jew” or “the Black” in his one-man show, presumably, continued in that vein. Just as the macaroni and man-milleners in plays like The Trip to Portsmouth served as foils to affirm the sailor’s masculinity, the effect of those grotesque impersonations seems to have established Jack Tar as noticeably less foreign. “Poor Jack” (1789), Dibdin’s most famous song, squarely addressed the old anxieties about the sailor’s sexual, and national, loyalties. Unlike earlier patriotic songs, such as “Heart of Oak,” that spoke about sailors, “Poor Jack” grants the sailor a long monologue of his own. D’ye mind me, a sailor should be every inch All as one as a piece of the ship, And with her brave the world without offering to flinch, From the moment the anchor’s a-trip.

Dibdin’s vigorously drawn character uses the gruff sea talk to affirm domestic and patriotic attachments. Nought’s a trouble from duty that springs, For my heart is my Poll’s, and my rhino’s55 my friend’s, And as for my life, ‘tis the king’s.

“Poor Jack” disdains the dangers of ocean and enemy because he believes in higher things; he squanders money and makes merry with friends because he is a free and noble spirit. He prides himself on his


95

plain speaking, but what he speaks about are his orthodox sexual and national loyalties, which intertwine and reinforce each other. For a finishing touch, “Poor Jack” expresses faith in Providence (the “little cherub that sits up aloft” to look out for him). These contrived lyrics have not aged well, but Dibdin had created a character with genuine popular appeal at the time. His achievement was to successfully merge the traits of the “English tar” with the nobler qualities of the national hero. The commercial success of “Poor Jack” would gall Dibdin for years, because others enjoyed the profits from his biggest hit. He sold it, along with 11 other songs, for 60 pounds. “Scarcely had I parted with it a fortnight, when it began to spread itself all over the kingdom; and I have no doubt … it has cleared the publisher five hundred pounds.”56 His songs were “universally popular; they were sold in every music-shop, seen on every lady’s pianoforte, and sung in every company.”57 Understandably, he decided to get involved in the publishing and sale of sheet music himself, offering a host of new songs that were thinly veiled rewrites of “Poor Jack.” These, too, sold well, and he was able to build his own theater in London, the Sans Souci. Yet “Poor Jack” and his shipmates continued to line the pockets of many people who paid Dibdin nothing, from the organ-grinders in the streets to the printmakers who sold his lyrics illustrated with saccharine pictures of rosy-cheeked sailorlads bidding farewell to their sweethearts. His songs appeared on the sides of jugs, and in every imaginable form of cheap publication, from the broadside to the provincial newspaper. Compilations of sea songs (Jack Sprit-Sail’s Frolic) from this period essentially marketed Dibdin’s product without putting his name on the cover. The broadside ballad collection in the Bodleian Library contains many Dibdin songs that appear without any indication of an author, as if they were songs that had been part of the common heritage for so many decades or centuries that no one remembered their origin.58 Dibdin is remembered today as a minor composer, but many people bought his lyrics without any accompanying score. Therefore, “Poor Jack” should be considered a best-selling poem, as well as a popular song. In his autobiography, the songwriter complained bitterly that the Royal Navy had not rewarded him for his contributions, although my songs have been considered as an object of national consequence … the solace of sailors in long voyages, in storms, in battle … quoted in mutinies, to the restoration of order and discipline.59

96


However, William Pitt did commission Dibdin to write war songs, and granted him a government pension.60 In one sense, then, it is tempting to write off Dibdin’s sailor songs of the 1790s as soporific hackwork created at the behest of a counterrevolutionary regime. Certainly lines such as “a lion in battle, afterwards a lamb” corresponded to what Pitt’s government hoped for in Jack Tar. Yet the vigorous life, and afterlife, of Dibdin’s lyrics as broadsides and as part of the oral tradition suggests that they met other needs as well. Dibdin’s paymasters undoubtedly imagined that his patriotic lyrics would enter into a debate with Jacobin ditties, but his songs reappear in quite different contexts. In the Bodleian Library’s collection, a copy of the ballad entitled “The Female Sailor”—discussed in the previous chapter—actually shares the page with a rollicking, boastful sea song called “Tom Tuff,” a Dibdin song, although like so many of his other writings, it was reproduced here without attribution. The song begins with Tom reeling off a list of famous admirals that he has served under: My name it is Tom Tuff, I’ve seen a little service, Where mighty billows roll and loud tempests blow, I’ve sailed with valiant Howe, also with noble Jervis, And in brave Nelson’s fleet I have sung yo heave ho.61

Tom confesses by the end of the song that he is “laid up in a shattered condition” (though he has “only” lost an eye and a leg), but these injuries themselves complete his set of credentials.62 Significantly, his vigor may be impaired but his virility is not: I’ll smoke my pipe and sing old songs, My boys shall revenge my wrongs, My girls will breed young sailors for to nobly face the foe, Then to country and king, Providence no harm can bring, While the tars of old England sing yo heave ho.

The number of songs and artworks praising the faithful sailor who is “constant and true to [his] Poll” rose sharply under Dibdin’s influence.63 The juxtaposition, on the same sheet, of “Tom Tuff” and “The Female Sailor” tells us something about the sexual politics inherent in Dibdin’s lyrics. In both songs, a limb is lost and a claim made on the nation’s good graces. Yet, in another way, it is Tom Tuff—not the female sailor—who remains fully functional after the loss of a limb. Tom cannot serve the nation now, but he plans to sire


97

children who will. The “Female Sailor,” meanwhile, for all her other accomplishments has made no promises to “breed young sailors.” Sailors themselves faced a decision about how to interpret Dibdin’s vision of their lives. Gillian Russell has shown that sailors were a conspicuous and economically important constituency of the British theater audience in the late eighteenth century, and were wellknown for shouting and even rushing the stage when maritime events were depicted.64 Over the ensuing decades, sailors would make a major contribution to the process of disseminating and interpreting Dibdin’s songs, appropriating “Poor Jack’s” language to describe themselves. The spokesmen for the greatest mutiny in the history of the British Navy used Dibdin’s words and imagery to justify their actions, and the British public interpreted that mutiny in terms of the representations of seamen that Dibdin had made popular.

“Endeavouring to Find Ourselves Men”: 1797 and After Did Dibdin’s temperate and reassuringly faithful sailor correspond to the real Jack Tars that the British public relied on to defend their shores from invasion? The mutinies of 1797 appeared to demonstrate that he did not. At a moment when Britain simultaneously faced threats from France and from the Netherlands, the fleet refused to sail.65 The spectacle of the nation unexpectedly held captive by selfgoverning mutineers evoked again all of the old stories about seafarers who forgot their homeland, turning Turk or resorting to piracy. To these venerable bogeymen, the French Revolution had added a new one: the Jacobin sailor. A naval officer pithily expressed the worst fears: “The wooden walls of England may yet prove the combustibles for setting the country in a flame.”66 The British Critic—stunned by the scope of the mutineers’ betrayal—treated them as men divorced from any terrestrial birthplace, reverting to language that might have come from the censorious George Forster: “[W]hen stimulated to rage, [sailors] are as boisterous as the element on which they are bred!”67 Timothy Jenks has recently argued that the British public was incapable of coming to terms with the political import of the mutinies because they had been fed a steady diet of songs like “Poor Jack,” and humorous anecdotes of sailor’s quaint words and deeds (which Jenks refers to as “tarism”). The mutineers needed the public to consider what sailors wanted, expected, and deserved; tarism, in contrast, “was designed to deny, rather than enable,

98


sailors’ agency.”68 It is true that Dibdin songs, for the most part, sound like Cheap Repository Tracts set to music.69 “Poor Jack” and its sequels did, however, grant the sailor a voice, and created a public that was accustomed to listening for it. Would aficionados of Dibdin’s plainspoken, diamond-in-the-rough patriots have heard nothing familiar in this blunt ultimatum? For the Lords Commissioners of the Board of Admiralty. Dam my Eyes if I understand your Lingo or Long Proclimations, but, in short, give us our Due at once, and no more of it, till we go in Search of the Rascals the Eneymes of our Country.70

Certainly, some of the mutineers were ready to mount a social and political critique of a sort that never appeared in Dibdin’s sea songs. Venting their fury at their incompetent and inhumane commanders, the Nore mutineers even dared to drop the name of Tom Paine’s banned book into their “Address to the Nation”: Shall we … who guard your coasts from invasion, your children from slaughter, and your lands from pillage—be the footballs, shuttlecocks, and Merry Andrews of a set of tyrants who derive from us alone their honours, their titles, and their fortunes? No, the Age of Reason has at length revolved.71

Significantly, however, the mutineers never released this “Address” for public consumption. Of the two handwritten copies of it that survive, one shows signs of revision to make it less “red” and less confrontational. Telling the unvarnished truth was part of Jack Tar’s image now, but even the notoriously undiplomatic Nore mutineers had a sense of what the public was ready to hear.72 Sailors had learned their own lessons from watching the meteoric rise of “Poor Jack” and Dibdin’s other creations. At Spithead, the leadership sent petitions to appear in the newspapers explaining their need for a pay increase in language that appealed to emerging middleclass conceptions of masculinity. Raise our wages, they asked, so that “we might be the better able to support our wives and families in a manner comfortable, and whom we are in duty bound to support as far as our wages will allow.”73 The mutineers offered carefully worded lists of grievances balanced with affirmations of loyalty to king and country, but the affirmation of fidelity to sweethearts and wives was the most politically innovative part of their petition. By equating their fidelity to women with their fidelity to Britain, and making the


99

case for a pay raise on the grounds that they had families at home to support, they established themselves both as family men and as steadfast patriots. They used the mutiny to emphasize the ways that they were not—in John Fielding’s phrase—“a generation different from all the world.” In words that will be familiar to many readers from E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, the Nore mutineers declared: “Long have we been endeavouring to find ourselves men. We now find ourselves so. We will be treated as such.”74 Thompson viewed these lines as a blunt affirmation of class consciousness, but as I have been arguing in this chapter, Jack Tar faced unique problems of his own. He had to convince a skeptical public of his ability to show “manly” restraint, directing his seed to the nation’s benefit and espousing fidelity to one woman. By launching a mutiny whose stated objective was to reinforce the sailor’s role as a patriarchal head-of-household, he conserved his affections (and symbolically, his seed) for the marriage bed.75 In “finding himself a man,” then, Jack Tar proved that he could keep his shot in the locker. By refusing to embrace openly revolutionary politics (the Nore mutineers even fired the requisite salutes on the King’s birthday), they exercised political restraint as well.76 The language of the 1797 mutinies partook of Tom Paine, but also of Charles Dibdin.77 It was no fluke that the same radical, and unpublished, petition from the Nore quoted by E. P. Thompson also invoked the Dibdin song that compared sailors to lions who turned gentle, like lambs, as soon as the battle was over.78 In response, newspapers across the country hailed the “manly” virtues of the mutineers. The Glasgow Courier admitted that “this is the most shocking business that ever happened,” but conceded that the Spithead petitions were “written in a language truly characteristick of their authors—the stile is simple and unadorned, but the statements are manly and impressive.”79 The Whig Newcastle Chronicle and the Tory Newcastle Courant found common ground in their admiration for the mutineers.80 The nation was in danger, invasion was imminent, the fleet refused to sail, but the sailors managed to earn plaudits for their manhood—plaudits that had not been forthcoming in earlier wars when they had, in fact, fought. Why? Jenks has suggested, plausibly, that newspaper editors chose their words with the mutineers themselves as a target readership. Flattering the “manly” sailors would soothe the anxious public, and might even help end the insurrection. Certainly, prophecies of Jacobin extremism in the fleet could have been self-fulfilling, especially if such alarmist

100


rhetoric had convinced the mutineers that there was no hope of reconciliation with the mother country. Yet the near unanimity of the endorsements of Jack Tar’s manhood also implies that the newspaper editors understood and, at some level, accepted the message that the mutineers had sent. The pamphlet that threatened Jack Tar with the disdain of women (“where is the honest-hearted Girl who will trust a Sailor, false-hearted to Old England!”) was a rare attempt to retake the high ground from the mutineers.81 Most publications, however, acknowledged that the sailors had carried the day with their innovative reformulation of gender politics. On August 1, 1798, Horatio Nelson defeated Napoleon’s fleet in the battle of the Nile. Prints commemorating this victory certainly glorified Nelson, but offered a new role for Jack Tar as well. This is evident in the title of this print, which Nelson shares with “his Brave Tars,” and in the arrangement of figures (see Figure 4.5). It is not hard to pick out Nelson (he is raised high, he is arguably the bestlooking man in the picture, and his missing arm and eye set him apart further), but the commander shares the scene—and the credit—with dozens of common seamen. The physiognomy of the sailors has

Figure 4.5 “Admiral Nelson Recreating with his Brave Tars.”


101

also changed dramatically from the snarling tars of just a few years earlier. Their joyous faces are hardly more caricatured than Nelson’s own. Yet the artist, Thomas Rowlandson, is the same individual who produced “Accommodation,” which had caricatured Jack Tar as a luxurious lout. In his Nile picture, however, Rowlandson was trying to make the opposite point. He is portraying Nelson with his “band of brothers,” and one way to show the (spiritual) kinship of these men is to draw their faces in ways that emphasize what they have in common, instead of differentiating between the true hero and his picturesque supporting cast. Even Benjamin West, who had excluded low-ranking personnel from his famous portrait of General Wolfe’s death, was forced to change with the times. His painting of Nelson’s death superficially resembles his earlier work, but it is significant for its inclusion of a conspicuous bare-chested and muscular sailor. This Jack Tar figure is positioned at a similar angle to the dying admiral, suggesting a similarity in their heroic qualities; Nelson may die, but his spirit lives on in every member of his crew. West, who ennobled the Native American figure in his painting of Wolfe by depicting him with a sharply defined facial profile, awards that classical face on this occasion to none other than Jack Tar, whose forehead and nose are viewed from the side, and closely resemble Nelson’s. Nelson died at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Other commemorations of that battle highlight Jack Tar’s relationship with women, which is now portrayed in the patriarchal spirit of the 1797 mutinies, tightly linking fidelity to the nation with fidelity to women. A print entitled “Brave Nelson’s Last Lash” shows the great man rallying his crew, but he must share the stage with a cheerful sailor who spots the Santissima Trinidad and remarks to a shipmate, “Why D— me Jack if this isn’t the ship we had a brush with once before! It’s recorded the largest in the World. I hope we shall get her home that Poll may see her!”82 The sailor’s female consort is even more prominent in “The Trafalgar Garter.” A sailor offers a garter inscribed “England expects every Man to do his Duty” to a seated woman who appears pregnant. He makes the following speech: Why look ye Kate, my name’s Tom Tough, I served on board the Victory in the glorious battle of Trafalgar and stood alongside my Noble Commander when he fell. I helped to carry him below, where (Heaven rest his Soul) he expired.— I believe the whole world knows, that we did do our duty on that day, and now if so be that it’s agreable that I should take you in tow, shiver my timbers but I’ll do my Duty by you.83

102


Tom has internalized Nelson’s virtues. His application of the great man’s sense of duty to his own life has led him to propose marriage, “taking in tow” both the woman and her unborn child. In this act of courage, the sailor is the protagonist. Nelson is reduced to the status of a supporting player, looking on from his framed portrait hanging on the wall in the background. Those who recalled Nelson’s notoriously undutiful conduct toward his own wife might even reach the conclusion that “Tom Tough” was the better man. If Jack Tar was, in a sense, now married to the nation, then critics of impressment had a new argument to use against that method of violent conscription that had the effect of separating men from their wives and families.84 As early as the 1790s, artists began to depict scenes of impressment featuring a worthy, sober, dignified sailor who is waylaid by a press gang composed of coarsely-caricatured ruffians, who sometimes burst into bedrooms to drag a husband away from his wife. It is significant that sailors were now close enough to the “British” ideal that artists could portray a wrong done to Jack Tar as an attack on Britons collectively. The pressed men are seized in the street—or in one case from a bedroom—and their faces convey shock and horror. The most vivid images, by George Morland for example, show us the moment of seizure, the fists and clubs of the gang raised to beat the sailor into submission. Although in reality many sailors ran, or fought, when faced with a press gang, the seamen in the prints stand and accept the blows. In Morland’s “Jack in the Bilboes,” the pressed man turns his eyes upward and clasps his hands in prayer, his face suffused with a gentle light and an expression so innocent and virtuous that one half expects him to be assumed into heaven at that moment.85 A print from 1807 “Britannia in Tribulation” sums up the distance that Jack Tar had traveled since the Seven Years’ War.86 His journey can be represented as a march in the direction of the figure of Britannia, from whom he was so conspicuously distanced in Figure 4.1. Here, the sailor stands face to face with the female figure, whose classical profile and ancient accoutrements have changed little since 1755. Now she has, literally, no one else to turn to for help and advice. His curious outfit, his sea talk (he will never desert her “while he has a timber to support him”), and even his heavy-jawed physiognomy confirm his place in the succession of Jack Tar caricatures stretching back into the eighteenth century. Yet the sailor’s reply, “stick to me, your old and faithful ally John Bull,” does more than redefine his place vis-à-vis the nation; if Jack Tar is John Bull, then he—as much as Britannia—personifies the nation itself.87


103

Conclusion Pace Linda Colley, sailors learned that conspicuous wartime service was, by itself, not enough to win acceptance as true Britons. For much of the eighteenth century, most people who wrote about Jack Tar interested themselves primarily in the sailor’s body. The goal was to cure his diseases, restrain him from committing crimes, press gang him into national service when necessary, and perhaps to salvage his wasted seed. Nurseries of seamen were fostered through subsidies to the fishing industry, just as nurseries of timber suitable for shipbuilding were promoted through incentives offered to landowners who might plant trees. It is questionable whether we can say that Jack Tar’s position had been completely transformed by 1800, but it is significant that the conversation over “nurseries” had changed decisively. The proposals to establish model fishing villages for procreative purposes gave way to an increasing concern with Jack’s fidelity, with his head and heart rather than just with his body. Dibdin’s songs were so widely reproduced and performed in part because they spoke to a deep anxiety about whether sailors would faithfully discharge their duties as the consort and protector of a nation that was gendered female. This, in itself, conceded a degree of agency to the sailor and offered a political opening. The mutineers of 1797 succeeded in exploiting this opening, using it to change the terms of the debate about who sailors were and what they wanted. Accomplishing this required more than a mutiny itself. In the middle of a war, and with Britain facing the possibility of an imminent invasion from the Continent, it was crucial for the mutineers to select their demands, and choose their words, carefully. In fact, the mutineers navigated the hazardous waters of sexual, and cultural, politics with skill. Identifying the motive for their insurrection as the desire for a wage increase that would enable them to provide for their families was disarming. It was taken as a noble and reassuring expression of fidelity to women, and by extension to Britain. It was also a commitment to reproductive virility, covering one of Jack Tar’s political weak spots and placing him—not the government— in charge of the nursery. This reconciliation with Britannia was combined with a notable abstinence from violence. Thus, the mutineers kept their shot in the locker in both the sexual and the military senses. In their rhetoric and actions, the mutineers displayed the “cool intrepidity” that was thought to be characteristic of British heroism and masculine patriotism. There were rewards for this. By 1805, when Lord Nelson

104


had assumed the iconic position once occupied by General Wolfe, the common seaman had become a staple of “victory culture.” Nelson’s victories and death were presented to the British public not as the apotheosis of a solitary hero, but often as group portraits that had begun to emphasize the contributions and sacrifices of the common seaman. This late development marks the beginning of the assimilation of Jack Tar into a British identity. As I noted in the Introduction, this is a process that we might have expected to begin 50 or 100 years earlier. In a strange twist, it was Dibdin’s songs—a quaint creation of the music halls and pleasure gardens coupled with subsidies from a conservative Prime Minister—that empowered sailors to reach a wider public. “Tarism” made room for them on the stage, and accustomed the theater-going public to the idea of listening to a sailor’s voice. Yet the crisis of 1797 came and went with many issues unresolved. The middle of a war was, in certain ways, the ideal time for a serious national conversation about how to give veterans their just due, but in contrast to the world wars of the twentieth century—which were also characterized by mass conscription—there was in fact no effort to envision a postwar society fit for heroes to live in. Impressment and flogging, more immediate problems, were not even raised in the petitions of the mutineers, which were notable for their political caution as much as for their rhetorical skill. Yet once sailors had “found themselves men” and also—even briefly—found an attentive audience, none of these questions were going to go away. Was there room within the discourse of British patriotism to criticize the Navy and the British government, or would sailors who dared to complain risk condemnation and derision as inauthentic Britons who were unworthy of the name of Jack Tar?

Chapter 5

4

Behold Our Empire: Loyalists, Refor mers, and Radicals

I

n the 1840s, John Bechervaise invited his readers to admire the extent of the British Empire, and credit the British seaman for its magnitude: The history of England is the history of her Navy. It is to that, under the providence of God, that she stands before the world unrivalled; the asylum of oppressed freedom, the scourge of tyranny, and the emporium of commerce. It is through her seamen that she is at this moment, in every part of the world, enlarging the domains of religion and civilization. And well may we adopt the beautiful lines of the poet, and say—“Far as the breeze can blow the billow’s foam, Behold our empire, and survey our home.”1

Ironically for such a jingoist, Bechervaise was born on the Frenchspeaking island of Jersey. He was, however, one of many sailors in the post-1797 era who felt entitled to identify themselves closely with Britannia, whether as her defender or even, in a sense, as her consort. Beholding an empire, for anyone possessing even a passing acquaintance with the empires described in the Bible and in Greek and Roman literature, had to evoke disquieting thoughts about the fate of all empires. Watching a ship sink and disappear beneath the waves, Bechervaise wrote, “fills the mind with painful ideas ... the words came to my recollection, ‘Here Troy once stood.’”2 The sailor’s reference may have been to a gloomy prophecy of Hector’s, in which Troy’s mightiest defender envisioned his own wife humiliated and reduced to

106


slavery in a foreign land after Troy’s fall. This same passage from the Iliad, according to Edward Gibbon, was quoted by the Roman general who burned Carthage to the ground. He could not carry out this deed against the Carthaginians without thinking of “the future calamities of Rome.”3 Those who had inflicted defeat on others trembled at the thought that the roles might one day be reversed. Identifying at a personal level with Britain’s imperial successes could also provoke fears for the future, in exact proportion. Beholding empire also meant contemplating empire’s injustices on its own subjects and servants, even if these took place at sea. From at least the 1790s onward, many sailors were acutely aware of the irony that they were held up as icons of British manliness and at the same time subjected to degrading punishments. The Political Harmonist, a collection of radical songs confiscated from two seamen in 1798, contained this acidic parody of “Rule, Britannia”: View, Brittania, Brittania view the waves, On which thy darling sons are slaves!4

A song of the Nore mutineers forces us to confront injustice and suffering through vision: View the Tenders loathsome hole Where droops Your Injured Seamen drag’d by Oppressions Savage Grasp From every dear Connection Midst putrid Air oh see them Gasp Oh mark their Deep dejection5

The rhetoric of naval reform would frequently return to the theme of vision, berating the public for not facing facts. An anonymous tract of 1826 begins with a quotation from Hamlet : “Look upon this picture, and on this.”6 The author, incensed that Parliament had not acted to restrict the authority of officers, presented graphic descriptions of flogging in the Royal Navy, detailing the injuries that a cat o’ nine tails could inflict on human flesh.7 Eighteenth-century psychology had taught that objects in the external world had a direct effect on the human mind, without the mediation of culture; thus a poignant scene would inevitably produce an emotional response.8 Yet this humanitarian urgency was, in itself, insufficient to provoke reform. The fact of brutality—the reality of sailors’ suffering bodies—did not answer the argument that brutality was necessary, that sailors needed

Behold Our Empire

107

to be coerced to serve in the Navy and, once in it, to be restrained by severe discipline. Vision was not enough; it would be necessary not only to behold empire, but to interpret and explain it. Here, the autobiographical writings of common seamen had an important part to play, extending and amplifying the early examples of political speech discussed in the last chapter. These book-length works asserted Jack Tar’s right to observe, as well as be observed, and his right to name things for himself. Loyalists and reformers identified themselves with the signal victories that had preserved British domination of the seas, kept the trade routes open, and left the colonies secure. They expected rewards and improved treatment, in return for their services. In contrast, radicals presented the empire as an illustration of exploitative power relationships laid bare. At the same time, all of the authors discussed in this chapter were aware that many of their readers would believe that a sailor-author was at best a contradiction in terms, particularly a sailor who chose to write on political issues. It was easy to label the sailor-author “un-patriotic, disloyal, un-English” or dismiss him as a malcontent.9 Sailors who believed that stoic silence was the path to respect found themselves at a loss. They had a story to tell about disrespect and abuse from officers, but men who had been acculturated with the belief that a real man “took it” without complaint had to think twice before revealing that they suffered. The act of begging for redress could compromise the very manhood that he sought to defend. At a more practical level, there was also the challenge of credibility. The mutineers of 1797 had won over the public, but they had stopped short of bringing the whole naval regime under question. A voice that ran contrary to the jaunty optimism of Dibdin’s “Poor Jack” might itself be dismissed as inauthentic, even though the new voice might come from a real sailor. In this chapter, I distinguish between three different political stances, identifying some sailors as loyalists, some as reformers, and others as radicals. Each position receives its own separate treatment, and certain autobiographers are identified as exemplifying each tendency. To some extent, these are labels that the sailors themselves would have understood and perhaps embraced. For example, there was a stark contrast between John Bechervaise, who praised the wisdom and generosity of the Royal Navy for incremental improvements such as introducing medals and ceremonies recognizing “long service and good conduct,” and Charles Pemberton, for whom the mere mention of the song “Rule Britannia” was enough to send him into a diatribe against the government and the hypocrisies of British society more generally.10 Yet, in the tradition of 1797, protestations of loyalty could be marshaled in an attempt to promote the cause

108


of reform. Similarly, advocates of temperate and gradual reform sometimes offered mordant and potentially radical observations about the psychology of oppression, as when Samuel Leech noted that sailors—accustomed to rough treatment—looked around for someone else to “kick in turn.”11 I develop the three categories, then, not as a method of pigeonholing the sailors in question, but in order to draw attention to the important ways in which their analyses point in different directions. Loyalists tended to see flogging and other abuses as the exception, rather than the rule. They sought patronage and support from wiser, more paternalist naval officers who could help ameliorate conditions. They understood the sailor’s duty in a fatalistic way, enduring hardships and even injustices without complaint, and consoling themselves with a sense of vicarious pride in the victories of their commanders. In contrast, the radicals questioned impressment, corporal punishment, military hierarchy, the reverence for kings and empires, and even the need for war itself. Reformers occupied a middle position, seeking to enhance the status and dignity of the common seaman, but approaching empire more in the spirit of Lord Palmerston’s civis Romanus sum speech. They saw themselves as empire’s protagonists, rather than as its victims, and expected privileges commensurate with their contributions toward Britain’s global hegemony. Reformers called on the Navy to reform its ways, but also held common seamen to a high standard, urging their shipmates to read the Bible and take the temperance pledge. To these autobiographers, naval reform meant, to a considerable degree, the responsibility to reform oneself into someone more deserving of rights and respect. This chapter is a study of an unusual, and little appreciated, variety of working class autobiography. Jonathan Rose, in his Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, has suggested that the world outside Britain was both “unvisited” and largely beyond the awareness of most ordinary people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite the best efforts of teachers and imperial propagandists to instill pride in Britain’s global influence. Cotton operatives in Oldham, for example, speculated that the planet was simply not big enough to house customers for all of the cloth that they were producing, and that they would soon be out of work when the factories closed.12 Given that Rose’s book was based on individuals who were curious, assiduous readers, and sufficiently mindful of a wider world to produce autobiographical accounts, we would expect his sample to include many of the best-informed people from the lower social strata. Rose concluded from the relative absence of empire references that

Behold Our Empire

109

most of the working class was “only vaguely aware that their empire existed.”13 Rose did not examine many autobiographies by sailors. Beginning with the pioneering works by Stanfield (1788) and Nicol (1822), these books present almost by definition a different aspect of the British working class, and suggest different conclusions than Rose’s. Empire was at the forefront of their consciousness and supplied their frame of reference. Pemberton remarked at the outset of his narrative that “I have acquaintances in either ‘half of the world.’ From Australia to Hudson’s Bay, from Ceylon to the Carribee Islands.”14 The sailors’ interaction with empire, whether as eyewitness, participant, or both, often took center stage in the books that they produced. Indeed, supplying insight on the British Empire and other faraway lands formed their rationale, both intellectually and commercially; it was one of the main reasons why publishers, and readers, were drawn to them. To illustrate this dynamic, I begin the chapter with two early autobiographers who arrived at diametrically opposed conclusions about the British Empire.

Two Servants of Empire: James Stanfield and John Nicol In 1788, the Irish sailor James Stanfield published a short first-person narrative based on his traumatic experiences on a slaving voyage out of Liverpool. This is an account of life on a slaver “from above,” in contrast with the riveting account of the Middle Passage “from below” in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, but there is no shortage of memorable detail in Stanfield’s unflinching Observations on a Guinea Voyage. Sent on shore in Africa to cut wood for the purpose of “fabricating a house over the vessel for the security of the slaves,” the sailors stripped down in the heat, but then burned in the sun; driven hard by “relentless officers,” they staggered and sank in the riverside mud, which teemed with worms and snakes. Back on ship, the sailors had to scrape “the contagious blood and filth, at every opportunity, from the places where the slaves lie.” Weakened by disease, heat exhaustion, and flogging, sailors sought out corners or quiet places to die while the ship’s busy schedule went on undisturbed around them. The slave ship was noteworthy for its indifference to human suffering, an indifference directed not only toward the human cargo below, but at the crew above. Stanfield recalled one sailor who collapsed, limp and helpless, one evening and was left where he lay. The next morning, “he was still alive, but covered with blood—the hogs had picked his

110


toes to the bones, and his body was otherwise mangled by them in a manner too shocking to relate.”15 Stanfield, perhaps even more than Equiano, drew explicitly political conclusions from his experiences. His radical analysis of the slave trade’s impact on both Africans and sailors is briefly presented, but extremely clear. Stanfield emphasized that the markets of Benin were well-stocked with produce and that they had smiths, carpenters, and weavers who were entirely capable of manufacturing their own goods. It was, he explained, the “glare and relish” of luxury imports, introduced by Britain to facilitate the slave trade, that undermined the local artisans and distorted the West African economy. The power of African rulers was undermined by roving groups who made a living by capturing people and selling them to Europeans.16 Meanwhile, the cycle of greed, drunkenness, and violence fostered in Africa rebounded on the slave ship sailors. Lured aboard in Liverpool by unscrupulous methods, subjected to sadistic beatings for no good reason, if they survived the disease, short rations, and mistreatment, they could expect to be spat out on the other side of the Atlantic, only to be cheated in the West Indies when they “received” their wages in local currency instead of pounds sterling.17 He enumerated the sufferings of sailors such as himself, but articulated something broader than special pleading or victimology. Stanfield’s awareness of exploitation extended beyond the realm of mercantile greed to encompass the conduct of governments as well; the “enormities” in his book were not simply the brutality of wicked individuals but “the offspring of barbarity and despotism” more generally.18 Stanfield, the sailor-participant, positioned himself as an analyst of British imperialism in ways that anticipated later critical appraisals of the slave trade by better-known authors such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Observations on a Guinea Voyage is also notable for its frank approach to the politics of knowledge production. “Through what channels,” Stanfield remarks, “must flow the sullied accounts that are thus impudently thrown before us?” Those who keep records, for example of mortality aboard a slaver, are going to keep records that do not invite much questioning. “Flux” was the common cause of death in a slave ship’s log, a single word not revealing anything about rations or the practice of “tight packing.” The sort of man who was likely to write about these voyages would do so with his career prospects in mind, leaving the public with the self interested affirmations of Traders; through Captains, whose continuance in the employ depends on their open attachment and

Behold Our Empire

111

defence of the proceedings of their owners; through Captains, I say, who hope to be Traders, and through Mates, who hope to be Captains.19

In such an atmosphere, the sailor who wrote a book in any way critical of the merchant fleet, or of the Royal Navy, was likely to be accused of exaggeration. Stanfield swore out an affidavit on the truth of his narrative. John Nicol presents an instructive contrast to Stanfield. His Life and Adventures, published in Edinburgh in 1822, also recounted his voyages to distant lands: “[T]wice I circumnavigated the globe; three times I was in China.”20 Nicol opened his narrative with the frank acknowledgement that poverty had driven him to write the story of his life’s adventures as a way to make some money.21 “To the Public it must appear strange,” wrote John Nicol, “that an unlettered individual, at the advanced age of sixty-seven years, should sit down to give them a narrative of his life.”22 However, despite his age and straitened circumstances, Nicol wrote of the Royal Navy with a sense of pride and ownership. After serving in the “American War” and the “French War” in the 1770s and 1790s respectively, he describes his elation at hearing news of the Trafalgar victory: None but an old tar can feel the joy I felt. I wrought none the next day, but walked about enjoying the feeling of triumph. Every now and then I felt the greatest desire to hurra aloud, and many an hurra my heart gave that my mouth uttered not.23

Nicol may have lacked money or high rank, but he felt enriched or ennobled by Trafalgar, a faraway victory in which he had played no part. Around this same time, Nicol joined a circle of “workmen” in Scotland who shared leftover newspapers and discussed the issues of the day. Most of these men were admirers of Tom Paine and “not friendly to the government,” whereas Nicol, as a veteran of the Royal Navy, felt an almost feudal allegiance to the Crown: I had broke his Majesty’s bread for fourteen years, and would not, upon that account, hear his government spoken against ... When they spoke of heavy taxes, I talked of China; when they complained of hard times, I told them of the West India slaves; but neither could make any impression on the other.24

Unlike Stanfield, Nicol deployed his overseas experience to glorify his own country. Britons, he argued, should feel proud of the liberties

112


that they did enjoy rather than pining for those that they did not. Things could be so much worse. As a cooper and naval veteran, he was liable to impressment and had moved inland for safety; evidently his patriotic fervor did not extend to serving the King one more time, and he promised his wife he would not go to sea again while she lived. However, Nicol brushed aside the taunts from his radical friends about the issue of press gangs: I told them, ‘Necessity had no law.’ Could the government make perfect seamen as easily as they could soldiers, there would be no such thing as pressing of seamen, and that I was happy to be of more value than them all put together, for they would not impress any of them, they were of so little value compared with me.25

Nicol’s travels had taught him to feel superior to many different kinds of people. In the West Indies, sailors bartered their food in return for sexual favors from female slaves; on a voyage to Australia with a cargo of convicts, Nicol “married” a woman for the duration.26 He was acutely aware that his world was hierarchical, but he rejected the idea that he was at, or even near, the same level as the people at the bottom. As a sailor, and a white man, he enjoyed many of the prerogatives of rank. For this reason, he did not hate or fear hierarchy, but saw himself as a beneficiary of empire, and took vicarious pride in empire’s triumphs.27 Peter Mandler has written of “the conceptual gulf between imperial and domestic thought, for rallying the classes was as vital overseas as separating them was at home.”28 Mandler’s firm distinction between “imperial” and “domestic” would have puzzled Stanfield and Nicol, and it is important to remember that one of the reasons why so many Britons found sailors intriguing was that they were seen as bridging or uniting the two spheres. An appreciation of one’s own place in the imperial order could also be, as Nicol demonstrated, a major constituent element of loyalism.

“Give Me a Good Dibdin Now and Then”: Loyalty and the Trap of Fatalism “Grieving’s a folly,” ran one favorite lyric, while another declared: “[A]t the mercy of Fortune we go.” A sailor’s toughness could be measured by his good cheer in the face of adversity: “A light heart and a thin pair of breeches/Will get through the world, my brave boys.”29 The songwriter Charles Dibdin did not invent these sentiments, but

Behold Our Empire

113

it was his words, and his tunes, that were best known among British sailors of the Napoleonic era and of several generations afterwards.30 Dibdin’s songs shaped how Britons imagined and expected real sailors would behave, but they also exercised a surprisingly powerful influence on the sailors themselves. However, the pride of Dibdin’s sailors was grounded in a cheerful, dutiful fatalism that left little room for Jack Tar to articulate a grievance, seethe at an injustice, or meditate on political solutions to the problems at hand. Consider Charles McPherson’s tale of the battle of Navarino (1827). McPherson was seeing to his wounded shipmates when he discovered a marine by the name of Hill sitting on a medicine chest, weakly singing a Dibdin song. The man had just lost both arms. When McPherson remonstrated with the wounded man for singing in such a state, he got this reply: “Why,” said he, “you know I must learn to sing ballads, and therefore I’ve begun in time; for d’ye see, since it has pleased God to let the Turks dock both my fins, I must only thank him that it was not my head.” I doubted much [sic] that this was an endeavour to re-enact an old story that I had heard years before, and could not help attributing such a piece of wretched affectation to the influence of Dibdin’s songs, and of many of the melo-dramas of our small theatres, which put into the mouths of our sailors so much false heroism and nauseous sentimentalism. I told Hill he had better compose himself, as his wounds were fresh.31

Considering the well-publicized tales of Lord Nelson’s stoicism when he lost his arm, it is telling that a pleasure-garden entertainer, not the hero of Trafalgar, was the inspiration for these effusions. Hoping to emulate an actor from “our small theatres” instead of one of the pantheon of captains or admirals who rested under St. Paul’s Cathedral does remind us that Dibdin’s lyrics contained elements that could inspire sailors to proclaim their own dignity and self-worth. The mark of Dibdin was especially evident in the work of Matthew Henry Barker, one of the first sailors to make a second career as a writer. Barker’s anecdotes of sea life first appeared in the Literary Gazette and were subsequently issued as a collected volume titled Greenwich Hospital (1826) with illustrations by George Cruikshank, who would supply the pictures for Oliver Twist a few years later. Cruikshank may have been the one who introduced Barker to Charles Dickens; in later life, still using his pen name “The Old Sailor,” Barker would become a regular contributor to Bentley’s Miscellany, a periodical edited by Dickens. 32

114


Barker wrote about his old shipmates in a style that resembles a prose version of a Dibdin song. His characters are prone to punctuate their conversations with sad or fortune-defying Dibdin lyrics. The songs are quoted without attribution and often in so few words that only someone familiar with the song would understand the reference. At one point he refers to Dibdin songs as if they were a staple of life, or even an addiction like alcohol: Give me a rum story and a store of rum (for that’s the true licknumvity), and a good Dibdin now and then about Tom Bowline, or Meg of Wapping—ay, them are your sentry-mentals!33

He affirmed the uniqueness and—in a sense—unreadability of a sailor’s book: [W]ell! our brave tars are rubbing up their intellects a bit, and showing that they can do something more than ‘handle a rope’s end.’ But what are the reviewers to do? Where will they find critics capable of understanding the merits or detecting the errors of the author?34

A knowledge of maritime technical terminology was not the only barrier to comprehension. In the midst of his good humor, Barker sometimes sounded defensive about his own precarious position as a writer who bridged the worlds of the articulate and the inarticulate: “Sailors have their feelings, and fine ones too, though they cannot always express them.”35 Barker’s own authorial tone positioned him as a voice from below, but his carefully crafted malapropisms (“jew de spree” for “jeu d’esprit”) betray a more literate consciousness.36 Heavily sentimental, humorous, and upbeat throughout, Greenwich Hospital keeps unpleasant subjects such as the press gang at the periphery of his short reminiscent narratives. His most astringent political points are invariably couched in the form of humorous anecdotes, and rendered still more oblique by wordplay. Jack Tar can get to heaven just as easily as a cleric from “Brazen-nose” College.37 One officer exercises his “pre-rogue-ative”; another earns so many pounds “per hang-em”; Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg’s name is rendered as “Prince Loophole.”38 His account of the 1797 mutinies does show a rough egalitarianism (“we were oppressed, and every body knew it”), though the sailors sought not indemnification, but “damnification.”39 Ultimately, however, Barker believed that the sailor’s cause would only prosper in the hands of powerful patrons; he dedicated Greenwich Hospital to Vice Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm,

Behold Our Empire

115

and expressed hope that “Mr. Hume” would continue to speak out against impressment in Parliament.40 Greenwich Hospital concludes with a sailor reminiscing about Princess Charlotte Augusta’s visit to a warship, where she utterly charms the crew with remarks like “With such brave fellows as these, England can never be subdued.”41 The patriotic tars are all ready to lay down their lives for the princess. Barker, like Dibdin, portrays this unselfish devotion to duty as a signal virtue, but it did have the effect of postponing any serious national debate about sailors’ rights—or indeed of making sailors who issued any serious political demands appear selfish and unmanly. Barker’s sailors expect attention and admiration from the nation, and to the extent that they are resentful, it is because the nation seems to forget them at times. Barker devotes a long descriptive passage to one sailor who attends the theater and rushes the stage when God Save the King is played; from Jack’s perspective, it is his song, and he relishes it. His next demand is that the orchestra strike up Rule Britannia.42 Charles Dibdin had praised the British sailor for being “a lion in battle, afterwards a lamb.” In other words, after the heroics of combat had passed, Jack Tar was in the habit of suspending his man-of-action persona and presenting a passive, lamb-like aspect to the officers in command. Whether we characterize this as fatalism or indifference, it was not conducive to a culture of reform, or of political action.

“The Chain That Eats Beyond the Flesh”: Reformers and the Claim to Sensibility The most influential enemies of fatalism would be Christian revivalists who sought to cultivate a more reflective approach to life—and death—among the lower ranks. In their view, a devil-may-care attitude was a form of spiritual inertia at best, and it might lead, quite literally, to the devil. A vague, almost deistic, faith in Providence (or in Dibdin’s much-quoted phrase, in a “Cherub who sits up aloft”) was no better. Methodists were active in the British military from the earliest years of their movement. This eerie poem from 1746 sums up a sermon given on the eve of the battle of Fontenoy: Ye senseless Souls, how will ye die? How meet the Ball, or Sword, Which comes commission’d from our God, A Kiss to some, to some a Rod? Consider well his Word.43

116


Many officers in both the army and the Navy, however, preferred their subordinates to be “senseless”; religion among the lower ranks, they feared, would take the dangerous form of politically inflected “enthusiasm.” Deep religious feeling was associated with Nonconformity, and religious dissent had often resulted in political treason. The American Revolution, with its New England origins, was perceived by many in Britain as a new and unwelcome manifestation of the radical sectarian spirit that had led to civil war and regicide in the age of Cromwell. The destructive Gordon Riots that harrowed London in 1780, with their religious overtones, also drew comparisons to the troubled events of the 1640s. Jonathan Martin’s autobiography—with its references to Ranters, John Bunyan, witchcraft, and the scourge of popery—sounds like a throwback to the spiritual tumult of the seventeenth century, although it appeared in 1826. Martin, who had served in the Royal Navy from 1804 to 1810, became a convert to his own bizarre variant of Methodism. He took to hijacking church services and haranguing the congregation about his hallucinatory visions of doom. Dragged from the pulpit but still fearing that he would be held to account “for their blood,” the frantic sailor was reduced to nailing his screeds to the church railings as a way to get his message across.44 Finally, he concluded that the offending churches had to be reduced to ashes. After he burned down most of York Minster in 1829, he spent the rest of his days in an asylum.45 This is a far cry from the skeptical sailors described by Marcus Rediker, who used religious tracts to light their pipes.46 Likewise, we must suspect that the Member of Parliament who quipped that soldiers (and, presumably, sailors) “have no more religion than my horses” was indulging in wishful thinking.47 Army regiments and naval vessels were often, though not invariably, assigned chaplains; their monotonous sermons, however, tended to emphasize submission to authority, and of course presented the viewpoint of the Church of England. With only a little exaggeration, one veteran recalled “fifty-two sermons every year from this text—Soldiers, be content with your wages!”48 Soldiers and sailors who held their own prayer meetings had to fend off accusations of disorderly conduct, or even of conspiracy.49 Ultimately, however, Tom Paine’s Age of Reason and the spectacle of Robespierre’s avowedly anti-Christian regime across the Channel led to a strategic reappraisal. The new British and Foreign Bible Society sought to distribute its volumes not only in Africa and the South Seas, but also closer to home, in darkest France. The Naval and Military Bible Society predated the French Revolution, but found itself in a close partnership with a British government fearful of dissension

Behold Our Empire

117

and mutiny in the lower ranks of the armed forces. The defeat of the French did not, of course, mean the end of radicalism and unrest in Britain, and religious revival was increasingly seen as an indispensable pillar of the regime. In 1825, the Duke of York commanded that every soldier who could read was to be issued with a Bible and a Prayer Book, an order that was carried out with remarkable thoroughness and speed.50 Evangelical officers like Richard Marks of the Royal Navy also undertook to “Christianize” the service on their own initiative, distributing tracts and explaining Bible passages to the crew.51 Would-be evangelists who sought to reform sailors faced problems with finding an appropriate language, or format, for communicating their message. The improving image of Jack Tar drew the attention of preachers, but many had misgivings about the character of seamen. William Myles, a Methodist, wrote in 1797 of his experiences preaching at Plymouth Dock some years earlier: My prejudices against sailors were removed while here; I had considered them as a most abandoned race of men, but here I found, to my unspeakable satisfaction, many christian sailors who walked in the fear of the Lord.52

Anthony Wilkins, an early leader of revivals on the Thames, was surprised by his own success: “Who could have thought of Sailors, wicked, depraved, and daring Sailors, returning to the Shepherd and Bishop of their souls, with weeping and supplication!”53 Some of these remarks may have been self-flattering—a revival among the truly reprobate would be more impressive—but many sources confirm that blasphemy, in particular, was a mainstay of sea life. John Nicol was uncomfortable with the swearing and “loose talk”; he said his prayers in private.54 A key figure in the revival movement was George Charles Smith, born near Leicester Square in London. Not long after serving under Nelson at Copenhagen, the young sailor had a conversion experience and became a Baptist minister.55 One of Smith’s earliest tracts, The Boatswain’s Mate, features a dialogue between Bob, a cheery but irreligious sailor, and James, a pious sailor. These two characters are identified on the title page as “British Seamen,” but they speak different languages. Bob’s speech is replete with extravagant nauticalism and fraternal banter, while James’s earnest exhortations to Bob are expressed in a rather stilted clergyman’s prose. At one point James weeps at the danger to Bob’s soul from sinful dissipation on shore, to which Bob replies: “[C]lap a stopper on that there rope ... you’ve no

118


leak in the hull—let’s have none of the eye-pumps at work.” Smith saw a vast gulf between the closed, subcultural world of sea talk and the spiritual uprightness of a reformed, mainstream lifestyle. James does not condemn Bob for his nautical chatter (though he is upset by Bob’s cursing), but the message is clear: for a sailor to change his life, he must also change his language. By extension, the Christian sailor would discard all the trappings of subculture. Bob’s verdict is immediate and unambiguous: “What, you are a methodist lubber, are you? ... Why, split my jib-boom if I wouldn’t sooner be a loblolly boy, or a Frenchman, than a methodist”— James’s rejection of liquor, carousal, and colorful language (along with his outburst of tears) put his masculinity, and even his Britishness, in question. Bob’s wordplay and nautical banter, often at the expense of James or of higher authority figures, undoubtedly made Smith’s tract more entertaining, and kept sailors turning the pages.56 As the dialogue between the two men continues, however, James successfully gets his message across. He does so not by condemnation but by a form of flattery, acknowledging Bob’s martial and patriotic spirit and recasting the Christian message as itself a struggle that the best men carry through to victory. This is not, James emphasizes, something Bob is likely to learn from the ship’s chaplain, a figure that Bob already despises for his “Oxford gibberish” and ignorance of seamanship. In a passionate digression, James relates how he (like Smith, the tract’s author) had fought under Lord Nelson, who died in sin, despite his military glory and the love of his crew.57 James has credibility because he, too, is a battle-tested warrior. Implicitly, James offers Bob a chance to win a battle that even the redoubtable Nelson had not the strength to wage. Bob catches on, and marvels at the irony that his own courage fails him in the face of the mockery of his shipmates: How many resolutions have I made; and how often have I wished to leave off swearing and drunkenness, and uncleanness; but this stupid soul of mine is so prone to sin, that no sooner does our mess start a bladder of liquor, than Bob’s gone. If I strive to be serious, they laugh me to scorn ... How is it, when I resolved to fight the French, the Spaniards, or the Dutch ... neither the fire of the enemy, nor the sight of my dying shipmates; nor the shattered rigging, nor falling masts, altered my resolution to conquer or die!58

The answer to the shipmates’ taunts, finally, is an assertion of the sailor’s favorite shibboleth, liberty; Bob concludes that he has been

Behold Our Empire

119

in Satan’s service, and pledges to “desert” that ship.59 He remarks, significantly, that James’ presence makes him feel better than he has felt since “our ship left Parker at the Nore, and ran for Gravesend to become loyal.”60 However, we should not assume that “loyalty” was the only outcome of the rapid proliferation of Bible Societies, magazines, Christian lodging houses, and ministries specifically targeting sailors that began in the 1820s. Many of the revivalists had maritime experience themselves, and proved adept at drawing sailors in with a little nauticalism of their own, replacing bum-boats with “Bible-boats” and holding prayer meetings aboard floating chapels flying the Bethel flag.61 In keeping with this notion that Jack Tar deserved to be met on his own ground, evangelical publications like Smith’s Sailor’s Magazine also encouraged introspective explorations of Jack Tar’s sensibility. Books like Samuel Leech’s A Voice from the Main Deck (1843) and John Bechervaise’s A Farewell to My Old Shipmates (1847) were, in effect, book-length versions of the sorts of first-person conversion narratives that Smith liked to publish. Leech and Bechervaise argued that sailors were capable of noble feelings and deep religious conviction, and therefore deserved greater respect and expanded rights. Both books addressed themselves very directly to a religious readership, and their emphasis reflected the themes that dominated Christian publications of the era. For example, the temperance movement was at its height in the 1840s, and John Bechervaise devoted much of his second book, A Farewell to my Old Shipmates, to long disquisitions on the evils of liquor. Samuel Leech positioned himself as a kind of missionary returned from the field, who now sought to raise awareness: he hoped to interest the “enlightened Christian community” in the spiritual plight of sailors.62 In his autobiography, Thirty-Six Years of a Seafaring Life, John Bechervaise took pains to present himself as a serious man. The sailor from the small French-speaking island of Jersey frequently interrupted his narrative to offer moral insights on the importance of piety, and the imminence of death. His favorite theme was that if a sailor were judged on his moral qualities and not on his appearance or his position in society, he would be ranked among the most manly and the most admirable of Britons. Although he did not deny the moral shortcomings of many of his old shipmates, he drew his readers’ attention to exemplary exceptions such as a devout and serene old sailor nicknamed “The Parson.”63 Bechervaise especially emphasized Jack’s private virtues—his capacity for loyalty and friendship, and his presence of mind in

120


emergencies. His emphasis on off-duty heroism (such as the sailors who put out a fire when on shore leave) suggested that Jack Tar’s virtues were not specific to the extraordinary environment of a ship at sea. Rather, sailors possessed qualities like courage and resourcefulness that every reader could admire and strive to emulate in their own lives. Sailors could be improved by outside influences, such as the Bethel movement, but they could also return the favor, writing improving literature like Bechervaise’s own books.64 He overheard an Admiral make the following observation, which may have been intended to express an ethos for officers and gentlemen, but which Bechervaise presents as entirely applicable to the rank and file: To sum up the true character of the British seaman, he should be a man, who, if placed in difficulty, will have presence of mind to overcome it; if placed in danger, will possess the necessary courage to meet it; or if presented with an object of beauty, will regard it with all the enthusiasm of genuine admiration.65

Making the case that sailors could discriminate between beautiful and ugly objects may seem like a strange rhetorical tangent, but by making a claim to sensibility, Bechervaise was also making a claim to humanity. To counter the paternalist arguments articulated by naval officers, who proposed that impressment into the Royal Navy was actually a blessing because Jack Tar was unfit to exercise his freedom, sailors turned to the antislavery movement for inspiration. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, few advocates of reform could claim any concrete results, but the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 added the glamour of success to a movement that was already wellknown and admired by thousands. Many plebeian or working-class Britons were supporters of the antislavery movement, and used the language of “slavery” as part of a political vision that encompassed both West Indian slaves’ predicament and their own; however, the slavery analogy was also appropriated by people who resented either the claims of the slaves or, more often, the attention that the needs of faraway slaves were receiving from Britain’s rulers at a time when progress on domestic issues such as factory conditions appeared wanting. 66 In the hammering repetition of the word “slave,” sailors’ rage and humiliation can be felt. By invoking slavery, sailors were calling upon the most powerful language they knew to describe injustice and degradation. Unfortunately, the effort to prove that sailors deserved better than such “slavery” sometimes took the form of deriding

Behold Our Empire

121

the antislavery cause. The seaman Thomas Urquhart argued that an African, “whose ideas are contracted, and who is more or less, a slave in his own country,” was simply incapable of suffering in the way that a press-ganged Briton (who possessed “exquisite feelings”) would.67 Urquhart surely knew better, but he maintained the fiction that sailors must all be white. Repeating these sentiments in a letter to William Wilberforce, he maintained that the British seaman had “a much stronger title” to reformers’ attention since he was British, since the country owed so much to his courage in war, and because he was “born and bred up to the rights and feelings of a free man.”68 Urquhart’s analysis encapsulates the imperialist sailor’s creed: The enlargers and defenders of the empire are entitled to a superior position, in effect as its citizens, while the subjugated are entitled to a degree of compassion, but only after the needs of the members of the imperial nation are met. An anonymous pamphleteer of 1826 sardonically noted that in legislating against slave owners’ flogging, Parliament decreed that “the backs of British seamen are not entitled to the same protection as the backs of West India negro slaves.” He went on to complain that the public responds with “sympathy and protection” to the abuse of animals such as horses or oxen, but not to the flogging of sailors, who are “men, and British men too.”69 Stanfield’s sophisticated critique of empire is absent here. Samuel Leech, born in Wanstead, Essex, and subsequently of both the Royal and the U.S. Navies, asked his readers to understand that the singing, dancing, and revelry which caught the attention of many visitors to warships was little more than a brave front, “the forced merriment of minds ill at ease.”70 Leech urged the public to listen more closely and hear “the voice of misery that groans in the inner man—that lives within, speaking of the indignity offered to its high nature by the chain that eats beyond the flesh.”71 Some people possessed an “inner man” to a greater degree than others, in his opinion. Leech wrote: “Flogging may be needful to awe a slave writhing under a sense of unmerited wrong, but never should a lash fall on a freeman’s back, especially if he holds the safety and honor of his country in his keeping.”72 The obsessive reversion of sailors to the subject of their manhood says much about how difficult it was for them to “feel themselves men.”73 The effects of the lash, in its various forms—from the cat o’ nine tails down to impromptu punishments with canes or short lengths of rope—take up many pages in the reformers’ accounts. The scale and scope of punishment at sea continues to be debated by historians, although Peter Earle’s summary is remarkably even-handed.

122


He acknowledges the findings of naval historians who have emphasized officers’ restraint and common sense, but notes that while some sailors might be tempted to exaggerate what had been done on a “floating hell,” they also had a disincentive to make claims that would seem beyond credibility to their contemporaries. A complaint so easily dismissed was hardly worth making in the first place.74 Earle concludes that on most ships (merchant or naval) “authority rested ultimately on the threat of violence, the sort of casual violence that does not get into logbooks.”75 For example, starting—an unannounced disciplinary smack with a rope’s end—was formally banned in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars, but sailors reported that it continued for decades afterwards. It is worth adding that the practice of flogging was resented as much for what it symbolized as for the physical pain it inflicted. Samuel Leech wrote about the experience of humiliation and proposed a solution: There is often more real manhood in the forecastle than in the wardroom; and until the common sailor is treated as a man, until every feeling of human nature is conceded to him in naval discipline—perfect, rational subordination will never be attained in ships of war, or in merchant vessels.76

Even simple things such as an officer who never called a sailor by his name (shouting “You, Sir!” instead) were noticed and resented.77 The challenge was not simply to amend the Navy’s policies, but to invent a masculine identity that would command the respect that sailors like Leech craved. These advocates of reform understood themselves primarily as evangelicals, spreading godliness and temperance in the Navy. Their agenda for reform was a limited one. However, their campaign to encourage sailors to reform themselves and lead more dignified, “manly” lives became inseparable from their critique of naval policies that fostered, or tolerated, the old profane, grog-swilling, and unreflective Jack Tar. Bechervaise advocated management by incentives, such as medals and praise, instead of corporal punishment. Leech, too, urged the Admiralty to search for alternatives to treating men as automata, offering the practical observation that flogging often produced a sailor obsessed with vengeance. That same individual would “do anything for a kind officer.” 78 The reformers promised the Navy entire ships filled with God-fearing, tractable subordinates. Yet, in their drive to make sailors more self-conscious, literate, and reflective, the Bethel movement and its associated magazines deserve a great deal of credit for the growing number of common seamen who broke into

Behold Our Empire

123

print in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. They included some who believed that the reformers did not go nearly far enough.

“A Side Wind of Heavy Taxation”: Skeptics and Radicals William Robinson was born near Farnham in Surrey.79 His father tried to raise him in his own occupation, as a shoemaker, but William ran away to London and joined the Navy as a volunteer in 1805. Just months later, on the Revenge, the young man took part in the battle of Trafalgar. Robinson could easily have cashed in on his role as an eyewitness and participant in Britain’s greatest victory, penning an account that celebrated the Navy, the nation, and not incidentally, himself. Instead, Robinson’s self-published memoir, Nautical Economy, announced its critical stance on the title page. Its long subtitle read: Forecastle Recollections of events during the last war. Dedicated to the brave tars of old England, by a Sailor, politely called by the officers of the Navy, Jack Nasty-Face. Rather than legitimating his narrative by invoking an officer patron, Robinson presented his book as a product of the forecastle, written by a sailor for other sailors. Anticipating scorn from “quarter-deck and epaulette authors,” his pen name of Nasty-Face suggested that his message, as well as his person, would be unwelcome to privileged readers.80 Appearing in 1836, at the height of public fascination with physiognomy, Robinson’s ironic reference to his own “nasty” face mocked the conventional wisdom that the lower orders of society resembled brute beasts.81 What was “nautical economy”? The closest thing to an explanation that Robinson provides is his remark that “the order of the present day, on land, it seems is reform,” and he simply wishes to extend that movement to “the sea-service.”82 He could rely on readers to remember that a host of contemporary debates revolved around what was known as “political economy.”83 In some quarters, this term was a synonym for the works of T. R. Malthus and Adam Smith, but Robinson may have had in mind antiestablishment voices such as Thomas Hodgskin, whose Popular Political Economy (1827) used the new science to critique entrenched or customary practices that most members of Parliament continued to tolerate. For example, Hodgskin made a case on both economic and moral grounds against taxes on imported grain, as well as against taxes on knowledge (the stamp tax on printed material). Where Hodgskin pointed to “misgovernment” and “our present diseased and unjust distribution of wealth,” Jack Nasty-Face objected to the “custom of the sea,” a legal convention that permitted naval officers

124


to abuse their authority, and he drew attention to the widespread belief that the only consequence that civilians could expect from many military adventures was “a side wind [of] heavy taxation.”84 Criticizing the Navy was a hazardous game. Like the mutineers of 1797, Robinson had to explain to his readers why a patriot would dare to defy authority, and how it was possible to condemn the policies of the authorities and still be a patriot. This may have been Robinson’s aim when he concluded his Dedication by invoking the memory of Lord Nelson’s words at Trafalgar. Since “England expects every man to do his duty,” it is the sailor’s duty to speak out against corruption and wrongdoing. Even this modest proposition, of course, elevated Jack Tar to the position of a social and political critic. It enabled Robinson to write satirical prose about the less glamorous assignments in the Navy, such as blockade duty, otherwise known as “Channel groping.”85 It empowered him to expose the double standards of the Royal Navy, when—for example—common seamen who smuggled goods were punished, but their officers, who smuggled on a grander scale, somehow escaped attention.86 The notion that sailors had a positive duty to expose the seamy underbelly of naval life found its most vigorous expression in Robinson’s jibes at the idea of “English liberty,” which, he observed, seemed to stop at the coastline. Not only were the men of the forecastle grossly subordinated to the men of the quarterdeck, the “unfortunate” women of Portsmouth were “taken to market like cattle” to serve the needs of crews newly arrived in the harbor.87 Robinson apologized for his lack of education, but only in ways that reaffirmed his main point—that his account was the accurate and truthful one. He mocked the adornments of learning—“quotations from Admiral Horner [sic], Commodore Virgil, or Captain Caesar”—and contrasted his plain, sincere writing with “the flowery display from a cabin dilletante” who might be writing only to impress his friends. Jack Nasty-Face wrote his pages “on a seaman’s chest,” not a writing desk, and their language was that of the “forecastle academy.”88 Even when Nautical Economy turned to the battle of Trafalgar, that moment of national triumph was not presented as a moment of unity when class distinctions were glossed over or forgotten. Instead, the narrative draws attention to a cruel midshipman, 12 or 13 years old, who died in the battle, unmourned by the men he had flogged.89 It would fall to another sailor, however, to write the definitive radical account of the Royal Navy and its place in British society. Charles Reece Pemberton was born in Wales in 1790 into a family that he characterized as “the poorest of the poor.”90 He ran away to sea in 1807, serving seven years in the Royal Navy. After the war, he

Behold Our Empire

125

drifted, earning some recognition as an actor and theater manager, but eventually settling on a career as a lecturer for Mechanic’s Institutes, which were intended to offer educational opportunities for working people. The first such institute was established in London in 1824 by Francis Place and Henry Brougham, partly inspired by George Birkbeck’s efforts in Glasgow.91 Pemberton seems to have specialized in recitations from Shakespeare’s tragedies, but George Jacob Holyoake remembered him as an “exotic lecturer,” so his talks at the Mechanic’s Institutes must have included some discussion of his experiences in the Royal Navy and overseas.92 Pemberton also became a contributor of poetry and prose to the Monthly Repository, a Unitarian publication then under the editorship of William Johnson Fox. Fox, a former Unitarian minister, deepened the magazine’s coverage of radical social and political thought; its proportion of articles on religion was in steep decline in the early 1830s, and the Repository featured regular commentary by Harriet Martineau and John Stuart Mill.93 It was here that Pemberton published his life story in 12 installments over the course of 1833 and 1834. Printing a radical sailor’s testament was fitting for a magazine that frequently denounced flogging and impressment.94 For the purposes of his autobiography, Pemberton assumed the name of “Pel. Verjuice,” the first name supposedly a shortening of Peregrine (possibly to evoke the razor-sharp beak of a falcon), and the surname referring to the bitter, vinegar-like quality of Pemberton’s account. His “sourness” extended far beyond his unpleasant recollections of the Royal Navy. Pemberton lashed out at the hypocrisy of British society in general: “On every village green, companion to the church, you have erected a pair of stocks. All your honesty, your morality, and much of your religion, is as two current coins jingled against each other.”95 Like his friend and fellow Monthly Repository contributor, the self-taught working-class poet Ebenezer Elliott, Pemberton lost no opportunity to excoriate a ruling elite that told the poor to satisfy themselves with pride in their country, while leaving most people in that country half-starved and ignorant. Elliott, known as the “Corn Law Rhymer,” liked to drive this point home by setting angry poems to the tune of “Rule Britannia” and “God Save the Queen” and then singing them at public gatherings and political rallies.96 Pemberton, too, found nothing more infuriating than patriotic songs and slogans devised for the mouths of the downtrodden: “[B]ound along, leap, leap in ecstasy, and cry, ‘I too am an Englishman!’ ... Then home to the scanty and exhausted ashes that lie on your shiver-giving chimney-hearth.”97 What distinguished Pemberton

126


from Elliott was that he could contribute his unique voice as a naval veteran who had become critical of war itself and specifically of the uses to which sailors, and soldiers, were put by Britain’s rulers. The Autobiography of Pel. Verjuice went far beyond a simple narrative of Pemberton’s life and experiences. He reviewed the various types of literature on sailors available to a reader in the early 1830s and systematically assessed the weaknesses of each genre. Best-selling novelists such as Frederick Marryat and James Fenimore Cooper had prepared the public for a different kind of excitement, conditioning them to expect swashbuckling derring-do and cliffhanger suspense. They wrote “to amuse, not to amend.” Reformed writers like those who wrote testimonials and conversion narratives in the Sailor’s Magazine possessed the “moral courage” to change themselves, but in Pemberton’s view, lacked the “moral strength” to demand that the Navy and the British government undertake reforms as well.98 Pemberton reserved his harshest words for the “flashy” songs of Charles Dibdin, which had inflicted possibly irrevocable damage on the sailor’s ability to win an audience for any realistic account of life at sea. 99 He recommended instead the poet George Crabbe’s harsh realism. Authenticity meant daring to be dull, gloomy, and critical, although Pemberton acknowledged that publishers would not welcome such an approach.100 Having, improbably, won an audience for the moment in the Monthly Repository, he proceeded to offer an account of his sea career that broke with every established convention. His shipmates were neither generous nor honest. Life at sea was squalid; at night, sailors hung clustered in their hammocks like so many bats in a cave.101 The taste of grog, the “elixir” celebrated in so many “claptrap sea songs, and flummeryised nautical tales,” was simply nauseating.102 So much writing about life at sea suffered from myopia; the injustices, to the extent that any were named or recognized as such, were confined to the temperament of particular officers or the misfortunes suffered by a specific crew. Pemberton had a considerably broader vision of what was wrong. He mocked the ubiquitous monuments to war heroes in churches, as well as the custom of staging citywide illuminations, which involved lighting candles to commemorate news of a triumph on land or sea. When he looked upon “England’s victories on every wall” or saw her glory “blazing from a thousand windows,” Pemberton saw evidence of the “pestilential wind” of militarism, a poisonous yet intoxicating vapor offered to the hungry and destitute as a substitute for real nourishment. Those who derived such pleasure and satisfaction from contemplating the sacrifice of the patriotic dead were, he proposed, engaged in a kind of cannibalism. The “poor

Behold Our Empire

127

and vital-gnawed of England” were expected to “look on the red and trampled field of slaughter, and banquet on their murdered and mangled brethren, to peruse the records of victory, and grow full upon its fumes.”103 Pemberton took an explicit stance against war in general, taunting conservatives who knew all too well that “men won’t fight, if ever they acquire the knack of asking for whom or for what.”104 Should Jack Tar ever hesitate and wonder why he was putting his life on the line “to fatten and gorge a few” while reaping few benefits for himself, a variety of disciplinary measures existed for “mingling and directing the elements of Rule Britannia-ism, and fitting such true-born Britons for their glorious destiny.” The floggings would continue until morale improved.105 In a passage of refreshing candor, however, Pemberton admitted that he himself “had no time to be frightened” in battle, consumed instead with an “excitement even to frenzy”; his mind might question the justifications for war, but his heart was “drunk and delirious” with the thrill of the moment. Even Pel. Verjuice was not immune to the seductive appeal of militarism.106 “For whom or for what” had the wars been about? Britain’s interventions within Europe had often been in alliance with despots. Pemberton observed that the Duke of Wellington’s bloody and expensive Peninsular campaign had been to restore the old dynasty there, making Spain safe once again for a church and state noted for its “fanatical ferocity and bigoted ignorance.”107 Perhaps Britain’s ruling elite had more values in common with its Continental counterparts than it was admitting. Was it not “pure Englishism” to adhere to custom and exact due submission from one’s social inferiors?108 No wonder, then, that “‘rights’ was a word out of the jolly British tar’s vocabulary; or, in short, and at best, his creed of faith, duties, and moralities, was the Russian catechism, with an appendix, viz. ‘the divinity that doth hedge a king’.”109 There were differences between Europe’s most reactionary and autocratic governments and the Old Regime still entrenched on Pemberton’s own sceptred isle, but not as many as patriots liked to pretend. Pemberton’s radical critique did not spare the British Empire. He argued that speeches and sermons calculated to instill reverence for the Empire represented “impudence and hypocrisy” at their very worst. Bid these cold and hungry be cheerful and rejoice, for England has won renown, and ocean owns her as its queen—ay—ay; and distant earth has felt the footsteps of her conquering sons upon its bosom.

128


Point east, and west, and south, and tell this man, THERE his country’s banner floats.110

What did that banner stand for in the wider world? It was not the flag of freedom. William Wilberforce might call for thanksgiving services to trumpet Britain’s generous decision to outlaw the Atlantic slave trade, but Pemberton’s own experiences in Havana and San Juan reminded him that Liverpool merchants continued to enrich themselves by sending their ships to Caribbean ports where human beings were still treated as property.111 The British government proclaimed that it regarded slave ships as no better than pirates, but in wartime that same government countenanced a legalized form of piracy, awarding “prize money” to the officers and crew of any naval vessel that captured any ship, military or civilian, belonging to the enemy. Was this rapacious band of corsairs, which “eagerly seeks and fattens on the ruin of the defenceless,” not the same Royal Navy that was supposedly the shield of helpless Africa?112 Stanfield had treated the slave trade more or less as an isolated horror, while Pemberton’s more comprehensive radical vision offers an integrated critique of the relationships between autocracy in politics and religion, war, loyalism, ignorance, and empire. His insights into why the low-ranking members continued to submit to and support the system were especially acute. Why, for example, did crews witness brutal acts of so-called discipline and not raise a hand to prevent them? Pemberton observed how “that precious claptrap, loyalty, as it was nicknamed, sealed many a mouth.”113 He astutely added that boatswain’s mates and others who were charged with the task of administering punishments actually relished their little privileges. “Men who have been promoted from the ranks, or from the mast, are generally the most harsh disciplinarians and [the most] industrious of tyrants ... it is their turn now. The principle extends broadly and deeply in political or social life also,” Pemberton explained, making upwardly mobile individuals “the staunchest of Tories,” for example.114 What was the solution? Pemberton hoped that improvements in education would ultimately lead to the decline of authoritarianism within the military and elsewhere. He argued that society had long taught people to be submissive, the fruits of which could be seen every time a strong, muscular sailor silently acquiesced to having his bare back sliced open by the whip: [E]ducation had obliterated their true manliness; it had bowed their souls to abject servility; it had bowed down their more beautiful and lofty nature to the degradation of mere hounds of the game.115

Behold Our Empire

129

Reeducating sailors would take time. Conservatives dreaded the day when “that cursed Delilah, the march of intellect, [would] cut off the sailors’ pigtails,” but Pemberton knew that day was not at hand.116 He made numerous references to his own struggles against the “grovelling superstition” of his shipmates. “They would not think, they could not think,” he exclaimed, “putting two ideas together to make a result, seemed to be beyond the reach of their faculties” and speaking to them felt like trying to bridge “an impassable gulf.”117 Yet he insisted that “the extension of knowledge among the people” was the only path to political improvement. There was, then, a direct link between the young Pemberton’s experiences during the Napoleonic Wars and his later years of writing, lecturing, and presenting scenes from Shakespeare at the Mechanic’s Institutes. He did not expect the process to be an easy one, but he could see no other way to create a working class that thought of itself as something better than living machinery.118

Conclusion I began this chapter with John Bechervaise’s rhapsody about the grandeur of the British Empire. Like most of the sailor-authors discussed in this chapter, he insisted Jack Tar deserved a considerable share of credit for that empire’s successes. Bechervaise wanted some sailors to garner more credit than others, however, as he makes clear in this passage about authenticity: It has been remarked, by some writer, that a Seaman is an original being, possessing habits and manners essentially different from those of other classes of society. No doubt this marked character is occasioned by the very peculiar mode of life he is obliged to adopt; a life so widely different from that of a landsman. Yet his feelings, in most instances, bear the stamp of Nature’s kindliest mould; and I have ever found, that the plain blue jacket of a true British seaman (not a mongrel) covers a heart largely endowed with the warmest and best affections of our nature.119

By his own admission, as a native of the Channel island of Jersey, Bechervaise spoke French better than English to the end of his life, and quite possibly had himself been called a “mongrel” or the equivalent by a shipmate or two. This might have led him to make common cause with all of his fellow sailors and assert a cosmopolitan identity. Instead, Bechervaise adopted a more exclusive, and exclusionist, version of Britishness in his autobiography. The sailors of Bechervaise’s generation would increasingly identify as “white.” As I have shown

130


in this chapter, he was not alone in this maneuver; many sailors, acutely aware of empire, sought to turn their imperial role to their advantage. Agitators against flogging, in particular, were prepared to obtain rights and recognition at the expense of fellow shipmates who might be sailors, but were not British sailors. In this all-important context, the exclamation “behold our empire” was not a reproach (as it clearly was to Stanfield) but a claim to dominion (as it was for Nicol). Identifying as British was one way of demanding a share of the spoils of empire. Those spoils, of course, took psychological as well as material forms; exemption from the lash was a point of pride, and one that could be enjoyed more fully in the simultaneous awareness that others did not enjoy it.120 There were other reasons why self-congratulatory voices like Bechervaise’s were more likely to obtain a hearing than the acidic criticisms of Pemberton. As Pemberton himself put it, Jack Tar was popular, but as a sort of clownish figure who won praise for his “oddities”; like the sailor characters on the London stage, the sailor was expected to keep on “chorusing clap-trap songs, and [dance] the everlasting reel and hornpipe.”121 Why was there such uneasiness at the thought that Jack Tar might have something new to say? Sailors carried the burden of being remembered as the cheerful, dutiful, and unreflective chaps who had won the last war. Autobiographies by veterans peaked in the 1830s and 1840s, at a time when many other worries preoccupied the reading public. Faced with political uncertainty, technological change, and social disarray, it was easier to associate the Royal Navy with comforting memories of a simpler world. Readers will learn in the following chapter how, at the moment when reform-minded sailors sought to deploy their patriotic service in the cause of social and political change, the admirers of Britain’s Old Regime invoked the name of Jack Tar as a symbol of how things once had been, hoping that the spirit of Nelson’s Navy could be presented as a viable alternative to the anarchic tendencies of the mid-nineteenth century.

Chapter 6

4

Shi ps Without Sailors? Nostalgia for Jack Tar in the Industr ial Age

A

lthough John Tosh has proposed that after 1815, “the dominant forms of masculinity were becoming increasingly detached from military training and from the expectation of taking up arms,” the continuing celebration of ships, sailors, and nautical derring-do suggests that the picture was more complicated.1 For example, from Douglas Jerrold’s smash hit Black Ey’d Susan (1829) to Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), Jack Tar remained one of the favorite icons of male heroism on the London stage. “Act I, Scene I. A View of the Country”: The first line of Black Ey’d Susan was not dialogue, but a stage direction.2 The action of Jerrold’s play necessarily unfolded in a port, but the invocation of a rural backdrop cast maritime life in a nonurban, or antiurban, frame. What precisely was “rustic” about sailors? The anomie of the growing cities appeared to contrast with life on a smaller, simpler, slower, and happier scale; implicitly, the urban life of ports was being contrasted with the smoky, smelly, and often wretched life of Manchester, Glasgow, and the other “shock cities” of the era. Jerrold learned this the hard way when his play Factory Girl flopped in 1832. A reviewer explained that the playwright should have stuck with the jolly tars of Black Ey’d Susan, or even from his edgier play about the Nore mutiny. There was a “romance which hovers about a seaman’s habits ... [which] insensibly relieves the pressure of wrongs and sufferings, which also might be found too real.”3 Implicit in all of this was an imagined contrast between Jack Tar’s fresh air, vigor, and loyalism, as compared to the factory worker’s confinement, alienation, and class-consciousness. This particular form

132


of nostalgia may seem strange; there had been no shortage of social and political conflicts during the Napoleonic Wars, and as I have shown in the two previous chapters, sailors had not been a model of contentedness.4 Consider, however, that Nelson died at the moment of his greatest triumph in 1805. Unlike Wellington, whose career in public life stretched well into Victoria’s reign, he did not live to see the urban, industrial, and political transformations of the new era. Nelson, enshrined in his tomb beneath St. Paul’s Cathedral, was never required to stake out positions on divisive issues like Catholic Emancipation, railroads, or Chartism. This sense that Nelson and his loyal crews were frozen in time, forever swearing allegiance to George III, contributed to the wistful fascination with Jack Tar that flourished in the period between 1815 and the Great Exhibition of 1851. Efforts to assert the continuing relevance of Nelson’s Navy in a changing world only confirmed that the past—however urgent its claims, and however present in memory—is, in fact, irretrievable.

Reading Captain Marryat on the Train to Manchester In 1839, J. M. W. Turner exhibited his instantly famous painting of the Fighting Temeraire—an old warship from Nelson’s day, destined for the “ship breaker,” that is towed into the sunset by a small black steamboat.5 Ten years later, Punch presented some of the same sentiments about ship-breaking in a more frenetic and comical image (see Figure 6.1). Nelson’s heirs appear here as senseless children who know no better than to smash the noble vessels that have been bequeathed to them. A teakettle labeled “the new boiler” lies on the floor, suggesting that the adoption of steam power is not the solution, but part of the problem. A possible caption for this cartoon might have been, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” Britannia, here a vexed and perplexed mother, admonishes the unruly admirals to stop “spoiling your things.” She is, significantly, accompanied by a lion wearing a sailor suit. The lion’s scowling face bears more than a little resemblance to the physiognomy of Rowlandson’s Jack Tar; as in the 1790s, we see the sailor as Britannia’s consort and best defender. The implication of this cartoon is that Jack Tar’s stalwart spirit is still around, but that he will soon have no ships worthy of bearing him, or perhaps that machinery (here, mocked as the teakettle) will eliminate any need for sailors. Punch may have enjoyed belittling steam power, but this was itself a tribute to the anxiety that it evoked. The strange idea that steamships

N o s ta l g i a f o r Jac k Ta r i n t h e I n d u s t r i a l Ag e

Figure 6.1

133

“Britannia and the Admiralty,” Punch, 1849.

would wage war without the participation or guidance of any human being had a precedent in comments from this same era about locomotives and railroads, which were likened to ships that lacked both a “captain” and a “crew” in the traditional sense. Passenger trains could travel 30, 40, or even 50 miles per hour. This giddy speed inspired effusions about “flying” past a blur of unintelligible scenery. Passengers accustomed to the higher level of control associated with walking, riding, or coach travel felt exhilarated, but also trapped, locked onto the track and the appointed route; there were no stops on demand. Train and track were one immense interlocked machine. The experience was likened to being a projectile shot through a gun barrel. Even the engineer, riding in front, was subservient to telegraph signals that let him know whether the line was clear. This vessel, then, lacked a true captain to assert authority over the machines, or even a helmsman to set the course.6 The speed and almost supernatural vigor of the mechanical horse, coupled with the heat and steam it emitted, fed visions of stygian darkness punctuated by outbursts of hellfire. Appropriately, Thomas Carlyle likened his first train ride to “Faust’s flight on the Devil’s mantle.”7 If George III’s reign had been epitomized by the sailing ship, many felt that Victoria’s would be remembered for this snorting, steaming apparition.

134


Carlyle had observed in his essay “Signs of the Times” that what he called the Age of Machinery involved not simply the increasing prevalence of steam but the triumph of “mechanical aids” replacing individual strength and initiative. To Carlyle, the prevailing fascination with political “machinery” (constitutions, franchises, and police) and intellectual “machinery” (clubs, societies, and educational institutions) marked a great loss for the human spirit. He conflated the adoption of labor-saving machinery with the stranglehold of thoughtsaving conformity, as in this representative passage about the publishing industry: “Literature, too, has its Paternoster-row mechanism, its Trade-dinners, its Editorial conclaves, and huge subterranean, puffing bellows; so that books are not only printed, but, in a great measure, written and sold, by machinery.”8 From here, it is a small step to a mechanistic explanation of the human body and even of the human mind. Carlyle quotes a materialist writer of the grossest sort who opined that poetry and religion are a secretion of “the smaller intestines.”9 In such a thoroughly disenchanted world, quantified in statistics of profit and loss, satiety and starvation, there is no room left for mystery, or for moral (rather than material) forces at work in history. By the late 1840s, the initial thrill of steam transport had abated somewhat, and there was a growing market in the railway stations for reading material. In addition to moving considerably faster than a stage coach, the railway journey was sufficiently smooth and bump-free to make hours of reading both possible and enjoyable. Publishers issued “Railway Libraries” series. In 1848, W. H. Smith opened his first bookstall in London’s Euston Station. Just two years later, Smith was operating about 30 stalls distributed over 1,000 miles of track; his retail bookselling enterprise would rapidly expand, growing with the rail network, to cover the British Isles.10 Euston Station was considered the heart of the national railway grid in this early period, because, as the capital city’s first railway terminus (1837–1839), it united London with the growing cities of the north. Euston was noted for its propylaeum, a gigantic ceremonial gateway later known as the Euston Arch.11 Critics were quick to observe that this “Brobdingnagian absurdity,” unlike its Athenian inspiration, did not stand in front of the Parthenon, but perhaps that was the point. The stately propylaeum screened off the ugly or alienating modernity of the ticket offices, train sheds, and hissing locomotives that lay behind.12 Smith’s bookstalls, too, would be seen as a gesture toward improvement or amelioration. Henry James would later write how the W. H. Smith stall, with its brightly colored merchandise, formed


135

“a focus of warmth and light in the vast smoky cavern” of the railway station.13 What sort of reading would be appropriate in such a modern and technologically advanced setting, as the railway passenger runs “down the ringing grooves of change” from London to Manchester?14 Perhaps a novel about the “Condition of England Question,” such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Story of Manchester Life, brand new in 1848?15 W. H. Smith’s list of best-sellers suggests a somewhat different pattern. Frederick Marryat was a favorite author among railway passengers.16 A retired naval officer who had seen action during the Napoleonic wars and in a colonial expedition to Burma, Marryat wrote tales of courageous young midshipmen, swashbuckling combat, and assorted adventures on the high seas, which garnered enthusiastic reviews and a large, devoted readership.17 It is true that some readers may have been drawn to Marryat more for the pranks, eccentric minor characters, and droll vignettes than for the maritime setting per se. His most popular books Peter Simple and Mr. Midshipman Easy combined naval adventure with aspects of other genres, particularly the entire spectrum of humorous writing, from low comedy to social and political satire. The hilariously misarranged “triangular” duel between three aggrieved participants in Midshipman Easy combines slapstick with a class-conscious comedy of manners: “But,” said Mr. Easthupp, “I do not understand it. Why is Mr. Biggs to fire at me? I have no quarrel with Mr. Biggs.” “Because Mr. Easy fires at Mr. Biggs, and Mr. Biggs must have his shot as well.” “If you have ever been in the company of gentlemen, Mr. Easthupp,” observed Gascogine, “you must know something about duelling.”18

Marryat had a disconcerting way of combining violence and comedy, treating fisticuffs, gunshot injuries, and blood-splattered decks in an offhand or cavalier manner. A series of pranks in Midshipman Easy involving missing trousers, the occasional open reference to prostitutes, and the presence of (untranslated) French obscenities made Marryat unwelcome with the next generation of readers. Even in the 1840s, W. H. Smith’s decision to stock more than a dozen different titles by Marryat is somewhat intriguing, given his reputation for keeping the inventory of his bookstalls thoroughly respectable (he was sometimes called “the North Western missionary” as a result).19 Marryat’s novels may have addressed some particular psychological needs of railway customers in the 1840s. Life in the Royal Navy

136


was heavily regulated and regimented, as the author admits in one unusual passage: What machines we are on board of a man-of-war! We walk, talk, eat, drink, sleep, and get up, just like clock-work; we are wound up to go the twenty-four hours, and then wound up again; just like old Smallsole does the chronometers.20

Clock discipline, of course, was a mainstay of the railway experience too. Such references to windup sailors are not at all typical of Marryat’s writing, which abounds in rule-breaking, misadventures, shipwrecks, and situations that leave the hero alone with just one or two friends, essentially surviving by their wits and reflexes. Wise authority figures learn to nod and wink at the bold enterprises of the young men, who often go missing for long periods only to return laden with prizes and wonderful stories. The villain of Peter Simple is Captain Hawkins, who provokes his ship to the verge of mutiny when, out of personal cowardice, he denies his ambitious young officers and enthusiastic crew the chance to capture an enemy vessel that lies within their grasp.21 Despite the hierarchical nature of military life, readers of Marryat’s sea stories could also enjoy them as adventure stories about a world in which the individual still mattered, and one person’s valor could decide a battle. This seemed less and less true in daily life as the century drew on, and certainly was far removed from the trajectory of a passenger in a train compartment. In Marryat’s world, however, skepticism about authority could only go so far. In Mr. Midshipman Easy, a sort of Tory rewrite of the Candide story, Jack Easy is brought up by an eccentric father who is entranced with utopian, millenarian, and phrenological ideas. In search of the perfect spot to enjoy equality and the rights of man, the young Easy deduces that the sea, which belongs to no one, would be the freest place on earth. Joining the Navy, the cheerful teenage philosopher—whose favorite expression is “I should like to argue this point”—learns about the shortcomings of his father’s position in a long series of often amusing misunderstandings and outright clashes with superior officers, not to mention the rough-and-tumble realities of the world. By the end of the book, Jack returns to his father’s estate, where he finds that the squire has failed to punish poachers or collect the rent from his tenants—since the land is theirs as much as his—and treats his house servants as equals. Naval officer Jack, who no longer believes in equality, resolves the latter problem with a single blow of the fist, flooring the insolent doorman.22 The final confrontation with his father takes place in a room where the devotee of utopianism and phrenology has constructed a bizarre


137

invention, a machine called “The Throne of Reason.” The Throne consists of “rods in every direction” connected to tubes, which lead to a large air-pump.23 The elder Mr. Easy explains its operation on the contours of the skull, once the “patient’s” head is locked in place with a steel collar: Observe all these little bell-glasses which communicate with the airpump; I shave my patient’s head, grease it a little, and fix on the bellglass, which is exactly shaped to fit the organ in length and breadth. I work the air-pump, and raise the organ by an exhausted receiver. It cannot fail. There is my butler, now; a man who escaped hanging last spring assizes on an undoubted charge of murder. I selected him on purpose; I have flattened down murder to nothing, and I have raised benevolence till it’s like a wen.24

Jack repudiates his father’s notions in a lengthy speech in which he observes that the pyramid is “the most lasting and imperishable form of building” and should be the model for society. He adds that peasants are actually happier than kings because they do not suffer from the monarch’s “cares and anxiety.” After Jack wrests control of the household, the elder Mr. Easy suffers a fatal accident in his own machine. The former midshipman puts down the poachers, goes hunting with his hounds, becomes known for hosting balls and dinners, and is convinced by the other great landowners of the county to take a seat in Parliament “on the conservative interest.”25 The notion that life in the Royal Navy would have offered a soothing respite from the fast pace and technological upheaval of Victorian life was wrongheaded for many reasons. Railroads were famous for disseminating the idea of standardized time, as exemplified by the Bradshaw series of timetables for arrivals and departures, but the early railroads synchronized their clocks to watches carried by messengers sent daily from the Admiralty, the acknowledged masters of scientific timekeeping. Many railway administrators and station managers were former army or navy officers, reflecting the expectation that military men knew how to hold workers to a tight schedule.26 Similarly, although it is tempting to contrast the wooden warships of the Royal Navy with the extraordinary engineering innovations epitomized by the locomotive and the railway shed, we should recognize that in certain areas—such as the use of a new material, corrugated iron, in the construction of gigantic self-supporting roofs—breakthroughs at the naval shipyards actually pointed the way for the builders of railway sheds.27 However, Jack Easy’s trajectory, which concludes with him living as a country squire and exacting submission from the tenants, suggests

138


why some would have felt that the Navy did represent ideological stability and a bulwark against social change.28 What Marryat would have offered to the railway passenger embarked for Manchester in 1848 was a sunlit world that still had room for an individual’s direct, single-handed action, and the exercise of what Carlyle called “natural genius.”29 Like the theatergoers who spurned Jerrold’s play Factory Girl, preferring the jolly tars of the same playwright’s Black Ey’d Susan, Captain Marryat’s readers may also have longed for a social order in which everyone knew their place and old certainties were not challenged by new political movements.30 Nostalgia for Jack Tar, then, was not necessarily an escapist response; it could be a commentary on the “Condition of England” and related questions. In the next section, I discuss a famous set of photographs by David Octavius Hill that presented an idealized fishing village as the alternative to the stresses of modern life. Just as Marryat’s novels acquired a special significance when they were read on the train, Hill exhibited his photographs at the Great Exhibition, a showcase for the latest technology. Although photography was, itself, a new scientific marvel, Hill enlisted his camera in the service of a backward-looking mission. He offered a pointed contrast between the troubling headlines of the late 1840s and the quiet dignity of sailors and fishwives in a small Scottish community where the pace of life appeared untouched by the changes that Britain had witnessed since 1815. It was, of course, just such seaside communities that had produced the sailors who had raised the British Empire to its present eminence. If that spirit could be somehow replicated in the swollen, poverty-stricken “shock cities” of the mid-nineteenth century, Hill discerned the potential for national, and imperial, renewal.

Newhaven: The Scottish Fishing Village That Went to the Crystal Palace The Great Exhibition of 1851 was, in effect, the first World’s Fair. It was housed in a bold modern structure erected in London’s Hyde Park that quickly acquired the nickname of the “Crystal Palace.” The exhibits expressed the latest progress in a variety of fields, including McCormick’s Reaper and “Count Dunin’s Man of Steel,” a 7,000piece robot.31 The Great Exhibition was not entirely futuristic in its focus; the Medieval Court demonstrated a nostalgia for more than just the trappings of bygone centuries. David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson’s exhibit, “Calotypes of fishermen and women of Newhaven, near Edinburgh,” reflected a nostalgia for a more recent


139

period.32 (For brevity, and because the “unassertive” Adamson seems to have devoted himself to technical matters, leaving Hill to determine the subject matter and overall artistic direction, I will omit Adamson’s name in subsequent references to the partnership.33) Hill’s fishing village was not a three-dimensional exhibit like the Medieval Court, nor was it an actual village whose buildings and residents had been transported to the site—a technique that would become common in later World’s Fairs. Instead, he used a new invention, “sun pictures” or photography, to create a composite portrait of a small community. The 130 photographs that Hill took of Newhaven, and of its neighboring ports, between 1843 and 1845 have been called “the first sustained use of photography for a social-documentary project.”34 This is true, but perhaps it does not do justice to the possibilities inherent in the display at the Great Exhibition. The Newhaven photographs offered something akin to the virtual “experiences” of Jerusalem or the Arctic that panoramas had made popular.35 Of course, Newhaven was not located in a distant land. Drawing people’s attention to such a searching and detailed examination of a site within Britain suggested that a more introspective social or political point was being made. In contrast to some other observational studies of the 1840s, such as Henry Mayhew’s writing on the London poor, or Edwin Chadwick’s reports on sanitation and conditions in factories, the Newhaven photographs represented sunshine, vigor, dignified labor, and social harmony. As Sara Stevenson has astutely noted, the Scottish fishing village was treated not merely as “a quaint historical survival, but a remaining model for a healthy—and undemoralized—society.”36 Creating and displaying such a compendious set of photographs, however, implied that the survival of Newhaven and communities like it was in some doubt. At a time when some technologies, such as railroads, were speeding up motion—literally and metaphorically—to the point that the eye became disoriented, photography conveniently froze people and scenery in place.37 Hill’s intensive application of cutting-edge technology to the task of preserving this fishing village showed an awareness that “heritage” and “tradition” are not natural or self-sustaining; they exist only in the imagination and are willed into existence anew with each generation, to suit the unique needs and circumstances of that era. In this sense, modernity (or “progress”) and nostalgia complement and reinforce each other more than we might expect.38 Students of Hill’s work have not addressed the ways that nostalgia for Jack Tar inevitably carried with it a strong element of nationalist

140


self-consciousness. When Hill displayed the village of Newhaven at the Great Exhibition, he was portraying an aspect of Scottish life, but he was also commemorating the much-discussed “nursery of seamen,” the vanishing milieu that had produced Nelson’s hardy warriors a generation or two earlier. Without the religious overtones of a trip to the Holy Land, the Newhaven exhibit invited viewers to undertake a pilgrimage to the heart of Britishness. Before discussing the Newhaven photographs in detail, it is important to situate them in the context of the Great Exhibition where so many people viewed them. Without attempting to summarize the large and nuanced scholarly literature on 1851 here, I will briefly indicate the ambition of this undertaking, and the magnitude of the public that came to view it.39 The Exhibition was housed in a structure at least as famous as the marvels that it contained. The Crystal Palace was an 18-acre enclosed space built in a mere eight months from prefabricated parts. Joseph Paxton’s design had no walls or roof in the conventional sense, instead relying on a vast iron grid to support a myriad of the largest glass panels that could be made. The ethereal, weightless effect of the transparent ferrovitreous structure dazzled some and disoriented others.40 Inside the Crystal Palace, there were more than 100,000 exhibits divided into 30 categories, with 1,750 docents standing by to explain the meaning of it all. Many observers remarked on how the exhibits were crowded together; even within 18 acres, there was not enough room. Even without the presence of the Newhaven exhibit, the Crystal Palace already held up a mirror to the nation. In the five months that the Exhibition was open, six million visits were made to the Crystal Palace, mostly on the “shilling days” when a larger cross-section of the public could afford the admission. Perhaps one million of the visitors arrived from the provinces on excursion trains. Such a sudden convergence of humanity was unprecedented, and prompted concerns about public safety, particularly inside a building that was thought to be able to accommodate no more than 50,000 at a time. On the peak day of attendance, October 7, 1851, the building held 92,000.41 The Great Exhibition was widely viewed as a statement about the state of the nation that played host to it. This could involve a certain amount of triumphalism, but also anxiety, particularly about the not-yet-enfranchised working classes. Who would attend, how would they behave, and how would they be influenced by what they saw at the Great Exhibition? Exhibition-goers were, in this sense, themselves one of the greatest novelties in the Crystal Palace.42


Figure 6.2

141

“Mr. Punch’s Industrial Exhibition,” Punch, 1850.

The Punch cartoon makes a pun on the idea of an “industrial exhibition”: instead of displaying the technological trappings of modernity, the cartoonist imagines a human exhibit, intended to represent what was often called the “Condition of England” question (see Figure 6.2). There was a point to this joke. Carlyle had warned that Herculean engines, bridges, and ships might find a counterpart in a diminution of the human body, mind, and spirit. In this dark caricature, elderly, distressed, and sweated labor replaced the steam-powered giants of the Great Exhibition, reminding readers of Punch—if they needed a reminder—of the moral and social dangers of the new era. This cluttered, dimly lit scene suggests sorrow and even claustrophobia in contrast to the bright, airy images typically associated with the Crystal Palace. Machinery had certainly not liberated these people; indeed, their occupations reduced them to the status of dreary automata. Trapped in the glass jars, the workers are isolated from each other, as well as from the middle-class observers, underscoring a common concern about the alienating experience of modern urban life. The Newhaven exhibit, in contrast, would promise a glimpse into a happier, healthier, and more socially harmonious way of living. David Octavius Hill had been concerned with these issues for much of his working life, although he probably would not have called

142


them the “Condition of England” question. Scotland was the most rapidly urbanizing region in all of Europe. Glasgow, and Hill’s own Edinburgh, could rival any city in the world for filth, overcrowding, and disease. Increased economic specialization made communities increasingly vulnerable to bouts of cyclical unemployment. Scotland was undergoing demographic upheaval in other ways as well, losing millions to overseas emigration alone, even as it supposedly enriched itself through rapid industrialization. There was a simultaneous influx of Irish Catholic immigrants. The networks of kinship, acquaintanceship, parish pride, and shared communal purpose that Hill admired were everywhere coming unstuck.43 Hill’s search for a more wholesome alternative to modern life is evident in his earlier, prephotographic work, particularly in The Land of Burns (1840). This heavily illustrated and expensive publishing project expounded on the manners of the Scottish peasantry, enlisting them in the service of what we would now call an invented tradition: the harmonious society of the Olden Time.44 Hill’s engravings, along with the text supplied by John Wilson and Robert Chambers, suggested that antiquarianism (and decades of fast-paced change had already made the Scotland of Burns a remote, antiquarian subject) could keep the Olden Time spirit alive. The description of the pilgrims to Robert Burns’s monument, near Ayr, emphasized how the cult of the Scottish poet fostered various forms of cheerful sociability and nationalist pride: [The monument is] a favourite place of resort for parties of pleasure of almost every kind. A Kilmarnock weaver brings his bride to it, by way of giving her a marriage jaunt. The gentry of Ayrshire bring their visitors to it ... The trades lads of the neighbouring towns of Ayr and Maybole come to it to enjoy their weekly half holidays on the Saturday afternoons. Even the children learn to wander to “the Monument” ... during the finer seasons of the year, there is a remarkable out-pouring of the “nations” of Kilmarnock to this place. They come in carts and in cars, twelve or eighteen to a party; and occasionally no fewer than seven or eight such parties have been reckoned in a day.45

Few contemporary readers of The Land of Burns could have been unaware that the tone of life in the Scotland of 1840 was far removed from the celebrated poet’s midnight romps in the countryside, or even from the common enjoyments of squires and “trades lads” around Burns’s monument. Ayrshire, where the harmonious bucolic festival unfolded, was rapidly developing its coal and iron deposits to service the great industrial towns that had sprung up just a few miles


Figure 6.3

143

“St. Andrews, Fishergate, Women and Children Baiting the Lines.”

away in the adjoining counties of Renfrew and Lanark, which stood at the epicenter of Scotland’s industrial earthquake. Hill’s aim was to make a statement about a particular kind of life and labor, rather than simply documenting conditions at a single point on the map. A few pictures in the “Newhaven” series were actually taken elsewhere, as in this photograph of St. Andrews, a small port on the opposite side of the Firth of Forth (see Figure 6.3). The contrast between this half-circle of women sitting in the brilliant sunshine and Punch’s depressing “industrial exhibition” could not be more dramatic. Unlike the solitary and stifling pursuits of Punch’s laborers, these Scottish women can enjoy the fresh air and each other’s company. The scene combines urban sociability, on a small and manageable scale, with a degree of tight camaraderie and shared purpose that one might associate with village living. The women are baiting the lines that their menfolk will later use to catch fish, a tedious activity, but one that seems ameliorated here by its humane pace, outdoor setting, and friendly ambiance. The central figure, a woman with her back to us, balancing a child on one arm and a basket in the other, casts a sharp shadow against the almost Mediterranean sunlit glare. The blurred white bonnets, an effect of the calotype process, accentuate the sense that we are squinting, or

144


momentarily dazzled by the light, as we follow her. She is posed to suggest movement, although in keeping with the technical limitations of Hill’s equipment, we know that she must have kept perfectly still while the photograph was taken. This careful composition of figures draws us forward, and inward, completing the convivial circle. As Sara Stevenson has observed, Hill’s fascination with ways to produce a fruitful union combining the best of village and city life found a kindred spirit in the projects of his contemporary Rev. Thomas Chalmers, who attempted to solve urban woes in Glasgow by breaking up a heavily populated parish into village-sized units of 60 to 100 families.46 The connection to Chalmers helps to explain why Newhaven, rather than the better-known university town of St. Andrews, became the focal point for Hill’s documentary efforts. Both contained fishing communities, but Newhaven was not much more than a mile from Scotland’s capital city. Indeed, Newhaven’s fishwives were wellknown in Edinburgh itself as they strolled, sold fish, and sang in the streets. The fishing village and the great city were economically interdependent, much as market gardeners in Kent earned their livelihood by servicing London. Edinburgh’s unusually rugged terrain meant that Newhaven and the Old Town slums were simultaneously visible to an observer standing at Calton Hill, just above the photographer’s studio at Rock House. Residents of London might exclaim over the contrasts between East End and West End, or less widely separated neighborhoods such as St. James and St. Giles, but these urban milieux were mutually invisible. Edinburgh, however, was a city of vistas. From Hill’s vantage point, Old Town, astride its ancient volcanic spine, was a standing reproach; Newhaven, a continual reminder of the alternative.47 Although Hill deserves some credit for taking his photographs on site, rather than posing his subjects in his studio (or hiring models to dress up in appropriate costumes), in other ways the Newhaven series did not live up to a documentary or investigative standard. Life in small ports and fishing communities, including Newhaven and the immediately adjacent port of Leith, was not as harmonious, affectionate, and free from class and gender conflicts as Hill’s photographs suggested. The archives of the Trinity House of Leith reveal a tense relationship between those who administered relief funds and the impoverished petitioners who sought help. Face-to-face intimacy did not always result in empathy or compassion. Sailors and their families never fit very well into a parish-based poor relief system. On the east coast of England and Scotland, Trinity Houses had operated for centuries in every major port, taxing


145

shipowners (including foreigners) who made use of the harbor. These revenues were intended to benefit “decayed seamen” and the widows of men lost at sea.48 Trinity Houses also maintained lighthouses and port facilities; as such, they tended over time to become a kind of trade association composed of well-to-do local shipowners, merchants, and sea captains. When, in 1747, Parliament passed a law to withhold 6d a month from the wages of all employed sailors for a “Merchant Seamen’s Fund,” the power to collect the tax, administer the funds collected in that port, and distribute them to needy sailors or their families was given to the local Trinity Houses or associations of shipmasters and merchants.49 Parliament’s decision made some sense, since these organizations had been collecting taxes and administering poor relief for a very long time, but the 1747 law had the effect of withholding money from the wages of all merchant seamen, supposedly for their future benefit, but then leaving them at the mercy of local shipowners—their employers—if they or their families needed a disbursement from the Fund. James Anderson, writing a petition on behalf of Jean Mylls to the Trinity House of Leith, felt the need to stress Mylls’s husband’s long, dutiful service to the local shipowners: [H]e saled with mr. gray in north leith and mr. Back one the [Collhell?] and with mr. primross and with Capton [Hay?] and with Capton hempseed and 6 years he sald to greenland from Leith wherfor [honorable] Gentlmen if you wont give it for her husband sak give it for [Godalmighty’s?] sake for she is in sterving condesion as is well [known] by the neighbourhood ...50

In practice, as Jon Press has observed, the shipowners and merchants tended “to administer the Fund as though it was a charity, with an income to be dispensed at their own discretion.”51 Sailors and their families were not well-informed about their rights to the money. When the Merchant Seamen’s Fund was on its last legs in the 1840s, a shipowner told Parliament that 90 percent of seamen did not know they were entitled to benefits under the 1747 law.52 The Trinity Houses exercised wide discretion in disbursing aid: payments went to those who appeared “deserving,” rather than in proportion to a sailor’s past contributions to the Fund. The typical beneficiary was a widow, but wives with missing or long-absent husbands often received aid as well.53 Although it was common to maintain a small hospital or almshouse on the Trinity House grounds, most of the relief was to “outdoor” pensioners at rates of a few shillings

146


a month.54 No sailors, or widows, could have lived on this alone. Charity on this modest scale could take on great importance, however, when an individual was facing an immediate subsistence crisis, or was on the verge of being evicted. The Trinity House disbursed many small sums to shipwrecked sailors and others who did not technically meet the eligibility requirements. Injured, diseased, or simply “old” sailors received aid, as did unnamed “sailor’s widows,” “women,” and “boys.” A fuming treasurer wrote on one occasion: “5 shillings to 5 vagabonds p[er] Order and against my Will.” Even a small port like Leith possessed its share of strangers, outsiders, and outcasts.55 The fishing village of Newhaven was not large enough to have a Trinity House. In Scotland, communities of this size often met the needs of sailors through a Friendly Society. The appeal of Friendly Societies was that they were administered by and for the people who had paid into the common treasury. Friendly Societies proliferated rapidly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, offering plebeians a measure of security in times of need without undergoing the humiliation of going to the parish or to private charities for relief.56 The Dumbarton and Leven Seamen’s Society wrote into their bylaws that the Society’s benefits were automatic—not subject to a test of the applicant’s “deserving” status. There was no need for petitions, or a special meeting of the directors, to decide upon a grant. Since the Society’s disbursements were “advantages derived from associations for mutual assistance”—not charity—“members widows etc. may freely avail themselves of them without the imputation of meanness.” Any member who was so “unmanly” as to insult anyone for accepting money from the Society would be subject to a fine of five shillings (ten shillings for the second offense).57 Societies did usually stipulate that members claiming illness would be visited, in an effort to discourage fraud.58 Paid-up members were entitled to a range of benefits. The Society at St. Monance, for example, paid 30 shillings for a wife’s funeral, 1 pound yearly for elderly members who could not work, 10 shillings yearly to widows unless they remarried, and 10 shillings yearly to orphans under 12. Some Societies owned burial grounds of their own; others maintained galleries or lofts for members in a local church.59 The Dysart Sailors Benefit Society established a three-class system of membership, allowing those who chose to contribute more to eventually withdraw more generous pensions.60 However, the bylaws of the maritime Friendly Societies contained many strictures about the proper conduct of members.


147

At Dumbarton, members had to be “of good moral character” and not come to meetings when drunk. St. Monance had rules against cursing at meetings, while the Friendly Society of Fishermen at Fisherrow fined members for working on the Sabbath. Illnesses brought on by the member’s own “misconduct” or “intoxication” were the member’s responsibility, not the Friendly Society’s. The Society at St. Monance wanted to stipulate that a widow would receive benefits only as long as she behaved in a “decent moral” fashion in keeping with “the Character of her deceased Husband,” but that clause was struck out by a lawyer. It was, however, standard practice to disqualify widows if they remarried. 61 In Hill’s idealized vision of village life, women and men lived and worked in harmonious groups. They did not beg each other for relief, bow to village hierarchies, bicker about the moral worth of their neighbors, or turn their back on community members in distress. Hill was only able to conjure up his fantasy by ignoring the sorts of daily circumstances and conflicts that affected real women and men. His monumental portrait of Willie Liston is an excellent example of this simplifying and idealizing tendency carried to its logical conclusion.62 Sara Stevenson describes this photograph as “a study in concentration, as he cleans and baits, with mussels, the hundreds of hooks on the line—a meticulous and lengthy task.”63 Hill has composed the picture to concentrate our attention in Liston’s hands and the intricate, “authentic,” and unmechanized work that they perform. Besides the hands, the contours and texture of the fisherman’s clothing stand out with exceptional clarity, right down to details like Liston’s rows of buttons or the individual stitches in the inseam of his trousers. Hill’s calotype technique enhances this effect; the photograph was printed on ordinary writing paper, whose gritty texture helps convey the “feel” of Liston’s weatherbeaten outfit. The photograph, then, defines this man by his task, and his occupational costume. It is a measure of Hill’s success that the photograph is often reproduced today without Liston’s name even appearing in the title. His conspicuously frayed and worn clothes “antique” the fisherman. Despite his humble quotidian task, Liston appears as if he were a veteran of many battles and adventures. He comes across as a man of action, in part because Hill uses the lighting and camera angle to reduce the head and neck in proportion to the rest of the fisherman’s body, suggesting broad shoulders and a rugged physique. The low hat brim shades his eyes, presenting him as a “type” rather than as an individual. Emphasizing his nose and jawline achieves in a photographic format the same physiognomic effect that Rowlandson

148


deployed to such effect in his caricatures of sailors. Hill’s overall composition leads us to assume that this is a man of vigor, but not of much thought or discrimination. “Redding the Line” is reminiscent of ancient statues of Hercules, whose flawed heroism found expression in his muscle-bound torso and small head. In keeping with the nostalgic thrust of the Newhaven series, this photograph suggests that Jack Tar did his duty, feared nothing, and did not trouble himself—or his social superiors—with the product of his thinking. Liston, a relatively young man in the 1840s, could hardly have been a veteran of Nelson’s Navy. Yet, by emphasizing the fisherman’s intensely weathered clothes and lowering his hat brim, Hill reinvents Liston as a sort of national monument to the “unknown sailor,” a form of commemoration that the government had failed to erect at St. Paul’s, or elsewhere.64 The sculptural qualities of Hill’s iconic photograph, precisely because they presented a generic and abstracted version of Jack Tar, suggested something at once splendid and remote, a bygone glory rather than a present source of vigor. Indeed, Liston’s pose suggested—like the famous Farnese Hercules sculpture—a portrait of exhausted strength after lengthy labors.65 This ghostly, careworn image could not fully satisfy those who hungered for more immediate and particular evidence that the spirit of Nelson’s navy lived on, even in this troubled age of change.

“Helpless Wrecks” and “Franklin Relics”: Surveying the Last Remains of the Old Navy Lord Nelson’s final resting place was beneath St. Paul’s Cathedral, but Westminster Abbey offered a rival memorial in the form of a lifelike wax effigy. The Visitor’s Guide to the Sights of London (1844) described it as “a very striking resemblance of our departed hero ... modelled in wax from a smaller one, for which his lordship sat, dressed in full uniform, and decorated with all his orders; the clothes (excepting the coat) were his lordship’s.” The uniform and regalia were authentic, and the face was only twice removed from the real thing. Actually confronting Nelson in the (waxen) flesh might momentarily make the pulse flutter; still, the immediate sequel was likely to be a feeling of disappointment.66 Perhaps sensing that the wax effigy offered an unsatisfying substitute for the dynamic presence of the great man of action, the Visitor’s Guide noted that a large diamond in the Admiral’s hat “can be set in motion by watch-work for two hours.”67 Of course, even if the figure’s arms, or eyes, had been susceptible to the same animatronic


149

windup key, the result would still have been closer to parody than to commemoration. In fairness to this faintly ticking wax model, its futility was less the result of any defect in execution, but rather arose from the flaws inherent in any effort to preserve or reanimate the past in such a literal-minded manner. A similar problem plagued Greenwich Hospital (or, as it was officially named, the “Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich”). This institution was extolled as a “safe mooring,” where old sailors could happily reminisce about past exploits. In the words inscribed on a mug on display at the Queen’s House, Greenwich, it was the place “where seamen prattle o’er their former wars/And proudly shew their wooden legs and tears.”68 The Hospital had been established in the 1690s to care for “Seamen who by Age, Wounds, or other Accidents shall become disabled for further service at sea.” The Hospital was originally financed by a mandatory deduction from the wages of all seamen, but by the mid-eighteenth century its purview was restricted to the veterans of the Royal Navy.69 Roughly 200 to 300 men were admitted each year, with sharp increases toward the end of wars (530 admitted in 1763; 390 in 1781). Although the classic image of the Greenwich pensioner was of an old man, seriously maimed or “ruptured” sailors in their twenties or thirties were also admitted; the period of service in the Royal Navy ranged from decades to just a few months.70 For men who had once taken pride in their “roving” or “merry” life, disability and old age appeared particularly difficult, and full of compromises and indignities. Asking for help was no guarantee of success. Greenwich Hospital’s correspondence with applicants amounts to a massive catalogue of reasons that a person could be ineligible. It was not easy to prove a service record, or the source of one’s injuries.71 If a sailor surmounted this barrier, he might enjoy a degree of security, but judging from the large number of pensioners who subsequently asked to leave or who got in trouble while in residence, life inside was not a very rewarding existence. Many left out of a desire to “remain useful,” yet when the Hospital tried to set pensioners to work maintaining the gravel paths on the Hospital grounds, it resulted in quarrels. There was also tension between the pensioners and the nurses, who were all the widows of seamen.72 Pensioners accused nurses of misbehavior, especially sexual misconduct; some of the nurses fought back, claiming that they had been slandered and demanding reinstatement. Pensioners could be compelled to wear yellow jackets as a punishment (this was known as “catching the yellow fever”), while nurses might be sentenced to wear

150


the “yellow sleeve.” At least two men were expelled from Greenwich Hospital simply for refusing to wear the yellow jacket.73 During wartime, Greenwich pensioners enjoyed more active lives. Some of the healthier men actually rejoined the Navy (they were supplied with clothes and a “sea bed” free of charge by the Hospital), while hundreds of the less able pensioners worked on the Thames, or boarded ships stripped by the press-gang and brought them safely into harbor.74 While the pensioners were eager to perform useful work, the people they had been sent to “help” sometimes complained that they were more trouble than they were worth. A Captain reported from the Nore that the Greenwich men were constantly leaving with illnesses and injuries.75 One officer sent back three pensioners who were “unable to do any duty”—perhaps they had volunteered simply for a change of scenery.76 Another set of pensioners were sent back “having met with accidents to their wooden legs.”77 For their part, the Greenwich men were often angry because the tasks they were given were too monotonous (scraping barnacles off a ship) or impossible because of their old injuries (some men could not row). Officers, accustomed to having their orders followed, took refusal as a form of mutiny; they threatened the pensioners, swore at them, and sometimes struck them. However, the Greenwich men were no longer technically in the Navy, so it was unclear if they could be punished at all for disobeying orders or refusing to work—except by expelling them from the Hospital.78 Although the opportunity to do some interesting work undoubtedly attracted pensioners to volunteer for Thames service, it was also a source of cash. Money did not cease to be important to the veterans “safe moored” in Greenwich, especially because many of them were still trying to help support their families. The Hospital had an ambivalent relationship to the domestic attachments of its pensioners. Those without marital ties were supposed to remain single: pensioners (or nurses) who married during their residency at Greenwich Hospital were expelled. At the same time, perhaps in the old spirit of pronatalist concern for the male offspring of seamen, the Hospital maintained a school for boys. However, the Hospital administrators disavowed any responsibility for the “[i]nconveniences, which may happen to the Parish [of Greenwich], by the Wives or Children of any of the Pensioners.” This strange situation was epitomized by the practice of doling out surplus pea soup to the pensioners’ families at the Hospital gates.79 In the 1760s, a pensioner named Thomas Bond was involved in expensive litigation on behalf of his wife, who claimed the right to sell goods in the marketplace at Greenwich.80


151

Many pensioners left the Hospital so that they could better provide for their families. Some visited their loved ones, discovered that they were desperately poor, and decided to stay and help (which resulted in their being marked down as runaways back at Greenwich). Cornelius Casey was already heavily in debt from “supporting” his wife and two children, and subsequently paying for his wife’s medical care and eventual burial. Afterwards, he rejoined the Navy to pay for the upkeep of his children, though when he was finally too old to work any longer, he applied for readmission to Greenwich Hospital. Thomas Grogan left for similar reasons after five years in the Hospital, but he was too old to draw water and scour pots in his new job as a ship’s cook, and he, too, was forced to beg for readmission.81 Over time, Greenwich Hospital released large numbers of men to become “out-pensioners,” enabling them to get some of the benefits of both worlds.82 The sailor’s very isolation—the aspect of Hospital life that proved so frustrating to the real pensioners—permitted Jack Tar to be idealized by visitors, without the distractions and contradictions presented by sailors’ families. In Thomas Davidson’s painting “The Pensioner’s Story,” a white-bearded and uniformed veteran holds forth to a prosperous-looking middle-class family.83 The problem of Jack Tar’s domestic ties has been resolved: the sailor’s own kin have been replaced by his middle-class admirers. In this narrative, the sailor’s service was to the nation, and now the nation has become his true family. As Thomas Hood put it in his “Sonnet to a Decayed Seaman,” Methinks—thou Naval History in one Vol.— A virtue shines, e’en in that timber leg, For unlike others that desert their Poll, Thou walkest ever with thy “Constant Peg”!84

Gazing at the crippled veteran put to rest any residual anxieties over the “wandering tar”; Jack could no longer hope to escape from the national embrace. Greenwich Hospital policy treated the pensioner as literally married to the nation, to the point that the sailor’s wife and children had to live outside and assemble periodically for handouts at the Hospital gates. This macabre disunion of the maritime family would have appalled the pronatalists of the previous century, but isolating the sailor from society made it easier to fulfill the expectations of the adoring tourist. Jack Tar’s real life had to be hidden offstage.85

152


After its peak during the Napoleonic Wars, when it housed nearly 3,000 pensioners, Greenwich Hospital began a slow decline, receiving ever more tourists even as its role as a veteran’s home diminished.86 The art historian Sarah Monks has characterized Greenwich—buildings and pensioners alike—as a highly contrived “spectacle” of state power.87 However, not every visitor came for the anticipated reasons, or responded in the intended manner. It was, to some extent, an accidental destination for steamboat day-trippers headed for the picnic grounds at Greenwich Park, or for people who found Christopher Wren’s Baroque façade impressive. From 1823 onwards, the Hospital was formally reorganized as a museum of art. Although the pictures on display were principally selected because they portrayed admirals, their victories, and other maritime topics, a significant proportion of the visitors may have come out of an interest in the famous painters represented in the collection, rather than as students of naval history or as pilgrims to a national shrine.88 The presence of pensioners in the room could come as a mild surprise to visitors lost in their own conversations or standing with their nose in a guidebook. One tourist publication actually interrupts itself as a way of reproducing this experience of intrusion. It begins to introduce a large painting in the chapel, Benjamin West’s portrayal of St. Paul’s rescue from shipwreck, noting its dimensions and subject matter, and then interjects: “But let us listen to its description by a veteran blue-jacket who, with his wand, directs the visiter’s [sic] attention to the various interesting objects delineated in the picture.”89 Visitors who did, in fact, turn their attention to the pensioners frequently reported ambivalent feelings. George Mogridge was well aware that he was meeting the “warriors of by-gone days,” some of the last who could have any personal memory of the battles of the Nile, of Copenhagen, or of Trafalgar, but found these elderly men something less than “thunderbolts of war.” It was hard to ignore the disconnect between the paintings of furious battles hanging on every wall and the quiet pensioners, some shuffling about, others sitting motionless and gazing at the river for hours.90 Mogridge suggested that “a plain building” would have been more appropriate for the purpose. Whose interests were served if the priority was “that it should be known, seen, felt, and talked of, that the nation’s defenders are not forgotten,—that they have pensions granted them, and live in palaces”?91 Maintaining Christopher Wren’s seventeenth-century riverfront complex could not have been the most cost-effective way to help veterans.


153

Foreign observers did not mince words. Zachariah Allen, visiting from the United States, characterized the pensioners as “helpless wrecks” and “poor decrepit men,” concluding that at Greenwich Hospital, “national pride and individual poverty are here contrasted.”92 Benjamin Silliman, another American visitor, remarked that the minds of the pensioners “seemed to be very vacant” and noticed how “some of them had but one leg; others none.” He pitied the veterans, who, in his view, had received “small ... compensation for a life mercilessly cut off from all the charities of home” even if they got to spend their last years among “lofty colonnades” and “extensive courts.”93 Joseph Ballard’s observation was the most poignant. He recorded how veterans of particular battles could be visited in their rooms, which were “ornamented with little pictures” of the appropriate battle and commander.94 This was a tribute to the veteran’s service, but it also suggested that some form of label or interpretive plaque was required because the veteran’s person, and his voice, were not sufficient to communicate his own significance to the passing tourist. Greenwich Hospital was meant to convey national grandeur, but ended up evoking a sense of pathos. If not at Greenwich, where could the spirit of Nelson’s navy remain alive and relevant? Those who felt stifled in the constricting milieu of an increasingly urban, domesticated, and bureaucratic society could fantasize about its Arctic opposite. The polar regions had become associated with a thrilling spiritual frisson; they were a place of “exultation and terror, liberation and acrophobia” where a man’s mettle could truly be tested.95 Arctic exploration had also become associated quite closely with the reputation, and the postwar identity, of the Royal Navy. Inventing a new national epic around the search for the Northwest Passage—the sea route across the icy regions of North America to the Pacific—became the life’s work of the influential Admiralty bureaucrat John Barrow. Drawing on the Elizabethan chroniclers Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, Barrow traced a centurieslong genealogy for this “object peculiarly British.” The Arctic was an unlikely target for imperial expansion; unless you were a whaler, it was both inhospitable and unprofitable. Trade to Asia was lucrative, but absent any prescient prophecies of global warming, there was little likelihood that the Northwest Passage, if discovered, would ever be commercially viable. Barrow, however, had a broader vision of the purpose of Arctic exploration. He claimed that the Navy’s polar voyages “never failed to excite a most lively interest among all conditions of men.”96 In other words, the Royal Navy’s inspiring quest for the

154


Northwest Passage could play an important part in restoring the sense of moral clarity and shared national purpose that many Britons had enjoyed during the Napoleonic Wars. Lord Nelson had been fond of a line from Henry V about his “band of brothers”; the warm bonds of comradeship on such a voyage offered an attractive alternative to the squabbling over taxation and the franchise, with their attendant undertones of class warfare, that seemed to dominate national discourse in the decades after 1815. Of course, naval vessels also retained a clear chain of command, and as such presented a model of social hierarchy, and social stability, that would have been congenial to the readers of the conservative Quarterly Review, where Barrow published his manifestoes for polar exploration. Barrow’s social and political agenda provides some context for his extraordinary claim that the expensive, hazardous Arctic missions were warranted by the need for a training ground for the next generation of sailors. They were, he argued, a nursery of maritime manly vigor at a time when other “nurseries” were imperiled: “We have much need of increasing such men, now that Steamers are supplanting our best Seamen.”97 In fact, even in the 1840s, when Barrow advanced this claim, steamships were not putting large numbers of sailors out of work—particularly in the Navy—but it spoke to an underlying concern about the condition of society, the pace of change, and the feeling that Britain’s best years might be behind it.98 The smart approach to Arctic exploration would have been to follow the whaler William Scoresby’s advice and adopt a “light footprint,” using small teams with dogs and sleds and living off the land.99 The Admiralty’s insistence, instead, on sending large warships into shallow water and narrow ice channels speaks to their desire to use Nelson’s navy—in the most literal sense, his ships, his officers, and his crews—to conquer this great natural obstacle in the north, and by doing so, prove its worth and contemporary relevance. Sending large parties of sailors dragging heavy supply-laden sledges for miles across the ice made no practical sense, but like Hill’s photographs, it did express a yearning for continuity in an era of tumultuous change. This was evident in the publicity surrounding what turned out to be Sir John Franklin’s last expedition in search of the Northwest Passage. Franklin formed a human link between the reign of George III and that of Victoria. The Illustrated London News, reporting on the departure of Franklin’s ships in 1845, noted that at the age of 14, their commander had served as a midshipman under Nelson in the battle of Copenhagen, and later fought at Trafalgar as well. The


155

Royal Navy’s campaign against the Arctic appeared, here, as a literal resurrection of Nelson’s spirit. As I will show, it was this human element—both the officers and the crews—that would ultimately capture the public imagination the most.100 Franklin’s ships, however, were very much of their own time, and their technical features stole some headlines at the time of the launch. The Terror and the Erebus, two of the biggest vessels yet to be employed on a voyage to the far north, had been refitted with steam engines and “the most approved Archimedean screw propellers” rather than a paddlewheel mounted on the side. In fact, the steam engine on the Erebus had been acquired second-hand from a locomotive that “formerly ran upon the Greenwich Railway.” This engine, the Illustrated London News reported, had the power of 25 horses.101 In a break with tradition, the Admiralty was deploying the most notorious symbol of modernity in the cause of polar exploration. In a grand gesture of industrial hubris, the Terror and the Erebus would pit their steam engines and their reinforced hulls against the polar ice pack. As the years went by and Franklin’s ships failed to return, however, the expedition was judged not in terms of the success or failure of this engineering, but in terms of the character of the officers and crews. Carlyle had warned that the development of mechanical energy could lead to an attenuation of personal and moral vigor, but by the late 1840s, the rhetoric of polar exploration had begun to unify man and machine, in interesting ways. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, in a memorable article, proposed that the indomitable British spirit would surmount every obstacle that the forces of nature could muster. Steam engines, however impressive, were just one expression of Britain’s constitutional dynamism or heartiness. Just beneath the trappings of technology, then, remained Jack Tar’s pluck and his officers’ inspired leadership. If that spirit failed, it did not speak well for Britain’s claims to be the world’s most energetic nation.102 After dozens of search and rescue missions, and extensive recourse to clairvoyants and spirit guides, the quest to discover Franklin’s lost polar expedition finally ended in 1854, when Dr. John Rae returned from the Arctic.103 Rae found some corpses, some items with the initials and family crests of the missing officers, and some gnawed human bones in a pot. He reached the conclusion that the starving explorers had resorted to cannibalism before the end. Rae’s report was published in the Times with this editorial coda, which encapsulated in three devastating sentences the many ways in which Franklin’s failure marked a humiliating setback, not merely for the reputation of

156


the expedition members, but for Britain’s claims to a broader civilizing mission in all parts of the globe: Some of the corpses had been sadly mutilated, and had been stripped by those who had the misery to survive them, and who were found wrapped in two or three suits of clothes. The articles brought home by Dr. Rae had all been worn as ornaments by the Esquimaux, the coins being pierced with holes, so as to be suspended as medals. A large number of books were also found, but these not being valued by the natives had either been destroyed or neglected.104

This was how Barrow’s glittering dream of a Northwest Passage ended, with only the Inuit sporting “medals,” while the explorers were to be remembered for preying on each other in a manner associated with savages. The silver forks belonging to the officers were among the most distressing of the so-called Franklin relics. Had they been used for an unholy feast? According to Rae’s story, rather than gratefully receiving Christianity and civilization in the form of books, the native peoples had decorated their clothing with objects belonging to the dead Britons, like grisly trophies of conquest. Not surprisingly, some readers of the Times rejected Rae’s account, ascribing cannibalism to the Inuit rather than to Franklin, his officers, or his crew.105 Charles Dickens developed this position at length in “Lost Arctic Voyagers,” published in Dickens’ magazine Household Words. Dickens mocked the Inuit testimony collected by Rae as “Esquimaux kettle-stories” and essentially acted as a character witness for the dead, repeatedly emphasizing that Franklin’s crews were “picked English seamen of the first class” who should be above suspicion.106 Dickens acknowledged that European voyagers had, at times, resorted to cannibalism, as in the case of the French ship Medusa. His rebuttal took a nationalist tack: And is it with the scourged and branded sweepings of the galleys of France, in their debased condition of eight-and-thirty years ago, that we shall compare the flower of the trained adventurous spirit of the English Navy, raised by Parry, Franklin, Richardson, and Back?107

The phrase “trained adventurous spirit” conjoined head and heart to form an ideal hero. Behind Dickens’s affirmation remained the fear that the officers and crews had, instead, lost their composure and succumbed to anarchy. “We have had quite enough of great Arctic expeditions,” the Times editorialized.108 This was an understandable sentiment, but the Franklin debacle had damaged more than the public


157

support for expensive, yet profitless, polar missions. It had exposed the problems inherent in holding up the Royal Navy as a beacon of social and political stability, a project that—as I have shown in this chapter—appealed to many people. What had become of the authority relationships between officers and crew on the Erebus and the Terror in the last days? Critics of high taxation, military adventures, and the (only recently repealed) Corn Laws had long maintained that in Britain, the rich fed upon the poor. Set apart like a laboratory experiment in the polar wastes, had this been acted out in reality? The precious metal, engraved initials, and family crests that made the officers’ forks identifiable also served as a reminder of the class divisions aboard ship. Alternately, if the crews had set upon the officers (perhaps because they looked like a better meal?), then the decorous and nonviolent mutinies of 1797 had been succeeded, in the more divisive 1840s, by an insurrection of cannibal sailors who devoured their own commanders. A country that prided itself on avoiding the excesses of Robespierre’s Terror now had its own to remember, and HMS Terror was the Royal Navy’s own. Nelson’s vaunted “band of brothers” had been replaced by a band of man-eaters. The legacy of Nelson was also on the mind of Sir Edwin Landseer when he painted his extraordinary portrait of two polar bears finishing off the remains of a polar expedition. “Man Proposes, God Disposes” was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1864; at the same time as he created this disturbing image, Landseer was completing his clay models for the four bronze lions that keep watch, to this day, at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.109 Unlike Landseer’s lions, whose strength is expressed through majestic inaction, the polar bears gnaw and rend. One bear tears a piece of sail between his teeth (though some have identified it as a British flag), while the other bear throws his head back, perhaps to swallow, but seemingly also to savor the act of crushing a bone from an exposed rib cage. In case any viewer should fail to make the connection to Franklin’s fate, a Navy coat and a telescope lie in the snow on the left. Landseer had a long history of painting pictures in which the animals were “not mere animals.” In 1839 he had arranged some of Queen Victoria’s favorite pets into anthropomorphic roles, suggesting an allegory about social or political hierarchy. In the following year, in “Laying Down the Law,” he assembled a group of dogs to play various roles in a courtroom drama.110 If the polar bears in “Man Proposes, God Disposes” are indeed meant to be people, then the ravenous feast takes on a different meaning. The hand of God might be at work in some inscrutable way, but the members of the polar expedition had

158


defeated—and consumed—themselves, turning on each other like beasts instead of upright Victorian heroes. Landseer, who could make any animal look erect, dignified, or even regal when he wanted to, degrades the polar bears by positioning them in ways that emphasize their horizontal aspect. One reviewer described them as “monster ferrets.”111 In a parallel to this arrangement of torsos and limbs, he also makes a study of their low foreheads and prominent jawlines. Richard Ormond has noted how “the mast and sail are arranged at the very center of the composition, supported by great blocks of ice, [to suggest] some huge, shattered trophy.”112 The lost trophy must be, in one sense, the polar objective that Pierre Berton dubbed “the arctic grail.”113 Yet, particularly, given Landseer’s simultaneous preoccupation with his monumental lions, it is worth considering whether the fallen column, flanked on either side by snarling bears with the temperament of junkyard dogs, may be a mordant revision of Trafalgar Square itself. Instead of presiding from a safe height over the sprawling, unruly metropolis (which by 1864, had tripled in size since Trafalgar), Nelson has been pulled down from his quarterdeck pedestal. Instead of ruling, as first among equals in the “band of brothers,” the mutinous brothers have devoured him, and each other. The anguished reaction to the Franklin debacle was possible only because sailors had become respectable at last. For most of the eighteenth century, Jack Tar was seen as a roguish, vaguely foreign, and not entirely trustworthy figure. At the time of the Cook expeditions to the Pacific, George Forster’s condemnation of Cook’s brutish seamen had been shrugged off as no reflection on Britain or its imperial pretensions. By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, fears about how steam technology might bring about Jack’s imminent extinction show us how much had changed since the 1770s. Rather than portraying sailors as peripheral to the nation, it was now possible to ask in all seriousness whether anyone could be British if Jack Tar no longer existed. Joseph Conrad, himself a sailor, developed an obsessive interest in the fate of the Franklin expedition, an interest that helped shape his famous short novel Heart of Darkness. It is very revealing that a lapse in Jack Tar’s conduct, a descent into savagery, could now be read as an indictment of European civilization more generally.114 This was itself an indication that the efforts of several generations of sailors to identify themselves with the fortunes of the British Empire, and with the values of imperialism, had finally made an impact.

Conclusion

I

n just a few carefully crafted lines, William Wordsworth captured the dilemma of the sailors who, themselves conscripted, later participated in press gangs and brought in new conscripts: A Sailor he, who many a wretched hour Hath told; for, landing after labour hard, Full long endured in hope of just reward, He to an armèd fleet was forced away By seamen, who perhaps themselves had shared Like fate; was hurried off, a helpless prey, ‘Gainst all that in his heart, or theirs perhaps, said nay.1

We could subsume the process described in Wordsworth’s poem under the rubric of “forging the nation”—the subtitle of Linda Colley’s influential book Britons—though a pressed sailor might ask who is doing the forging, and who is under the hammer. At a more visceral level, Wordsworth’s lines evoke one of the central problems that we must consider when nationalism and masculinity intersect. The very call to arms that supposedly distinguished (and exalted) male identities above female ones, the call that promised to multiply the individual male’s virility into a majestic masculine host—an army, a fleet—too often found its origin in the humiliation of the conscript. However powerful the military might be, its individual members could not be unaware of their own disempowerment. Saying “yes” to the nation required at least a temporary suppression of the individual “nay.” What did sailors get in return? I have shown that beginning in the 1770s, their indispensible contributions to British power were, increasingly, recognized and celebrated. I want to emphasize,

160


however, that this success remained uneven and, in certain important ways, surprisingly limited. In the 1790s, despite more than 20 years of celebratory songs and theater, Jack Tar found himself inducted into the national pantheon mainly as a supporting player in the hero worship surrounding Horatio Nelson. Already a hero in 1797, and on the verge of even greater celebrity, Nelson selected “a British Sailor” alongside a lion as the heraldic supporters for his new coat of arms. This intriguing use of a human being where, traditionally, a fierce animal would have stood, could be interpreted as a mark of respect, but it also suggests a kind of appropriation—and domestication—of Jack Tar.2 This heraldic symbolism persisted in the arrangements for Nelson’s commemoration after his death. The funeral procession, in January 1806, included 300 sailors who were selected and carefully outfitted for the occasion. “We are to wear blue Jackets, white Trowsers and a black scarf round our arms and hats besides [a] gold medal for the battle of Trafalgar, Valued £7-1s, round our necks,” wrote one participant. It was important that the “mob”—as the 100,000 mourners who waited in the cold were called by the funeral planners—see Jack Tar saying farewell, and that he look the part.3 Did this gesture acknowledge sailors as actors in the great national drama, or were they a convenient prop? Meanwhile, John Flaxman, then one of Britain’s greatest living sculptors, took on the task of commemorating the hero. His monument to Nelson, in St. Paul’s, reproduced the heraldic relationships in sculpture, with a lion on the right and the “British Sailor”— infantilized as two young boys in sailor suits—on the left, gazing admiringly up at the one-armed hero on his pedestal.4 Again, this is inclusion, but not inclusion at its most generous or meaningful. What of common seamen who themselves paid the ultimate price for their country? As Holger Hoock has observed in an insightful essay, “the ruling orders clearly remained uneasy about the political ambiguities that general battle honours and a more democratic commemorative culture might have been seen to carry, and which could have been exploited by those like Major Cartwright who demanded political participation for all fighting men.” He notes that Britain lagged behind France, Prussia, and Austria, failing to construct a “general war monument to all the fallen” that would commemorate the sacrifices of the rank and file.5 In this book, I have examined a number of reasons why sailors had such difficulty earning admittance to the pantheon of British heroism. At the national level, sailors were treated more like objects than subjects until the late eighteenth century. They were to be “bred” or

Conclusion

161

raised in a “nursery” as if they were trees or livestock. An acute interest in managing the sailor’s body—keeping track of his spilled seed, finetuning his diet, and curing his diseases—was only gradually replaced by an interest in his mind. Even then, much was written about the feebleness of that mind, its fickle temperament, and the problem of the rambling, globe-trotting, unreliable sailor. There was a fear that sailors, rather than joining the nation-building project, could easily become emigrants or renegades; although most were born in Britain, they denaturalized themselves through exposure to sea breezes and foreign climes. Underlying this, of course, was a presumption that a degree of rootedness was required in order to be truly national. The dream of a system of model fishing villages dotting the coastline spoke directly to this problem. Rather than a motley crew of Jack Tars that mysteriously “generated” or reproduced itself from a promiscuous blend of domestic and foreign sources, the fishing village offered a sexually orthodox regime that situated sailors firmly in a local setting. The more ambitious variants of this scheme, such as Jonas Hanway’s plan for forced marriages between sailors and prostitutes, represented a drastic social-engineering solution to what was considered a grave problem: How to retain the sailor’s spilt seed, and ensure that Jack Tar’s sons became British sailors themselves. At a symbolic level, the fishing village fulfilled some of the same functions as farms and pastures in the emerging iconography of the nation. It was as bucolic as seafaring could get. The intense interest in “settling” Jack Tar spans the entire period covered in this book. As late as the 1840s, David Octavius Hill was still at work on this project, using the new technology of photography to capture the men and women of the much-idealized fishing village. Frozen in the image, roving Jack Tar was forced at last to remain still. Sailors were aware of these anxieties, but responded to them in their own, creative ways. The petitions written by the 1797 mutineers drew on the mass of writing about Jack Tar, including Dibdin lyrics and the ruminations about how to get sailors married and settled down. However, the mutineers reminded the public that many sailors were already married and trying to support their families on inadequate wages. The mutineers showed restraint and urged the government to appeal to their minds—through a wage increase and other reforms—rather than just seeking to control their bodies. Sailors struggled to find a voice that would communicate their agenda to a wider public. In order to make that connection successfully, however, they had to pay close attention to how the public already perceived them.

162


Jonathan Rose relates a marvelous anecdote about the young working-class reader who finally figures out, to his pain and bewilderment, that the references to “low cads” and “ruffians” in his favorite novels are meant to refer to him, that the rough neighborhoods supposedly infested with such dangerous characters are, indeed, his own.6 For too long, we have ignored the ways in which sailors, too, would have become aware of the discourses that swirled around Jack Tar. Yet we know that sailors spent much time in the great port cities, which—particularly in the case of London—were also centers of cultural production, including theater and publishing. I have shown that—like Rose’s astonished “cad”—sailors became increasingly sensitive to how people looked at them, and subsequently tried to do something about it. As Gareth Stedman-Jones might put it, they began searching for a language that they could inhabit.7 This halting, uncertain process is not one that is well accounted for in the literature on nationalism, which has often had a teleological prejudice in favor of ready-made, coherent rhetoric. One honorable exception is Matthew Brown, whose analysis of nineteenth-century Colombia cleverly twisted Colley’s term (“forging the nation”) and proposed that during their war against Spain, elites were “foraging” for patriots to serve in their armies.8 Both Colley and Brown acknowledge that nation-building was improvised and driven by expediency, but “foraging” avoids some of the pitfalls inherent in Colley’s image of a forge. A forge (like the “melting pot” once favored as a metaphor for the process of becoming American) is a place where things come together, lose their distinctiveness, and never come apart again. A forge also requires a forger, some hulking Promethean figure standing above with a hammer and a grand design, imposing a final order on the elements before him. In contrast, Brown’s term—“foraging”— leaves us with entirely human and slightly desperate actors who are assembling something to meet their needs of the moment. Rather than forging or even foraging, I will suggest a third term framing to describe what sailors did. When you position a picture frame, you impose a border that includes some things and crops out or shuts out others. This helps us talk about the numerous varieties of nationalism that are based not on alloy-building or amalgamation, but on separation, discrimination, and firm distinctions of “us” against “them.” Unlike forging, which requires considerable power, the framing maneuver can be performed by almost any member of society. It is, we might say, a proposal rather than an imposed regime of national identity. Like other proposals, reframing the question invites further debate. In contrast, a nation, once forged, hardens into

Conclusion

163

a set shape and, barring a cataclysmic meltdown and reconstitution, cannot incorporate new elements. Such a process would likely involve violence (recall the hammer and anvil). My book has, instead, been concerned with the efforts of common seamen, and a few women, to position the national frame in a way that included them. I would argue that framing is actually more true to Colley’s own underlying idea of Britishness as an invented tradition of fairly recent origin. It shows how Britishness, long after its initial “forging,” remained susceptible to redefinition by individuals and groups who took what might be called an entrepreneurial approach to nationalism. This was particularly evident among the self-described reformed sailors discussed in Chapter Five. These writers emphasized religion, and their book-length works imitated the example set by the short conversion narratives that appeared in the evangelical magazines, but their relevance extended well beyond that sphere. The category that they promoted, of the “true British seaman,” staked out a distinct masculine refusal to be either “bred” or “nursed.” Through their appeal to a national-character explanation for Jack Tar’s merits, they also tethered masculinity to race. This invention of the white sailor does not lend itself to terms such as “forging.” Rather, they articulated a nationalism that relied upon framing. The “true British seaman” could not exist without explicitly excluding others who had to be cropped out of the picture. This suggests a more general conclusion. Among the humbler ranks of society, the quest for Britishness was likely to be experienced as a divisive, rather than unifying, exercise. Self-proclaimed “Britons” were apt to disparage the claims of others, just as many groups later on in the nineteenth century would make their case for the franchise by noting how supposedly inferior sorts of people did not deserve the right to vote.9 The likely judges in a contest for “number one patriot” would not be from groups whose Britishness was particularly in question. Although Colley identified ways in which the aristocracy and even the royal family scrambled to portray themselves as productive and patriotic contributors to the nation’s wealth and military success, it was people from economically and socially marginal groups whose safety, livelihood, and hopes for a better future were most obviously at stake in the battle for Britishness. By comparison, existing entrenched elites had little to risk and much to gain by encouraging a proliferation of would-be Britons who could fight each other for scraps from the master’s table.10 A similar point could be made about racial polarization. It is true that some sailors sought to benefit from division and invidious comparison, but not without assistance from Parliament and from government

164


bureaucrats. In Chapter One, I took note of how the Home Office imposed its own classification system to the disservice of the empire’s colonial sailors, who might be rallied to the flag as Britons in one year and find themselves chased back to their “foreign” continents of origin the next. Another example of framing Britishness to exclude certain categories of sailors is the formation, in early 1786, of the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor in London. The Committee’s charitable work with homeless “blacks” (a vague but color-coded category including individuals of American, African, and Asian origin), predominantly refugees from the American War and including many men with sea experience, culminated in a resettlement project that “returned” black sailors to Sierra Leone in West Africa, a part of the world that many of them had never even visited, and to which some were not tied even by ancestry.11 Yet alternatives existed. In that same year, 1786, the British Fisheries Society was founded—also in London—to create model fishing villages as a way of retaining unemployed sailors and keeping them close, and safe, as a reservoir of trained manpower pending some future war. This won approval, and funding, as an ingenious method of “home colonization.”12 Ullapool and Tobermory were established two years later. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of those sent to found the African settlement had died of disease, warfare, and starvation. Framing certain sailors as outside the circle of Britishness had real, and sometimes deadly, consequences. None of this is meant to position black Britons as passive victims who could not, themselves, exercise some form of agency. Another advantage of framing over forging is that framing admits the possibility of contestation and multiple versions (or visions) of nationality. I have not discussed many sailors from overseas in this book, and the available evidence is limited, but it seems clear that they had their own ideas about where the borders of Britishness might be drawn. For example, in the 1810s, Joseph Johnson—a street singer who is remembered as the man with the ship on his head—found a way to put himself back in the picture (see Figure C.1). Johnson, a black sailor of American origins, began his itinerary on Tower Hill near the East End, but expanded to include market towns and farming communities as far afield as the present location of Heathrow Airport. The ship served, in part, as a discreet advertisement. The cries, interruptions, and importunities of street vendors, beggars, and entertainers formed a familiar, and sometimes unpopular, feature of life in the capital.13 Johnson’s ship—bobbing over the heads of a crowd, displaying a perfect “appearance of sea-motion”—was silent, yet it gave him a competitive edge in the fight for the fleeting

Conclusion

165

Figure C.1 “Joseph Johnson.”

attention of passersby. Johnson’s repertoire of sea songs such as “The British Seaman’s Praise” and “The Wooden Walls of Old England” cut through the suspicion, firmly identifying this peg-legged sailor with patriotic sacrifice, explaining and contextualizing the ship. His predecessors on the streets of London were written off as the “Black Poor.” Johnson’s success at making a living by professing his role in the national, and imperial, story suggests that he won a degree of acceptance as the face—and the voice—of British heroism. He “never fails to gain the farmer’s penny,” recorded John Thomas Smith.14 In the absence of a clear legal or cultural consensus about the place of people of color in Britain, informal assertions of street citizenship— like Johnson’s—mattered a great deal. A street singer was in no position to resolve the question of who counted as a Briton, but he was able to enlarge the space of possible answers.15

166


A similar point could be made about Mary Anne Talbot, discussed in Chapter Three. Whether or not she ever went to sea, Talbot made a cogent case for the real possibility of female patriotism equal to any man’s. We need to set Talbot’s narrative against competing accounts written by men, who tried to position the frame exclusively around male seafaring, devaluing women who had performed the same work and took the same risks. The male sailor’s critique of impressment was based on a concept of the dignity of maritime labor resembling what Anna Clark has described as “Chartist domesticity,” positing the sailor as a patriarchal breadwinning head-of-household.16 The returning seaman intent on providing for his family was demonstrating an ability to defer gratification, precisely the quality that so many observers had lamented was missing in Jack Tar. While sailors were quick to bring up their wives when it suited their purposes—the 1797 mutineers are a good example—the remarkable silence about women in virtually all of the autobiographies produced by male sailors would seem to confirm that their priorities may have been “the very reverse of domestic,” as Jack Tar’s detractors had often warned in the past. 17 We can, then, acknowledge the passion of the sailors who wrote against flogging and impressment, but also observe that the quest for better treatment and more respect from society in general was coupled with an effort to closely identify white male sailors with the British empire. Without Jack Tar’s efforts, they observed, there would have been no Captain Cook, no Lord Nelson, and indeed none of the entire panoply of seaborne scientific, commercial, and imperial achievements that had raised Britain to its present status as a global superpower. Sailors like John Bechervaise did not reject a national—or imperial—identity; rather, they saw opportunities in both and chose to exploit them. This may be difficult to reconcile with one received view of oceanic space (as developed by some proponents of Atlantic history, for example) as inherently liberating and cosmopolitan. In this book, however, I have proceeded from the premise that sailors were not primarily the product of long, isolated weeks aboard a ship at sea. They are better understood as residing in the coastal borderland of rivers and ports. In keeping with that estuarine geography, sailors had mixed motives, equivocal politics, and ambiguous identities. Their identities, and priorities, were obviously shaped by what happened to them at sea, but sailors were also deeply implicated in the culture that they interacted with on shore. We should not be surprised, then, to learn that a nineteenth-century British seaman had more in common with a Chartist or an agitator against the Corn Law than he did with a seventeenth-century Caribbean pirate.

Conclusion

167

In Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, Marcus Rediker emphasized the ways that sailors could be an important constituency for rebellion in the Atlantic world. I do not wish to downplay the value or the consequence of Rediker’s contributions. I have discussed a number of undeniably radical sailors in this book, but I have tried to complicate the picture by considering a wider spectrum of subject positions. The sailors who embraced self-help, evangelicalism, and the temperance movement—and even those who offered deceptively simple protestations of loyalism—still found ways to offer mordant critiques of the military and occasionally of society in general. We should not think less of these individuals because they did not divorce themselves from the nation-state, sail off into the sunset, or foment a revolution. “Loyalist” is not an adequate term to describe these men. In this book, I have argued that Jack Tar was more than a passive recipient of culture, who would take away only the intended message from government-sponsored patriotic lyrics or Methodist injunctions against fatalism. While I believe that Linda Colley was too optimistic about the rewards that lay in store for patriots, I concur with her suggestion that popular patriotism could be as dynamic and creative as any other form of expression.18 Sailors consumed culture, but they also produced it, refashioning the message to suit their own objectives. Jack Tar’s political vision was not confined to a closed circle of shipmates; he crafted his statements with an eye to their reception by a larger British public, even if the outcomes were not always the ones that he anticipated. I have also suggested that finding room for the sailor’s voice—any sailor’s voice—was itself a radical development that could have unpredictable consequences. Charles Dibdin, no friend to revolutions, had trained the London theater audience to listen for that voice, even though he did so in the pay of Pitt’s counterrevolutionary regime. Dibdin inadvertently prepared the way for the publication of a number of muckraking autobiographies by sailors in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Their bitter remarks about Dibdin’s saccharine lyrics should not prevent us from observing the debt of the sailor-authors to the famous songwriter. Gauging the impact of Jack Tar’s changing image on the actual policies and practices of the Royal Navy is more difficult. Impressment was not practiced after 1815, and flogging declined over the course of the nineteenth century, but pressure from reformers was only one of many factors that encouraged the decline of these traditional practices. By the 1830s, advances in gunnery had created the need for sailors who were schooled in trigonometry. For the first time, the

168


skills taught in the merchant service and in the Navy diverged; the press gang was no longer an effective solution to the Navy’s wartime recruitment problem. It was now in the Navy’s interest to develop a large contingent of career servicemen trained to operate modern warships. This, in turn, led to reforms in discipline and other areas, aimed at retaining personnel in the long term.19 Meanwhile, broader changes in culture and politics made flogging appear obsolete. David Brion Davis has argued that the unusual regimens of punishment characteristic of the King’s ships and of the West Indian plantations were increasingly difficult to defend against the rising influence of utilitarian doctrines advocating the measured and restrained management of pain. The argument that sailors—or slaves—lacked the faculties of judgment and foresight and therefore should be placed in a special category of restraint did not sit well with a public that was coming to believe that all citizens should be subject to the same laws. It is worth noting that after the 1790s, the long-term trend in all European armies was away from corporal punishment.20 The repeal of the protectionist Navigation Acts in 1849 opened the door wider for Asian seamen, who would sail aboard British-owned merchant ships in ever-increasing numbers from the late nineteenth century onwards.21 The relationship between “nautical” and “domestic” had been transformed. In a globalized marketplace for maritime labor, there was either no need for a “nursery of seamen,” or that nursery would be profoundly redefined.22 I began this book by referring to the historian J. E. Cookson’s suggestion that the “physical remoteness” of seamen led to their cultural and political marginality, or even irrelevance. I have shown that this kind of statement is incorrect for many reasons, but I will also concede that Cookson’s assessment is actually one that was widely held at the time. The naval surgeon Thomas Trotter claimed that the British seaman was ignorant of “general affairs” and actually took pride in his own parochialism: Excluded, by the employment which they have chosen, from all society, but people of similar dispositions, the deficiencies of education are not felt, and information on general affairs is seldom courted. Their pride consists in being reputed a thorough bred seaman.23

Sailors were not so “excluded” as Trotter believed, but they liked to cultivate a proud, distinct persona grounded in an occupational identity. Why did this occupational identity, with its attendant feelings of solidarity, not lead sailors as a group to take a more active role in

Conclusion

169

the reform movements of the day? As I have shown, there was no shortage of disillusionment and alienation among sailors. Impressment, in particular, fostered resentment. Mass conscription—which was meant, obviously, to help sustain the authority of the nationstate—also helped to create a new community of sailors whose sensibility was both more urban, and more urbane, than that of their predecessors. This, too, played into the hands of any would-be agitators. This collective identity was, however, fragile. It was unlikely to survive the special wartime environment in which it flourished. After 1815, those who “used the sea” would disperse to their old pursuits. Sailors came from a great diversity of geographical and occupational backgrounds, and this diversity reasserted itself quickly once the press gangs ceased their activities. The coal-haulers would return to Newcastle; the herring fishers, to scores of small seaside towns around the British Isles. The demography of maritime work should also be considered here. In contrast to a trade in which a young man might hope to progress from apprentice to master over many decades in the same occupation, sailors who survived their time at sea often moved on to other work in later life. It is certainly possible to identify individuals with maritime credentials who played a prominent role in reform movements, but they understood themselves in terms of larger categories that included seafarers only incidentally. Olaudah Equiano wanted to speak for Africans in the diaspora. John Gast, a shipwright, understood himself as a trade unionist and aspired to create a grand alliance of artisans, the “Philanthropic Hercules,” to represent labor’s interests. The sailor-conscript, on the other hand, was a category that would lose its political salience with the end of the war. Perhaps the disgruntled veterans of the Royal Navy were a missed opportunity for the radicals of the early decades of the nineteenth century. We know that agitators on the left were not shy about espousing their own form of patriotism, and it was entirely possible to turn the government’s own slogans against it. A list of floats and banners in this shipwrights’ parade in support of the much-maligned Queen Caroline serves as a reminder: Blue flag with a portrait of the Queen, ‘God Protect the Innocent C.R.’ Model of the head of a ship, inscription ‘Long may our wooden walls defend our native land, May innocence and truth break the tyrants’ band!’ Union Jack, ‘What we have we guard.’24

170


In slogans like “England’s best bulwarks are her wooden walls,” Jack Tar found a political identity that validated his belief in his own distinctive role, but one that simultaneously gave him common ground with other Britons.25 This, in itself, offers one answer to the puzzle of the sailor’s relative silence. The same habit of thinking collectively that made sailors such successful mutineers in certain situations might, under other circumstances, lead them to think in terms of the welfare and preservation of the entire empire even when that ran against their own immediate needs or interests. Jack Tar was reluctant to rock the boat, or in this case the metaphorical Ship of State.

Notes Introduction 1. J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), v. 2. Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman, 1200–1860: A Social Survey (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1968), 123. 3. H. V. Bowen, War and British Society, 1688–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. 4. Alan Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society during the Revolution and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 5. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 6. HO/28/40: Lieut. Comm. Thomas Hawkes to J. W. Croker, 15 Aug 1811. 7. HO 28/7: R. Dawson, Lt. Governor of the Isle of Man, to Grenville, 20 July 1790. 8. The best studies of impressment are likely to be local histories for this reason. Keith Mercer, “Sailors and Citizens: Press Gangs and NavalCivilian Relations in Nova Scotia, 1756–1815,” Journal of Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society 10 (2007): 87–113; Keith Mercer, “The Murder of Lieutenant Lawry: A Case Study of British Naval Impressment in Newfoundland, 1794,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 21, no. 2 (2006): 255–289. 9. HO 28/7: R. Dawson to Grenville, 20 July 1790; HO 28/24: Evan Nepean to John King, 11 July 1798; HO 28/34: John Barrow to J. Beckett, 1 September 1807; HO 28/40, John Barrow to J. Beckett, 21 August 1811. This simmering sense of injustice helps provide context for similar (but less clearly explained) violent episodes elsewhere, such as the ones witnessed by the young William Lovett in his Cornish fishing village. William Lovett, Life and Struggles of William Lovett (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1967), 1–3. 10. I discuss some additional examples from the archives in Isaac Land, “The Humours of Sailortown: Atlantic History Meets Subculture Theory,” in City Limits, ed. Glenn Clark (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, forthcoming).

172

N ot e s

11. Anthony G. Brown, “The Nore Mutiny: Sedition or Ships’ Biscuits? A Reappraisal,” Mariner’s Mirror 92, no. 1 (February 2006): 63, for sailor shortage. 12. Margarette Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy: British Sea Power, 1750–1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 32. 13. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963); Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); the term in quotation marks first appeared in Rosemary Ommer and Gerald Panting, eds., Working Men Who Got Wet (St. Johns: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1980). See also Colin Howell, and Richard Twomey, eds., Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Acadiensis Press, 1991). Nicholas Rogers, The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and its Opponents in Georgian Britain (London: Continuum, 2007) came into my hands too late for me to engage with it fully here. 14. The best-known work is Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 15. N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (New York: Norton, 1986), 145–204. 16. I am referring to Robert Colls’s bold reading of Rodger’s work in John Hutchinson, Susan Reynolds, Anthony D. Smith, Robert Colls, and Krishan Kumar, “Debate on Krishan Kumar’s The Making of English National Identity,” Nations and Nationalism 13, no. 2 (2007): 193. 17. Rodger, Wooden World, 345: “It offends against every canon of experience and common sense to suppose that men who proved under the supreme test of battle to be brave, disciplined, skilful and daring, were in their everyday lives the degraded subjects of an arbitrary tyranny.” On the same page: “[N]o one who has ever commanded ships or men imagines that cruelty and oppression are the way to mould an efficient fighting force.” Fiercely comprehensive claims of this sort can only be intended to silence disagreement, but consider Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 95–105; for the Red Army, Anthony Beevor, Stalingrad (New York: Viking, 1998), 85–86. 18. N. A. M. Rodger, “Stragglers and Deserters from the Royal Navy During the Seven Years’ War,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 57, no. 135 (May 1984): 56–79. See also Robert R. Dozier, For King, Constitution, and Country: The English Loyalists and the French Revolution (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983); Ian R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984); Clive Emsley, “The Social Impact of the French

N ot e s

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

173

Wars,” in Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815, edited by H. T. Dickinson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 211–228; H. T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995). Lloyd, British Seaman, 132–133. Samuel Leech, A Voice from the Main Deck (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999), 17. Stephen Conway, “War and National Identity in the Mid-EighteenthCentury British Isles,” English Historical Review 116, no. 468 (September 2001): 863–893. The admittedly awkward-sounding term “trans-local feeling of solidarity” does have the merit of approaching this problem with the appropriate humility: Juliane Engelhardt, “Patriotism, Nationalism and Modernity: The Patriotic Societies in the Danish Conglomerate State, 1769–1814,” Nations and Nationalism 13, no. 2 (2007): 206. See also J. E. Cookson, “The Napoleonic Wars, Military Scotland and Tory Highlandism in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Scottish Historical Review 78 (1999): 60–75; J. E. Cookson, “Service without Politics? Army, Militia and Volunteers in Britain during the American and French Revolutionary Wars,” War in History 10, no. 4 (2003): 381–397; Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Mark Philp, ed., Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Linda Colley, “The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty, and the British Nation, 1760–1820,” Past and Present 102 (February 1984): 94–129. Robert Fahrner, The Theatre Career of Charles Dibdin the Elder (1745–1814), (New York: Lang, 1989). Conrad Gill, The Naval Mutinies of 1797 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1913) is still the standard work on these events. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 10. Linda Colley, “Whose Nation?: Class and National Consciousness in Britain, 1750–1830,” Past and Present 113 (November 1986): 97–117; Linda Colley, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies 31 (October 1992): 309–329; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). For the continuing debate and response to Colley’s work on nationalism, see Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Stephen Conway, War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy, 19, 62, 140–143; the window treatment is Plate 6. Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852; London: George G. Harrap, 1956), 628–629.

174

N ot e s

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

For material culture that made a fetish of the sailor, see the lavishly illustrated J. Welles Henderson and Rodney P. Carlisle, Marine Art and Antiques: Jack Tar, a Sailor’s Life, 1750–1910 (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1999). For an account focusing on this phenomenon, broadly defined, in the 1880s and 1890s, see Cynthia Fansler Behrman, Victorian Myths of the Sea (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977). Colley, Britons, 127. John Nicol, The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1822), 208–210. Quarterly Review 35, no. 49 (January 1827): 164. For context on Lockhart, see William Thomas, “Religion and Politics in the Quarterly Review, 1809–1853,” in History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 136–155. Quarterly Review 35, no. 49 (January 1827): 149. London Magazine (June 1750): 266–268. Colley remarked, I hope in jest, that the battle of Waterloo had “made the world safe for gentlemen again”: Britons, 191. Consider the devastating indictment of expedient and disingenuous wartime rhetoric in Rebecca Earle, “Creole Patriotism and the Myth of the ‘Loyal Indian’,” Past and Present 172 (August 2001): 125–145. The “gentlemen” on both sides of Spanish America’s wars for independence had a lot to say about the fine qualities of the Indians, but they had no intention of empowering the indigenous majority after the fighting was over. My argument here has affinities with, but goes beyond, E. P. Thompson, “Which Britons?” in E. P. Thompson, Making History: Writings on History and Culture (New York: New Press, 1994), 319–329. Tyne Mercury, October 23, 1815; Norman McCord, “The Seamen’s Strike of 1815 in North-East England,” Economic History Review 21 (1968): 127–143. Rogers, Press Gang, 125.

Chapter 1 1. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1st edition (1768), s.v. “Clupea”; Britannica, 3rd edition (1797), s.v. “Fishery” and “Clupea”; Richard Ayton and William Daniell, A Voyage Round Great Britain (London: Scolar, 1978), 3: 78–79. 2. Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Pelican, 1982), 56; Philip Payton, The Making of Modern Cornwall: Historical Experience and the Persistence of Difference (Redruth: Dyllansow Truran, 1992), 86–89; Jane Grigson, Jane Grigson’s Fish Book (London: Michael Joseph, 1993), s.v. “herring” and “pilchards and sardines.”

N ot e s

175

3. For a description of a genuinely Atlantic lifestyle, see Jerry Bannister, “Citizen of the Atlantic: Benjamin Lester’s Social World in England, 1768–69,” Newfoundland Quarterly 38, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 32–37. For other examples of the deepwater emphasis, Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003); Emma Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors and their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007). Contrast with Isaac Land, “Tidal Waves: The New Coastal History,” Journal of Social History 40, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 731–743, and Michael N. Pearson, “Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems,” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 353–373. 4. P. M. Horsley, Eighteenth-Century Newcastle (Newcastle upon Tyne: Oriel, 1971), 227–228. 5. Peter Earle, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen, 1650–1775 (London: Methuen, 1998), 6–7. Ships involved in the North Sea trades would make four or five voyages a year: Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1962), 205. 6. Davis, Shipping; John M. Mackenzie, “Lakes, Rivers, and Oceans: Technology, Ethnicity, and the Shipping of Empire in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century, ed. David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (London: Boydell, 2004), 127. Daniel Vickers, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers and the Age of Sail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) is a stimulating reappraisal of maritime history from this perspective. 7. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 83, 89, 93, 119, 159. Despite Rediker’s evident sensitivity to the labor environment of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, he repeatedly cites sociological or ethnographic studies (by Vilhelm Aubert and others) that deal with conditions on twentieth-century merchant vessels and oil tankers, which were arguably more isolated than vessels from the Age of Sail. Improvements in technology and food preservation permitted them to stay at sea for much longer periods. 8. Ibid., 37. 9. This is also the starting point for Jesse Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly 25 (1968): 371–407. 10. Rediker, Devil, 161. 11. Ibid., 162. 12. Ibid., 147, 168, 191. 13. Ibid., 3, 5.

176

N ot e s

14. See the description of London in Ibid., 24–35. 15. Ibid., 286. 16. Gordon Jackson, “Ports, 1700–1840,” in Cambridge Urban History of Britain, ed. Peter Clark (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2: 726–731, contains much insight in a very short space, but deals with sailors mainly as a social and administrative problem for the authorities. Contrast with Judith Fingard, Jack in Port: Sailortowns of Eastern Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). 17. Ibid., 41, 197. 18. This approach is not abandoned in Marcus Rediker, “Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger: The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Pirates,” in Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920, ed. Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 1–33. 19. Rediker, Devil, 166. 20. Margaret Hunt, “Women and the Fiscal-Imperial State in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29–47; for women and seafaring communities more generally, Creighton and Norling, eds., Iron Men and Wooden Women; Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Valerie Burton, “Boundaries and Identities in the Nineteenth-Century English Port: Sailortown Narratives and Urban Space,” in Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City since 1850, ed. Simon Gunn and Robert J. Morris (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 137–151; Vickers, Young Men, 146–149. 21. Simon P. Newman, “Reading the Bodies of Early American Seafarers,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 55, no. 1 (January 1998), quoted 72–73; Earle, Sailors, 19. See also Vickers, Young Men, 3, 139. 22. Rediker, Devil, 8. 23. Edward Coxere, Adventures by Sea of Edward Coxere, ed. E. H. W. Meyerstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 37; quoted in Rediker, Devil, 79. 24. Rediker, Devil, 172–176. 25. N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (New York, NY: Norton, 1986), 118, 344–346, seems skeptical that there were many conflicts and tensions in British society, but this is, to say the least, an idiosyncratic reading of E. P. Thompson’s writings on the “moral economy” and other crowd actions. 26. Thomas Hodgskin, An Essay on Naval Discipline (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1813), ix; ODNB, s.v. “Thomas Hodgskin”; for Cochrane, see Timothy Jenks, Naval Engagements: Patriotism, Cultural Politics, and the Royal Navy, 1793–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 247–290.

N ot e s

177

27. Dean King and John B. Hattendorf, eds., Every Man Will Do His Duty: An Anthology of Firsthand Accounts from the Age of Nelson (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), xxii, xxv. For a different approach to sailors’ autobiographies, see Margaret S. Creighton, Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 28. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000); see also Julius S. Scott, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution,” Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1986; Jesse Lemisch, Jack Tar vs. John Bull: The Role of New York’s Seamen in Precipitating the American Revolution (New York: Garland, 1997). 29. Rediker, Devil, 90. 30. Robert Hay, Landsman Hay: The Memoirs of Robert Hay, 1789–1847, ed. M. D. Hay (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953), 155–156. 31. On this point, contrast Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra with Isaac Land, “The Many-Tongued Hydra: Sea Talk, Maritime Culture, and Atlantic Identities, 1700–1850,” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 25, nos. 3–4 (December 2002): 412–417. 32. Cal Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 119–166; John G. Rule, “Wrecking and Coastal Plunder,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree, ed. Hay et al., 167–188; Gavin Daly, “English Smugglers, the Channel, and the Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1814,” Journal of British Studies 46 (January 2007): 30–46. 33. Earle, Sailors; Paul van Royen, Jaap Bruijn, and Jan Lucassen, eds., “Those Emblems of Hell”?: European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570–1870 (St. John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 1997); Ralph Lloyd-Jones, “The Men Who Sailed with Franklin,” Polar Record 41, no. 219 (2005): 311–318. 34. Rediker, Devil, 154–155. The overlap between naval and merchant seamen is confirmed in Earle, Sailors, 185. 35. Rediker, Devil, 83. 36. N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (New York: Norton, 2005), 499–501. 37. Denver Brunsman, “The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2004. Even mayors of cities in foreign countries like Prussia imagined that the Royal Navy would be a good destination for their criminals: Richard J. Evans, Tales from the German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 40–41.

178

N ot e s

38. The London and Westminster Guide (London, 1768), xv. The same wording appeared again in John Fielding, A Brief Description of the Cities of London and Westminster (London, 1776). 39. For the uncertainties of this troubled transitional period, see for example D. S. Neff, “Bitches, Mollies, and Tommies: Byron, Masculinity, and the History of Sexualities,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 3 (July 2002): 395–438. 40. Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 41. For overviews that terminate too early to appreciate Dibdin’s full impact, see Harold F. Watson, The Sailor in English Fiction and Drama, 1550–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931); Terence M. Freeman, Dramatic Representations of British Soldiers and Sailors on the London Stage, 1660–1800: Britons Strike Home (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen, 1995). 42. Edward Barlow, Barlow’s Journal of his life at sea in King’s Ships, East and West Indiamen and other Merchantmen from 1659 to 1703, transcribed by Basil Lubbock, 2 vol. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1934) 1: 146, 128, 161–163, 175. 43. Barlow, Journal, 1: 163. 44. Ibid., 1: 134, see also 2: 548. 45. Ibid., 1: 244, 119, 137, 2: 424. 46. Coxere, Adventures, 87; for languages and “passing,” 26, 29–30, 60, 108. 47. Ibid., x. 48. Barlow, Journal, 1: 161–162; for similar passages about “poor men,” 1: 213–214, 2: 358. 49. Earle, Sailors, 167–182. 50. Barlow, Journal, vol. 1, 146. 51. HO 28/24: St. Vincent to Evan Nepean [forgery in Jersey], 8 February 1798; Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman, 1200–1860: A Social Survey (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1968), 163 [forgery in Sunderland, London, and New York]. 52. Matthew Barker, Tough Yarns (London: Effingham Wilson, 1835), 120–121. If we take it as axiomatic that Britishness was the smart bet, as Colley likes to suggest, do we risk condescending to the “deluded” deserters? See also Jesse Lemisch, “Listening to the ‘Inarticulate’: William Widger’s Dream and the Loyalties of American Revolutionary Seamen in British Prisons,” Journal of Social History 3, no. 1 (Fall 1969): 1–29. 53. HO/28/45, f141. 54. For one example, John Cremer, Ramblin’ Jack: The Journal of Captain John Cremer, 1700–1774, ed. R. Reynell Bellamy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), 82, 114–115. It is true that racial categories seem to have hardened in most places after the late seventeenth century, but if sailors were susceptible to those changing terrestrial norms,

N ot e s

55. 56.

57. 58.

59.

60. 61.

62.

63.

64. 65. 66.

179

that susceptibility in itself implies an underlying weakness in the rough egalitarianism that Rediker identified at the heart of maritime culture. Rodger, Command, 498; Michael Lewis, A Social History of the Navy, 1793–1815 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960), 127–133, 137, 139. Peter Linebaugh, “All the Atlantic Mountains Shook,” Labour/Le Travailleur 10 (Autumn 1982): 87–121, speculated that one quarter of the Navy’s crews may have been black; for some updates and corrections, see Philip D. Morgan, “Black Experiences in Britain’s Maritime World,” in Empire, the Sea, and Global History: Britain’s Maritime World, c. 1760–c.1840, ed. David Cannadine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 105–133, especially 113–114. See also W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African-American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). For Asian seamen, see Michael H. Fisher, “Working Across the Seas: Indian Maritime Labourers in India, Britain, and in Between, 1600–1857,” International Review of Social History 51 (2006): 21–45; David A. Chappell, Double Ghosts: Oceanian Voyagers on Euroamerican Ships (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997). Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra. Thomas Clarkson, The Substance of the Evidence of Sundry Persons on the Slave Trade in The British Transatlantic Slave Trade, Vol. 3, The Abolitionist Struggle: Opponents of the Slave Trade, ed. John Oldfield (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), 222. Brian Howman, “Abolitionism in Liverpool,” in Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, ed. David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz, and Anthony Tibbes (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 292. Frederick Marryat, Peter Simple (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 63. Deirdre Coleman, ed., Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies: Two Women’s Travel Narratives of the 1790s (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), 130. David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London: Europa, 1981), 26–27; see also Geoffrey Best, War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 1770–1870 (Bath: Leicester University Press, 1982), 201; Peter Hofschröer, Wellington’s Smallest Victory: The Duke, the Model Maker, and the Secret of Waterloo (London: Faber and Faber, 2004). N. A. M. Rodger, “Mutiny or Subversion? Spithead and the Nore,” in 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective, ed. Thomas Bartlett, et al. (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003), 564. William Spavens, The Narrative of William Spavens, introduction by N. A. M. Rodger (London: Chatham, 1998), vii. Rodger, “Mutiny or Subversion?” 564. Peter Bailey, “Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up?: Towards a Role-Analysis of Mid-Victorian Working-Class Respectability,” Journal of Social History 12, no. 3 (Spring 1979): 336–353.

180

N ot e s

Chapter 2 1. Charles Reece Pemberton, The Autobiography of Pel. Verjuice, ed. Eric Partridge (London: Scholartis, 1929), 202. For reflections on the meaning and broader context of passages like this one, see Valerie Burton, “‘Whoring, Drinking Sailors’: Reflections on Masculinity from the Labour History of Nineteenth-Century British Shipping,” in Working Out Gender: Perspectives from Labour History, ed. Margaret Walsh (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 84–101. 2. “Molly put the kettle on,” in Vocal Museum [British Library 1077. g.47.(14)]. 3. “Jack Tar” in The Singing Island: A Collection of English and Scots Folksongs, ed. Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl (London: Mills Music, 1960), 67; BMC 9106. 4. John Winton, Hurrah for the Life of a Sailor! Life on the Lower Deck of the Victorian Navy (London: Michael Joseph, 1977), 164; Charles McPherson, Life on Board a Man-of-War (Glasgow: Blackie, Fullarton, 1829), 1. 5. Examples are numerous. Three representative caricatures are BMC 5087, 9642, 11139. 6. For a legal defense of this form of conscription, see Charles Butler, On the legality of impressing seamen, 2nd ed., with additions “partly by Lord Sandwich” [1778; The Pamphleteer 23 (1824): 234–239]. J. R. Hutchinson, Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1913); Daniel James Ennis, Enter the Press-Gang: Naval Impressment in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002); Nicholas Rogers, The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and its Opponents in Georgian Britain (London: Continuum, 2007). 7. The literature on plebeian resistance is vast. Classic treatments include Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (1969; New York: New Press, 2000); George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848, rev. ed. (London: Serif, 1995); E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1993); Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged. Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 8. George Orwell, England Your England and Other Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1954), 197. 9. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 97–151; Paul Kléber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 256; E. P. Thompson, “The Crime of Anonymity” in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, Hay et al., eds. (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 255–344; James S. Donnelly jun., “Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel,” Studia Hibernica 21 (1981): 7–73.

N ot e s

181

10. Monod, Jacobitism, 182, my italics; see also John Brewer, “The Number 45: A Wilkite Political Symbol,” in England’s Rise to Greatness, ed. Stephen B. Baxter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 349–376. 11. Thompson, Customs in Common, 75. 12. Rudé, Crowd in History, 150 for Rebecca. 13. Gale E. Christianson, “Secret Societies and Agrarian Violence in Ireland, 1790–1840,” Agricultural History 46 (1972): 369–384. 14. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage, 1985), 75–106. 15. Contemporary scholarship on subculture and pop culture informs my thinking here, but as I have just shown, these phenomena are not new. It is therefore not really anachronistic to invoke the insights of Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip-Hop (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 50–51; Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 61, 100–101, 124. 16. Susan A. Phillips, Wallbangin’: Graffiti and Gangs in L.A. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 207. 17. I have found Dick Hebdige’s work especially helpful: Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979); Isaac Land, “The Humours of Sailortown: Atlantic History Meets Subculture Theory,” in City Limits, ed. Glenn Clark (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, forthcoming). See also more recent literature such as Russell A. Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 8, 57; Phillips, Wallbangin’, 23, 148–150. 18. The hip-hop group Cypress Hill used this sentence as a sneering refrain in one of their best-known songs, “How I could just kill a man.” Speaking unintelligible jargon in a public place is just such a proclamation: here is something you can’t understand. 19. Nicholas Rogers, “Liberty Road: Opposition to Impressment in Britain during the American War of Independence,” in Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour, ed. Colin Howell and Richard Twomey (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Acadiensis Press, 1991), 55–75; Paul A. Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 20. Gilje, Liberty, 129, 234. 21. John Nicol, The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1822), 3–8; Robert Hay, Landsman Hay: The Memoirs of Robert Hay, 1789–1847, ed. M. D. Hay (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953), 28–29; Thomas Trotter, Medicina Nautica: An Essay on the Diseases of Seamen (London, 1797), 35–36, claims that Robinson Crusoe made many “proselytes” of boys from inland towns. See also Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the

182

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

N ot e s British Working Classes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 108–109. Nicol, Life, 3; William Robinson, Nautical Economy (London: William Robinson, 1836), ix–xii, 1–4; George Irwin, Narrative of the Voyages (Hexham: M. Dickenson, 1830), 5. McPherson, Life, 1. Ibid., 22–23. Nicol, Life, 8. Irwin, Narrative, 6–8. Peter Earle, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen, 1650–1775 (London: Methuen, 1998), 67–82, 96–98, offers a helpful, if understated, overview. Robinson, Nautical Economy, 2; Jonas Hanway, The Origins, Progress, and Present State of the Marine Society (London, 1770), 50–51; Hay, Landsman Hay, 37; Matthew Barker, Greenwich Hospital (London: James Robins, 1826), 170; Irwin, Narrative, 6–8; Pemberton, Autobiography, 138–140. The material culture of an eighteenth-century warship is brilliantly evoked in James P. McGuane’s photographic essay, Heart of Oak: A Sailor’s Life in Nelson’s Navy (New York: Norton, 2002). Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 163; Peter Linebaugh, “All the Atlantic Mountains Shook,” Labour/Le Travailleur 10 (Autumn 1982): 110–112; J. H. Parry, “Sailor’s English,” Cambridge Journal 2 (1948–1949): 660–670. BMC 5087. Hay, Landsman Hay, 44. John Cremer, Ramblin’ Jack: The Journal of Captain John Cremer, 1700–1774, ed. R. Reynell Bellamy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), 82, 114–115. Irwin, Narrative, 36; Samuel Kelly, Samuel Kelly: An EighteenthCentury Seaman, ed. Crosbie Garstin (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1925), 61; Nicol, Life, 32; Cremer, Ramblin’ Jack, 78; John Bechervaise, Thirty-Six Years of a Seafaring Life (Portsea: Woodward, 1839), 156, 219; McPherson, Life, 181; Barker, Greenwich, 49. Hay, Landsman Hay, 44. Cremer, Ramblin’ Jack, 69, 200; Robinson, Nautical Economy, 54–55. Barker, Greenwich, 147, 163; Robinson, Nautical Economy, 67–68. For context on alcohol and the military, see N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (New York, NY: Norton, 1986), 72–74; Paul E. Kopperman, “‘The Cheapest Pay’: Alcohol Abuse in the Eighteenth-Century British Army,” Journal of Military History 60, no. 3 (July 1996): 445–470. Alcohol was also used (and abused) to an extravagant degree on merchant ships; see A

N ot e s

39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

183

Soldier [Joseph Donaldson], Recollections of an Eventful Life Chiefly Passed in the Army (Glasgow: W. R. McPhun, 1824), 53–57 for a particularly memorable instance. Notwithstanding the book’s title, Donaldson devotes about 60 pages to his brief stint as a sailor in his early teens. Christopher Lawrence, “Disciplining Disease: Scurvy, the Navy, and Imperial Expansion, 1750–1825,” in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 80–106; Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Encounters in the South Seas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 433–437. James Cook’s Journal, 28 August 1769. Accessed via South Seas project, http://southseas.nla.gov.au/index.html ; see also Earle, Sailors, 132–133. Samuel Leech, A Voice from the Main Deck (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999), 29; Earle, Sailors, 137. Robinson, Nautical Economy, 83–84; Barker, Greenwich, 76. Leech, Voice, 36. Barker, Greenwich, 190–191 and Barker, Tough Yarns, 94–96, 119–120; see also Trotter, Medicina Nautica, 35–43, for an outsider’s description of the “toughness” ethic as it was expressed in combat, as well as sailors’ fierce loyalty and generosity to former shipmates. Relevant songs include “Blow Boreas Blow,” in A Collection of Sea Songs on Several Occasions (London, 1720), 6; “The Neglected Tar,” in The Greenwich Pensioner’s Garland [BL 11621. c.2.(20)], 5–6; “The Jovial Sailor’s Crew,” in The Jovial Sailor’s Garland [BL 11621.c.2.(30)], 2–4; “The Hardy Sailor” and “The Forecastle Sailor” in Jem of Aberdeen’s Garland [BL 11621. c.2.(32)], 6–7; “Pretty Nancy from Yarmouth,” in The Life of a Man: English Folk Songs from the Home Counties, ed. Ken Stubbs (London: English Folk Dance and Song Society, 1970), 60; “The Ship in Distress,” in The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, ed. R. Vaughn Williams and A. L. Lloyd (London: Penguin Books, 1957), 96. Barker, Greenwich, 198; Cremer, Ramblin’ Jack, 188. Bechervaise, Thirty-Six Years, 48, 73; Kelly, Samuel Kelly, 68–71. In George Crabbe’s 1810 poem, “The Borough,” the British tars disdain to cheat the innkeeper by wiping off the reckoning, even though it would have been easy to rub the chalk off the walls: Letter XI, lines 203–228. Cremer, Ramblin’ Jack, 86. Clive Behagg, “Secrecy, Ritual, and Folk Violence: The Opacity of the Workplace in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England, ed. Robert D. Storch (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 154–179.

184

N ot e s

49. Nicol, Life, 174–175; John Bechervaise, A Farewell to My Old Shipmates (Portsea: W. Woodward, 1847), 54; Hay, Landsman Hay, 59. 50. Bechervaise, Farewell, 17–18; see also 5–6, 11–17, 20, 40; McPherson, Life, 138. 51. Pemberton, Autobiography, 199. 52. Ibid., 198. 53. Leech, Voice, 226–228; Cremer, Ramblin’ Jack, 132; Pemberton, Autobiography, 213, Bechervaise, Farewell, 47. 54. Jacob Nagle, The Nagle Journal, ed. John C. Dann (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 65. 55. Glasgow City Archives, T-ARD 3/9: Greenock Merchants’ Society minutes, 25 November 1790; HO 28/36: Captain S. Horton to Admiralty, 26 June 1809. 56. [n.a.], A Letter to a Naval Officer from a Friend (London: Murray and Highley, 1797), 11. 57. Nicol, Life, 158–160. 58. Bechervaise, Thirty-Six Years, 256–258; see also Kelly, Samuel Kelly, 129. In the ballad “The Young and Single Sailor,” in Folk Songs, ed. Williams and Lloyd, 104–105, a sailor successfully masquerades as—and is accepted as—a “man of honour.” 59. Irwin, Narrative, 46–49. George Miller, A Trip to Sea from 1810 to 1815 (Long Sutton: John Swain, 1854), 49: a sailor dresses as a surgeon’s servant to avoid the gang. 60. Naval officers sometimes outfitted their men at their own expense, a practice that was more characteristic of the army. Scott Hughes Myerly, British Military Spectacle: From the Napoleonic Wars through the Crimea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). A ship named the Harlequin had a boat’s crew fitted out by the captain “as if they had signed on to appear in a pantomime”: Christopher Lloyd, Captain Marryat and the Old Navy (London: Longmans, Green, 1939), 15. 61. Rodger, Wooden World, 15, 64–65; Michael Lewis, A Social History of the Navy, 1793–1815 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960), 75; Ronald Hope, A New History of British Shipping (London: John Murray, 1990), 248–249. See also Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, CN: Park, 1882), 247. 62. McPherson, Life, 1; Barker, Tough Yarns, 6; Hay, Landsman Hay, 190; Donaldson, Recollections, 15. For additional citations and a longer discussion of clothing, see Land, “Humours of Sailortown.” 63. Dudley Jarrett, British Naval Dress (London: Dent, 1960), 48, 55, 62, 69. See also Amy Miller, Dressed to Kill: British Naval Uniform, Masculinity and Contemporary Fashions, 1748–1857 (London: National Maritime Museum, 2007). 64. Tobias Smollett, Roderick Random (1749), chapter 25. 65. Trotter, Medicina Nautica, 39–40. 66. Ibid., 38. 67. Barker, Greenwich, 142.

N ot e s 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

89.

185

Lewis, Social History, 108–109. Robinson, Nautical Economy, 38–39. [n.a.], The Jovial Songster, or Sailor’s Delight (Gainsbrough, 1792), 1. Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 24–41, 58–75, 64; Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, vol. 1, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 55–63, 69, 195, 394, 425–430. “The Sailor’s Return,” in The London Songster [BL 1077.g.47.(9)]. A Collection of Sea Songs on Several Occasions [BL 1720 (8)]. Trumbach, Sex, 1: 90–111; Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 42–62. Pierce Egan, Life in London (London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1821), 286. “The Sailor’s Resolution,” in The Mariner’s Concert [BL 1077. g.47.(25)]. Trumbach, Sex, 1: 279. See also 116, 140 of Trumbach for prostitutes whose fathers were “at sea.” “The Oak and the Ash,” in Life of a Man, ed. Stubbs, 54–55. “Tarry Trousers,” in The Wanton Seed: More English Folk Songs from the Hammond and Gardiner MSS., ed. Frank Purslow (London: English Folk Dance and Song Society, 1968), 110. Bodleian Ballads: Firth c.13(169). See also Harding B 25(1340). “Portsmouth Jack,” in Portsmouth Jack’s Garland [BL 11621. c.2.(58)], 2–3. Trumbach, Sex, 1: 199. Trotter, Medicina Nautica, 459–461; Thomas Trotter, A Practicable Plan for Manning the Royal Navy without Impressment (Newcastle upon Tyne: Longman, 1819), 40. Hay, Landsman Hay, 190–191. Vickers, Young Men, 132. “Portsmouth Jack,” in Portsmouth Jack’s Garland [BL 11621. c.2.(58)], 2–3. Rodger, Wooden World, 44; Todd Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), 137–138; Robinson, Nautical Economy, 56–61, 64–65; C. Northcote Parkinson,Portsmouth Point: The Navy in Fiction, 1793–1815 (Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool, 1948), 98–104. “The Oak and the Ash,” in Life of a Man, ed. Stubbs, 54–55; “Home Boys Home,” in The Seeds of Love: A Comprehensive Anthology of Folk Songs of the British Isles, ed. Stephen Sedley (London: Essex Music, 1967), 14–15; “The Basket of Eggs,” in Folk Songs, ed. Williams and Lloyd, 18–19. BMC 11204. For an example of the genre that this song was satirizing, see BMC 10691.

186

N ot e s

90. “The Distracted Sailor’s Complaint,” in The Distracted Sailor’s Garland [BL 11621.e.2.(14)], 2–4. 91. “The Sailor’s Advice to his Brother Sailors,” The Horn-Fair Garland [BL 11621.e.2.(23)], 8. See also BMC 9802, “Poll of Plymouth’s prayer”; BMC 11965, “A Seaman’s Wife’s Reckoning”; Trumbach, Sex, 1: 110. 92. “Rounding the Horn,” in Folk Songs, ed. Williams and Lloyd, 90. 93. Trumbach, Sex, 1: 163. 94. Maud Karpeles, Folk Songs from Newfoundland (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1970), 117–119. 95. “The Sailor’s Return,” in The London Songster [BL 1077.g.47.(9)]; “The Sailor’s Advice to his Brother Sailors,” in The Horn-Fair Garland [BL 11621.e.2.(23)]. For plebeian misogyny, see Clark, Struggle, 63–88. 96. Nagle, Journal, 154–157; “Maggie May,” in Seeds of Love, ed. Sedley, 12–13; (quoted) “Up to the Rigs of London Town,” in Life of a Man, ed. Stubbs, 74–75; “Ratcliffe Highway,” in Folk Songs, ed. Williams and Lloyd, 85; “The Green Bed,” in Ibid, 48–49; “Jack Tar,” in Singing Island, ed. Seeger and MacColl, 67. 97. Bodleian Ballads: Harding B 25 (46). 98. Peter Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree, ed. Hay et al., 92; Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, ed. Eric Partridge (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963), s.v. “dock.” 99. POB: Thomas Bedworth; Murder, 13 September 1815. 100. POB: Robert Anderson, Matthew Goodall; Murder, 23 May 1792. 101. POB: John Colley; Murder, 29 May 1811. 102. POB: John Taylor; Murder (attempted), 1 June 1808. 103. On this topic generally, see Anna Clark, Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770–1845 (London: Pandora, 1987). For sodomy cases and crowd violence, see for example B. R. Burg, Boys at Sea: Sodomy, Indecency, and Courts Martial in Nelson’s Navy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 17, 73.

Chapter 3 1. Some sources spell her middle name “Ann,” without the “e.” I am following the spelling favored by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 2. R. S. Kirby, Life and surprising adventures of Mary Anne Talbot (1809), ed. Paul Royster, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/32/, 37, 40. 3. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 4. Fraser Easton, “Gender’s Two Bodies: Women Warriors, Female Husbands and Plebeian Life,” Past and Present 180 (August 2003): 152.

N ot e s

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

187

Also of interest here is Lynne Friedli, “‘Passing Women’: A Study of Gender Boundaries in the Eighteenth Century,” in G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, eds., Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 234–260; Scarlet Bowen, “‘The Real Soul of a Man in Her Breast’: Popular Opposition and British Nationalism in Memoirs of Female Soldiers, 1740–1750,” Eighteenth-Century Life 28, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 20–45. Easton, “Gender’s Two Bodies,” 133, 168. Giovanni Bianchi, The True History and Adventures of Catharine Vizzani (London, 1755), 64–65, urges his readers to stop “making so light” of cross-dressing because it could lead to lesbian activity. Peter Guillery, “The Further Adventures of Mary Lacy : ‘Seaman,’ Shipwright, Builder,” History Workshop Journal 49 (2000): 212–220. “The Rakish Female Sailor,” Bod. Frith c.12 (238); Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Women’s Press, 1985), 47–62; Camilla Townsend, “‘I am the Woman for Spirit’: A Working Woman’s Gender Transgression in Victorian London,” Victorian Studies 36, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 293–314; Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); Alison Oram and Annmarie Turnbull, eds., The Lesbian History Sourcebook: Love and Sex between Women in Britain from 1780 to 1970 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 11–49. “The Female Cabin Boy,” Bod. Harding B 11 (3512), which has the distinction of being the only ballad included in The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall, ed. Terry Castle (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). “The Pimlico Tar,” Bod. Harding B 22 (235). “The Rakish Female Sailor,” Bod. Frith c.12 (238). The problem of naming and evidence is considered in the following: Martha Vicinus, “‘They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong’: The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian Identity,” Feminist Studies 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 467–497; Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668–1801 (New York: HarperCollins, 1993); Anna Clark, “Anne Lister’s Construction of Lesbian Identity,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, no. 1 (1996): 23–50. The essays in Part III of Sue Morgan, ed., The Feminist History Reader, (New York: Routledge, 2006), 203–270, recapitulate and continue this conversation. For alternative approaches, see Theresa Braunschneider, “Acting the Lover: Gender and Desire in Narratives of Passing Women,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 45, no. 3 (2004): 211–229; Nan Alamilla Boyd, “Bodies in Motion: Lesbian and Transsexual Histories,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 420–433.

188

N ot e s

12. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 13. Carolyn D. Williams, “Women Behaving Well: Early Modern Examples of Female Courage,” in Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early-Modern Culture, ed. Chris Mounsey (London: Associated University Presses, 2001), 72. 14. Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 92–128 is a superb account of this. 15. Suzanne J. Stark, Female Tars: Women aboard Ship in the Age of Sail (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996), 47–81. The baby, Daniel Tremendous McKenzie, who received a medal, is mentioned on page 81. His middle name was that of the ship on which he was born. 16. Here I differ from Easton, “Gender’s Two Bodies,” 149. 17. Kirby, Talbot, 21. 18. Stark, Female Tars; Anna Kirsten Clark, “Womanhood and Manhood in the Transition from Plebeian to Working-Class Culture: London, 1780–1845.” Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 1987, 196–219. Clark discovered 38 instances of “women who tried to enlist or actually served as sailors and soldiers.”: 205. 19. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 65; Matthew Barker, Greenwich Hospital (London: James Robins, 1826), 199. 20. Ferdinand Mount, “Fraud Squad,” London Review of Books, 2 August 2007, 19–21. 21. [n.a.], Minutes of the Evidence taken before the Committee appointed by the House of Commons, to Enquire into the State of Mendicity and Vagrancy in the Metropolis and its Neighborhood (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1815), 19–20, 27, 29, 69–71, 76–81; John Thomas Smith, Vagabondiana, or Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers (London: J. and A. Arch, 1817), 25–26. 22. POB: Weskett and Cooper, 12 December 1764. 23. Lloyd’s Evening Post, May 25–27, 1768; Todd Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), 205; see also George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 99, for journeymen weavers dressing as sailors in 1763 to attack their rivals in a wage dispute. 24. POB: Tate and Connoway, 20 February 1799); Hall and Chapman, 15 January 1800; Roberts 3 December 1800; Moorhouse, 3 December 1800; Brewer and Doyle, 13 January 1802; Nicholson, 4 December 1828, Welch and Lewis, 14 January1830, Davis and Simmons, 6 January 1831. 25. POB: Smith and Pearson, 29 October 1783. For a similar case in which the woman’s disguise left the witnesses uncertain and led to an acquittal, see Ann Hocks, 12 September 1744.

N ot e s 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

189

POB: Williamson, 5 July 1749. “The London Merchant,” Bod. Harding B 25 (1133). Stark, Female Tars, 89. Eneas Mackenzie, A Descriptive and Historical Account of the Town and County of Newcastle upon Tyne Including the Borough of Gateshead (Newcastle upon Tyne: Mackenzie and Dent, 1827), 184. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding (New York: Vintage, 1988), 205–209; C. H. Currey, The Transportation, Escape, and Pardoning of Mary Bryant (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1963). Ian Duffield, “‘Haul Away the Anchor, Girls’: Charlotte Badger, Tall Stories, and the Pirates of the ‘Bad Ship Venus’,” Journal of Australian Colonial History 7 (2005): 35–64; Marcus Rediker, “Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger: The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Pirates,” in Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920, ed. Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Stark, Female Tars, 102. For “William Brown,” another misreported incident, see ibid., 86–87, and the correction in Morgan, “Black Experiences,” 105–106. For the possibilities and difficulties inherent in reading the autobiographies of people who are known to be proficient liars, see Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, “Seven Tales for a Man with Seven Sides,” in Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives, ed. Lucy Frost and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart (Carlton, South Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 64–76. Hannah Snell, Female Soldier, ed. Dianne Dugaw (Los Angeles: William Rogers Clark Memorial Library, 1989), 8, 16. Stark, Female Tars, 102–110. Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 28, 74; see also David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 196–227. Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). “Lovely Nancy,” Bod. Harding B 17 (175b); “Bristol Bridegroom,” Bod. Harding B 6 (56); “Faithless Captain,” Bod. Harding B 1 (15). “The Female Tar,” Bod. Harding B 11 (1192). “The Cabin Boy,” Bod. Harding B 25 (321). “The Female Smuggler,” Bod. Harding B 11 (1446). “A New Song, call’d Female Sailor,” Bod. Harding B 12 (166). Similar songs include “The Sailor Dear,” Bod. Harding B 25 (1686); “The Female Captain,” Bod. Harding B 16 (93a). “Britons Strike Home,” Bod. Harding B 11 (1310). “The Faithless Captain or, Betrayed Virgin,” Bod. Harding B 1 (15). “Gosport Tragedy or The Perjured Ship Carpenter,” Bod. Harding B 3 (33); “Polly Love, or The Cruel Ship Carpenter,” Bod. Harding B 11

190

N ot e s

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

(3053A); “Polly’s Love, or The Cruel Ship Carpenter,” Bod. Frith c.13 (206). “The Sailor’s Tragedy,” in The Contented Wife’s Garland [British Library 11621.e.2.(9)], 4–6. Kirby, Talbot, 24; Mary Slade, The History of the Female Shipwright (London, 1773), 17, 46. For parody and re-citation, see Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: CrossDressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 142. “Billy Taylor,” Bod. Harding B 20 (205). “Britons Strike Home,” Bod. Harding B 25 (299). “The Fair Maid’s Adventure for her Sweetheart,” Bod. Harding B 25 (189). J. R. Hutchinson, Press Gang Afloat and Ashore (London, 1913), 70. Gentleman’s Magazine, May 1773, 250. Kirby, Talbot, 37; Cecilia Lucy Brightwell, Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie (Norwich: Fletcher and Alexander, 1854), 17–21; Stark, Female Tars, 96. Randolph Trumbach, “London’s Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 112–141.

Chapter 4 1. Kathleen Wilson, “Empire, Trade, and Popular Politics in MidHanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon,” Past and Present 121 (November 1988): 74–109; Gerald Jordan and Nicholas Rogers, “Admirals as Heroes: Patriotism and Liberty in Mid-Hanoverian England,” Journal of British Studies 28, no. 3 (July 1989): 201–224; Timothy Jenks, “Contesting the Hero: The Funeral of Admiral Lord Nelson,” Journal of British Studies 39, no. 4 (October 2000): 422–453; the celebrity and notoriety of admirals is also discussed extensively in Margarette Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy: British Sea Power, 1750–1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 2. For moderation as the ideal for masculine taste and masculine conduct, see Amelia Rauser, “Hair, Authenticity and the Self-Made Macaroni,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 1 (2004): 101–117. For Greek or Roman-like composure in adversity, notice the discussion of Major André in Sarah Knott, “Sensibility and the American War for Independence,” American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (February 2004): 19–40. Also of interest here is Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society: Britain, 1660–1800 (London: Longman, 2001), 88–123. 3. Stevens predates the most influential codification of physiognomy: Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy (London: Holloway and Hunter, 1789–1798); Melissa Percival and Graeme Tytler, eds., Physiognomy in Profile: Lavater’s Impact on European Culture

N ot e s

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

191

(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005); Sharrona Hyla Pearl, “As Plain As the Nose on Your Face: Physiognomy in NineteenthCentury England,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2005. George Alexander Stevens, Lecture on Heads (London, 1785), 72; for 1780 playbill, Gerald Kahan, George Alexander Stevens and the Lecture on Heads (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 148. Stevens, Lecture on Heads, 77–78. A valuable and heavily illustrated guide is Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500– 1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). Alan McNairn, Behold the Hero: General Wolfe and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997), 138–139; Simon Schama, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (New York: Knopf, 1991), 7; Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), Lectures III, VII, XIII; Rochelle Gurstein, “The Elgin Marbles, Romanticism, and the Waning of ‘Ideal Beauty,’” Daedalus 131, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 88–100. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), 141. For context on Rowlandson and his contemporaries: Draper Hill, Mr. Gillray the Caricaturist: A Biography (London: Phaidon, 1965); Ronald Paulson, Rowlandson: A New Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Robert L. Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996). Hogarth, Analysis, 141. The British Museum’s copy of this print, BMC 11139, has the sailor’s face tinted brown, whereas the Walpole Library’s copy, used here, has a paler complexion. The contours of the face, however, rather than the skin complexion, were what counted for the devotees of physiognomy. “Heart of Oak” was written for David Garrick’s comic play “Harlequin’s Invasion”: Egon Wellesz and Frederick Sternfeld, eds., The New Oxford History of Music: The Age of Enlightenment, 1745–1790 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 337. Robert Greenhalgh Albion, Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy, 1652–1862 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1965), 4, 133–134; Harvey Green, Wood: Craft, Culture, History (New York: Viking, 2006), 137–188. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 166; Stephen Daniels, “The Political Iconography of Woodland in later Georgian England,” in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 43–82; Murray G. H. Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685–1789 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 103–104.

192

N ot e s

14. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 220; Schama, Landscape and Memory, 174. 15. N. A. M. Rodger, Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (New York: Norton, 1986), 183. 16. Robert Wallace, A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind (Edinburgh, 1753), 93–94; Thomas Short, A Comparative History of the Increase and Decrease of Mankind (London, 1767), 25ff, 29–30; James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (London, 1767), vol. 1, 70–71. 17. J. S. Bromley, ed., The Manning of the Royal Navy: Selected Public Documents, 1693–1873 (London: Navy Records Society, 1974), 109. 18. Ibid., 104–113. For a response, see Gentleman’s Magazine 28 (1758), 195–196. 19. Donna Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 56–57, 69–70, 100–101, 111; D. E. C. Eversley, Social Theories of Fertility and the Malthusian Debate (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959); Jonas Hanway, The Origins, Progress, and Present State of the Marine Society (London, 1770), 11, 43–44, 48, 51; for a suggestion in a similar spirit, Gentleman’s Magazine 32 (1762), 34–35. 20. For a proposal from that same year urging that the government itself fund such an endeavor, see Bromley, Manning Pamphlets, 95–103. See also Roland Pietsch, “Ships’ Boys and Youth Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Navy Recruits of the London Marine Society,” Northern Mariner 14, no. 4 (October 2004): 11–24. 21. Wallace, Dissertation, 19, 21, 146–147; John Fielding, An Account of the Origins and Effects of a Police (London, 1758), viii; Steuart, Inquiry, vol. 1, 69; A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 4th ed. (London, 1773), 230ff; for a famous refutation of these views, see T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Patricia James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Part III, Chapter XIV. 22. For an elegant summary, see Denis Diderot, Encyclopédie (Geneva, 1765), s.v. “Population.” I have adapted the “barbarism to decadence” phrase from Oscar Wilde. 23. William Buchan, Domestic Medicine; or the Family Physician (Edinburgh, 1769), 576–578; later edition of Domestic Medicine (Manchester, 1804), 347; Wallace, Dissertation, 95, 98–99; Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1: 79; Malthus, Population, 23. 24. See for example Wallace, Dissertation, 19; Malthus, Population, 23–24. 25. Gentleman’s Magazine 39 (December 1769), 601–602. 26. Britannica 1st ed. (1771), s.v. “Fishery.” 27. Isaac Land, “‘Sinful Propensities’: Piracy, Sodomy, and Empire in the Rhetoric of Naval Reform,” in Discipline and the Other Body: Humanitarianism, Violence, and the Colonial Exception, ed. Anupama

N ot e s

28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

193

Rao and Steven Pierce (Duke University Press, 2006), 90–114; Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1999). Rodger, Wooden World, 80–81; Peter Earle, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen, 1650–1775 (London: Methuen, 1998), 100–103; Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 169–200; Kathleen Wilson, “Thinking Back: Gender Misrecognition and Polynesian Subversions aboard the Cook Voyages,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660– 1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 345–362; Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 58–75, esp. 64; B. R. Burg, Boys at Sea: Sodomy, Indecency, and Courts Martial in Nelson’s Navy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). See for example Philo Nauticus (1758) in Bromley, Manning Pamphlets, 104–113. Gentleman’s Magazine 33 (January 1763), 16–17; see also the proposal in Gentleman’s Magazine 33 (March 1763), 120. For a glimpse of the results, see Jean Dunlop, The British Fisheries Society, 1786–1893 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1978), 40–41. Cited in Andrew, Philanthropy, 123. George Forster, A Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 1: 121–122. Ibid., 1: 290. See also Ibid., 2: 611. Ibid., 2: 612. Johann W. von Archenholz, A Picture of England (London, 1789), 2: 205–206. William Wales, Remarks on Mr. Forster’s Account (London, 1778), reprinted in Forster, Voyage, 2: 699–753; quoted page 701. The Easter Island statues are discussed on 722–723. For Wales’s most explicit defense of the sailors, 751–752. Contrast Wales’s attitude toward sailors with a text from 1774: Janet Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality, ed. Evangeline Walker Andrews (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 46–47, 72–73. Hoxie Neale Fairchild, The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928); Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740– 1830 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 81ff, 127–139; John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997), 113–122; Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside, 1750–1840 (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). Charles Dibdin, The Professional Life of Mr. Dibdin (London: Charles Dibdin, 1803), 1: xxi; Charles Dibdin, Observations on a Tour

194

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

52.

53. 54. 55.

N ot e s through almost the whole of England (London: G. Goulding, 1801), 2: 92, 145. Dibdin, Professional Life, 1: xxii. Ibid., 1: 2; Dibdin, Observations, 1: 39, 170, 173, 209; 2: 94–95, 255. Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 72–103. Mark Judd, “‘The Oddest Combination of Town and Country’: Popular Culture and the London Fairs, 1800–60,” in Leisure in Britain, 1780– 1939, ed. John K. Walton and James Walvin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), 21–22. For Tobias Smollett, Roderick Random (1749), 2: 39–40, 108, 194, 202; 3: 249. [n.a.], A Lecture on Hearts, 2nd ed. (London, 1767), 4–6. [n.a.], Annual Register 1773, 202–207; Jeremy Black, “Introduction,” in The British Navy and the Use of Naval Power in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Jeremy Black and Philip Woodfine (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988), 16. George Stevens, The Trip to Portsmouth; A Comic Sketch of One Act, with Songs (London, 1773), 16–17. See for example the characters of Ben in Edward Neville’s Plymouth in an Uproar: A Musical Farce (London, 1779), and Cabin in Robert Benson’s Britain’s Glory, or A Trip to Portsmouth (London, 1798), first performed in 1794; see also Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 65, 98, 102. ODNB s.v. George Alexander Stevens. Uvedale Price, Essay on the Picturesque (London, 1796); William Combe, The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (London: J. Diggins, 1812), 108–109. Illustration is facing page 121 in Combe, Syntax. For context on Augustus Keppel’s reputation in 1779, see Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 140–165, 255–258. For the commemoration of naval victories, see Pieter van der Merwe, “The Glorious First of June: A Battle of Art and Theatre,” in The Glorious First of June, 1794: A Naval Battle and its Aftermath, ed. Michael Duffy and Roger Morriss (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001), 132–158. For Dibdin’s life and career see: Robert Fahrner, The Theatre Career of Charles Dibdin the Elder (1745-–1814), (New York, NY: Lang, 1989); Charles Dibdin, The Songs of Charles Dibdin, ed. George Hogarth (London: How and Parsons, 1842), xiii–xxx. Fahrner, Theatre Career, 122–127. Dibdin, Songs, xxiii. “Money.” Grose, Classical Dictionary, s.v. rhino.

N ot e s

195

56. Dibdin, Professional Life, 3: 8; see also 2: 240. 57. Dibdin, Songs, xxi. 58. Dibdin, Professional Life, 1: 6; NMM PAH 7358, PAF 4013, 4016, 4019, 4020, 4031, 4037, 4042, 4043; [n.a.], Jack Sprit-Sail’s Frolic, 2nd ed. (London, 1791). BMC 7817, NMM PAF 4028; Rina Prentice, A Celebration of the Sea: The Decorative Art Collections of the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum, 1994), 63; Greenock Advertiser, June 11, 1802; Sara Stevenson, The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1991), 27. 59. Dibdin, Professional Life, 1: 8. See also Henry Lee as quoted in Fahrner, Dibdin, 157. 60. Eric David Mackerness, A Social History of English Music (London: Routledge, 1966), 135. 61. “Tom Tuff,” Bod. Harding B 12 (166). This song appeared elsewhere under the title “Tom Tough.” 62. For statements equating the sacrifices of sailors with those of their officers, at least in the matter of lost limbs, see Timothy Jenks, Naval Engagements: Patriotism, Cultural Politics, and the Royal Navy, 1793– 1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 200–218. However, many prints continued to present sailors as only marginally relevant to naval victories: BMC 5991, 8469, 8470; NMM, PAF 4026. 63. NMM, PAH 7358, PAF 4031, PAF 4013, PAF 4016, PAF 4019, PAF 4020, PAF 4037, PAF 4042, PAF 4043. 64. Russell, Theatres of War, 95–121; Jenks, Naval Engagements, 231–232. 65. Conrad Gill, The Naval Mutinies of 1797 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1913); for a historiographical overview, see N. A. M. Rodger, “Mutiny or Subversion? Spithead and the Nore,” in 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective, ed. Thomas Bartlett, et al. (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003); see also N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (New York: Norton, 2005), 442–453; Anthony G. Brown, “The Nore Mutiny: Sedition or Ships’ Biscuits? A Reappraisal,” Mariner’s Mirror 92, no. 1 (February 2006); Anne Hawkins and Helen Watt, “‘Now is our time, the ship is our own, huzza for the red flag’: Mutiny on the Inspector, 1797,” Mariner’s Mirror 93, no. 2 (May 2007): 156–179. 66. [n.a.], Letter from a Naval Officer, 14–15. 67. British Critic 9 (1797), 666. 68. Jenks, Naval Engagements, 88–89. 69. The 1797 mutinies did, in fact, elicit a Cheap Repository Tract of their own: [n.a.] The Loyal Sailor; or, No Mutineering (London, 1797). See also Christopher Anstey, Britain’s Genius (Bath, 1797). 70. ADM 1/727, Papers of the Repulse. 71. ADM 1/5125.

196

N ot e s

72. For example, ADM 1/5125 closes with the words “Health and Prosperity attend you——your loving Brothers——Red for Ever—— Huzza” while the version in ADM 1/5486 has instead “We remain, Dear Countrymen, Yours affectionately.” 73. Delegates to Admiralty, 18 April 1797; quoted in Gill, Mutinies, 363. Clark, Struggle. 74. ADM 1/5486. 75. Another gender-oriented analysis, Jeffrey D. Glasco, “‘The Seaman Feels Him-self a Man,” International Labor and Working-Class History no. 66 (Fall 2004): 40–56, has surprisingly little to say about this dimension of the mutinies. Also on the gendered nature of labor on ships: Mary Conley, From Jack Tar to Union Jack: Representing Naval Manhood in the British Empire, 1870–1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 147. 76. Rodger, Command of the Sea, 450. 77. Here my interpretation differs significantly from Frank Mabee, “The Spithead Mutiny and Urban Radicalism in the 1790s,” Romanticism 13, no. 2 (2007): 133–144. 78. This line appears in both surviving versions, ADM 1/5125 and ADM 1/5486. 79. Glasgow Courier, April 25, 1797. 80. Newcastle Chronicle, April 29, 1797; Newcastle Courant, April 29, 1797. 81. [n.a.], A Letter to the Tars of Old England (London, 1797), 11. 82. BMC 10443. 83. NMM: PAF 3795. 84. Lincoln, Representing, 149–151, remarks on the growing popularity of the belief that the society of women had an improving effect on men. In this view, the Navy—by removing males from female influence—predictably did harm to the morals of their conscripts, while anything that strengthened their bonds to women would gradually make them more amenable to polite society. 85. BMC 5609; 7753; George Morland, “Jack in the Bilboes,” painting; engraving by R. Clamp, 1797. George Morland’s painting “Execrable Human Traffic,” displayed at the Royal Academy in 1788, also depicts a proud, virtuous man about to be battered and humiliated. In this case, the outrage depicted is the African slave trade, not impressment. 86. NMM: PAF 4001. Also viewable online: http://www.maryevans. com/search.php, search by title or call number 10239053. For the juxtaposition of characters representing beauty and ugliness in the same picture, see Paulson, Rowlandson, 46–47. See also Hogarth, Analysis, 139. 87. For another example of Jack Tar as John Bull, Walpole 807.8.0.1, “John Bull threatened by Insects from all Quarters.” Jeannine Surel, “John Bull,” in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1989),

N ot e s

197

3: 3–25; Miles Taylor, “John Bull and the Iconography of Public Opinion in England c. 1712–1929,” Past and Present 134 (February 1992): 93–128; Tamara L. Hunt, Defining John Bull: Political Caricature and National Identity in Late Georgian England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 121–169.

Chapter 5 1. John Bechervaise, A Farewell to My Old Shipmates (Portsea: W. Woodward, 1847), 7. 2. John Bechervaise, Thirty-Six Years of a Seafaring Life (Portsea: Woodward, 1839), 38–39. See Iliad Book VI, 447–449, and also Aeneid, Book II and the first lines of Book III. David Skilton, “Tourists at the Ruins of London: The Metropolis and the Struggle for Empire,” Cercles 17 (2007): 93–119. For the belief in a direct historical link between the fall of Troy and the founding of the British nation, see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 65–67. 3. As quoted in Skilton, “Tourists at the Ruins,” 94. 4. HO 28/24 f144. 5. ADM 1/727, papers of the Repulse (C370a) (my italics). 6. [n.a.], An Inquiry into the Nature and Effects of Flogging in the Royal Navy and the Merchant Service, 2nd ed. (London: Hunt and Clark, 1826), 1. 7. Thomas W. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 176–204. For more general discussions of the cultural context of humanitarianism, see Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility,” Part 1, American Historical Review 90 (1985): 339–361 and Part 2: 547–566; G. J. BarkerBenfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 8. James Walvin, England, Slaves, and Freedom, 1776–1838 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 156; Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 9. William Robinson, Nautical Economy (London: William Robinson, 1836), vii; Charles Reece Pemberton, The Autobiography of Pel. Verjuice, ed. Eric Partridge (London: Scholartis, 1929), 215. 10. Bechervaise, Farewell, 76. 11. Samuel Leech, A Voice from the Main Deck (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999), 17. Hester Blum’s important and stimulating The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008) nonetheless has little to say about the political views of her sailor-authors.

198

N ot e s

12. Jonathan Rose, Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 344. To find his sources, Rose used John Burnett, David Vincent, and David Mayall, eds., The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography (New York: New York University Press, 1984). Also of great value is Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom. 13. Rose, Intellectual Life, 335, 321. 14. Pemberton, Autobiography, 3. 15. James Field Stanfield, Observations on a Guinea Voyage [1788], in The British Transatlantic Slave Trade, vol. 3: The Abolitionist Struggle: Opponents of the Slave Trade, ed. John Oldfield (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), 116, 130. 16. Stanfield, Observations, 122. 17. Ibid., 104. 18. Ibid., 122, 104, 133. 19. Ibid., 103–104. 20. John Nicol, The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1822), 1. 21. Ibid., 1–2. 22. Ibid., 1–2. For his life, see ODNB, s.v. “John Nicol”; Tim Flannery, “Introduction,” in Tim Flannery, ed., The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1997), 1–18. 23. Nicol, Life, 206. 24. Ibid., 204. 25. Ibid., 204–206. 26. Ibid., 19, 119. 27. Nicol’s outlook, then, is an instructive contrast to the one suggested in Emma Christopher, “‘Ten Thousand Times Worse than the Convicts’: Rebellious Sailors, Convict Transportation and the Struggle for Freedom, 1787–1800,” Journal of Australian Colonial History 5 (2004): 30–46. 28. Peter Mandler, “ ‘Race’ and ‘Nation’ in Mid-Victorian Thought,” in History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750– 1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 232. 29. Matthew Barker, Greenwich Hospital (London: James Robins, 1826), 7, 99. 30. The dissemination of Dibdin words and music was discussed in the previous chapter. Dibdin songs were familiar to the young American sailor Herman Melville, who quotes Dibdin a number of times in his first novel, Typee (1846). 31. Charles McPherson, Life on Board a Man-of-War (Glasgow: Blackie, Fullarton, 1829), 158–159. Dibdin references abound in the autobiographies; see for example John Brown, Sixty Years’ Gleanings from Life’s Harvest (New York: D. Appleton, 1859), 95. 32. For his life, see ODNB, s.v. “Matthew Henry Barker.” Some library catalogues still list him only by his pen name “The Old Sailor.” 33. Barker, Greenwich, 80.

N ot e s 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

199

Ibid., 49. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 187. Ibid., 163, 169, 197. Ibid., 149. See also Matthew Barker, Tough Yarns (London: Effingham Wilson, 1835) 17. Barker, Greenwich, 191. Ibid., 197–200. Ibid., 19–20. Michael Snape, The Redcoat and Religion: The Forgotten History of the British Soldier from the Age of Marlborough to the Eve of the First World War (London: Routledge, 2005), 38. Jonathan Martin, The Life of Jonathan Martin, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: R. E. Leary, 1828), 15–17 is a particularly delightful account of his attempts to preach in churches. He is accused of killing a pony through witchcraft on page 38. ODNB, s.v. Jonathan Martin. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 170, 175–176. Snape, Redcoat and Religion, 67. G. C. Smith, The Quarter Master; or, the Second Part of The Boatswain’s Mate (Cincinnati: Western Navigation and Bible Tract Society, 1819), 8. Originally published in London, 1812. Almost every evangelist who ministered to the armed forces in this period had a story to tell of this kind. For one, see Roald Kverndal, Seamen’s Missions, Their Origin and Early Growth: A Contribution to the History of the Church Maritime (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1986), 163–164. Snape, Redcoat and Religion, 95. Not every variety of Christianity was consistent with service in the military; see Henry Taylor, Memoirs of the Principal Events in the Life of Henry Taylor (North Shields: T. Appleby, 1811), 8–11, 57, for a sailor who became a Methodist convert and a pacifist in the late 1750s. He joined the Quakers in 1778. Richard Marks, The Retrospect, 13th ed. (London: James Nisbet, 1828), 92–105, 113–114. See also Margarette Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy: British Sea Power, 1750–1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 109–136. Arminian Magazine (June 1797), 264–265. Quoted in Kverndal, Seamen’s Missions, 158. Nicol, Life, 11–12; see also McPherson, Life, vii–viii, but contrast with Peter Earle, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen, 1650–1775 (London: Methuen, 1998), 103 who found bibles and prayer books appeared with some frequency in probate inventories. ODNB, s.v. Smith, George Charles.

200

N ot e s

56. G. C. Smith, The Boatswain’s Mate, or An Interesting Dialogue between Two British Seamen (New York: New York Religious Tract Society, 1818), 4. Kverndal, Seamen’s Missions, 109 dates the first publication of The Boatswain’s Mate at 1812. 57. Smith, Quarter Master, 8–9. For a larger context, see Jeremy Gregory, “Homo Religiosus: Masculinity and Religion in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in English Masculinities, 1660–1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (London: Longman, 1999), 85–110. 58. Smith, Quarter Master, 15. 59. Ibid., 21. 60. Ibid., 5. Bob’s newfound faith was tested in subsequent installments of Smith’s series, such as Jack Tars at Plymouth, or the Fourth Part of the Boatswain’s Mate (New York: New York Religious Tract Society, 1818). 61. These developments are covered in great detail in Kverndal, Seamen’s Missions, 113–353. 62. Bechervaise, Farewell, 26–28, 106–107; Leech, Voice, 65–67, 74, 254–255. 63. Bechervaise, Farewell, 27–28. 64. Ibid., 6, 7, 8ff, 33, 40ff, 47, 77. See also Thomas Trotter, A Practicable Plan for Manning the Royal Navy without Impressment (Newcastle upon Tyne: Longman, 1819), 30ff. 65. Bechervaise, Farewell, 47. For a possible literary precedent for speeches like these, see the Richard Parker character in Douglas Jerrold’s play The Mutiny at the Nore. 66. Seymour Drescher, “Cart Whip and Billy Roller: Antislavery and Reform Symbolism in Industrializing Britain,” Journal of Social History 15, no. 1 (1981): 3–24; Patricia Hollis, “Anti-Slavery and British Working-Class Radicalism in the Years of Reform,” in Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey, ed. Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (Folkestone: W. Dawson, 1980), 294–315; J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Antislavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 33. 67. Thomas Urquhart, Letters on the Evils of Impressment, 2nd ed. (London: J. Richardson, 1816), 16. 68. Ibid., 44–45. 69. [n.a.], Inquiry, 21–28. 70. For Leech’s life, see Michael J. Crawford, “Introduction,” in Samuel Leech, Voice, vii–xx. 71. Leech, Voice, 74. See also Matthew Barker’s later, more reformoriented works, such as Tough Yarns, 139–152. 72. Leech, Voice, 59. 73. For masculinity, see Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 74. Earle, Sailors, 147.

N ot e s

201

75. Earle, Sailors, 159. See also Daniel Vickers, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers and the Age of Sail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 214–247. 76. Leech, Voice, 122–123 (quoted), 254–255. George Miller, A Trip to Sea from 1810 to 1815 (Long Sutton: John Swain, 1854), also advances the idea that naval reform is the best way to create obedient sailors, but religion is notably absent from his prescriptions for reform and from his book in general. See also Robinson, Nautical Economy, 105; Brown, Sixty Years’ Gleanings, 74, 84, 97–100. 77. Robert Hay, Landsman Hay: The Memoirs of Robert Hay, 1789–1847, ed. M. D. Hay (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953), 75–76. 78. Leech, Voice, 63–64. 79. ODNB, s.v. William Robinson. 80. Robinson, Nautical Economy, iii. 81. Isaac Land, “Men with the Faces of Brutes: Physiognomy, Urban Anxieties, and Police States,” in Enemies of Humanity: The NineteenthCentury War on Terrorism, ed. Isaac Land (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 117–135. 82. Robinson, Nautical Economy, iii. 83. For context, see Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, 1815–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); a new chair in Political Economy at Oxford was established by 1830: Francis E. Mineka, The Dissidence of Dissent: The Monthly Repository, 1806–1838 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 227. 84. Thomas Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy: Four Lectures Delivered at the London Mechanics’ Institution (London: Charles Tait, 1827), 125, 160; Robinson, Nautical Economy, 8–9, 95–96, 109–110. 85. Robinson, Nautical Economy, 69–72. 86. Ibid., 98. For the related custom of “portage,” see Vickers, Young Men, 83–86. 87. Robinson, Nautical Economy, 56–61. 88. Ibid., iii–xiii. 89. Ibid., 27–28. 90. Pemberton, Autobiography, 3; see also 125. For his life, see ODNB, s.v. “Charles Reece Pemberton”; Eric Partridge, “Charles Reece Pemberton: A Sketch,” in Pel. Verjuice, ed. Eric Partridge, xi–xxiv. 91. Edward Royle, “Mechanics’ Institutes and the Working Classes, 1840–1860,” Historical Journal 14, no. 2 (1971): 305–321; Richard Johnson, “‘Really Useful Knowledge: Radical Education and Working-Class Culture, 1790–1848,” in Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory, ed. John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson (1979; New York: Routledge, 2007), 75–102; Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom, 133–165. 92. Royle, “Mechanics,” 319. Holyoake delivered a lecture about Pemberton’s autobiographical writing to Branch A1 of the London

202

93. 94. 95. 96.

97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

N ot e s Communists in 1844: Eric Partridge, “Introduction,” xiii. For context on Holyoake’s long and complex career in radical politics, see Lee E. Grugel, George Jacob Holyoake: A Study in the Evolution of a Victorian Radical (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1976). Mineka, Dissidence, 234–244, 250, 271–283. Ibid., 266–267, 345–348. Pemberton, Autobiography, 50. Asa Briggs, “Ebenezer Elliott, The Corn Law Rhymer,” Cambridge Journal 3, no. 11 (1950): 686–695; Ebenezer Elliott, The Poetical Works of Ebenezer Elliott, The Corn Law Rhymer (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1840), 167–173. Pemberton, Autobiography, 111; see also 102, 152. This style and content is similar to the delightful (though unfinished) autobiography of John James Bezer, “Autobiography of One of the Chartist Rebels of 1848,” in Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working-Class Politicians, 1790–1885, ed. David Vincent (London: Europa, 1977), 149–187. Bezer’s father, incidentally, was a naval veteran (who bore scars from flogging); he was eligible for Greenwich Hospital, although like many pensioners there, he had to give up his place in order to work and support his family. Pemberton, Autobiography, 211. Ibid., 211. Ibid., 214–215. For Crabbe, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Pemberton, Autobiography, 159–160. Ibid., 105 (cited), 213. Ibid., 110–111. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 202. Ibid., 231–232. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 148. Ibid., 112, 140. Ibid., 276. Ibid., 195–196. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 148–149. Ibid., 146–147. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 104, 106–108. Ibid., 115. Bechervaise, Farewell, 6. I have developed these ideas in greater depth in Isaac Land, “ ‘Sinful Propensities’: Piracy, Sodomy, and Empire in the Rhetoric of Naval Reform,” in Discipline and the Other Body: Humanitarianism,

N ot e s

203

Violence, and the Colonial Exception, ed. Anupama Rao and Steven Pierce (Duke University Press, 2006). 121. Pemberton, Autobiography, 213–214.

Chapter 6 1. John Tosh, “The Old Adam and the New Man: Emerging Themes in the History of English Masculinities, 1750–1850,” in English Masculinities, 1660–1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (London: Longman, 1999), 222. Consider in contrast: J. S. Bratton, ed., Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991); Jim Davis, “British Bravery, or Tars Triumphant: Images of the British Navy in Nautical Melodrama,” New Theatre Quarterly 4 (1988): 122–143; Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994). 2. Douglas Jerrold, Black Eyed Susan in Nineteenth Century Plays, ed. George Rowell (London: Oxford University Press, 1953). For context on the meaning of the “rustic,” see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 3. Quoted in Michael Slater, Douglas Jerrold, 1803–1857 (London: Duckworth, 2002), 91. Sally Vernon, “Trouble up at T’Mill: The Rise and Decline of the Factory Play in the 1830s and 1840s,” Victorian Studies 20, no. 2 (Winter 1977): 117–139. 4. For the imagined contrast between lost, chivalrous Nelson and decadent Regency values, see Tim Fulford, “Romanticizing the Empire: The Naval Heroes of Southey, Coleridge, Austen, and Marryat,” Modern Language Quarterly 60, no. 2 (June 1999): 161–196. 5. Judy Egerton, Turner: The Fighting Temeraire (London: National Gallery Publications, 1995); see also David A. Mindell, War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 5–6, 13, 41, 124. 6. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 55–56, 72–73, 78–79. 7. William Feaver, The Art of John Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 142–145; Herbert L. Sussman, Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 25. The scholarly literature on railways and their impact is vast; a recent synthesis can be found in Ian Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), an even more wide-ranging book than its title suggests. 8. Thomas Carlyle, Selected Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 24.

204

N ot e s

9. Ibid., 27. 10. Charles Wilson, First with the News: The History of W. H. Smith, 1792–1972 (New York: Doubleday, 1986), 143. 11. For context, see Samuel Sidney, Rides on Railways (London: W. S. Orr, 1851.) 12. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Early Victorian Architecture in Britain (New York: Da Capo, 1972), 1: 501. 13. Henry James, English Hours, 2nd ed. (New York: Orion, 1960), 24–25. This essay, “London,” first appeared in 1890. 14. Alfred Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” in Tennyson’s Poetry, ed. Robert W. Hill, Jr., 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1999), 121. 15. For the “industrial novel,” see Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 87–109. For Manchester’s reputation, see Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). 16. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 54–55. 17. For Marryat’s career in the military, see Christopher Lloyd, Captain Marryat and the Old Navy (London: Longmans, Green, 1939). 18. Frederick Marryat, Mr. Midshipman Easy (London: Dent, 1965), 160. 19. Wilson, First, 101–109. 20. Marryat, Easy, 168. 21. Frederick Marryat, Peter Simple (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 380–395. 22. Marryat, Easy, 290, 346–348, 353. 23. Ibid., 354. 24. Ibid., 356–357. 25. Ibid., 366–367, 370, 406. For more on Marryat’s political views, see Louis J. Parascandola, “Puzzled Which to Choose”: Conflicting SocioPolitical Views in the Works of Captain Frederick Marryat (New York: Peter Lang, 1997). 26. Wilson, First, 66; Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 43. 27. Hitchcock, Early Victorian Architecture, 1: 492–529; Adam Mornement and Simon Holloway, Corrugated Iron: Building on the Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 10–27. See also Carl Thompson, “The Heroic Age of the Tin Can: Technology and Ideology in British Arctic Exploration, 1818–1835,” in Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century, ed. David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), 84–99. 28. Elliot Engel and Margaret F. King, The Victorian Novel before Victoria: British Fiction during the Reign of William IV, 1830–37 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984), 34–35, reaches a similar conclusion. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), has interesting ideas about Marryat as an early example of imperialist literature.

N ot e s

205

29. Carlyle claimed to despise Marryat’s fiction, but read it anyway: Parascandola, Puzzled, 77. 30. For some more recent parallels, see the wide-ranging essay by James Chapman, “‘This Ship is England’: History, Politics, and National Identity in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003),” in The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches, ed. James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 55–68. 31. Allison Lockwood, Passionate Pilgrims: The American Traveler in Great Britain, 1800–1914 (New York: Cornwall Books, 1981), 250–269. 32. “Photographic Exhibitions in Britain, 1839–1865,” http://peib. dmu.ac.uk/index.php. 33. Sara Stevenson, The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1991), 11. 34. Malcolm Daniel, “‘The Pictures are as Rembrandt’s but Improved’: Calotypes by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, 56, no. 4 (Spring 1999): 12–23, quoted page 15. 35. Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1978); Robert G. David, The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 36. Stevenson, Fishermen, 27. 37. Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 62–63. 38. Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985), 161–192. 39. For some recent works that also summarize earlier interpretations, see Louise Purbrick, “Introduction,” in The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Louise Purbrick (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 1–25; Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 40. Grove Art Online, s.v. “Joseph Paxton” and “Exhibition Architecture”; Hitchcock, Early Victorian Architecture, 1: 530–553; Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 46–49. 41. Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (London: Yale University Press, 1999), 106, 139, 148; Purbrick, “Introduction,” 2–3. 42. Peter Gurney, “An Appropriated Space: The Great Exhibition, the Crystal Palace and the Working Class,” in The Great Exhibition of 1851: Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Louise Purbrick (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 114–145. 43. T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation: A History, 1700–2000 (New York: Viking, 1999), 106–107, 113, 162–163, 252–253, 263–264; Stevenson, Fishermen, 23. 44. ODNB, s.v. “Hill, David Octavius”; Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (London: Yale University Press, 1997), 21–70;

206

45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

N ot e s Michael Fry, The Dundas Despotism (Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 331–338; Eric Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). John Wilson and Robert Chambers, The Land of Burns (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1840), 1: 44–45. Stevenson, Fishermen, 23–24. Ibid., 23–36. A historian of Englishness misidentified these photographs as representing Newhaven in Sussex, which of course deprives them not only of their Scottish context, but their extremely pointed commentary on big-city life: Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Caption to Plate 1. SRO, GD 226/18/17/1 and /2; Joyce Moffet, “Trinity House of Newcastle,” TWAS Searchroom Pamphlet no. 1186, 4; Gordon Jackson, Hull in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Economic and Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 325–326; Land, “Domesticating the Maritime,” 133. Jon Press, “The Collapse of a Contributory Pension Scheme: The Merchant Seamen’s Fund, 1747–1851,” Journal of Transport History, New Series, 5 (1979): 91–104; TWAS, GU/TH/91. SRO, GD 226/18/220, letter of 28 July 1761. See also Margaret Leven’s petition of 1 February 1762. Press, “Collapse,” 93. Ibid., 98. SRO, GD 226/9/2; TWAS, GU/TH/21/16; Press, “Collapse,” 94. Mackenzie, Descriptive and Historical Account, 687; G. McCombie, “The Buildings of Trinity House, Newcastle upon Tyne,” Archaeologia Aeliana , 5th ser., 13 (1985): 163–186. SRO, GD 226/1/4; GD 226/1/10; GD 226/4/6; GD 226/4/9. Jackson, Hull, 281; R. A. Cage, The Scottish Poor Law, 1745–1845 (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), 28, 71; Eric Hopkins, Working-Class Self-Help in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995). SRO, FS 1/7/4; see also FS 1/17/144 for a similar stipulation. SRO, FS 1/11/13; FS 1/11/28 and FS 4/82. SRO, FS 1/11/28 and FS 4/82; FS 1/17/171; FS 1/11/13. SRO, FS 1/11/13. SRO, FS 1/7/4; 1/11/28; FS 1/17/144; FS 1/11/13. See Anna Clark, Struggle, 35–39. D. O. Hill, “Willie Liston ‘Redding the Line’” is available in many reproductions, and online at the National Portrait Gallery (London)’s website under the call number NPG P6 (217). Sara Stevenson, Facing the Light: The Photography of Hill and Adamson (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 2002), 111. Holger Hoock, “Nelson Entombed: The Military and Naval Pantheon in St. Paul’s Cathedral,” in Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy, ed. David Cannadine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 115–143.

N ot e s

207

65. Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 230. 66. Later efforts to display Nelson’s ship, the Victory, as a tourist attraction in Portsmouth led to a similar experience of estrangement and letdown. For an early, and devastating, appraisal, see Henry James, English Hours, 156–158. This essay, “English Vignettes,” first appeared in 1879. 67. [n.a.], The Visitor’s Guide to the Sights of London (1844), 108. 68. For “safe mooring,” Matthew Barker, Greenwich Hospital (London: James Robins, 1826), 104. 69. John Maule and John Cooke, A Historical Account of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich (London: G. Nicol, 1789), 14; Press, “Collapse,” 91. 70. ADM 73/52–54. 71. See for example ADM 2/1711. 72. Maule and Cooke, Royal Hospital, 86. 73. ADM 65/81; ADM 67/20. 74. For clothes and seabed: ADM 67/20, 4 June 1757. 75. ADM 65/82, G. Jackson to Sir Charles Hardy, 16 March 1776. 76. ADM 65/85, Lt. Robert Lowtham to Sir Richard Pearson, 9 June 1803. 77. ADM 65/85, Keith to Viscount Hood, 12 June 1803. 78. ADM 65/82, Diamond et al. to Sir Evan Nepean, 12 August 1795; “W. L.” to Evan Nepean, 26 April 1797; W. Pierrepont to Lt. Governor of Greenwich Hospital, 8 July 1797; “W. L.” to Capt. Oswald, 7 July 1798; ADM 65/83, Nepean to Palliser, 3 October 1795; Petition of Pensioners to Sir Rich. Pearson, April 1801; ADM 65/85, Richard Pearson to Lord Hood, 22 March 1803; M. Melhinish to Greenwich Hospital, 27 March 1803. 79. ADM 67/20, 28 December 1751; Maule and Cooke, Royal Hospital, 85. 80. ADM 65/81, letter of 23 January 1762. 81. ADM 65/81. 82. ADM 65/82, Stephens to Palliser, 8 July 1782; ADM 65/93. 83. National Maritime Museum, BHC 1815. 84. Thomas Hood, “Sonnet to a Decayed Seaman,” The Works of Thomas Hood (New York, 1861), 2: 191. 85. For a more optimistic reading of state provision for families, see Patricia Y. C. E. Lin, “Extending Her Arms: Military Families and the Transformation of the British State, 1793–1815,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1997. 86. Lloyd, British Seaman, 177. 87. Sarah Monks, “National Heterotopia: Greenwich as Spectacle, 1694–1869,” Rising East: The Journal of East London Studies 2, no. 1 (1998): 156–166. 88. [n.a.], Visitor’s Guide, 9. See also Matthew Barker, Tough Yarns (London: Effingham Wilson, 1835), 7–42. 89. [n.a.], Visitor’s Guide, 17.

208

N ot e s

90. George Mogridge, Old Humphrey’s Walks in London (Nashville, TN: E. Stevenson, 1855), 206, 209, 212. First edition: London: Religious Tract Society, 1843. 91. Mogridge, Old Humphrey’s Walks, 206. 92. Zachariah Allen, The Practical Tourist (Boston: Carter, Hendee, 1833) 2: 296. 93. Benjamin Silliman, Journal of Travels in England, Scotland, and Holland, 2nd ed. (Boston: T. B. Ait, 1812), 1: 284–285. 94. Lockwood, Passionate Pilgrims, 109. See also Tamara L. Hunt, Defining John Bull: Political Caricature and National Identity in Late Georgian England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 13. 95. For the wider salience and cultural circulation of arctic imagery, see Chauncey C. Loomis, “The Arctic Sublime,” in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 95–112, quoted page 98; Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997); Jessica Richard, “ ‘A Paradise of My Own Creation’: Frankenstein and the Improbable Romance of Polar Exploration,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 25, no. 4 (2003): 295–314. 96. John Barrow, A Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions (London: John Murray, 1818), 364. 97. Quoted in Jen Hill, White Horizon: The Arctic in the NineteenthCentury British Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 11–12. 98. For a more nuanced assessment of the slow transition from sail to steam, see Graeme J. Milne, Trade and Traders in Mid-Victorian Liverpool: Mercantile Business and the Making of a World Port (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2000), 21–45. 99. Edinburgh Review (December 1817): 416. 100. Illustrated London News, May 24, 1845, 328. 101. Ibid., 328. 102. “The Navigation of the Antipodes,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 62, no. 385 (November 1847): 515–533. 103. For a sense of the frenzied search and the extensive media coverage, see W. Gillies Ross, “Clairvoyants and Mediums Search for Franklin,” Polar Record 39, no. 208 (2003): 1–18. 104. Times, October 23, 1854. See also Illustrated London News, October 28, 1854, 421–422; November 4, 1854, 433. 105. Times 10/30/54: E. J. H., letter to the editor; Times 10/31/54: Rae’s reply to E. J. H.; Times 11/1/54: “Medicus,” letter to the editor. 106. Charles Dickens, “The Lost Arctic Voyagers,” first published in Household Words in two parts, on December 2 and 9, 1854. For the text, see Charles Dickens, Miscellaneous Papers (London: Chapman and Hall, n.d.): 1: 499–526; quoted 503; see also 508. For Rae’s

N ot e s

107. 108. 109.

110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

209

response to Dickens, published December 23, 1854, see John Rae, “The Lost Arctic Voyagers,” in Harry Stone, ed., Charles Dickens’ Uncollected Writings from Household Words, 1850–1859 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1968), 2: 513–522. Dickens, “Lost Arctic Voyagers,” Part 2, 516. Times 10/24/54. See also “Travellers’ Tales,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 78, no. 481 (November 1855): 586–599. Richard Ormond, Sir Edwin Landseer (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), 204–209; for context, see Alison Yarrington, “The Commemoration of the Hero, 1800–1864: Monuments to the British Victors of the Napoleonic Wars,” Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 1980. “Man Proposes, God Disposes” has been widely reproduced and can be viewed online at http://www4.rhbnc.ac.uk/ picture-gallery/landseer.html. Ormond, Landseer, 148, 192–194. Illustrated London News 44, May 7, 1864, 355. Ormond, Landseer, 207. Pierre Berton, The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North West Passage and the North Pole, 1818–1909 (New York: Viking, 1988). Mary Conley, From Jack Tar to Union Jack: Representing Naval Manhood in the British Empire, 1870–1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 132, for “naval manhood as a model for imperial manhood.”

Conclusion 1. William Wordsworth, Guilt and Sorrow, Stanza VI. 2. Roger Knight, The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson (London: Allen Lane, 2005), 257; Isaac Land, “What Are We at War about?” London Review of Books, December 1, 2005. 3. Knight, Pursuit, 531; Holger Hoock, “Nelson Entombed: The Military and Naval Pantheon in St. Paul’s Cathedral,” in Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy, ed. David Cannadine, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 115; Timothy Jenks, “Contesting the Hero: The Funeral of Admiral Lord Nelson,” Journal of British Studies 39, no. 4 (October 2000): 427, notes that traditionally, a lord of the manor was escorted to his tomb by a complement raised “from the tenantry.” 4. Margaret Whinney (revised by John Physick), Sculpture in Britain, 1530–1830, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1988), 348. Hoock, “Nelson Entombed,” 123, identifies the boys as young midshipmen, i.e., not even common seamen but future officers. 5. Hoock, “Nelson Entombed,” 124. As stratified as Nelson’s Navy was, upward mobility through the ranks would become more difficult in future generations. Fiction and children’s games about this

210

N ot e s

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

bygone era encouraged Victorian boys to imagine that they would enjoy similar opportunities for advancement: Mary Conley, From Jack Tar to Union Jack: Naval Manhood in the British Empire, 1870–1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 107–114. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 324. Gareth Stedman-Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 96,102. Matthew Brown, “Not Forging Nations but Foraging for Them: Uncertain Collective Identities in Gran Colombia,” Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 2 (2006): 223–240. Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Linda Colley, “Whose Nation?: Class and National Consciousness in Britain, 1750–1830,” Past and Present 113 (November 1986): 117, acknowledges “dividing and ruling” as a tactic in the post-Napoleonic era—as if those circumstances were different—but presumably those who roused the volunteers in the 1790s and 1800s did so in the expectation that the war would, one day, be over. Mass mobilization always comes with an expiration date, even if the commitment to mobilize is temporarily left open-ended. I have discussed this in considerable detail in Isaac Land, “Bread and Arsenic: Citizenship from the Bottom Up in Georgian London,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 1 (Fall 2005). See also Isaac Land and Andy Schocket, “New Approaches to the Founding of Sierra Leone, 1786–1806,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9, no. 3 (Winter 2008). John Knox, Observations on the Northern Fisheries (London: J. Walter, 1786), 6. These model villages are discussed further in Jean Dunlop, The British Fisheries Society, 1786–1893 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1978). Brenda Assael, “Music in the Air: Noise, Performers and the Contest over the Streets of the Mid-Nineteenth Century Metropolis,” in The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Stink, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Heather Shore (London: Rivers Oram, 2003), 183–197. John Thomas Smith, Vagabondiana, or Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London (London: J. & A. Arch, 1817), 33. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 2003), is also of interest. I will discuss Equiano’s relationship to Britishness in a forthcoming publication.

N ot e s

211

16. Clark, Struggle, 220–232. 17. Charles Cunningham, A Narrative of Occurences That Took Place during the Mutiny at the Nore (Chatham: William Burrill, 1829), 116. 18. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale Unversity Press, 1992), 5, 372. 19. Michael Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 1814–1864: A Social History (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), 166–193; Eugene Rasor, Reform in the Royal Navy: A Social History of the Lower Deck, 1850 to 1880 (Hamden, CN: Archon, 1976), 34–35; John Winton, “Life and Education in a Technically Evolving Navy, 1815–1925,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy, ed. J. R. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 250–279. 20. Isaac Land, “‘Sinful Propensities’: Piracy, Sodomy, and Empire in the Rhetoric of Naval Reform,” in Discipline and the Other Body: Humanitarianism, Violence, and the Colonial Exception, ed. Anupama Rao and Steven Pierce (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 21. Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto, 2002); Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travelers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004). Shompa Lahiri, “Patterns of Resistance: Indian Seamen in Imperial Britain,” in Language, Labour and Migration, ed. Anne J. Kershen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 155–178; Sarah Palmer, Politics, Shipping, and the Repeal of the Navigation Laws (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). 22. Laura Tabili, “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 23. Thomas Trotter, Medicina Nautica: An Essay on the Diseases of Seamen (London, 1797), 38. 24. I. J. Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and His Times (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 141. 25. Matthew Henry Barker, Greenwich Hospital, A Series of Naval Sketches, Descriptive of the Life of a Man-of-War’s Man. By an Old Sailor (London: James Robins, 1826), 200.


Bibliography Manuscript Collections Dundee City Archives. Glasgow City Archives. National Archives (formerly Public Record Office, Kew). Scottish Record Office. Tyne and Wear Archives Service. Watt Library, Greenock.

Prints and Ephemera British Library. Collections of broadsides. 1077.g.47; 11621.c.2. Music collection. H.35 (A Collection of Sea Songs on Several Occasions, 1720). British Museum. Satires. National Maritime Museum. Prints.

Contemporary Newspapers and Periodicals Annual Register. Arminian Magazine. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. British Critic. Edinburgh Review. Gentleman’s Magazine. Glasgow Courier. Greenock Advertiser. Illustrated London News. Lloyd’s Evening Post. London Courant. London Magazine. Newcastle Chronicle. Newcastle Courant.

214

Bibliography

Quarterly Review. St. James’ Chronicle. Times. Tyne Mercury.

Electronic Resources Bodleian Library, Oxford: Broadside Ballads. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Grove Art Online. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Photographic Exhibitions in Britain, 1839–1865. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey. South Seas Project.

Printed Primary Sources Publishers not supplied for works before 1800. [n.a.]. An Inquiry into the Nature and Effects of Flogging in the Royal Navy and the Merchant Service. 2nd ed. London: Hunt and Clark, 1826. [n.a.]. Jack Sprit-Sail’s Frolic. 2nd ed. London, 1791. [n.a.]. The Jovial Songster, or Sailor’s Delight. Gainsbrough, 1792. [n.a.]. A Lecture on Hearts. 2nd ed. London, 1767. [n.a.]. A Letter from a Naval Officer to a Friend on the Late Alarming Mutiny aboard the Fleet. London: Murray and Highley, 1797. [n.a.]. A Letter to the Tars of Old England. London, 1797. [n.a.]. The London and Westminster Guide. London, 1768. [n.a.]. The Loyal Sailor; or, No Mutineering. London, 1797. [n.a.]. The Visitor’s Guide to the Sights of London. London: [n.p.], 1844. Allen, Zachariah. The Practical Tourist. 2 vols. Boston: Carter, Hendee, 1833. Anstey, Christopher. Britain’s Genius. Bath, 1797. Archenholz, Johann Wilhelm von. A Picture of England: Containing a Description of the Laws, Customs, and Manners of England. 2 vols. London, 1789. Ayton, Richard and William Daniell. A Voyage Round Great Britain. 2 vols. London: Scolar, 1978. Barker, Matthew Henry. Greenwich Hospital, A Series of Naval Sketches, Descriptive of the Life of a Man-of-War’s Man. By an Old Sailor. London: James Robins, 1826. ———. Tough Yarns. London: Effingham Wilson, 1835. Barlow, Edward. Barlow’s Journal of his life at sea in King’s Ships, East and West Indiamen and other Merchantmen from 1659 to 1703. Transcribed by Basil Lubbock. 2 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1934. Barrow, John. A Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions. London: John Murray, 1818.

Bibliography

215

Bechervaise, John. Thirty-Six Years of a Seafaring Life by an Old Quarter Master. Portsea: Woodward, 1839. ———. A Farewell to my Old Shipmates and Messmates; With Some Examples, and a Few Hints of Advice. By the Old Quarter Master. Portsea: W. Woodward, 1847. Benson, Robert. Britain’s Glory or, A Trip to Portsmouth. London, 1798. Bezer, John James. “Autobiography of One of the Chartist Rebels of 1848.” In Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working-Class Politicians, 1790–1885, edited by David Vincent, 149–187. London: Europa, 1977. Bianchi, Giovanni. The True History and Adventures of Catharine Vizzani. London, 1755. Brightwell, Cecilia Lucy. Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie. Norwich: Fletcher and Alexander, 1854. Bromley, J. S., ed. The Manning of the Royal Navy: Selected Public Documents, 1693–1873. London: Navy Records Society, 1974. Brown, John. Sixty Years’ Gleanings from Life’s Harvest. New York: D. Appleton, 1859. Buchan, William. Domestic Medicine; or the Family Physician. Edinburgh: Balfour, Auld & Smellie, 1769; Manchester: S. Russell, 1804. Butler, Charles. On the legality of impressing seamen. 1777. 2nd ed., with additions “partly by Lord Sandwich,” 1778 and reprinted in Pamphleteer 23 (1824): 226–287. Carlyle, Thomas. Selected Works. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. Castle, Terry, ed. The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Clarkson, Thomas. “The Substance of the Evidence of Sundry Persons on the Slave Trade.” In The British Transatlantic Slave Trade, Vol. 3, The Abolitionist Struggle: Opponents of the Slave Trade, edited by John Oldfield. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003. Coleman, Deirdre, ed. Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies: Two Women’s Travel Narratives of the 1790s. London: Leicester University Press, 1999. Combe, William. The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque. London: J. Diggins, 1812. A Commander in the Royal Navy. Hints on the Impressment of Seamen. London: James Ridgway, 1827. Coxere, Edward. Adventures by Sea of Edward Coxere, ed. E. H. W. Meyerstein. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. Crabbe, George. The Complete Poetical Works, edited by Norma DalrympleChampneys and Arthur Pollard. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. Cremer, John. Ramblin’ Jack: The Journal of Captain John Cremer, 1700–1774, edited by R. Reynell Bellamy. London: Jonathan Cape, 1936. Cunningham, Charles. A Narrative of Occurrences That Took Place During the Mutiny at The Nore. Chatham: William Burrill, 1829. Dibdin, Charles. Observations on a Tour through almost the whole of England. 2 vols. London: G. Goulding, 1801.

216

Bibliography

———. The Professional Life of Mr. Dibdin, Written by Himself. 4 vols. London: Charles Dibdin, 1803. ———. The Songs of Charles Dibdin, edited by George Hogarth. London: How and Parsons, 1842. Dickens, Charles. “The Lost Arctic Voyagers.” In Miscellaneous Papers, 1: 499–526. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, [n.d.]. Diderot, Denis. Encyclopédie. Geneva, 1765. Donaldson, Joseph [A Soldier, pseudo.]. Recollections of an Eventful Life Chiefly Passed in the Army. Glasgow: W. R. McPhun, 1824. Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Hartford, CN: Park, 1882. Egan, Pierce. Life in London. London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1821. Elliott, Ebenezer. The Poetical Works of Ebenezer Elliott, The Corn Law Rhymer. Edinburgh: William Tait, 1840. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin, 2003. Ferguson, A. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. 4th ed. London, 1773. Fielding, John. An Account of the Origins and Effects of a Police. London, 1758. ———. A Brief Description of the Cities of London and Westminster. London, 1776. Forster, George. A Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof. 2 vols. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. Grose, Francis. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 3rd ed, edited by Eric Partridge. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963. Hanway, Jonas. The Origins, Progress, and Present State of the Marine Society. London, 1770. Hay, Robert. Landsman Hay: The Memoirs of Robert Hay, 1789–1847, ed. M. D. Hay. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953. Hodgskin, Thomas. An Essay on Naval Discipline. London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1813. ———. Popular Political Economy: Four Lectures Delivered at the London Mechanics’ Institution. London: Charles Tait, 1827. Hood, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Hood. New York: Derby and Jackson, 1861. Hogarth, William. The Analysis of Beauty, edited by Joseph Burke. Oxford: Clarendon, 1955. Irwin, George. Narrative of the Voyages and Adventures of George Irwin, A Native of Hexham, During Ten Years in the Navy and Merchant Service. Hexham: M. Dickenson, 1830. James, Henry. English Hours. 2nd ed. New York: Orion, 1960. Jerrold, Douglas. “Black Eyed Susan.” In Nineteenth Century Plays, edited by George Rowell. London: Oxford University Press, 1953. Karpeles, Maud. Folk Songs from Newfoundland. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1970. Kelly, Samuel. Samuel Kelly: An Eighteenth-Century Seaman, edited by Crosbie Garstin. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1925.

Bibliography

217

King, Dean, and John B. Hattendorf, ed. Every Man Will Do His Duty: An Anthology of Firsthand Accounts from the Age of Nelson. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. Kirby, R. S. Life and surprising adventures of Mary Anne Talbot (1809), ed. Paul Royster, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/32/. Knox, John. Observations on the Northern Fisheries. London: J. Walter, 1786. Lamb, Charles, and Mary. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, edited by E. V. Lucas. London: Methuen, 1903. Lavater, Johann Caspar. Essays on Physiognomy. 3 vol. London: Holloway and Hunter, 1789–1798. Leech, Samuel. A Voice from the Main Deck. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999. Lovett, William. Life and Struggles of William Lovett. London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1967. Mackay, Charles. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. 1852; London: George G. Harrap, 1956. Mackenzie, Eneas. A Descriptive and Historical Account of the Town and County of Newcastle upon Tyne including the Borough of Gateshead. Newcastle upon Tyne: Mackenzie and Dent, 1827. Malthus, T. R. An Essay on the Principle of Population, edited by Patricia James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Marks, Richard. The Retrospect. 13th ed. London: James Nisbet, 1828. Marryat, Frederick. Mr. Midshipman Easy. London: Dent, 1965. ———. Peter Simple. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. Martin, Jonathan. The Life of Jonathan Martin, 3rd ed. Lincoln: R. E. Leary, 1828. Maule, John, and John Cooke, A Historical Account of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich. London: G. Nicol, 1789. McPherson, Charles. Life on Board a Man-of-War; Including a Full Account of the Battle of Navarino. By a British Seaman. Glasgow: Blackie, Fullarton & Co., 1829. Miller, George. A Trip to Sea from 1810 to 1815. Long Sutton: John Swain, 1854. Mogridge, George. Old Humphrey’s Walks in London. Nashville, TN: E. Stevenson, 1855. 1st ed.: London: Religious Tract Society 1843. Nagle, Jacob. The Nagle Journal: A Diary of the Life of Jacob Nagle, Sailor, from the Year 1775 to 1841, edited by John C. Dann. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988. Neville, Edward. Plymouth in an Uproar: A Musical Farce. London, 1779. Nicol, John. The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1822. Oram, Alison, and Annmarie Turnbull, eds. The Lesbian History Sourcebook: Love and Sex between Women in Britain from 1780 to 1970. New York: Routledge, 2001. Pemberton, Charles Reece. The Autobiography of Pel. Verjuice, edited by Eric Partridge. London: Scholartis Press, 1929.

218

Bibliography

Price, Uvedale. Essay on the Picturesque. London, 1796. Purslow, Frank, ed. The Wanton Seed: More English Folk Songs from the Hammond and Gardiner MSS. London: English Folk Dance and Song Society, 1968. Rae, John. “The Lost Arctic Voyagers,” In Charles Dickens’ Uncollected Writings from Household Words, 1850–1859, edited by Harry Stone, 2: 513–522. 2 vols. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1968. Reynolds, Sir Joshua. Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. Richardson, William. A Mariner of England: An Account of the Career of William Richardson from Cabin Boy in the Merchant Service to Warrant Officer in the Royal Navy as Told by Himself, edited by Spencer Childers. London: John Murray, 1908. Robinson, William. Nautical Economy; or, Forecastle Recollections of Events During the Last War. Dedicated to the Brave Tars of Old England, by a Sailor, Politely Called by the Officers of the Navy, Jack Nasty-Face. London: William Robinson, 1836. Schaw, Janet. Journal of a Lady of Quality, edited by Evangeline Walker Andrews. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Sedley, Stephen, ed. The Seeds of Love: A Comprehensive Anthology of Folk Songs of the British Isles. London: Essex Music, 1967. Seeger, Peggy, and Ewan MacColl, ed. The Singing Island: A Collection of English and Scots Folksongs. London: Mills Music, 1960. Short, Thomas. A Comparative History of the Increase and Decrease of Mankind in England and Several Countries Abroad. London: W. Nicoll and C. Etherington, 1767. Sidney, Samuel. Rides on Railways. London: W. S. Orr, 1851. Silliman, Benjamin. Journal of Travels in England, Scotland, and Holland. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Boston: T. B. Ait, 1812. Slade, Mary. The History of the Female Shipwright. London, 1773. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by Edwin Cannan. New York: Modern Library, 1965. Smith, G. C. The Boatswain’s Mate, or An Interesting Dialogue between Two British Seamen. 1812; New York: New York Religious Tract Society, 1818. ———. The Quarter Master; or, the Second Part of the Boatswain’s Mate. 1812; Cincinnati: Western Navigation and Bible Tract Society, 1819. ———. Jack Tars at Plymouth, or the Fourth Part of the Boatswain’s Mate. New York: New York Religious Tract Society, 1818. Smith, John Thomas. Vagabondiana, or Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London. London: J. & A. Arch, 1817. Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Roderick Random. New York: Jenson Society, 1905. Snell, Hannah. The Female Soldier, ed. Dianne Dugaw. Los Angeles: William Rogers Clark Memorial Library, 1989. Spavens, William. The Narrative of William Spavens. Introduction by N. A. M. Rodger. London: Chatham, 1998.

Bibliography

219

Stanfield, James Field. “Observations on a Guinea Voyage,” [1788] in The British Transatlantic Slave Trade, vol. 3: The Abolitionist Struggle: Opponents of the Slave Trade, ed. John Oldfield. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003. Steuart, James. An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy. London, 1767. Stevens, George. The Trip to Portsmouth: A Comic Sketch of One Act, with Songs. London, 1773. ———. Lecture on Heads. London, 1785. Stubbs, Ken, ed. The Life of a Man: English Folk Songs from the Home Counties. London: English Folk Dance and Song Society, 1970. Taylor, Henry. Memoirs of the Principal Events in the Life of Henry Taylor. North Shields: T. Appleby, 1811. Tennyson, Alfred. “Locksley Hall.” In Tennyson’s Poetry, edited by Robert W. Hill, Jr. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1999. Trotter, Thomas. Medicina Nautica: An Essay on the Diseases of Seamen. London, 1797. ———. A Practicable Plan for Manning the Royal Navy and Preserving our Maritime Ascendancy, without Impressment. Newcastle upon Tyne: Longman, 1819. Urquhart, Thomas. Letters on the Evils of Impressment, with the Outline of a Plan for Doing Them Away, On which Depend the Wealth, Prosperity, and Consequence of Great Britain, 2nd ed. London: J. Richardson, 1816. Wales, William. Remarks on Mr. Forster’s Account .London, 1778. reprinted in George Forster, A Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof, 2: 699–753. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000, 2: 699–753. Wallace, Robert. A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind in Antient and Modern Times: In Which the Superior Populousness of Antiquity Is Maintained. Edinburgh: G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1753. Williams, R. Vaughn, and A. L. Lloyd, ed. The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs. London: Penguin Books, 1957. Wilson, John, and Robert Chambers. The Land of Burns. 2 vols. Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1840. Wordsworth, William. William Wordsworth: The Poems, edited by John O. Hayden. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.

Parliamentary Papers Minutes of the Evidence Taken before the Committee . . . to Enquire into the State of Mendicity and Vagrancy in the Metropolis. 1815.

Secondary Sources Albion, Robert Greenhalgh. Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy, 1652–1862. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1965. Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957.

220

Bibliography

———. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1978. Andrew, Donna. Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Aslet, Clive. The Story of Greenwich. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Assael, Brenda. “Music in the Air: Noise, Performers and the Contest over the Streets of the Mid-Nineteenth Century Metropolis.” In The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Stink, edited by Tim Hitchcock and Heather Shore, 183–197. London: Rivers Oram, 2003. Auerbach, Jeffrey A. The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display. London: Yale University Press, 1999. Bailey, Peter. “Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up?: Towards a RoleAnalysis of Mid-Victorian Working-Class Respectability.” Journal of Social History 12:3 (Spring 1979): 336–353. Bannister, Jerry. “Citizen of the Atlantic: Benjamin Lester’s Social World in England, 1768–69.” Newfoundland Quarterly 38, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 32–37. Barker-Benfield, G. J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Bartov, Omer. Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Beevor, Anthony. Stalingrad. New York: Viking, 1998. Behagg, Clive. “Secrecy, Ritual and Folk Violence: The Opacity of the Workplace in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century.” In Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England, edited by Robert D. Storch, 154–179. London: Croom Helm, 1982. Behrman, Cynthia Fansler. Victorian Myths of the Sea. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1977. Berg, Maxine. The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, 1815–1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Berton, Pierre. The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North West Passage and the North Pole, 1818–1909. New York: Viking, 1988. Best, Geoffrey. War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 1770–1870. Bath: Leicester University Press, 1982. Black, Jeremy. “Introduction.” In The British Navy and the Use of Naval Power in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Jeremy Black and Philip Woodfine. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988. Blum, Hester. The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African-American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Bowen, H. V. War and British Society, 1688–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Bowen, Scarlet. “‘The Real Soul of a Man in Her Breast’: Popular Opposition and British Nationalism in Memoirs of Female Soldiers, 1740–1750.” Eighteenth-Century Life 28, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 20–45.

Bibliography

221

Boyd, Nan Alamilla. “Bodies in Motion: Lesbian and Transsexual Histories.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 420–433. New York: Routledge, 2006. Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Bratton, J. S., ed. Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790–1930. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991. Braunschneider, Theresa. “Acting the Lover: Gender and Desire in Narratives of Passing Women.” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 45, no. 3 (2004): 211–229. Brewer, John. “The Number 45: A Wilkite Political Symbol.” In England’s Rise to Greatness, edited by Stephen B. Baxter, 349–376. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. ———. The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. ———. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997. Briggs, Asa. “Ebenezer Elliott, The Corn Law Rhymer.” Cambridge Journal 3, no. 11 (1950): 686–695. ———. Victorian Cities. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Brown, Anthony G. “The Nore Mutiny: Sedition or Ships’ Biscuits? A Reappraisal.” Mariner’s Mirror 92, no. 1 (February 2006): 60–74. Brown, David K. “Wood, Sail, and Cannonballs to Steel, Steam, and Shells, 1815–1895.” In The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy, edited by J. R. Hill, 200–226. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Brown, Matthew. “Not Forging Nations but Foraging for Them: Uncertain Collective Identities in Gran Colombia.” Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 2 (2006): 223–240. Burg, B. R. Boys at Sea: Sodomy, Indecency, and Courts Martial in Nelson’s Navy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Burnett, John, David Vincent, and David Mayall, eds. The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography. 2 vols. New York: New York University Press, 1984. Burton, Valerie. “‘Whoring, Drinking Sailors’: Reflections on Masculinity from the Labour History of Nineteenth-Century British Shipping.” In Working Out Gender: Perspectives from Labour History, edited by Margaret Walsh, 84–101. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. ———. “Boundaries and Identities in the Nineteenth-Century English Port: Sailortown Narratives and Urban Space.” In Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City since 1850, edited by Simon Gunn and Robert J. Morris, 137–151. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Cage, R. A. The Scottish Poor Law, 1745–1845. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981. Carretta, Vincent. Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005.

222

Bibliography

Carter, Ian. Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Carter, Philip. Men and the Emergence of Polite Society: Britain, 1660–1800. London: Longman, 2001. Chapman, James. “‘This Ship is England’: History, Politics, and National Identity in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003).” In The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches, edited by James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper, 55–68. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Chappell, David A. Double Ghosts: Oceanian Voyagers on Euroamerican Ships. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. Christianson, Gale E. “Secret Societies and Agrarian Violence in Ireland, 1790–1840.” Agricultural History 46 (1972): 369–384. Christie, Ian R. Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984. Christopher, Emma. “‘Ten Thousand Times Worse than the Convicts’: Rebellious Sailors, Convict Transportation and the Struggle for Freedom, 1787–1800.” Journal of Australian Colonial History 5 (2004): 30–46. ———. Slave Ship Sailors and their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Clark, Anna. Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770–1845. London: Pandora, 1987. ———. The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. ———. “Anne Lister’s Construction of Lesbian Identity,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, no. 1 (1996): 23–50. Claver, Scott. Under the Lash: A History of Corporal Punishment in the British Armed Forces. London: Torchstream Books, 1954. Colley, Linda. “The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty, and the British Nation, 1760–1820.” Past and Present 102 (February 1984): 94–129. ———. “Whose Nation?: Class and National Consciousness in Britain, 1750–1830.” Past and Present 113 (November 1986): 97–117. ———. “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument.” Journal of British Studies 31 (October 1992): 309–329. ———. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven: Yale Unversity Press, 1992. Colls, Robert. Identity of England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Conley, Mary. Jack Tar to Union Jack: Naval Manhood in the British Empire, 1870–1918. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. Conway, Stephen. The British Isles and the War of American Independence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. “War and National Identity in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Isles.” English Historical Review 116, no. 468 (September 2001): 863–893. ———. War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Bibliography

223

Cookson, J. E. The British Armed Nation, 1793–1815. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. ———. “The Napoleonic Wars, Military Scotland and Tory Highlandism in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Scottish Historical Review, 78 (1999): 60–75. ———. “Service without Politics? Army, Militia and Volunteers in Britain during the American and French Revolutionary Wars.” War in History 10, no. 4 (2003): 381–397. Corbin, Alain. The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside, 1750–1840. Cambridge: Polity, 1994. Crawford, Michael J. “Introduction.” In A Voice from the Main Deck by Samuel Leech, vii–xx. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999. Creighton, Margaret. Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Creighton, Margaret, and Lisa Norling, eds. Iron Men and Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Currey, C. H. The Transportation, Escape, and Pardoning of Mary Bryant. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1963. Daly, Gavin. “English Smugglers, the Channel, and the Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1814.” Journal of British Studies 46 (January 2007): 30–46. Daniel, Malcolm. “‘The Pictures are as Rembrandt’s but Improved’: Calotypes by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, 56, no. 4 (Spring 1999): 12–23. Daniels, Stephen. “The Political Iconography of Woodland in later Georgian England.” In The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments, edited by Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, 43–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York: Vintage, 1985. David, Robert G. The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Davis, Jim. “British Bravery, or Tars Triumphant: Images of the British Navy in Nautical Melodrama.” New Theatre Quarterly 4 (1988): 122–143. Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975. Davis, Ralph. The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. London: Macmillan, 1962. Dawson, Graham. Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities. London: Routledge, 1994. de Bolla, Peter. The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. de Grazia, Margreta. Hamlet without Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Dekker, Rudolf M. and Lotte C. van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

224

Bibliography

Devine, T. M. The Scottish Nation: A History, 1700–2000. New York: Viking, 1999. Dickinson, H. T. The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Donnelly, James S., Jr. “Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel.” Studia Hibernica 21 (1981): 7–73. Donoghue, Emma. Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668– 1801. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Dozier, Robert R. For King, Constitution, and Country: The English Loyalists and the French Revolution. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983. Drescher, Seymour. “Cart Whip and Billy Roller: Antislavery and Reform Symbolism in Industrializing Britain.” Journal of Social History 15, no. 1 (1981): 3–24. Duffield, Ian. “‘Haul Away the Anchor, Girls’: Charlotte Badger, Tall Stories, and the Pirates of the ‘Bad Ship Venus.’” Journal of Australian Colonial History 7 (2005): 35–64. Dugaw, Dianne. Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Dunlop, Jean. The British Fisheries Society, 1786–1893. Edinburgh: John Donald, 1978. Earle, Peter. Sailors: English Merchant Seamen, 1650–1775. London: Methuen, 1998. Earle, Rebecca. “Creole Patriotism and the Myth of the ‘Loyal Indian’.” Past and Present 172 (August 2001): 125–145. Easton, Fraser. “Gender’s Two Bodies: Women Warriors, Female Husbands and Plebeian Life.” Past and Present 180 (August 2003): 131–174. Egerton, Judy. Turner: The Fighting Temeraire. London: National Gallery Publications, 1995. Emsley, Clive. “The Social Impact of the French Wars.” In Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815, edited by H. T. Dickinson, 211–228. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989. Endelman, Todd. The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979. Engel, Elliot, and Margaret F. King. The Victorian Novel before Victoria: British Fiction during the Reign of William IV, 1830–37. New York: St. Martin’s, 1984. Engelhardt, Juliane. “Patriotism, Nationalism and Modernity: The Patriotic Societies in the Danish Conglomerate State, 1769–1814.” Nations and Nationalism 13, no. 2 (2007): 205–223. Ennis, Daniel James. Enter the Press-Gang: Naval Impressment in EighteenthCentury British Literature. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002. Evans, Richard J. Tales from the German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Eversley, D. E. C. Social Theories of Fertility and the Malthusian Debate. Oxford: Clarendon, 1959.

Bibliography

225

Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. London: Women’s Press, 1985. Fahrner, Robert. The Theatre Career of Charles Dibdin the Elder (1745–1814). New York: Peter Lang, 1989. Fairchild, Hoxie Neale. The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1928. Feaver, William. The Art of John Martin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Fingard, Judith. Jack in Port: Sailortowns of Eastern Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. Fisher, Michael H. Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. ———. “Working Across the Seas: Indian Maritime Labourers in India, Britain, and in Between, 1600–1857.” International Review of Social History 51 (2006): 21–45. Flannery, Tim. “Introduction.” In The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner by John Nicol, 1–18. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1997. Forrest, Alan. Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society during the Revolution and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Freeman, Terence M. Dramatic Representations of British Soldiers and Sailors on the London Stage, 1660–1800: Britons Strike Home. Lewiston, New York: E. Mellen, 1995. Friedli, Lynne. “‘Passing Women’: A Study of Gender Boundaries in the Eighteenth Century.” In Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, edited by G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, 234–260. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Fry, Michael. The Dundas Despotism. Edinburgh University Press, 1992. Fulford, Tim. “Romanticizing the Empire: The Naval Heroes of Southey, Coleridge, Austen, and Marryat.” Modern Language Quarterly 60, no. 2 (June 1999): 161–196. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992. George, M. Dorothy. Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. Vols. 5–11. London, 1935–54. Reprint. London: British Museum Publications, 1978. Gilje, Paul A. Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Gill, Conrad. The Naval Mutinies of 1797. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1913. Glasco, Jeffrey D. “‘The Seaman Feels Him-self a Man.” International Labor and Working-Class History no. 66 (Fall 2004): 40–56. Green, Harvey. Wood: Craft, Culture, History. New York: Viking, 2006. Green, Martin. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. London: Routledge, 1980. Gregory, Jeremy. “Homo Religiosus: Masculinity and Religion in the Long Eighteenth Century.” In English Masculinities, 1660–1800, edited by Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen, 85–110. London: Longman, 1999.

226

Bibliography

Grigson, Jane. Jane Grigson’s Fish Book. London: Michael Joseph, 1993. Grugel, Lee E. George Jacob Holyoake: A Study in the Evolution of a Victorian Radical. Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1976. Guillery, Peter. “The Further Adventures of Mary Lacy: ‘Seaman,’ Shipwright, Builder.” History Workshop Journal 49 (2000): 212–220. Gurney, Peter. “An Appropriated Space: The Great Exhibition, the Crystal Palace and the Working Class.” In The Great Exhibition of 1851: Interdisciplinary Essays, edited by Louise Purbrick, 114–145. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Gurstein, Rochelle. “The Elgin Marbles, Romanticism, and the Waning of ‘Ideal Beauty.’” Daedalus 131, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 88–100. Hall, Catherine, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall. Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Haskell, Francis, and Nicholas Penny. Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Haskell, Thomas L. “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility.” American Historical Review 90 (1985): Part 1, 339–361; Part 2, 547–566. Hawkins, Anne, and Helen Watt. “‘Now is our time, the ship is our own, huzza for the red flag’: Mutiny on the Inspector, 1797.” Mariner’s Mirror 93, no. 2 (May 2007): 156–179. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979. Henderson, J. Welles, and Rodney P. Carlisle. Marine Art and Antiques: Jack Tar, A Sailor’s Life, 1750–1910. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1999. Hill, Draper. Mr. Gillray the Caricaturist: A Biography. London: Phaidon, 1965. Hill, Jen. White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. Early Victorian Architecture in Britain. 2 vols. New York: Da Capo, 1972. Hitchcock, Tim. English Sexualities, 1700–1800. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. ———. Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London. New York: Hambledon and London, 2004. Hobsbawm, Eric. Bandits. New York: New Press, 2000. Hobsbawm, Eric, and T. O. Ranger, ed. The Invention of Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Hofschröer, Peter. Wellington’s Smallest Victory: The Duke, the Model Maker, and the Secret of Waterloo. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. Hollis, Patricia. “Anti-Slavery and British Working-Class Radicalism in the Years of Reform.” In Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey, edited by Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher, 294–315. Folkestone: W. Dawson, 1980.

Bibliography

227

Hoock, Holger. “Nelson Entombed: The Military and Naval Pantheon in St. Paul’s Cathedral.” In Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy, edited by David Cannadine, 115–143. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Hope, Ronald. A New History of British Shipping. London: John Murray, 1990. Hopkins, Eric. Working-Class Self-Help in Nineteenth-Century England. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Horsley, P. M. Eighteenth-Century Newcastle. Newcastle upon Tyne: Oriel, 1971. Howell, Colin, and Richard Twomey, eds. Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour. Fredericton, New Brunswick: Acadiensis Press, 1991. Howman, Brian. “Abolitionism in Liverpool.” In Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, edited by David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz, and Anthony Tibbes, 277–296. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding. New York: Vintage, 1988. Hunt, Margaret R. “Women and the Fiscal-Imperial State in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries.” In A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, edited by Kathleen Wilson, 29–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Hunt, Tamara L. Defining John Bull: Political Caricature and National Identity in Late Georgian England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Hutchinson, J. R. The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore. London: Eveleigh Nash, 1913. Hutchinson, John, Susan Reynolds, Anthony D. Smith, Robert Colls, and Krishan Kumar, “Debate on Krishan Kumar’s The Making of English National Identity,” Nations and Nationalism 13, no. 2 (2007): 179–203. Jackson, Gordon. Hull in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Economic and Social History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. ———. “Ports, 1700–1840.” In The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, edited by Peter Clark, Vol. 2, 1540–1840, 705–732. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Jarrett, Dudley. British Naval Dress. London: Dent, 1960. Jenks, Timothy. “Contesting the Hero: The Funeral of Admiral Lord Nelson.” Journal of British Studies 39, no. 4 (October 2000): 422–453. ———. Naval Engagements: Patriotism, Cultural Politics, and the Royal Navy, 1793–1815. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Johnson, Richard. “‘Really Useful Knowledge: Radical Education and Working-Class Culture, 1790–1848.” In Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory, edited by John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson, 75–102. 1979. Reprint, New York: Routledge, 2007. Jordan, Gerald, and Nicholas Rogers. “Admirals as Heroes: Patriotism and Liberty in Mid-Hanoverian England.” Journal of British Studies 28, no. 3 (July 1989): 201–224.

228

Bibliography

Judd, Mark. “‘The Oddest Combination of Town and Country’: Popular Culture and the London Fairs, 1800–60.” In Leisure in Britain, 1780–1939, edited by John K. Walton and James Walvin, 11–30. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983. Kahan, Gerald. George Alexander Stevens and the Lecture on Heads. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984. Knight, Roger. The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson. London: Allen Lane, 2005. Kopperman, Paul E. “‘The Cheapest Pay’: Alcohol Abuse in the EighteenthCentury British Army.” Journal of Military History 60, no. 3 (July 1996): 445–470. Knott, Sarah. “Sensibility and the American War for Independence,” American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (February 2004): 19–40. Kriegel, Lara. Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Kumar, Krishan. The Making of English National Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Kverndal, Roald. Seamen’s Missions: Their Origin and Early Growth: A Contribution to the History of the Church Maritime. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1986. Lahiri, Shompa. “Patterns of Resistance: Indian Seamen in Imperial Britain.” In Language, Labour and Migration, edited by Anne J. Kershen, 155–178. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Land, Isaac. “The Many-Tongued Hydra: Sea Talk, Maritime Culture, and Atlantic Identities, 1700–1850.” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 25, no. 3–4 (December 2002): 412–417. ———. “Bread and Arsenic: Citizenship from the Bottom Up in Georgian London.” Journal of Social History 39, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 89–110. ———. “What Are We at War about?” London Review of Books, December 1, 2005. ———. “‘Sinful Propensities’: Piracy, Sodomy, and Empire in the Rhetoric of Naval Reform.” In, Discipline and the Other Body: Humanitarianism, Violence, and the Colonial Exception, edited by Anupama Rao and Steven Pierce, 90–114. Duke University Press, 2006. ———. “Tidal Waves: The New Coastal History.” Journal of Social History 40, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 731–743. ———. “Men with the Faces of Brutes: Physiognomy, Urban Anxieties, and Police States.” In Enemies of Humanity: The Nineteenth-Century War on Terrorism, edited by Isaac Land, 117–135. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ———. “The Humours of Sailortown: Atlantic History Meets Subculture Theory.” In City Limits, edited by Glenn Clark. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, forthcoming. Land, Isaac, and Andy Schocket. “New Approaches to the Founding of Sierra Leone, 1786–1806.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9, no. 3.

Bibliography

229

Laqueur, Thomas W. “Bodies, Details and the Humanitarian Narrative.” In The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt, 176–204. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. ———. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Lawrence, Christopher. “Disciplining Disease: Scurvy, the Navy, and Imperial Expansion, 1750–1825.” In Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, edited by David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, 80–106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Lemisch, Jesse. “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America.” William and Mary Quarterly 25 (1968): 371–407. ———. “Listening to the ‘Inarticulate’: William Widger’s Dream and the Loyalties of American Revolutionary Seamen in British Prisons.” Journal of Social History 3, no. 1 (Fall 1969): 1–29. ———. Jack Tar vs. John Bull: The Role of New York’s Seamen in Precipitating the American Revolution. New York: Garland, 1997. Lewis, Michael. A Social History of the Navy, 1793–1815. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960. ———. The Navy in Transition, 1814–1864: A Social History. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965. Lincoln, Margarette. Representing the Royal Navy: British Sea Power, 1750– 1815. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. Linebaugh, Peter. “The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons.” In Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, Cal Winslow, 65–118. New York: Pantheon, 1975. ———. “All the Atlantic Mountains Shook.” Labour / Le Travailleur 10 (Autumn 1982): 87–121. ———. The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon, 2000. Lloyd, Christopher. Captain Marryat and the Old Navy. London: Longmans, Green, 1939. ———. The British Seaman, 1200–1860: A Social Survey. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1968. Lloyd-Jones, Ralph. “The Men Who Sailed with Franklin.” Polar Record 41, no. 219 (2005): 311–318. Lockwood, Allison. Passionate Pilgrims: The American Traveler in Great Britain, 1800–1914. New York: Cornwall Books, 1981. Loomis, Chauncey C. “The Arctic Sublime.” In Nature and the Victorian Imagination, edited by U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson, 95–112. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Mabee, Frank. “The Spithead Mutiny and Urban Radicalism in the 1790s.” Romanticism 13, no. 2 (2007): 133–144.

230

Bibliography

Mackenzie, John M. “Lakes, Rivers, and Oceans: Technology, Ethnicity, and the Shipping of Empire in the Late Nineteenth Century.” In Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century, edited by David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby, 111–127. London: Boydell, 2004. Mackerness, Eric David. A Social History of English Music. London: Routledge, 1966. Mandler, Peter. The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home. London: Yale University Press, 1997. ———. “‘Race’ and ‘Nation’ in Mid-Victorian Thought.” In History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950, edited by Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young, 224–244. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Maxwell-Stewart, Hamish. “Seven Tales for a Man with Seven Sides.” In Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives, edited by Lucy Frost and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, 64–76. Carlton, South Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2001. McCalman, Iain. Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983. McCombie, G. “The Buildings of Trinity House, Newcastle upon Tyne.” Archaeologia Aeliana, 5th series, 13 (1985): 163–186. McCord, Norman. “The Seamen’s Strike of 1815 in North-East England.” Economic History Review 21 (1968): 127–143. McGuane, James P. Heart of Oak: A Sailor’s Life in Nelson’s Navy. New York: Norton, 2002. McNairn, Alan. Behold the Hero: General Wolfe and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997. Mercer, Keith. “The Murder of Lieutenant Lawry: A Case Study of British Naval Impressment in Newfoundland, 1794.” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 21, no. 2 (2006): 255–289. ———. “Sailors and Citizens: Press Gangs and Naval-Civilian Relations in Nova Scotia, 1756–1815.” Journal of Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society 10 (2007): 87–113. Miller, Amy. Dressed to Kill: British Naval Uniform, Masculinity and Contemporary Fashions, 1748–1857. London: National Maritime Museum, 2007. Milne, Graeme J. Trade and Traders in Mid-Victorian Liverpool: Mercantile Business and the Making of a World Port. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2000. Mindell, David A. War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Mineka, Francis E. The Dissidence of Dissent: The Monthly Repository, 1806–1838. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944. Moffet, Joyce. “Trinity House of Newcastle.” Tyne and Wear Archive Service Searchroom Pamphlet no. 1186. Monks, Sarah. “National Heterotopia: Greenwich as Spectacle, 1694–1869.” Rising East: Journal of East London Studies 2, no. 1 (1998): 156–166.

Bibliography

231

Monod, Paul Kléber. Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Montefiore, Sebag. Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Morgan, Philip D. “Black Experiences in Britain’s Maritime World.” In Empire, the Sea, and Global History: Britain’s Maritime World, c. 1760–c.1840, edited by David Cannadine, 105–133. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Morgan, Sue, ed. The Feminist History Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006. Mornement, Adam, and Simon Holloway. Corrugated Iron: Building on the Frontier. New York: Norton, 2007. Mount, Ferdinand. “Fraud Squad,” London Review of Books, August 2, 2007. Myerly, Scott Hughes. British Military Spectacle: From the Napoleonic Wars through the Crimea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Neff, D. S. “Bitches, Mollies, and Tommies: Byron, Masculinity, and the History of Sexualities.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 3 (July 2002): 395–438. Newman, Gerald. The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830. New York: St. Martin’s, 1987. Newman, Simon P. “Reading the Bodies of Early American Seafarers.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 55, no. 1 (January 1998): 59–81. Norling, Lisa. Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Oldfield, J. R. Popular Politics and British Antislavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Ommer, Rosemary, and Gerald Panting, ed. Working Men Who Got Wet. St. Johns, Newfoundland: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1980. Ormond, Richard. Sir Edwin Landseer. London: Thames and Hudson, 1981. Orwell, George. England Your England and Other Essays. London: Secker and Warburg, 1954. Palmer, Sarah. Politics, Shipping, and the Repeal of the Navigation Laws. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Parascandola, Louis J. “Puzzled Which to Choose”: Conflicting Socio-Political Views in the Works of Captain Frederick Marryat. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Parkinson, C. Northcote. Portsmouth Point: The Navy in Fiction, 1793–1815. Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool, 1948. Parry, J. H. “Sailor’s English.” Cambridge Journal 2 (1948–1949): 660–670. Partridge, Eric. “Charles Reece Pemberton: A Sketch.” In The Autobiography of Pel. Verjuice, by Charles Reece Pemberton, xi–xxiv. London: Scholartis Press, 1929.

232

Bibliography

Patten, Robert L. George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art. 2 vols. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Paulson, Ronald. Rowlandson: A New Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Payton, Philip. The Making of Modern Cornwall: Historical Experience and the Persistence of Difference. Redruth: Dyllansow Truran, 1992. Pearson, Michael N. “Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems.” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 353–373. Percival, Melissa, and Graeme Tytler, ed. Physiognomy in Profile: Lavater’s Impact on European Culture. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. Perry, Imani. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip-Hop. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Phillips, Susan A. Wallbangin’: Graffiti and Gangs in L.A. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Philp, Mark, ed. Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Pietsch, Roland. “Ships’ Boys and Youth Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Navy Recruits of the London Marine Society,” Northern Mariner 14, no. 4 (October 2004): 11–24. Pinch, Adela. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pittock, Murray G. H. Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685–1789. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Porter, Roy. English Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Pelican, 1982. Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Prentice, Rina. A Celebration of the Sea: The Decorative Art Collection of the National Maritime Museum. Greenwich: National Maritime Museum, 1994. Press, Jon. “The Collapse of a Contributory Pension Scheme: The Merchant Seamen’s Fund, 1747–1851.” Journal of Transport History, New Series, 5 (1979): 91–104. Prothero, I. J. Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and His Times. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Purbrick, Louise. “Introduction.” In The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, edited by Louise Purbrick, 1–25. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Rasor, Eugene. Reform in the Royal Navy: A Social History of the Lower Deck, 1850 to 1880. Hamden, CN: Archon, 1976. Rauser, Amelia. “Hair, Authenticity and the Self-Made Macaroni.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 1 (2004): 101–117. Rediker, Marcus. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Bibliography

233

———. “Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger: The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Pirates.” In Iron Men and Wooden Women, edited by Margaret Creighton and Lisa Norling, 1–33. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. ———. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking, 2007. Richard, Jessica.“‘A Paradise of My Own Creation’: Frankenstein and the Improbable Romance of Polar Exploration.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 25, no. 4 (2003): 295–314. Rodger, N. A. M. “Stragglers and Deserters from the Royal Navy during the Seven Years’ War.” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 57, no. 135 (May 1984): 56–79. ———. The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy. New York: Norton, 1986. ———. “Mutiny or Subversion? Spithead and the Nore.” In 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective, edited by Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Dáire Keogh, and Kevin Whelan, 549–564. Dublin: Four Courts, 2003. ———. The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815. New York: Norton, 2005. Rogers, Nicholas. “Liberty Road: Opposition to Impressment in Britain during the American War of Independence.” In Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour, edited by Colin Howell and Richard Twomey, 55–75. Fredericton, New Brunswick: Acadiensis Press, 1991. ———. The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and its Opponents in Georgian Britain. London: Continuum, 2007. Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Ross, W. Gillies. “Clairvoyants and mediums search for Franklin.” Polar Record 39, no. 208 (2003): 1–18. Royle, Edward. “Mechanics’ Institutes and the Working Classes, 1840–1860.” Historical Journal 14, no. 2 (1971): 305–321. Rudé, George. Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774. London: Oxford University Press, 1965. ———. The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848. Rev. ed. London: Serif, 1995. Rule, John G. “Wrecking and Coastal Plunder.” In Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow, 167–188. New York: Pantheon, 1975. Russell, Gillian. The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Salmond, Anne. The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Encounters in the South Seas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

234

Bibliography

Schama, Simon. Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations. New York: Knopf, 1991. ———. Landscape and Memory. New York: Knopf, 1995. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Skilton, David. “Tourists at the Ruins of London: The Metropolis and the Struggle for Empire,” Cercles 17 (2007): 93–119. Slater, Michael. Douglas Jerrold, 1803–1857. London: Duckworth, 2002. Snape, Michael. The Redcoat and Religion: The Forgotten History of the British Soldier from the Age of Marlborough to the Eve of the First World War. London: Routledge, 2005. Spufford, Francis. I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Stark, Suzanne J. Female Tars: Women aboard Ship in the Age of Sail. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996. Stedman-Jones, Gareth. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Stevenson, Sara. The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth. Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1991. ———. Facing the Light: The Photography of Hill and Adamson. Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 2002. Surel, Jeannine. “John Bull.” In Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, edited by Raphael Samuel, vol. 3: 3–25. London: Routledge, 1989. Sussman, Herbert L. Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. Tabili, Laura. “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Taylor, Miles. “John Bull and the Iconography of Public Opinion in England c. 1712–1929.” Past and Present 134 (February 1992): 93–128. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. Thomas, William. “Religion and Politics in the Quarterly Review, 1809–1853.” In History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950, edited by Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young, 136–155. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Thompson, Carl. “The Heroic Age of the Tin Can: Technology and Ideology in British Arctic Exploration, 1818–1835.” In Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century, edited by David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby, 84–99. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004. Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage, 1963. ——— “The Crime of Anonymity.” In Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow, 255–344. New York: Pantheon, 1975.

Bibliography

235

———. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New York: New Press, 1993. ———. “Which Britons?” In E. P. Thompson, Making History: Writings on History and Culture (New York: New Press, 1994), 319–329. Tosh, John. “The Old Adam and the New Man: Emerging Themes in the History of English Masculinities, 1750–1850.” In English Masculinities, 1660–1800, edited by Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen, 217–238. London: Longman, 1999. Townsend, Camilla. “‘I am the Woman for Spirit’: A Working Woman’s Gender Transgression in Victorian London.” Victorian Studies 36, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 293–314. Trumbach, Randolph. “London’s Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture.” In Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, 112–141. New York: Routledge, 1991. ———. Sex and the Gender Revolution. Vol. 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Turley, Hans. Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity. New York: New York University Press, 1999. van der Merwe, Pieter. “The Glorious First of June: A Battle of Art and Theatre.” In The Glorious First of June, 1794: A Naval Battle and its Aftermath, edited by Michael Duffy and Roger Morriss, 132–158. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001. van Royen, Paul, Jaap Bruijn, and Jan Lucassen, eds. “Those Emblems of Hell”?: European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570–1870. St. John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 1997. Vernon, Sally. “Trouble up at T’Mill: The Rise and Decline of the Factory Play in the 1830s and 1840s.” Victorian Studies 20, no. 2 (Winter 1977): 117–139. Vicinus, Martha. “‘They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong’: The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian Identity.” Feminist Studies 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 467–497. Vickers, Daniel. Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers and the Age of Sail. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Vincent, David. Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography. London: Europa, 1981. ———. Literacy and Popular Culture: England, 1750–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Visram, Rozina. Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto, 2002. Wahrman, Dror. The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Walvin, James. England, Slaves, and Freedom, 1776–1838. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

236

Bibliography

Watson, Harold F. The Sailor in English Fiction and Drama, 1550–1800. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931. Wellesz, Egon and Frederick Sternfeld, eds. The New Oxford History of Music: The Age of Enlightenment, 1745–1790. London: Oxford University Press, 1973. Whinney, Margaret. Sculpture in Britain, 1530–1830. 2nd ed. Revised by John Physick. New York: Penguin, 1988. Williams, Carolyn D. “Women Behaving Well: Early Modern Examples of Female Courage.” In Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early-Modern Culture, edited by Chris Mounsey, 49–75. London: Associated University Presses, 2001. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus, 1961. ———. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. ———. Culture and Society: 1780–1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Wilson, Charles. First with the News: The History of W. H. Smith, 1792–1972. New York: Doubleday, 1986. Wilson, Kathleen. “Empire, Trade, and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon.” Past and Present 121 (November 1988): 74–109. ———. The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ———. The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge, 2003. ———. “Thinking Back: Gender Misrecognition and Polynesian Subversions aboard the Cook Voyages.” In A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, edited by Kathleen Wilson, 345–362. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Winslow, Cal. “Sussex Smugglers.” In Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, Cal Winslow, 119–166. New York: Pantheon, 1975. Winton, John. Hurrah for the Life of a Sailor!: Life on the Lower-deck of the Victorian Navy. London: Michael Joseph, 1977. ———. “Life and Education in a Technically Evolving Navy, 1815–1925.” In The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy, edited by J. R. Hill, 250–279. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Wright, Patrick. On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain. London: Verso, 1985.

Unpublished Dissertations Brunsman, Denver. “The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, New Jersey, 2004.

Bibliography

237

Clark, Anna Kirsten. “Womanhood and Manhood in the Transition from Plebeian to Working-Class Culture: London, 1780–1845.” Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, 1987. Land, Isaac. “Domesticating the Maritime: Culture, Masculinity, and Empire in Britain, 1770–1820.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1999. Lin, Patricia Y. C. E. “Extending Her Arms: Military Families and the Transformation of the British State, 1793–1815.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1997. Pearl, Sharrona Hyla. “As Plain As the Nose on Your Face: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century England.” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2005. Scott, Julius S. “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution.” Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1986. Yarrington, Alison. “The Commemoration of the Hero, 1800–1864: Monuments to the British Victors of the Napoleonic Wars.” Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 1980.


Index

Adamson, Robert, 138–139 Africans or African-Americans, 24, 46, 164–165, 169 attitudes toward, 25, 35, 93–94, 109–111, 129–130, 163–165. Altick, Richard, 66 Anderson, Bob, 53 Arctic, 139, 153–158 Asia and Asians, 24, 168 Atlantic world, 3, 15, 19, 110, 128, 166–167 autobiography, 26–28, 33, 64–65, 95, 105–130, 167 Ayr, 142–143 Badger, Charlotte, 64 Bailey, Peter, 27 ballads. See songs Baptist, 117 Barker, Matthew, 37, 113–115 Barlow, Edward, 21–23 Barrow, John, 153–154, 156 Bechervaise, John, 40, 105, 107, 119–120, 129–130, 166 Bedworth, Thomas, 52–53 Beesmore, Elizabeth, 52–53 Bentley’s Miscellany, 113 Bethel movement, 119, 122 Benin, 110 Billingsgate, 16 Black Ey’d Susan, 131, 138 Bond, Thomas, 150 Bonny, Anne, 64 Bowen, Essex, 57 Bowen, H. V., 1

Brewer, John, 2 Britannia, 72, 78–80, 102, 105, 106, 132–133 Britishness, 7, 9–10, 24–26, 77–104, 110–112, 120–121, 123–130, 139–140, 153–158, 159–165 Brown, Matthew, 162 Bryant, Mary, 64 Burns, Robert, 89, 142–143 Calotypes. See photography Calton Hill, 144 cannibalism, 86, 126, 155–158 Carlyle, Thomas, 133–134, 141, 155 Catholics, 6, 132 Chalmers, Thomas, 144 Chartists, 9, 132, 166 China, 111 Clark, Anna, 46, 166 clothing, 34, 39–41, 61–62, 63 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 110 Colley, John, 53 Colley, Linda, 2, 6–11, 103, 159, 162–163, 167 Colombia, 162 “Condition of England” question, 135, 141, 142 Conrad, Joseph, 158 Conway, Stephen, 4 Cook, James, 36–7, 86–88, 166 Cookson, J. E., 1, 168 Cooper, James Fenimore, 126 Corn Law, 125, 157, 166

240

Index

Cornwall, 13 courage. See heroism Coxere, Ned, 17, 21–23 Crabbe, George, 126 cross-dressing, 57–76 Cruikshank, George, 113 Cruikshank, Isaac, 92–93 Crystal Palace. See Great Exhibition of 1851 Davidson, Thomas, 151 Dell, John, 53 Dell, Susannah, 53 Dibdin, Charles, 5, 78, 89–98, 99, 103, 107, 112–114, 115, 126, 167 Dickens, Charles, 113, 156–157 Douglas (Isle of Man), 2, 5 drink and drunkenness, 15, 29, 36–37, 39, 122, 147 Dugaw, Dianne, 58, 70 Dumbarton, 146–147 Dysart, 146–147 Earle, Peter, 121–122 Easton, Fraser, 57–58, 59 Edinburgh, 8, 34, 111, 138, 142, 144 Egan, Pierce, 46 Elliott, Ebenezer, 125 Empire and imperialism, 86–88, 105–112, 127–130, 153–158, 159–170 Equiano, Olaudah, 10, 109, 110, 169 factories, 131, 142 Falconbridge, Anna Maria, 25 Ferguson, Thomas, 53 Fielding, John, 20–21, 99 Fighting Temeraire (painting), 132 fishing, 2, 13, 143–148 Flaxman, John, 160 flogging, 104, 106, 109, 121–122, 124, 127–129, 130, 166, 167–168

Forrest, Alan, 3 Forster, George, 86–88, 97, 158 Forster, Johann Reinhold, 86 Foundling Hospital, 84 Fox, William Johnson, 125 France and the French, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 24, 59, 79–80, 83, 91–93, 97, 100, 105, 116, 118, 160 Franklin, Sir John, 154–158 Friendly Societies, 146–147 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 135 Gast, John, 169 Gibbon, Edward, 106 Gilje, Paul, 32 Glasgow, 34, 125, 131, 142, 144 Great Exhibition of 1851, 132, 138–144, 147–148 Greenwich Hospital, 5, 6, 8, 39, 149–153 Hanway, Jonas, 34, 86, 161 Hay, Robert, 34, 35, 48 Hercules, 148, 169 heroism, 59–60, 66–76, 77–104, 119–123, 126–128, 136, 147–148, 160, 165 herring, 2, 13, 169 Hill, David Octavius, 138–148, 161 Hodgskin, Thomas, 17, 123 Hogarth, William, 81–82 Holyoake, George Jacob, 125 Home Office, 2, 10, 24, 27, 164 Hoock, Holger, 160 Hood, Thomas, 151 Howe, Richard, 92–93, 96 Hull, 43 Hume, Joseph, 115 Hunt, Margaret, 16 impressment, 2–7, 19–20, 30, 34, 39, 54–55, 66–70, 102, 104, 112, 150, 159, 167–168, 169 Inuit, 155–156 Ireland and the Irish, 6, 31, 35, 142

Index Irwin, George, 34, 40 Isle of Man, 2, 43 Jack Tar, 3–6, 8–11, 13–28, 30, 32, 37, 54–55, 60, 77–104, 105–109, 115–130, 131–132, 147–153, 155–158, 159–170 experience of combat, 29, 38, 127 experience of corporal punishment, 38, 120–122 fatalism, 37, 38 as father, 83–86, 98–99, 145–147 initiation of outsiders, 34, 38 loyalty to shipmates, 38 loyalty to officers, 18, 114, 122, 128–129 as married or engaged, 46–54, 98–99, 101–103, 145–147, 150–152 in old age, 149–153 patriotic or nationalist sentiments, 97–104, 105, 110–115 in port, 39–55 radical or revolutionary tendencies, 5–6, 10, 14–19, 110, 123–130, 167–170 as religious, 95, 105, 115–123, 167 resistance to impressment, 42–44 spending habits of, 29 Jenks, Timothy, 97–98, 99 Jerrold, Douglas, 131, 138 Jersey, 105, 119, 129 Jews, 94 John Bull, 102 Johnson, Joseph, 164–165 Kelly, Samuel, 37 Keppel, Augustus, 92 Kirby, R. S., 57 Lacy, Mary, 58, 72 Landseer, Sir Edwin, 157–158

241

language, 35, 36, 41–44, 88–97, 98, 114, 117–118, 124 Laocoön, 77–78 “lascar”, 24 Leech, Samuel, 37, 38, 108, 119, 121–122 Leith, 144–145 lesbianism, 58–59 Lewes, Lee, 80 Libertinism. See misogyny; sexuality; and women Lincoln, Margarette, 3, 7 Linebaugh, Peter, 3, 18, 25 Liston, Willie, 147–148 Liverpool, 25, 43, 110, 128 Lockhart, J. G., 8 London, 1, 5, 8, 16, 20–21, 40, 43, 46, 57, 64, 65, 74, 75, 89, 90, 93–95, 134–135, 144, 148–153, 157–158, 164–165. See also St. Paul’s Cathedral; Westminster Abbey loyalism, 4–9, 18, 99, 107–109, 112–115, 122, 126–129, 159–170 luxury, 81, 85–87, 101–102 Mackenzie, John, 14 Macpherson, James, 88, 89 Malcolm, Pulteney, 114 Malthus, Thomas, 85, 123 Manchester, 48, 131, 135, 138 Mandler, Peter, 112 Marine Society, 34, 40, 84, 86 maritime culture, 13–28, 29, 83–88, 167–170 Marks, Richard, 117 Marryat, Frederick, 25, 126, 135–138 Martin, Jonathan, 116 Martineau, Harriet, 125 masculinity, 29–33, 36–55, 77–104, 106–107, 115, 117–123, 136–138, 146–148, 159–163 Mayhew, Henry, 139

242

Index

McPherson, Charles, 41, 113 Mechanic’s Institutes, 125, 129 Methodism, 22, 91,115, 116, 117, 167 Middle Passage, 109 Mill, John Stuart, 125 misogyny, 44–55, 69, 71–76, 166. See also sexuality; women Monks, Sarah, 152 Monthly Repository, 125–126 Morland, George, 102 Mungo, 93–94 music. See songs mutinies of 1797, 97–104, 107, 124, 157, 161, 166 Myles, William, 117 Mylls, Jean, 145 Nagle, Jacob, 38, 51 Napoleon. See France and the French Nasty-Face, Jack. See Robinson, William national and regional identities, 24, 35 nationalism, 1–11, 77–104, 117–130, 159–167 Naval reform, 108, 115–123, 126, 167–168 Nelson, Horatio, 10, 96, 100–104, 113, 118, 124, 132, 148–149, 154, 158, 160, 166. See also Trafalgar Newcastle upon Tyne, 10, 13, 169 Newhaven, 138, 144–148 Nicol, John, 8–9, 33, 34, 40, 111–112, 117, 130 Nore, 98, 99. See also mutinies of 1797 Northwest Passage. See Arctic nostalgia, 131–158 “nursery of seamen”, 83–86, 103, 140, 143–148, 154, 161, 164 Olden Time, 142 Oldham, 108

Ormond, Richard, 158 Orwell, George, 30 Ossian, 88 Pacific, 86–88 Paine, Tom, 8, 98, 99, 111, 116 parody, 31, 60, 71–76, 125, 149 Paxton, Joseph, 140 Pemberton, Charles, 29, 34, 38, 107, 109, 124–130 philanthropy, 84. See also Marine Society; Trinity Houses photography, 138–148, 161 phrenology, 136–137 physiognomy, 78–82, 87–88, 93, 100–101, 123, 132, 147–148 picturesque, 91 pilchard, 13 Pinafore (operetta), 131 piracy, 86, 97, 166 Pitt, William (the Younger), 96, 167 Place, Francis, 125 pleasure gardens, 89 Plymouth, 117 “political economy”, 123 Portsmouth, 48, 90–91, 124 Press, Jon, 145 press gangs. See impressment pronatalism, 78, 83–86, 161 prostitutes, 48–49, 61, 85–86 Punch, 132, 141, 143 Quarterly Review, 8–9, 154 Rae, Dr. John, 155–156 railroads, 132–138 railway stations, 134–135 Rambling Jack (Jack Cremer), 35, 37, 38 rape, 54 Read, Mary, 64 Rediker, Marcus, 3, 4, 11, 14–28, 116, 167 revolution, 3, 18, 167 Reynolds, Joshua, 80

Index Robinson, William, 34, 36, 43, 123–124 Roderick Random. See Smollett, Tobias Rodger, N. A. M., 4, 26–27 Rogers, Nicholas, 10 Romans and Roman Empire, 80–81, 85, 106 Rose, Jonathan, 3, 108–109, 162 Rowlandson, Thomas, 81–82, 91, 100–101, 132, 147 Royal Navy, 1–10, 16–20, 23–24, 26–28, 30, 36–37, 39, 40, 58, 68–69, 87, 95, 105–107, 116–117, 120–122, 136–137, 153–155, 167–168. See also impressment; Jack Tar Russell, Gillian, 97 Russia and Russians, 24, 127 sailors. See Jack Tar Sailor’s Magazine, 119, 126 sailortown, 29–55 Schama, Simon, 81 Scotland and the Scots, 9, 111, 138–148 seamen. See Jack Tar sexuality, 20–21, 29, 33, 45–55, 57–59, 83–88. See also masculinity; sodomy; women Shadwell, Charles, 21 Sierra Leone, 25, 164 slavery, 25, 111, 112, 120–121, 128 slave trade, 25, 109–111, 120, 128 Smith, Adam, 6, 9, 123 Smith, George Charles, 117–119 Smith, Mary, 61–62 Smith, W. H., 134–135 Smollett, Tobias, 21, 42, 89–90 Snell, Hannah, 64, 65, 72, 74 sodomy, 54, 85–86. See also sexuality Somerset, 74 songs, 45–48, 50–52, 58, 63, 66–74, 83, 94–97, 106, 165

243

Spain and Spaniards, 86, 118, 127, 162 Spithead, 6, 98. See also mutinies of 1797 St. Andrews, 143–144 St. Paul’s Cathedral, 57, 160 Stanfield, James, 109–111, 121, 128, 130 Stark, Suzanne, 65, 74, 75 State power, 1–11, 16–26, 30, 32, 55, 66–70, 167–168 steam power, 132–134, 154–155 Stedman-Jones, Gareth, 162 Stevens, George Alexander, 80, 90, 93 Stevenson, Sara, 139, 144, 147 Subculture, 30–33, 40–44, 62, 117–119, 167–170 Talbot, Mary Anne, 57, 58, 64, 65, 72, 74–76, 166 Taylor, John, 54 theater, 89–90, 93–97, 131–132 Thompson, E. P., 3, 99 Tosh, John, 131 Trafalgar, 10, 23, 101–102, 111, 123, 124, 152, 154, 160 Trafalgar Square, 157–158 Trinity Houses, 144–146 Trotter, Thomas, 42–43, 168 Trumbach, Randolph, 75 Turner, J. M. W., 132 Unitarians, 125 United States of America, 23 urban anxieties, 9, 131, 140–148 Urquhart, Thomas, 121 Vickers, Daniel, 48 Vincent, David, 26 virility, 77–78, 96–97, 99. See also masculinity; “nursery of seamen”; sexuality Wales, William, 88 Wales and the Welsh, 124

244

Index

Wellington, Duke of (Arthur Wellesley), 127, 132 West, Benjamin, 80–81, 101, 152 Westminster Abbey, 148–149 whiteness, 25, 129–130, 163 Wilberforce, William, 128 Williamson, Ann, 62 Wolfe, James, 80–81, 101, 104 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 69 women, 16, 29, 32, 33, 36, 38, 39, 40, 44–55, 57–76, 78, 96–97,

99, 100, 101–103, 112, 143–147, 149–151, 166, 169 Wood, Sarah, 54 Wordsworth, William, 159 working class, 3, 120, 125, 129, 162, 166–170 York, 116

War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750-1850

British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876-1906

British Silent Cinema and the Great War

British Empire and the Second World War

Home is the Sailor

SinBad the Sand Sailor

Home is the Sailor

SinBad the Sand Sailor

The Shipwrecked Sailor

SinBad the Sand Sailor

SinBad the Sand Sailor

British at War

British at War

Home Is the Sailor

Wayward Sailor

Wayward Sailor

Wayward Sailor

Soldier, Sailor

The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804-2012

SinBad the Sand Sailor

Spunky Sailor

Nationalism and Internationalism in the Post Cold-War Era

British State Romanticism: Authorship, Agency, and Bureaucratic Nationalism

Nationalism

Understanding Post-War British Society

The Complete Sailor, Second Edition

Race nationalism and the state

Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel

Nationalism

The Romanov Empire and Nationalism

Sailor & Lula

War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750-1850

British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876-1906

British Silent Cinema and the Great War

British Empire and the Second World War

Home is the Sailor

SinBad the Sand Sailor

Home is the Sailor

SinBad the Sand Sailor

The Shipwrecked Sailor

SinBad the Sand Sailor

SinBad the Sand Sailor

British at War

British at War

Home Is the Sailor

Wayward Sailor

Wayward Sailor

Wayward Sailor

Soldier, Sailor

The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804-2012

SinBad the Sand Sailor

Spunky Sailor

Nationalism and Internationalism in the Post Cold-War Era

British State Romanticism: Authorship, Agency, and Bureaucratic Nationalism

Nationalism

Understanding Post-War British Society

The Complete Sailor, Second Edition

Race nationalism and the state

Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel

Nationalism

The Romanov Empire and Nationalism

Sailor & Lula

Recommend Documents