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5: Seafaring Bodies
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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Chapter 5 Seafaring Bodies It was George Ribble's body that marked him as a man of the sea, the way he moved, his scars and tattoos, and the clothes he wore. As he walked through Philadelphia early in President ThomasJefferson's second term, Ribble displayed the rolling gait of the man who spent as much time aboard ships as he did on land, and he wore the clothes of the seafarer, short working garments made distinctive by the use of oil and tar as weatherproofing. Ribble was almost two inches shorter than the average native-born adult white man, and the twenty-three-year-old had already been scarred by his work at sea. But more than anything it was this man's tattoos that identified him as a sailor and revealed something about his life, for they showed Ribble seizing control of his body and image in a manner unique to seafarers, writing his own stories and values on his very skin. Seafarers were the only white Americans to wear these emblems: the anchor emblazoned on his right hand emphasized Ribble's pride in his craft, the cross on his left hand indicated his religious convictions, and the spread eagle on his right arm celebrated the patriotism of a man born in Philadelphia during the final year of the War for Independence, a man who resented and perhaps even hated Great Britain and the Royal Navy for its continued impressment ofAmerican sailors like himself. Ribble most likely spent months and even years away from Philadelphia, yet his connections with the city remained strong, and on his left arm he wore a tattooed heart containing the initials of his young, illiterate partner, Mary Shippen.1 In early national Philadelphia, sailors were the lower sort's single largest occupational group and also its most easily recognizable. As they gathered in and around waterfront taverns, grog shops, and residences, their distinctive rolling gait, their tarred shortjackets and trousers, their weathered complexions, and their unique songs, dances, jargon, and curses all marked them as men who worked at sea. Although many spent no more than a small portion of their adult lives as sailors, others formed a core ofmore professional, long-term sailors, and again it was their bodies that revealed them as such.2 Tattooed arms and hands, scars and other injuries, a high incidence of disease and significantly shorter than Seafaring Bodies 105 average stature-together comprising what Herman Melville described as the "wens and knobs and distortions of the bark"-marked many of them as men who spent most of their adult lives at sea.3 Seafarers were the men whose labor made possible the trade and commerce upon which early national America depended. They were engaged in one of the hardest, most dangerous, and poorest paid of professions, and often historians have found it difficult to learn about the before-themast long-term seamen who were at the heart of the maritime community , for when they appear in such records as tax lists and militia rolls, it is all but impossible to differentiate them from short-term sailors. The relatively small number of professional seafarers, who worked at sea for longer than more casual sailors, had a place within and an impact upon the seafaring community out of all proportion to their numbers, as demonstrated by Table 7. Figure 11. William Birch, Arch Street Ferry, Philadelphia, 1800. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia. This engraving shows the waterfront in the area between Philadelphia and the Northern Liberties. The bodies of the working poor, especially seafarers-far and away the single largest group of working men in the city-are presented in a sanitized form, with no sense of the condition of men whose bodies had been shaped and sometimes broken by work at sea, or of their lives among families and friends on or near the waterfront. [52.55.214.236] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:17 GMT) 106 Chapter 5 Thus, despite the fact that only 10 percent of these sailors served more than ten years at sea, these long-term seafarers accounted for as much as 37 percent of the total number of years served by all one thousand men in this example. The bodies of professional mariners formed an alternative record that proclaimed their occupation and revealed a great deal about their backgrounds, experiences, attitudes, beliefs, and values. Like those of black slaves, the bodies ofprofessional sailors were molded, scarred, and marked by...