Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (review)

Daniel Vickers, with the collaboration of Vince Walsh, has produced a provocative version of new maritime history without a radical emphasis. Exploitation, class formation, and resistance remain largely absent in this book, while compromise, communal ties, routine work, and social mobility take center stage. The author further rejects any sort of economic determinism in his thinking about why and how Yankee sailors in the Age of Sail behaved as they did. No one interested in the social history of seafaring and early America should ignore this book.

The first two chapters lay out the ways in which the early Puritan Commonwealth remained tied to the sea. The first chapter deals mostly with the initial settlements at Plymouth and Boston. Vickers demonstrates that water travel and maritime trade represented a basic part of life even in areas populated primarily by pious yeoman. The second chapter opens with Salem's initial settlement and expansion. Here, the coasting trade in fish and lumber is explored in detail. These small-scale, short-haul voyages gradually involved people from all walks of life in maritime activities, providing a training ground of sorts for landsmen to acquaint themselves with sea work and regional coastlines. By the end of the seventeenth century, the entire colony of Massachusetts maintained a high proportion of professional mariners to total population, "one in twenty five," representing "one of the most thoroughly maritime societies to be found during the seventeenth century anywhere around the North Atlantic rim" (60).

The third chapter treats eighteenth-century ship life. Vickers uses mariner's memoirs in combination with ship journals to demonstrate that work at sea was shared collectively between shipmaster and crew. Wage differentials were not great, captains tended not to abuse common sailors, and camaraderie between the forecastle and the quarterdeck was not rare. As a result "most voyages out of this port [Salem] unfolded at a more subdued tempo in an environment where for the greatest part of the time a customary understanding of work routine prevailed on board" (94).

Chapter 4 discusses the mid-eighteenth-century sailing career of Ashley Bowen, a mariner from Marblehead, Massachusetts, before moving back to Salem seafarers. After providing evidence of social mobility in Salem's labor market and arguing that tropical disease posed a "graver danger" (110) to maritime laborers than the rigors associated with work at sea, Vickers argues that we have to shift our focus away from the shipboard experience to the entire course of sailors' lives in order to truly understand these men. Those familiar with his earlier article, "Beyond Jack Tar," which called on maritime scholars to integrate land and sea history, will not be shocked by this attempt to relocate the center of maritime scholarship away from ship life. According to Vickers, when we alter our focus in this manner, incorporating seafarers' lives on land, any class divisions that did exist dim and antagonisms become significantly mitigated. The fact that Salem merchants were by and large not genteel capitalists alleviated antagonisms. Ubiquitous kinship ties and local, neighborly relations among seafarers and merchants further mitigated class conflict. Age, not class, Vickers concludes, was "the principal defining feature of Salem's maritime labor market in the eighteenth century." Yankee seafarers were twenty-year-olds "who had gone to sea because in this waterfront society that is what young men did" (129).

Chapter 5 begins with a discussion of sailor's sea lives around the Atlantic world in order to demonstrate that most early modern mariners were born, raised, and shipped out of seaport towns. The chapter ends by exploring the land-based social networks that supported mariners during their seafaring careers. Sailor's wives performed vital economic and domestic functions that kept home fires burning. When mariners decided to leave the sea, a majority survived financially through sons who worked away from land. Moreover, widows paid family debts when mariners died...