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

Vickers has written a wonderful book that provides a detailed history of Salem as a maritime community from its early colonial beginnings to the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Three things stand out about this book—Vickers' incredible depth of research, his lucid prose, and his argument, which challenges the traditional view of American maritime culture.

Vickers, with Walsh's help, amassed a huge database to create more than a community study; the book is also a survey of the life course of thousands of individuals. Using a Paradox 8 database program, Vickers and Walsh traced 10,451 man voyages between 1641 and 1850. They created a sample of 2,620 individuals and compiled information from a wide array of sources. They culled legal records, town histories, account books, customs records, shipping papers, vital statistics, ship registers, provincial documents, tax assessments, and other sources. Fortunately for them, Salem is an exceptionally well-documented place, especially with the James Duncan Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum in town. The notes do not do justice to the ordeal that Vickers, Walsh, and several research assistants underwent. Vickers and Walsh, however, provide a further explanation of the methodology in the appendixes, which also include a number of graphs, tables, and charts packed with the results of their number crunching. It is hard to imagine that anyone could mine such a rich cache of material in any other maritime community.

Despite the plethora of material used, and the social-scientific method to generate numbers and handle the data, Vickers has written an elegant book that is simply a pleasure to read. (Vickers states in the acknowledgments that he wrote the book, "but in every other respect, the line at which his [Walsh's] contributions end and mine [Vickers'] begin is impossible to tell" [xiii]). Vickers integrates personal stories with hard data to provide an informal, intimate, and mature portrait of Salem as a maritime community with real people who lived real and complicated lives. For example, in discussing how easily youths turned to the sea in Salem, Vickers first cautions, "The reality of childhood—not as observed or remembered by adults but as encountered by children themselves—is one of the history's shadowy corners" (136).

The outcome of this research and writing is a book that other maritime scholars will not be able take lightly. Vickers argues that there was no major gap between Salem the land-based community and Salem the maritime community. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, going to sea was a normal activity of most young men in Salem. Some of these mariners continued their careers at sea, and the majority of them eventually became officers and captains. For most Salemites, going to sea represented a phase of life before they turned to more shore-bound activities in their late twenties and early thirties. For both groups of men, the boundary between life at sea and life ashore was not hard and fast. Moreover, Vickers advises against categorizing maritime labor as one thing or another: "Any attempt to classify sailors as adventure-seeking youths, old salts, shipmasters on the make, saltwater mechanics, proletarians, or lumpenproletarians runs into this obstacle: that in the course of their lives most seafaring men fell into several of these roles" (4).

This argument challenges the work of Marcus Rediker, the dominant interpretation of eighteenth-century Anglo-American seafarers, which posits that mariners were a class-conscious workforce separate and distinct from land-based communities. Vickers' position also runs counter to my own study of sailors, which explores a distinct maritime culture along all of the American waterfront. Vickers himself cautions that the situation that he describes for a smaller port like Salem is different from what might be found along the London docks. He also traces significant changes in Salem during the early nineteenth century that reflect a transformation in shipping...