Writing the Seaman’s Tale in Law and Literature: Dana, Melville, and Justice Story by Kathryn Mudgett (review)

Ishmael famously philosophizes, “Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is.” Melville’s wry analogy between sailor and hereditary bondsman polemically indicted maritime wage slavery. Shipboard society, as his sea narratives document, existed in a state of suspension from the civil law that protected landsmen and their right to bodily integrity, or, as the law termed it, their “inviolability of person.” Physical coercion and corporal punishment were common features of discipline at sea. By midcentury, sailors stood virtually alone as a class of recognized citizens still subject to the foremost icon of cruelty in America: the lash. The figure of the lash—and the despotism and barbarism it represented—became central to the rhetorical strategies of large-scale antebellum reform movements, including those directed at naval flogging, prisons, and, most prominently, slavery.

Kathryn Mudgett takes Ishmael’s analogy between seaman and slave as the starting point for Writing the Seaman’s Tale in Law and Literature: Dana, Melville, and Justice Story. A number of studies have explored the links between the naval anti-flogging campaign and the anti-slavery movement; Mudgett goes deeper as she explores the legal overlap between slaves and sailors in her telling of the “story of the nineteenth-century seaman through the prism of the law” (xx). She builds upon the work of Myra Glenn and W. Jeffrey Bolster, especially Bolster’s discussion of the seaman’s “situational slavery,” to illuminate the complex legal histories that helped popularize the trope of the sailor-slave (63). She charts the struggle for seamen’s protections and rights through a detailed study of the interrelated legal and literary work of three key commentators: Joseph Story, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Herman Melville. Mudgett begins with the jurist Story who mentored Dana in his legal career. Dana later parted ways from Story on the controversial issue of seamen’s rights. As a lawyer and writer, Dana mediated between the authoritative discourses of the law and the narratives that sought to humanize “a class of men otherwise reduced to a cultural stereotype by the law” (xxiii). These narratives found their most expansive form in Melville’s lesser-studied maritime novels, Redburn and White-Jacket, and in Billy Budd. US law consistently failed to protect American seamen as citizens, and Mudgett’s book explores how the common sailor became a measure against which the experiment in American democracy might be gauged.

Writing the Seaman’s Tale in Law and Literature emphasizes the interpenetration of legal and literary narratives in shaping American perceptions and public responses to merchant and naval seamen. The courts were the primary means by which seamen, otherwise invisible in society, entered national consciousness. Narrating events at sea was an essential part of the judicial process in the adjudication of maritime cases. The public forum of the court trial was one of the few milieus in which the common sailor could exercise a public voice in antebellum America. The subsequent publication of trial reports and court proceedings in newspapers both mediated and amplified the seaman’s story. Mudgett reconstructs a number of these stories from the archives of admiralty and maritime law. For some common seamen, like David White-head of the brig Floyd, the legal record offers the only extant document of a life brutally cut short by a captain’s disciplinary violence at sea.

Law and literature are more than parallel or homologous discourses in this book. Mudgett does not treat the legal archive as simply an untapped resource for seamen’s stories. The judicial process began with the seaman’s tale—the story of...