With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Mariners and the Making of an American Maritime Empire by Brian Rouleau (review)

In the 1960s, Jesse Lemisch’s Jack Tar swaggered into the world of American history like a “bull in a china shop,” stowed his kit and tools there, and took up residence. Hidden in plain sight on the orlop deck, in the forepeak, and at the crosstrees, this American sailor and his shipmates had been of less interest to previous historians than were the officers who commanded them. Rank-and-file mariners had too often found themselves consigned by historians to an aggregate of childlike men who boozed, womanized, and had a distinctive wardrobe and vocabulary. But that vocabulary was only that of the trade— not one of discrete individuals with a role to play in shaping history. Lemisch and those who followed in his wake gave Jack Tar a role to play and a voice that has continued to sound in the ensuing generations of maritime scholars.

This history-from-the-keel-up approach has informed groundbreaking works by Marcus Rediker, W. Jeffrey Bolster, Daniel Vickers, Margaret Creighton, and Lisa Norling, to mention a few. Through their works, colonial and early republic mariners communicated, fomented rebellion, created community, and blurred the boundaries between land and sea. They showed that American sailors of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were far more complex than the simplistic caricature that earlier, more antiquarian maritime histories portrayed. Recent works by Matthew Taylor Rafferty, Leon Fink, and Dane Morrison delve even further as they explore the mariner’s relationships with the law, with labor relations, and with national identity. As Daniel Vickers put it, we have necessarily moved away from the old vision of Jack Tar.

Brian Rouleau has now given the mariners of the early republic a berth—and a voice—in the history of American foreign relations in With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Mariners and the Making of an American Maritime Empire. Taking the tack used by Nathaniel Philbrick in his 2003 work on the US Exploring Expedition, Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, Rouleau convincingly argues that America’s frontier was not merely the land, but that it very much included the sea—and American sailors were among the first shapers of foreign relations for the new nation. Rouleau argues that the largest group of Americans traveling abroad in the early republic and antebellum years were those who labored on board ships: merchant mariners, whalers, and naval personnel. Focusing on the native-born white American sailors, who made up an aggregate majority in a multiethnic workforce, this work shows how these men made the notion of manifest destiny a matter of maritime destiny as they interacted with foreign peoples around the globe. This work, he says, is “less a maritime history than it is a history of the United States in the world” (9).

Through thematic chapters that follow these sailors as they export American ideas of race, ethnicity, class, and gender to foreign ports and peoples, Rouleau crafts a new identity for seamen of the early republic that casts them in the role of active importers as well. These self-styled Yankee tars “supplied much of the current that coursed through global circuits of knowledge” (18). Rouleau shows how American sailors established trade, cultural, and sexual relations with men and women around the globe. These associations could lead to sympathetic understanding but just as often led to “diplomatic fisticuffs” and souring relations. Until the later nineteenth century, when American tourists overtook American sailors in terms of numbers abroad, mariners, for good or for ill, were the face of America to a vast array of peoples in far-flung parts of the globe.

Sometimes that face was not what it seemed. Perhaps the most fascinating part of this volume is the chapter titled “Jim Crow Girdles the Globe.” Rouleau finds that the use of blackface minstrelsy on American vessels was widespread and multifaceted. Like work songs...