An Honest Tar: Ashley Bowen of Marblehead

Abstract

for the rest of my days, a fate he considered worse than a Botany Bay exile.' Dana's words spoke to an old apprehension, common among landsmen (and Dana was a lawyer's son), that life at sea eventually rendered men incapable of life on shore. As far back as 1630, John White of Dorchester, England, had attributed the failure of early New England fishing settlements to what seemed to him the self-evident truth that rarely any Fisher-men will worke at Land.2 Yet, did the sea really possess this transforming quality? Were several years before the mast enough to mark a man for life? If we note the ages of common seamen under sail in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the old salt Dana feared he might become seems to have been historically a rare character. Although the decision to go to sea was never taken lightly, it may have been for most mariners neither the fatal decision Dana supposed nor the occupational dead end White suggested.3