Beyond Jack Tar

Abstract

P OPULAR history of seafaring in America has always commanded a wide and enthusiastic audience. Clipper ships to California, piracy in the Gulf of Mexico, whaling voyages to tropical seas, naval actions off Chesapeake Bay: all form part of a maritime mythology that supports a sizable corner of the publishing market as well as some of the most important of America's historical museums. This popular history has no comparable academic counterpart. Consider how little most students of early American history know about the fisheries, shipbuilding industries, and seafaring communities of the thirteen colonies. American people may be interested in their maritime past, and a large group of museum historians and popular writers may labor hard to answer their questions, but the great majority of academic historians-those who train other historians-pay maritime subjects little heed. Accordingly, the maritime history of early America is strong on public presentation but weak on analytic content. A number of possible explanations for this imbalance suggest themselves. One is that in simple quantitative terms seafarers and their families did not count for much, since most colonists belonged to agricultural or craft households that earned their living from the land. Another is that maritime subjects have not mattered terribly in the greater calculus of national affairs that activates scholarly attention today. Twentieth-century historians are far more preoccupied with topics such as class, race, gender, and economic policy-all of which have contemporary resonance-than they are with the origins of shipping and fishing industries that have spent most of this century in decay. Another is the absence of any well-defined body of maritime theory around which research and debate might be organized. Labor historians can argue the questions formulated by Marx and Weber; economic historians have an even more refined body of thought descending from Adam Smith to give direction to their work; and ethnohistorians can work with models of cultural behavior derived from anthropology. American maritime historians do not in the main address one another at all. Lacking any powerful common agenda, they sit as it