Hearts of oak and jolly tars? Heroism and insanity in the Georgian navy

Abstract

During the war against Napoleon, physician Gilbert Blane estimated that insanity was seven times more common in the navy than among the general population. Blane did not have any explanation for this, but presumed it had something to do with sailors frequently banging their heads against the wooden beams of the ship under the influence of alcohol. Today we immediately think of post-traumatic stress disorders, although we hesitate to make a retrospective diagnosis two centuries later. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sailors not only faced extreme physical but also great mental challenges, and the aim of this research project is to see how they dealt with these, whether these challenges were reasonably well overcome, suffered from quietly, placed into the physical realm, compensated by alcohol, religion and other remedies, or indeed responsible for filling Georgian madhouses with sailors. On the surface, the sailors' response to these challenges was to cultivate an extreme idea of masculinity that took danger, pain and death without complaint or even with trivialisation and sarcasm. Yet was the sailors' bravado, celebrated in the songs of contemporary performers like Charles Dibdin, really genuine, or did many seamen just lock away all negative impressions in a sea chest deep down in their memory? The hypothesis of this research project is that there may have been a link between the struggle to live up to the sailors' heroic ideal and the frequent cases of insanity.