Myra C. Glenn . Jack Tar's Story: The Autobiographies and Memoirs of Sailors in Antebellum America . New York: Cambridge University Press. 2010. Pp. xi, 194. $85.00.

Abstract

In her new book, Myra C. Glenn carefully reads and critically examines sailors' recollections about their seafaring lives. While superficially these narratives may appear to be mere high‐adventure stories, they are actually hybrids of popular genres from antebellum America and repeatedly deal with issues of manhood and nationalism. Unlike previous studies, this book does not describe sailors' lives but rather “explore[s] how mariner authors remembered, interpreted, their years at sea; how the lens of memory shaped their life stories” (p. 6). It is also “the first study to systematically investigate the veracity of sailor narratives by using a wide variety of institutional records” (p. 6). Glenn's very accessible book should be of interest to general readers as well as scholars of history, literature, and gender studies. Glenn uses the introduction to situate her work within current scholarship, set the study's chronological boundaries, explain the limitations posed by the race and class of these seafaring authors, and interrogate the nature of autobiographical writing and the ways in which it can enrich historians' understanding of an era. Turning to the works themselves in her first chapter, Glenn surveys these narratives as coming‐of‐age stories. Lower‐class men as well as “gentlemen sailors,” like Richard Henry Dana, Jr., sought out the sea to escape lives filled with crushing poverty, moral deprivation, or the stifling conventions of genteel America. Despite portraying initial feelings of freedom and independence, these texts quickly transform into captivity narratives, as the harshness of life at sea becomes apparent to the authors and threatens their goal of manly independence.