Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail, 1740–1840 by Stephen Taylor

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail, 1740–1840 by Stephen Taylor Sharada Balachandran Orihuela (bio) Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail, 1740–1840 stephen taylor Yale University Press, 2020 XXV + 490 pp. Stephen Taylor's Sons of the Waves is an impressively researched yet distressingly undertheorized book about the seminal role of the common British sailor, or the Jack Tar, in the rise of British power. Covering the hundred years after 1740, before steam ships came to dominate the seas, this work of trade history follows the lives of dozens of ordinary seamen, some of whom left letters, memoirs, and even novels narrating their participation in British seafaring. As Taylor argues, Jack Tars, named for the tar used to waterproof their coats, were integral to a British sense of national identity, the Industrial Revolution, as well as to the expansion of British colonialism and the consolidation of its empire. Taylor's monograph is convincing in its claim that ordinary seamen were integral in the accumulation of British wealth and power. While this work is expansive in historical and archival scope, I want to focus on two aspects of Sons of Waves that I believe will be most useful to literary scholars: the first is the impressive range of written texts authored by ordinary seamen found in this monograph, and the second is the importance this work lends to ongoing debates about the place of the ordinary seaman in the creation of the liberal subject. Taylor's monograph follows in the tradition of Marcus Rediker's work on seamen and pirates on the other side of the Atlantic found in works including Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge UP, 1987); The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon P, 2000); Villains of All Nations: [End Page 273] Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Beacon P, 2004); and Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail (Beacon P, 2014). Rediker's works, like Taylor's, are focused on re-creating the life of ordinary sailors using a range of different primary documents that include works authored by the sailors themselves. In particular, they share detailed descriptions of the difficult lives of ordinary sailors, including being subject to harsh disciplinary measures, to impressment and other forms of forced conscription, as well as having to navigate the harsh conditions of life at sea (as Taylor repeatedly notes, the mortality rate of sailors was extremely high, with sometimes as many as one in three sailors succumbing to scurvy, disease, or the rough seas). However, while Rediker's works tend to focus on the place of the sailor as a figure central to the development of free wage labor, to the growth of a transnational working class, and also to the expression of revolutionary fervor across the Atlantic, Taylor's monograph focuses on sailors' rebellions that resulted in better wages, the outlawing of impressment, and reduced corporeal punishment for minor offenses at sea. As he writes, Rights of Man (1791) by Thomas Paine, himself a privateer and sailmaker, had quite an effect on sailors' demands for egalitarianism. In many ways, Taylor, like Rediker, attributes a more progressive politics to the demands made by mariners, an argument made even more compelling when considering that by and large mariners belonged to the lower classes in pre-industrial England. For example, Taylor's focus on Edward Pellew who rose from ordinary seaman to a Navy frigate captain to viscount, is illustrative of how life at sea provided some men from the lower classes with the ability to move across the class divisions of the age. Taylor makes a compelling case for why we should view these common mariners as anti-authoritarian heroes who are able to transcend their station, and in doing so, are also central to more egalitarian and less cruel lives in England. Taylor's book is also impressive in the archival materials it assembles found in the British Library, the Library of...