Tears and the manly sailor in England, c. 1760–1860

Abstract

This article explores the apparent paradoxes in representations of the British Jack Tar in order to reconsider the ways in which his figure came to embody idealised attributes of manliness in the period 1760–1860. Naval historians have revealed that images of sailors were closely related to ideas about class, sex, and nation, identifying distinctive types of Jack Tar such as the drunken carouser, the fatalistic, fearless but simple Tar, and the domesticated family man. Notions of heroism changed over the period too. The officer was the hero in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and notions of valour only extended to the lower ranks by the mid-nineteenth century. Thus the picture is of the ordinary tar emerging as manly hero once his character was scrubbed clean of its less salubrious aspects. This article argues that there were not diverse and distinct Jack Tars successively climbing the ladder of morality over time. The tar was not sanitised and civilised, but was given feelings. In particular, tears identified the sailor as a man of feeling as well as a fearless fighter, stressing his tenderness, fidelity, duty, and self-sacrificing love for his brother sailor, his ‘Poll’, and his nation. But he still loved grog, dance, and girls. The Jack Tar was thus the everyman, which aided his popularity and democratised the manly hero.