Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (review)

Abstract

Young Men and Sea: Yankee Seafarers in Age of Sail. By Daniel Vickers with Vince Walsh. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii, 336. Cloth, $35.00.)Daniel Vickers, with collaboration of Vince Walsh, has produced a provocative version of new maritime history without a radical emphasis. Exploitation, class formation, and resistance remain largely absent in this book, while compromise, communal ties, routine work, and social mobility take center stage. The author further rejects any sort of economic determinism in his thinking about why and how Yankee sailors in Age of Sail behaved as they did. No interested in social history of seafaring and early America should ignore this book.The first two chapters lay out ways in which early Puritan Commonwealth remained tied to sea. The first chapter deals mostly with initial settlements at Plymouth and Boston. Vickers demonstrates that water travel and maritime trade represented a basic part of life even in areas populated primarily by pious yeoman. The second chapter opens with Salem's initial settlement and expansion. Here, coasting trade in fish and lumber is explored in detail. These small-scale, short-haul voyages gradually involved people from all walks of life in maritime activities, providing a training ground of sorts for landsmen to acquaint themselves with sea work and regional coastlines. By end of seventeenth century, entire colony of Massachusetts maintained a high proportion of professional mariners to total population, one in twenty five, representing one of thoroughly maritime societies to be found during seventeenth century anywhere around North Atlantic rim (60).The third chapter treats eighteenth-century ship life. Vickers uses mariner's memoirs in combination with ship journals to demonstrate that work at sea was shared collectively between shipmaster and crew. Wage differentials were not great, captains tended not to abuse common sailors, and camaraderie between forecastle and quarterdeck was not rare. As a result most voyages out of this port [Salem] unfolded at a more subdued tempo in an environment where for greatest part of time a customary understanding of work routine prevailed on board (94).Chapter 4 discusses mid-eighteenth-century sailing career of Ashley Bowen, a mariner from Marblehead, Massachusetts, before moving back to Salem seafarers. After providing evidence of social mobility in Salem's labor market and arguing that tropical disease posed a graver danger (110) to maritime laborers than rigors associated with work at sea, Vickers argues that we have to shift our focus away from shipboard experience to entire course of sailors' lives in order to truly understand these men. Those familiar with his earlier article, Beyond Jack Tar, which called on maritime scholars to integrate land and sea history, will not be shocked by this attempt to relocate center of maritime scholarship away from ship life. According to Vickers, when we alter our focus in this manner, incorporating seafarers' lives on land, any class divisions that exist dim and antagonisms become significantly mitigated. The fact that Salem merchants were by and large not genteel capitalists alleviated antagonisms. Ubiquitous kinship ties and local, neighborly relations among seafarers and merchants further mitigated class conflict. Age, not class, Vickers concludes, was the principal defining feature of Salem's maritime labor market in eighteenth century. Yankee seafarers were twenty-year-olds who had gone to sea because in this waterfront society that is what young men did (129). …