Liberty on the Waterfront. Paul A. Gilje
a twenty-one-year-old gentleman with some education who had served as a reporter in Washington, D.C. In the summer of 1842 he wanted to see the world, sought to make his fortune, and had a penchant for romantic adventure. With smooth hands and fine clothes, he could not find a berth on a merchant vessel in New York. An advertisement for a landsmen caught his eye, and giving it hardly a thought, he signed with a shipping agent for a whaleship out of New Bedford. He was soon on his way to the southern oceans.
The first day at sea was a sobering introduction. Like most green hands, he quickly became seasick. The mate, however, insisted that everyone must work, and work hard, regardless of his condition. “After a day of horrors” the men were allowed to go below. Conditions did not improve. The forecastle, where sailors slept, “was black and slimy with filth, very small, and as hot as an oven.” Its contents were none too attractive. “It was filled with a compound of foul air, smoke, sea-chests, soap-kegs, greasy pans, tainted meat, Portuguese ruffians, and sea-sick Americans.” Still reeling from his first day on a ship, he found the Portuguese “were smoking, laughing, chattering, and cursing the green hands.” “Groans on one side” contrasted with “yells, oaths, laughter and smoke on the other.” Distressed, Browne thought that this was not “a very pleasant home for the next year or two,” and was soon “sick and sorry enough,” wishing heartily that he was ashore.1
The voyage only got worse. Browne had barely settled into his berth when a storm struck the vessel. With the bark “staggering along, creaking, groaning, and thumping its way through heavy seas,” all hands were called on deck. Browne had no idea what to do and grabbed the first rope he saw, holding on for dear life. The mate came by screaming, “tumble up aloft, and lay out on the yards!” With the ship leaning at forty-five degrees Browne thought the idea preposterous. When the mate thundered “with the ferocity of a Bengal tiger,” Browne started climbing delicately up the ratlines and found his way out onto the yardarm. There, with the guidance of a more practiced seaman, he hauled in a sail and secured it with a rope. Somehow he survived. But his romantic vision had been shattered. From that moment Browne saw existence aboard ship as a form of slavery with long, hard hours of work, intermittent boredom, and the lash as the ultimate form of coercion. Life, just as that first night, often hung by a thread.2
12. Intended to mock one green hand's fear of heights, this etching also shows seamen at work on a yard of a square-rigged vessel. “Etching of work in rigging.” Francis Barrett, Log of the Ship Edward, 1849–1850. Nantucket Historical Association.
Browne's account offers us a nice antidote to a romantic portrayal of the sailor's life. Many seamen would agree: aboard ship the work was arduous and they were often miserable. Yet there was an attraction. Herman Melville begins Moby Dick with Ishmael on the waterfront, drawn to the sea as an escape. For Melville the sea attracted “crowds of water-gazers” who are “fixed in ocean reveries” and “must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in.” He advised, “Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it.” This magic cast its spell on landsmen, as well as the seasoned sailor like Melville. He believed that, like Narcissus, we see ourselves “in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”3
Less metaphysical, yet with an equal appreciation for the attractions of the sea, Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s description of his first days aboard a ship contrast with Browne's experience. (Browne may have written his book with a copy of Dana's Two Years Before the Mast close at hand.) After a long day of work, Dana took a moment to look over the expanse of ocean and proclaim, “I felt for the first time the perfect silence of the sea…. However much I was affected by the beauty of the sea, I could not but remember that I was separating myself from all the social and intellectual enjoyments of life. Yet, strange as it may seem, I did then and afterwards take pleasure in these reflections, hoping by them to prevent my becoming insensible to the value of what I was leaving.”
Dana was shocked out of his daydreaming by orders from the mate and by the coming of a storm. While he, too, struggled up into the rigging for the first time, Dana did not dwell on the negative. He muddled through like Browne, but was up at dawn the next day and wrote “nothing will compare with the early breaking of day upon the wide ocean.” Dana could be almost lyrical: “Notwithstanding all that has been said about the beauty of a ship under full sail, there are very few who have ever seen a ship, literally, under all her sail…light and heavy, and studding-sails, on each side, alow and aloft, she is the most glorious moving object in the world.”4
The sea continued to lure more prosaic men as well as great literary talents like Melville and Dana. Some sailors rejected the limits and regularity of work ashore. Others were restless.5 Often, beyond the thrill of the sailing vessel's bow cutting through the spray of salt water, men who went to sea sought a certain kind of freedom. On the waterfront a sailor might act out his fantasies and enjoy excesses of liberty; at sea he experienced a different freedom that came from the vast expanses of the ocean and the fact that he had the whole world to explore. Hugh Calhoun copied a poem in his journal on the “Traits of the Sailors Character.” It opened with the following stanza:
A Sailor ever loves to be in motion,
Roaming about, he scarce knows where or why;
He looks upon the dim and shadowy ocean
As his home, abhors the land, even the sky;
Boundless and beautiful, has naught to please,
Except some clouds, which promise him a breeze.6
Another seaman, aboard a tension-ridden whaler with an abusive captain, admitted, “The life of a sailor in its best light is hard and unsocial,” and then confessed that “The Sea, the dark blue sea, has its fascination, and its hails like the abandoned female is overlooked.”7 David Bryant noted “light and pleasant weather” in the logbook of the Tartar on February 7, 1816, and then commented that he was “just becoming habituated to the life [at sea] and suppose I could live a year without putting foot to land contentedly.”8 Benjamin Morrell, a seaman who worked his way up to captain, recalled how going to sea for the first time in 1812 excited him: “My soul seemed to have escaped from a prison cage…I could now breathe more freely.”9
Life at sea was a study in contrasts—offering both unfettered liberty and a peculiar form of bondage. Set against the openness of the ocean and the exhilaration of seeing wind and sail driving a great vessel toward faraway places were the hard labor, the limits of board and plank, and the sailor's lack of control over the voyage. Despite the universal brotherhood of the sea and the male bonding that occurred between shipmates, petty conflicts and hatred built up between human beings forced to live on top of one other. Finally, the almighty power of the quarterdeck was tested by the many means of resistance and assertion of independence exerted from the forecastle. The sea simultaneously represented a passport to freedom and a life akin to slavery.
Being a common seaman was all about work. Ships were moving machines whose various parts needed constant adjustment, repair, and replacement as wind and water assaulted every inch of the vessel. The intensity of work surprised many a green hand. George Little had thought that “sailors must have a fine time, with nothing to do but eat, sleep, and look out.” Before he even left port he was disabused of this notion, as the crew set to “rigging the headpump, washing down the decks and sides of the ship, swabbing,” and countless other tasks.10 Once at sea the labor continued. Every rope had to be checked and repaired or replaced as needed. The masts and yardarms also had to be maintained, slushed with tar, adjusted, reset, and sometimes replaced. Sails, too, needed persistent tending. Rips and tears occurred in all weather. When a storm struck, if sails were not quickly furled, they could be in tatters or take down a spar or a mast. Even on the balmiest of days, a sail could wear out. The trick was to make repairs before that point. Decks needed to be cleaned. Sailors hauled equipment in and out, as well as up into the rigging and then down again. Leaks needed to be