Liberty on the Waterfront. Paul A. Gilje
and early national period was able to turn his back on the mainstream values and assert a type of freedom denied most landbound workers. The sailor's liberty represented a counterculture that had special attraction for the working class and for those on the margins of society; it included a strain of anti-authoritarianism that denied hierarchy ashore, and, in light of the emphasis on fraternity and brotherhood among shipmates, it contained a strong current of egalitarianism.32
The sailor's liberty enabled many seamen to avoid regular employment and encouraged disdain for the daily routine of land-based workers. Alfred Lorrain wrote that many sailors spoke with envy of farmers as they approached port, declaring that at least a farmer could be with his family in a storm. Resolves to stay on land and not “dip their feet in salt water” again, however, faded within weeks of coming ashore. Soon “the prettiest farm in the country could not hold them, as a general thing,” and the call is “‘Come boys—who's for blue water.'”33 At one point in his maritime career Samuel Leech was apprenticed to a bootmaker in the hope of breaking from his “wicked mode of life.” He dreaded “the confinement to the shoe-bench,” however, which his “riotous fancy painted as being worse than a prison,” and he rejoined his shipmates to engage in a life of “dissipation and folly.”34 John Elliott had a similar experience, finding “the shoemaker's seat did not furnish him that variety he had so long been accustomed to.”35 William Torrey “determined to abandon the seas” several times, only to find that on shore “time passed tediously.”36 Melville's Ishmael also had disdain for landsmen, who “of week days” were “pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.”37
Locked into a world of authority and deference at sea, sailors enjoyed flaunting social barriers and relationships while at liberty on shore, where they could be “their own lords and masters, and at their own command.” Sailors aped their social betters by playing at being gentlemen. Horse riding was “a favourite amusement with the son of Neptune,” although few sailors displayed much horsemanship. As awkward as he might appear in the saddle, a seaman recognized that the horse had long been the prerogative of the rich and well born.38 Many sailors also rented carriages as soon as they reached terra firma. To the landlubber the sight of a carriage reeling by with a couple of tars and a prostitute on either side may have appeared totally absurd; to the sailor it was the epitome of style.39
To assert a larger meaning for the sailor's acting the “gentleman” while ashore does not mean that the wild and excessive behavior reflected a specific consciousness. For most of the men on the waterfront their goals and gratification were more immediate and reflected simply a reaction to the world around them. And yet the sailor often consciously played up to his own stereotype. Boys learned the peculiar dockside values of the sailor from an early age. Ten-year-old Horace Lane and other young seamen on their first liberty in 1799 mimicked more seasoned sailors. Lane remembered that “monkey like, all that we heard or seen practiced by the sailors, we thought it becoming in us to say and do.” Several of the older boys rented horses and a few carriages and took “each his fancy girl with him, to ride out and recreate at a tavern about three miles in the country.” Seeing this, Lane went to the captain and asked him for some money. Then, with six dollars jingling in his pocket—more than a week's wage for an adult worker—he hired a horse and carriage and toured the countryside.40 So ingrained were these values that sailors took liberty on the waterfront to be their right. As Philip Greggs recorded in 1788, once the brig Eagle touched the wharf in Philadelphia, he and the other crew members went ashore “agreeable to the Laws of Nations…in order to refresh themselves.”41
Although the sailor's liberty allowed the sailor to enjoy excesses of personal freedom, seamen frequently lost their economic freedom. A sailor might enjoy a frolic, participate in rowdyism, and act the part of the jolly tar, yet he quickly spent the earnings from months and even years of labor. By using up his money the sailor left himself open to economic exploitation that curtailed his own freedom in the marketplace, and the freedom of all who lived and toiled on the waterfront. The fast and loose way of life pursued by many while on liberty led to difficulties in supporting a family and maintaining stable relationships. In all, life on the waterfront was often cruel and nasty.42
Despite a belief that he dictated the terms of his own labor, especially into the nineteenth century, the sailor often abdicated even this control over his life. Technically, and this process was stipulated by both British and American statutes, the sailor signed the articles of a ship of his own free will, agreeing to the conditions of employment and the rate of pay.43 But the process of recruiting merchant sailors varied greatly throughout the revolutionary era, depending on circumstances, time, and location.
In the most basic manner of finding employment, the sailor, individually or as part of a group, had direct contact with the captain or shipowner and signed the ship's articles stipulating the conditions of employment. In 1762, Louis Pintard, New York merchant and owner of the Catherine, had the five-man crew sign the articles at his house. The men were recruited by either the second mate or one of Pintard's partners.44 In 1809, William Peterson and several ex-shipmates in Philadelphia heard of a vessel in need of men. They went up to the captain and signed on together.45 In this method, the sailor supposedly had the freedom to bargain for wages, although the labor market may already have set the basic wage. John Willcock walked along the New York docks in late 1783 or 1784 searching for a job. At one brig he was told that the captain wanted a hand, and while waiting for the captain, Willcock helped the crew to heave ballast. Work was scarce at the time, and when the captain appeared Willcock told him he would take whatever wages were offered. The captain assured him that he would not lose for not bargaining and allowed Willcock to join the crew.46
Recruiting could also be based on long-standing relationships. Around the turn of the nineteenth century in smaller ports, like Marblehead, Massachusetts, captains of fishing schooners recruited their crews locally from among men they knew and who knew each other.47 In this situation relatives, friends, and neighbors formed tight-knit groups, relationships that occurred in merchant vessels as well. In 1762 the Prosperous Polly, out of Providence, Rhode Island, hired William Dunbar in Martinique. Dunbar, it turns out, was also from Providence and had known Captain Waterman for at least two years before he signed on. The crew list suggests that there were other connections on board. The carpenter's last name was also Waterman, and both the mate and the cabin boy shared the name Whipple. One sailor had been born in Ireland, had sailed out of Providence for at least two and a half years, and claimed to have know the captain for a somewhat longer period of time.48 As a young man, Nicholas Isaacs fell in with a captain from Mystic, Connecticut, and relied on this gentleman for years afterward for employment.49 In 1809, a friend of John Allen's family in Marblehead had an uncle in Portsmouth who needed a few more hands. Allen headed for the New Hampshire port, introduced himself to the captain, and signed on for the voyage.50
Parents and guardians sometimes made arrangements for a young man or boy. Simeon Crowell's stepfather insisted that the seventeen-year-old join a fishing schooner on the Grand Banks in 1795.51 The mother of eleven-year-old Frederick Jordan signed him on the schooner Mercy in the Pocomoke River, Maryland, for a voyage to New York in 1774.52 Earlier in the eighteenth century, John Fillmore chafed under his apprenticeship to a Boston carpenter. After many entreaties, his mother relented and allowed him to join a fishing vessel at age nineteen.53 James Jenks's father signed him aboard the Ocean in the opening decade of the nineteenth century upon the promise that Captain Thomas Roach would rein in Jenks's wildness.54 And in 1806 James Fenimore Cooper's friends and relatives interceded to make sure that his first voyage as a merchant seaman was relatively safe and under a good captain.55
3. This detail of a schooner near the Marblehead docks suggests the way the waterfront appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century. From Ashley Bowen Diary. Peabody Essex Museum.
Although these various forms of recruitment occurred between 1750 and 1850, personal connections may have been more important in the eighteenth