The Way of a Ship by Derek Lundy

Author:Derek Lundy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

Historians have lately become more interested in Jack Tar, some as part of the rise of social history during the last half of the twentieth century. The traditional approach of “great man” history or political-military study—Napoleon or Hitler, the Battle of Trafalgar or the kings and queens of England, and so on—has slipped into near disrepute. Now we’re interested, with justification, in how people, all classes of people, lived: the details of their private lives, what they thought, what their relationships were with each other and with the state. In the past, sailors appeared only in literature, in the works of the great sea writers—Dana, Melville, Conrad—and in that of many other writers too, from James Fenimore Cooper to Jack London, Ernest Hemingway and Peter Matthiessen. Now seamen have become a legitimate subject for historians and social scientists as well.

Sailors certainly made up a clearly defined and distinct group of workers. There was no confusion about what they did and where, and that they suffered in the process. The suffering might often have been at the whim of the sea in storm or calm, but other humans—brutal officers, parsimonious owners, an uninterested government—made it much worse than it had to be. The relationship of seamen to those other individuals and groups has become, therefore, grist for the scholarly, and ideological, mill. A variety of gazes have been cast back onto the iron men.

Marxist or leftist analyses, for example. In an otherwise useful and persuasive argument that Jack Tar, or “Bachelor Jack,” had become a caricature towards the end of the nineteenth century, the writer asserts that “caricature had a purpose in extending capitalist control of labour and legitimizing the hegemony of a ruling class.” Another academic sees the seaman aboard ship as embodying “capitalist social relations.” He writes: “Removed from home and the once-binding ties of kin and family, a collective body of seamen were now assembled and confined aboard the merchant ship. Their experience of work at sea—broad cooperation within a complex division of labour, coordinated and synchronized effort within a routinized and regimented labour process, continuous shiftwork as organized through a watch system, close supervision and harsh discipline—insured the primacy of work over life at sea, and hence a kind of alienation that was expressed in their characterization as ‘hands.’” This may be an interesting summary of one view of seamen, even if it’s designed, with Procrustean motivations, to fit a theory. (The idea of the sailor as an exploited worker has been a literary theme as well—for example, in the work of Jack London and Eugene O’Neill.) But it’s certainly a long way from Conrad’s “great passion for the sea”—or from Billy Budd, who, in irons and soon to die in the foretop, will, like Milton’s Lycidas, be “mounted high” in “kingdoms meek of joy and love.”

Feminist and gender scholars have become interested in square-rigger seamen as one of the last repositories of traditional male virtues (and vices), living in the segregated, intensely masculine society of the

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