Stories could also be told by another distinctive mark often found on a sailor’s body: the tattoo. Marking the body was an ancient art, but one that acquired a special association with sailors during the age of sail. Seamen had been tattooing each other long before specialized artists emerged in sailortown during the late nineteenth century to adorn the seafaring body. They pricked the skin repeatedly with needle or knifepoint, then rubbed into the small cuts a pigment, either ink or, more commonly, a compound made with gunpowder. The original purpose of the tattoo was deeper than decoration: many a sailor wanted a telltale mark on the body so that in the event of catastrophic death he could be identified and properly buried. The most common tattoo on the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century American sailor was his initials. But tattooing rapidly acquired other meanings. One was occupational: an anchor on the hand or forearm signaled initiation into the community of deep-sea sailors. Religious tars might visit Palestine and return home with a Jerusalem Cross, always a prompt to tell the story of the maritime pilgrimage. After Captain James Cook’s historic voyages to the South Seas in the 1760s and 1770s, a newer Polynesian style of tattooing came to be popular among sailors, especially those who had made the grueling multiyear voyages to the Pacific and could therefore boast the marks as signs of cosmopolitanism. Tattooed hearts could prompt tales of loved ones back at home, while a liberty cap, pole, or tree could elicit a political rant about “liberty,” a favorite theme among sailors in the age of revolution.14
Another aspect of the yarn was illuminated in a sweeping comment by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in a lecture of 1973. For the entirety of Western civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the ship—“a floating piece of space . . . closed in on itself”—was not only the “great instrument of economic development,” it was at the same time “the greatest reserve of the imagination.” Without ships, and presumably without yarns, said Foucault, “dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.” Within the enclosed, repressive space of the ship, an engine of capitalism, emerged dreams of freedom, stories of new ways of being, transcendent and sometimes utopian. Sailors spun yarns of gleaming gold (here we get close to the pirate tale), of abundant food, warm shelter, and human care, not unlike peasant tales of the same period, about the “Land of Cockaigne.” Long voyages fostered fantasy—male fantasy in particular. Sailors’ yarns therefore highlighted fighting, drinking, sex, virility, and masculinity. The dialectical shipboard imagination expressed itself as sailors gathered in an intimate space, sat in a circle on the main deck, among a group of messmates at mealtime, at night in the dark fo’c’sle, or even off the ship, on the dock or in the tavern, to spin a yarn. The sailor was a performer, especially when telling a “tall tale”—full of lies, humor, exaggeration, embellishment, and literally outlandish claims, as well as deep and necessary truths.15
The very dangers of life at sea encouraged among sailors a set of beliefs that are often derided as “superstition.” Spirits loomed especially large, not least because of the high mortality that stalked life at sea. Ramblin’ Jack Cremer noted that sailors all had a “fear of Aperishons [apparitions].” In a dangerous environment in which someone could be killed in an instant (falling from aloft, falling overboard, or being hit by falling gear), dead comrades frequently haunted the ship. Cremer relayed the story of “a man who was drownded two Voages past, and has been seen by Severall new-Shipt hands, but never but once to any body.” On another occasion Cremer himself saw the apparition of a stranger sitting on his own sea chest.16
A common yarn among sailors in the late eighteenth century (when it entered written discourse) was the “Flying Dutchman.” According to George Barrington in A Voyage to Botany Bay (1795), sailors told the tale of a Dutch man-of-war that went down in a storm off the Cape of Good Hope: “every soul on board perished.” Its consort ship survived, refitted, and went back to sea, where in the very same latitude as before another fierce storm hit. Members of the night watch said they saw a vessel coming directly at them through the storm with a full press of sail “as though she would run them down.” One sailor in particular swore it was their sunken consort ship, or her apparition. Later versions of the story claimed the ghost ship belonged to a mid-eighteenth-century Dutch captain who had defied the elements, was sunk and destroyed by his own arrogance, and now wandered the sea ever after as a punishment to himself and a warning to sailors. The glowing phantom ship represented the specter of death that haunted every deep-sea sailor, and yarns about it were many. In a dangerous, enchanted world sea stories had no small element of what we now call “magical realism.”17
Many a yarn concerned sea monsters, symbols of the dangers of the ocean deep from antiquity through the age of sail. Cartographers had long drawn on seamen’s stories to adorn their maps with strange sea creatures. Medieval Swedish mapmaker Olaus Magnus drew a rich and colorful map of Scandinavia in 1539, adorning the oceanic spaces with fantastical sea monsters, including the fearsome Kraken, which first appeared in the written historical record in the thirteenth century, in Iceland, and was subsequently spotted by Scottish seamen, Norwegian fishermen, and American whalemen in the North Atlantic, near Greenland, or in the North Sea, off the coasts of Norway, although French sailors encountered it off the coast of Angola. Seafarers’ stories of Kraken inspired the literary imagination, moving John Milton to mention the monster “haply slumb’ring on the Norway foam” in Paradise Lost in 1667. Erik Pontoppidan, the Danish Bishop of Bergen, drew on the sailors’ yarns as he wrote about Kraken in 1752, emphasizing that when the huge creature was submerged, a “dangerous swell of the sea” created a maelstrom that could pull a man-of-war straight to the bottom. Other tales had it that the creature was a mile and half long and that its back, when above the water line, could be mistaken for an island. Scientists listened to the sailors too: French naturalist Pierre Dénys de Montfort included Kraken in his Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particulière des Mollusques (1801). When the great Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus included the creature in his Systema Naturae (1735), he gave it the name Microcosmus marinus, which was perfect in its way: among seamen, Kraken embodied in beastly form the dangers of the open, unmapped, deadly, and utterly terrifying oceans of the planet.18
It is of first importance that yarn spinning existed independently of the official hierarchy of power aboard the ship. In other words, the yarn spinner took his authority not from his privilege on land, nor from his rank or pay grade aboard the ship. He derived his authority from his own experience and that of his fellow tars—as long as he could speak to their commonalities in rich, compelling, and instructive ways. The haggard, weather-beaten, wise old salt might serve as a sort of griot on the ship, as a repository of occupational lore and living memory—about the ship, the officers, and the sailors’ craft, all of which could be expressed in yarns long and short. What happened on any given vessel was always measured against the memory of “the oldest and most experienced man on the ship.” The combination of experience, knowledge, resistance, and fantasy expressed in the yarn was critical to the self-understanding of a roving maritime proletariat.19
Kraken, detail from map by Olaus Magnus. (Used with permission)
In order to last as a cultural form, the yarn had to be, first and foremost, consistent with the social realities of a sailor’s life, which meant that it had to be mobile; it had to move with the men who moved restlessly from one job to another, one continent to another, one ocean to another. Part of its power lay in its flexible, democratic nature: anyone could tell a story, and everyone who was part of the group decided the meaning of the story. Another part of its power lay in its immateriality: the yarn was spoken and heard and repeated, but the storyteller’s words were carried away by the wind over time, as they were on the very decks of ship. The yarn is therefore a fugitive form, and indeed this is the key to its success and significance as a means of communication. At the very same time it is w
hat makes the yarn so difficult to study. In the distant past we never find it in its pure form, never as speech; we find it only after someone has taken the initiative to write some part of it down.
Yarns can therefore be found in unexpected places—for example, in depositions given by sailors in the High Court of Admiralty when summoned to testify about why a mutiny or murder had taken place on their ship. As the sailor spoke to the judge, in all likelihood repeating a story he had told many times before, a court scribe took down, and inevitably translated, his words. For example, one can almost hear the previous oral version of courtroom testimony when Phillip Brand explained in 1729 that a cruel mate named George Steel threatened his messmate, common seaman George Williams, with a beating. Williams, according to Brand, answered politely but firmly, drawing the line against mistreatment: “I never was beat by any Master yet and it will be very hard to be beat now.” A yarn might thus be trapped in amber, so to speak: recolored by surrounding new circumstances but perhaps largely unchanged from its original expression.20
Yarns in Motion, or the Poetry of Salt Water
Where did the yarns go? They went all over the world, carried by sailors to sea and port city, up and down rivers, and into landed societies, and they went into print, into a most voluminous and popular form of eighteenth-century writing, the voyage narrative. Roughly two thousand accounts were published in England in that century to tell a ravenous reading public “the story of the voyage,” to use the title of Phillip Edwards’s important book on the subject. The maritime oral and printed traditions coexisted well into the nineteenth century.21
The seepage of yarns into printed form is exemplified, as suggested above, by the very book that made the voyage narrative one of the most popular genres of the eighteenth century: Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World. Dampier was conscious that the work, language, and culture of the sea shaped how he would tell the stories that made up the book: “As to my Stile, it cannot be expected, that a Seaman should affect Politeness.” He explained that he had “divested my self of Sea Phrases, to gratify the Land Reader: for which the Seamen will hardly forgive me.” And yet he admitted that he left many sea terms in the book, persuaded that if what he had to say was “intelligible, it matters not greatly in what words it is express’d.” Many passages have the sound of well-rehearsed stories that made their way from yarn to print.22
Let me now give a few more examples of what I would call the migration of yarns, beginning with the lofty domain of philosophy. It will be recalled that one of the founding texts of Western philosophy, Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More, begins when a mariner named Raphael Hythloday returns from the sea to narrate the story of the new society without private property he has encountered in his travels, about which he spins a powerful yarn. Later in the same century, within the same humanist tradition, Michel de Montaigne wrote a famous essay entitled “Of Canibals,” in which he concludes that the less civilized people in the meeting of Old World and New were not the Native Americans but rather the Europeans. He saw “Indians” not as savages, as did his contemporary fellow elites, but rather as noble and dignified people. Perhaps even more interesting is where Montaigne got his information about them—from a servant, a man who had worked for years as a sailor and voyaged to Brazil, where he met the indigenous people, later to spin yarns about them that would influence the famous humanist and his classic essay. What other great men learned from “the reports of illiterate men” populates a valuable book by William Brandon, New Worlds for Old: Reports From the New World and Their Effect on the Development of Social Thought in Europe 1500–1800 (1986), about the profound effect the discovery of “primitive communism” had on Europe.23
Yarns have likewise had an enormous impact on the development of drama and literature worldwide. Shakespeare used the printed and oral tales of the deep-sea voyagers in writing The Tempest (1611). Kipling suggested that he got the main idea for the play from “a drunken sailor.” Seafarers and their tales would shape many kinds of writing throughout the seventeenth century, poetic and literary, utopian and scientific, as English ships plied the oceans of the world. John Milton drew on voyage literature in imagining the rebellious Satan’s empire in Paradise Lost. According to literary critic Margaret Cohen, Satan himself appeared as a “complete mariner.” A new stage of influence emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the mobile workers of the world inspired and fueled what we now call “the rise of the novel.”24
Daniel Defoe, the writer usually credited with inventing the modern novel, drew heavily on sea narratives and the accounts of sailors as he produced a truly prodigious number of fictional and nonfictional works about sailors, pirates, shipwrecks, indeed about almost all things maritime. He paid special attention to Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English (1589–1600) and Dampier’s New Voyage. He was known to have forty-nine published accounts of voyages in his personal library and to seek out sailors to interview them for their valuable personal experience.25
Inspired by the adventures of the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, marooned on a buccaneering voyage on the Juan Fernández Islands off Chile in 1704, then picked up by Woodes Rogers and his fellow privateers in 1709, Defoe in 1719 published the founding text of modern maritime fiction: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself, With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pirates. Later known as Robinson Crusoe, the novel was an immediate and stunning success, rapidly appearing in dozens of editions (some of them pirated) in England and France and soon translated into twenty languages. The fictionalized account of the maritime marronage in turn inspired many other sea novels during the years following its publication. Defoe’s picaresque stories drew their subjects and their energy from sailors and other workers in motion around the Atlantic and beyond.26
Defoe’s contemporary and rival Jonathan Swift detested the notion of the adventurous sea hero, but he too was influenced by sailors and their writings, especially in his greatest work, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, In Four Parts, By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, published in London in 1726, and better known as Gulliver’s Travels. Swift based the Yahoos on descriptions of Australian aborigines and may have based Lemuel Gulliver on Dampier himself. Even though Swift mercilessly satirized the popular sea voyage genre, he did so from within the form, and there can be no question that the popularity of his novel owed much to the public hunger for writing about sailors, the sea, and strange places abroad. Swift did not share Defoe’s enthusiasm for merchants and empire, but he nonetheless affirmed the centrality of the sailor’s oceanic labors—and stories—to his own epoch.27
The Scottish man of letters Tobias Smollett became a preeminent sea novelist courtesy of an early-life work experience as a lowly surgeon’s second mate during the grandly named War of Jenkins’ Ear in the Caribbean (1739–1748). Smollett served aboard HMS Chichester, a third-rate man-of-war with eighty cannon and a crew of six hundred. Here he saw cooperative labor, ferocious discipline, torture and terror, grisly sickness, and premature death, all on a massive scale. This set of experiences in turn formed the basis of his famous picaresque novel, The Adventures of Roderick Random, published in 1748, in which he graphically described the horror of the ship’s sickroom:
Here I saw about fifty miserable distempered wretches, suspended in rows, so huddled one upon another, that not more than fourteen inches space was allotted for each with his bed and bedding; and deprived of the light of the day, as well as of fresh air; breathing nothing but a noisome atmosphere of the morbid steams exhaling from their own excrements and diseased bodies, devoured with vermin hatched in the filth that surrounded them, and destitute
of every convenience necessary for people in that helpless condition.
His description of the naval man-of-war applied equally well to a slave ship, although the sickroom in the latter was sometimes the entire lower deck. Smollett carried forward the maritime genre established by Defoe, in and through which the experience of seafaring animated the most popular novels of the era.28
In 1806 the sailors aboard the Stirling began the education of a seventeen-year-old American named James Fenimore Cooper. The vessel’s crew was small but motley: its dozen hands included a Dane, a German, an Irishman, a Spaniard, and a Portuguese. On a transatlantic voyage to England, then to the Mediterranean, the novice seaman was taught “how to knot and splice, and other niceties of the calling.” He heard yarns, saw sights, and learned about resistance as British press gangs came after his shipmates, including his friend “Philadelphia Bill,” for service in the Napoleonic Wars. (Bill would serve as something of a model for Long Tom Coffin in Cooper’s first sea novel, The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea [1823].) According to Cooper biographer Wayne Franklin, the voyage aboard the Stirling secured “the foundation for his future,” and not merely his own: Cooper would pioneer the American sea novel and become an inspiration for a generation of European writers, including Frederick Marryat, Eugène Sue, and Victor Hugo. Best remembered for The Last of the Mohicans and other stories of the landed frontier, Cooper actually began his writing life with works about a different frontier, eastern and maritime, on which he wrote a third of his novels.29
Another example of the migration of yarns concerns the stories about the slave trade by dissident sailors told to an earnest young abolitionist gentleman named Thomas Clarkson, who had disguised himself as a sailor and walked the wharves of Liverpool to gather them. These sailors had sailed in slave ships, experienced the horror, and now wished to tell their stories. Clarkson’s first informant was a black sailor named John Dean, who dramatically stripped off his shirt to show the gentleman the scars caused by a flogging he received while working on a slaver. This encounter, and others like it, had a profound effect on the abolitionist and on the movement that sought to educate the broader public about the terrors of the trade. Such yarns would circulate into Parliamentary reports, social movement propaganda, poetry (William Cowper and Robert Southey), literature (Samuel Taylor Coleridge), sermons (Joseph Priestley), and art (J. M. W. Turner). The “reports of illiterate men” were thus central to the social and intellectual origins of utopian literature, humanist philosophy, Renaissance drama, the rise of the novel, and the abolitionist movement, all because “Men of the greatest learning” went down to the docks to talk to sailors.30
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