The sailor’s yarn was also crucial to community making from below as demonstrated on a grand scale in the Atlantic’s age of revolution, especially the most revolutionary decade, the 1790s, as illustrated in two extraordinary works of scholarship, Julius Scott’s “The Common Wind: Currents [note that: “currents”] of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” and Niklas Frykman’s “The Wooden World Turned Upside Down: Naval Mutiny in the Age of Revolution.” These exemplary maritime histories reveal, each in its own way, how crucial events cannot be comprehended without attention to sailors’ yarns as international means of communication.
Drawing on a classic account of communication from below—George Lefebvre’s The Great Fear, about the role of rumor among self-organized rebellious peasants in late July and early August of 1789, in the French Revolution—Scott explains precisely how the related revolution in Saint-Domingue, led by Toussaint Louverture, became an Atlantic phenomenon, that is to say, precisely how this great slave revolt of half a million workers became the nightmare of every master class in every slave society in the Western Hemisphere. The agents of communication were sailors, black, white, and brown, part of what Scott calls the “masterless Caribbean” that spread from ship and seaport in North America, the West Indies, and northern South America. Sailors told the tale of revolution in the fo’c’sles and on the docks, key locations in the proletarian public sphere, to waterfront workers enslaved and free, to boatmen and pilots and other mobile workers, to “higglers,” usually market women, and other small traders, who then carried the tales, news, and information inland, to the plantations, expanding geometrically the reach and political meaning of the uprising and expanding the worldwide antislavery movement from below.31
Niklas Frykman does something similar for the tens of thousands of sailors who engaged in mutiny in the 1790s—motley crews whose common history of resistance was previously hidden in narrowly national British, French, Dutch, and other histories. He shows that an upsurge from below—on the scale of the French and Haitian revolutions—took place at sea. He identifies structural causes of mutiny in all of the European navies of the day, but he also shows how the flow of experience, through common participants and common ideas, linked these most radical events. He details the history of the Hermione, on which a motley crew of 160 rose up in September 1797, somewhere between Saint-Domingue and Puerto Rico, killed ten officers, seized the ship, carried it to Caracas, surrendered it to Britain’s enemy, Spain, then scattered with the Atlantic winds. Eventually thirty-five men would be tracked down, twenty-four of them executed, several because they could not resist telling yarns about the mutiny! It is inconceivable that naval mutiny could have exploded with such force and fury and on such a vast scale without the tales that were whispered on the lower decks of naval vessels far and wide, from Britain to France, to the West Indies, to South Africa.32
One of the big questions of the age of sail was: who can tell the story of the voyage? Sailors could, and did, but this posed a problem for the ruling classes of the day, who most decidedly did not want to depend on “the reports of illiterate men.” This contradiction would lead to a series of important historical developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as reaction from above against this dependency: the rise of commercial newspapers; the rise of travel literature; the rise of the novel; the rise of maritime bureaucracies; the rise of vice-admiralty courts; the rise of state-sponsored scientific maritime expeditions; and the rise of modern cartography. These developments converged on a common point: seamen occupied a strategic position in the global division of labor, which in turn gave them mobile access to, and control of, certain kinds of knowledge, information, and ideas. Alternative sources and forms of knowledge, more securely generated by and controlled from above, would have to be developed in response.
Yarns were central to all of it. As the late, great labor historian David Montgomery used to say of the world of nineteenth- and twentieth-century industry: “the boss’s brain was under the workman’s cap.” The same was true in the early modern era, in that workplace called the deep-sea sailing ship. The sailor’s yarn, spun on merchant, naval, fishing, slave, privateering, and pirate ships, not only conveyed crucial information about a wide set of human issues, it shaped the very dynamics of world history in the age of sail.
TWO
Edward Barlow, “Poor Seaman”
Edward Barlow plied the oceans of the world for almost half a century. The only thing more remarkable than his ability to survive so long in a dangerous, often deadly occupation was the record he left of that survival. His journal, located in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, is an extraordinary work of 225,000 words and more than 150 drawings and color pictures. Self-educated in literacy and art (“I could not write before I came to sea”), Barlow wrote so that others might “understand what dangers and troubles poor seamen pass through.” Even though he made no apparent efforts to publish his work in his lifetime, perhaps he had family or friends in mind; perhaps he wrote for posterity, which is to say, for us.1
Barlow sailed the seas during momentous times. His career (1659–1703) parallels almost perfectly England’s “Commercial Revolution,” the exponential and increasingly vital growth of trade between 1660 and the 1690s. During these years, unprecedented numbers of seamen were mobilized in the shipping industry in order to move the commodities of the world, and in navies in order to protect those profitable movements. Barlow was thus a member of one of the largest and most important occupational groups that comprised the first generation of international free wage laborers. He worked on the ship, where free and fully waged workers were employed, segregated, and taught the semiskilled work of using machinery within a complex division of labor, and where workers were disciplined to the task of orderly collective production. The concentration of labor on Barlow’s ships was huge by the standards of the day, reaching as many as one thousand sailors on the largest man-of-war.2
Barlow’s astonishing journal illuminates what it meant to be a sailor in the late seventeenth century. Here we can hear a man from the lower order speaking in his own voice; his words are not mediated or distorted by authorities—the merchants, naval officers, judges, and royal officials on whom we often depend for information about working people. We do not, for once, have to ask repression to recount the history of what it was repressing. Instead we can learn of the seaman’s life as set down in the crooked hand of an autodidact, a man who valued his observations so much that for many years he carefully protected them from the elements in a wax-stoppered joint of bamboo. His triumph over the voracious seas allows us to undertake an exercise in biography and identity formation from below.3
Early Life
Born in Prestwich, England (near Manchester), in 1642, Barlow early on had all the makings of a sailor. He had humble origins amid a large family of “poor people” who struggled as farmers. The family with six children had an annual income of eight or nine pounds (a little more than $1,200 in 2014 US dollars). “I never had any great mind to country work,” admitted Barlow, “as ploughing and sowing, and making hay and reaping, nor also of winter work, as hedging and ditching and thrashing and dunging amongst cattle and suchlike drudgery.” He had also worked in the coal pits. Without money or connections, Barlow was unable to get an apprenticeship to a decent trade: “the tradesmen would not take us without money or unless we would serve eight or nine years,” an unreasonably long term. In any case, Edward never had a “mind to any trade [from the time he was] a child.” Instead he had eyes that longed to see the world, and he had feet given to wandering. After hearing neighbors spin yarns about their travels, he wanted to see places remote and “strange things in other countries.”4
Edward Barlow leaving his mother’s house (National Maritime Museum)
Although he did not know what a ship was the first time he saw one, he had in fact laid eyes upon his fate. Over the initial objections of family members, he signed an apprenti
ceship to a naval captain at the age of thirteen. He spent the remainder of his life working his way around the world, sailing merchant and naval vessels to Europe, the East Indies, and the New World. He spent many years living on the unforgiving element called the ocean, and left an unparalleled record of his working life.5
At Sea
Barlow’s integration into the labor system of the wooden world upon the high seas was jarring. One of his earliest and most emotional comments about his new work life concerned his painful separation from loved ones. As he prepared to leave London, he ruefully noted, “Here hath the husband parted with the wife, the children from the loving parent, and one friend from another, which have never enjoyed the sight of one another again, and some by war and some in peace, and some by one sudden means and some by another.” Work at sea meant painful distance from family and friends, in the short term and, for many, the long: all relationships involving sailors were haunted by the Grim Reaper—captains drew the death’s head, a symbol of mortality, into their logs to record a sailor’s end, far from home.6
Separated from kith and kin, Barlow had to adjust to the new spatial order of the ship. From the beginning of his long life at sea he compared the seaman’s lot to that of the man who “endures a hard imprisonment.” His sleeping place, for example, resembled nothing so much as a “Gentleman’s dog kennel.” And for good reason: after he was impressed into the navy in 1668, Barlow did not set foot on land for seven months. When he finally did feel the ground beneath his feet, it was in “a place where they knew I would not run away, it being a heathen country” (in North Africa). The Admiralty’s fear of desertion, especially in wartime, made this a common fate among sailors. Long incarceration on a ship was a favorite complaint among naval sailors.7
Barlow soon began to see that the seaman’s life was a running duel with fear. He discovered the hard way that the work of a maritime laborer was extremely dangerous. Before he had mastered “sea affairs,” he suffered a serious accident: he fractured his skull while working at the capstan (a winch for heavy lifting). He also faced raging storms, including a hurricane, a fire in a ship with four hundred barrels of gunpowder, leaky vessels, cruel and abusive masters, capture by the Dutch navy and a Spanish privateer, and the ever-present threat injury, disease, and epidemic. Barlow counseled “young men to take any trade rather than go to sea, for though he work hard all day, he may lie safe at night.” Lucky seamen might live as well “as many ordinary tradesmen, yet they must go through many more dangers.” Peril and premature death, Barlow found, were the seaman’s shadows while working on the vast and unpredictable ocean.8
Another important part of Barlow’s initiation into the world of deep-sea sailing was learning to live on his wage, which he now required for subsistence itself. His family, although humble, always managed to produce a little food for themselves, but for Barlow and others aboard the ship, this fundamental fact of life had changed. He now depended upon that customary part of the wage that was food, always a topic of serious interest to Barlow, who dearly loved to eat. When he first went to sea, Barlow thought the food was better than what he had eaten among his poor rural family at home. But later he repented of such thoughts, recalling how he left his apprenticeship to a bleacher because of bad fare: “Though it was sometimes coarse, yet it might serve any ordinary man to live by, and many times since I could have wished for the worst bit of it.” Compared to the sailor’s traditional rotten salt beef and biscuit so full of vermin that it could self-locomote, his previous diet at times looked kingly. At sea he dreamed of the “pleasures those had in England who had their bellies full of good victuals and drink, though they never worked so hard for it.”9
Barlow also complained about the monetary portion of his wage, especially after he had worked off his apprenticeship. He never considered his wages equal to his trouble and suffering, and worse, he found that he often had to fight for what was lawfully his. Many merchants, it turned out, bilked seamen of their wages in order to cover the cost of damaged cargo and oceanic transport. Barlow also discovered, much to his dismay, that the navy illegally held wages in arrears as a means of labor control, to prevent desertion. As we shall see, Barlow had serious misgivings about the ways in which money increasingly governed human relationships. His own dependence upon the wage taught many lessons on this score.10
All of these problems—isolation, incarceration, danger, and wage struggles—led Barlow to conclude: “There are no men under the sun that fare harder and get their living more hard and that are so abused on all sides as we poor seamen.” He was even moved to write an imaginary dialogue with young men who were thinking of becoming sailors. He warned them away from the sea, saying that he found himself “wishing many times I had never meddled with it.” He approvingly cited “the old saying”: “whosoever putteth his child to get his living at sea had better a great deal bind him prentice to a hangman.” He went on to lament, “Yea, I always knew that the worst of prentices did live a far better life than I did, for they had Sundays and other holy days to rest upon and take their pleasures; but all days were alike to us, and many times it fell out that we had more work on a Sabbath day than we had on other days.”11
“East Indiaman Sceptre” by Edward Barlow (National Maritime Museum)
This last comment is crucial, for it shows how the very necessities of work at sea weakened or stripped the seaman of attachments to local and regional land-based cultures. Life at sea, for example, nearly obliterated the plebeian calendar rich with holy days and breaks from work. By Barlow’s reckoning, labor at sea even made difficult the observance of basic Christian rituals such as a proper Christmas dinner. Working as a seaman also had other, more subtle cultural effects. Barlow found that he had less control of his own time, his schedule, and his hours and activities of work, play, and rest. Seafaring, like disciplined wage labor in general, represented a brave new world.12
Since Barlow continually bemoaned his occupation, why didn’t he leave the sea? At the end of each voyage Barlow faced the question anew. It seems his inability to leave the sea did not turn on lack of effort. Indeed, he felt his life at sea was a race against the clock, not least because he deeply feared having to go to sea after he reached forty years of age. Barlow kept trying to “drive a trade ashore,” but he kept failing. He faced enormous obstacles. The English economy in the late seventeenth century offered little to the “swollen mass of the poor.” The situation did not improve until late in the century, by which time Barlow was in his fifties and was unlikely to be able to switch occupations. His fears notwithstanding, Barlow was still battling the elements and “proud, imperious, and malicious” captains as he moved into his middle fifties. This was relatively uncommon among seamen, but far from unknown.13
Work and Thought
How did work at sea affect Barlow’s consciousness and identity? Did it foster class consciousness? Did it foster national consciousness? International consciousness? How did he think about the world and his own place within it? We can answer these questions by analyzing the evidence of social conflict in Barlow’s journal, and more specificallythe language he uses to describe and discuss the power relationships that governed ever-roving travels around the globe.
Barlow took great pride in his global seafaring, which transformed him from a provincial farm laborer into a man of the world, a genuine cosmopolitan. Indeed he looked back from his worldly perch at sea to scorn his neighbors: “Some of them would not venture a day’s journey from out of the smoke of their chimneys or the taste of their mother’s milk; not even upon the condition that they might eat and drink of as good cheer as the best nobleman in the land, but they would rather stay at home and eat a little brown crust and drink a little whey.” Barlow would return home as Walter Benjamin’s man from afar to tell stories of strange and fascinating things he had seen overseas.14
One of Barlow’s most dogged habits was his insistence upon blaming authorities for the problems he experienced. Whether his difficulties were
personal or political, small or large, he usually managed to find a culprit. Not surprisingly, he always had special venom for those who exploited and oppressed “poor seamen.” Actions by the lesser officers of the vessels on which he sailed rankled him from time to time, particularly with their privilege of first choice of the ship’s food. When the officers took their cut of the salt beef, they “left for the poor men but the surloin next to the horns.” They also left the tars “Hobson’s choice”—that or nothing. Barlow also disliked the surgeons on the larger ships, whose prescriptions, he said, “doeth as much good to [the sick sailor] as a blow upon the pate with a stick.” Even when Barlow became an officer later in his career, his view of the world reflected his origins on the lower deck.15
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