Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour

Olaf Uwe Janzen is a history professor at the Memorial University of
Newfoundland.

Most of the essays in this collection were first presented as papers at
a scholarly conference held in Halifax in 1990.

Through a variety of methodologies and sources, the papers explore the
life and labor of 18th- and 19th-century mariners, a world that too
often has been stereotyped and romanticized when it has not been
overlooked completely. The essays avoid confinement to a single
nationality, race, gender, or era, but have been grouped according to
themes that should attract the attention of scholars outside the field
of maritime studies. One essay in the section on “Seafaring in the
World of Revolution” interprets social turbulence in
eighteenth-century port communities as evidence of proto-industrial
labor unrest; another reveals how Afro-American sailors were vectors of
information and revolutionary ideas in the North Atlantic world. A
section on “Resistance, Punishment and the World of Law” carries
essays on widespread English opposition to impressment, the labor
activism that underscored the British naval mutinies of 1797, and the
inability of government to regulate the wages and lien system in the
Newfoundland fishery. Four essays in a section on “Gender, Family and
the World Ashore” offer ways of exploring and explaining changing
gender roles in the sailor’s world. Two essays on “Sailors in the
World of War” use detailed military records to analyze the origins and
characteristics of seamen in two national navies. Finally, a section on
“Seafaring Labour in the Industrial World” carries an essay
expounding on the value and drawbacks of oral history, while another
traces how the very success of one community as a seafaring centre begat
landward industrialization that eventually contributed to its decline as
a seafaring centre, with dramatic consequences for its laboring classes.
Invariably, a number of themes recur from one section to the next: the
status of Afro-American sailors, changes in women’s status as maritime
labour industrializes, and so on. As Greg Kealey explains in an
afterword, “Any studies of plebian or proletarian life that try to
study class with no reference to gender and race are destined to
fail.” In that sense, this book succeeds very well.