Liberty on the Waterfront. Paul A. Gilje
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houses of prostitution is suggested by the tongue-in-cheek reportage of an anti-prostitution riot in New York City in 1793. One newspaper proclaimed that the mob had attacked “Mother Carey's nest of CHICKENS” during the riot. Everyone in a port like New York would understand the joke; Mother Carey may have been the name of the keeper of this house of ill repute, but Mother Carey's chicken was also the common name of a sea petrel sighted on every cruise in the Atlantic.61
Although sailors could joke about their relationships with women ashore, there was also a dark side. A sailor could go to sea to escape from women who sought to control him. In this case going to sea meant liberty from tiresome shoreside attachments. The sailor sometimes viewed a wife as a tyrant who henpecked her husband, preventing him from enjoying himself. John Palmer copied a song into his Revolutionary War journal that claimed that a man who was married may as well be hanged because “His Wife at his Elbow Like an Emperor will Stand,” ordering him about. A wife needed constant praise and presents. Moreover, women would not allow the sailor to spend his money and go to the tavern to drink with his shipmates. This ballad Palmer labeled a “true song” and concluded:
So a Bachelors Life I Do think is the Best
be him Drunk or be him Sober he may take his Rest
No Wife to Controle him Nor Children to Cry
O Happy is the man Who A Bachelor Dies.62
Going to sea also allowed a man to escape from a woman who would eventually betray him. Ultimately this view of women gave vent to expressions of misogyny. Charles Babcock wrote his brother Henry that his girlfriend was not to be trusted. Charles went on to exclaim that no woman could be trusted out of the man's sight for more than a week.63 In a similar vein, Ebenezer Clinton copied the following lines on the inside cover of a journal:
Mankind from Adam have Been Woman's fools
Women from Eve have Been the Devil's tools
Heaven might have spar'd one torment when we fell
Not Left us Women or not threaten'd Hell.64
Nathaniel Ames had contempt for all women. He commented despairingly about the “Wapping landladies and sailor's wives” who came aboard ships in London. Such women were not to be trusted and were searched “in the most indecent manner” both upon coming aboard, for fear they were smuggling liquor, and upon leaving, for fear that they were stealing. Ames, who wrote his book to provide an unadulterated account of what it meant to be a sailor, also explained (wrongly) that most sailors do not marry because of the “proverbial infidelity of sailors’ wives.”65
Richard Henry Dana, Jr., offered a similar understanding of the seaman's view of women, focusing on the woman who married the sailor to obtain as much money as she could and, as soon as the tar set out on his next voyage, abandoned him. Dana described the despondency of “Chips,” the carpenter, when the Pilgrim received a mail delivery and there was no letter from his wife, whom he had married just before leaving Boston. “Sails,” the sailmaker, tried to comfort him by telling him he was “a bloody fool to give up his grub for any woman's daughter.” Dana did not leave this negative portrait here; he went on to have Sails describe his own ill-conceived marriage. Sails had just been paid off with five hundred dollars from a Pacific voyage—a small fortune—rented a four-room apartment for his new wife—which was spacious beyond belief for a nineteenth-century working man—packed it full of furniture, and provided half pay in his absence for his next voyage. When he returned she was “'off, like Bob's horse, with nobody to pay the reckoning;’ furniture gone,—flag-bottomed chairs and all;—and with it his ‘long togs,’ the half-pay, his beaver hat, white linen shirts, and everything else.” Sails concluded with advice to Chips, telling him to “cheer up like a man, and take some hot grub! Don't be made a fool of by anything in petticoats! As for your wife, you'll never see her again; she was ‘up keeleg and off’ before you were outside of Cape Cod.”66
The hazy boundary separating the various images of women in sailors’ minds is suggested when Joshua Penny self-mockingly related how sailors go ashore and play the gentleman while their money lasted. Two such tars passed by a window where two “ladies” were sitting. One lady turned to the other and, in a voice intended to be overheard by the sailors, dismissively declared, “There goes two sailors, gentlemen for a week.” Without missing a beat, one of the sailors turns to the other and says “Yes .. . and there sits two strumpets for life.”67 Perhaps the women mocked the pretensions of the seamen because they resented both the sailors’ independence and their rejection of values that would have kept them closer to hearth, home, and female companionship. The sailors, not surprisingly for men who had been out at sea in a largely male fraternity, focused on the sexuality of the “strumpets.” The women were not identified; they may have been prostitutes, or wives or sweethearts of men on the waterfront, or from a higher class. To Penny it almost did not matter. From Jack's cynical perspective, all women were captives to their sexuality and whatever relationships that entailed.
The interplay of these various images of women also appears in the sailor's approach to the exotic native. Here was the innocent child, trusting caretaker, carnal object, and sexual exploiter rolled up in one. The exotic female had long played a prominent role in travel and adventure literature. Captain John Smith, after having been rescued by other princesses, was saved by Pocahontas. Sailors had similar tales. In the Sumatran wilderness in 1780 escaped prisoner of war John Blatchford stumbled across a nearly naked girl who led him to safety.68 The mulatto seaman Robert Adams reported sleeping with the wife of his Muslim master while held in Saharan Africa.69 In a light-hearted song published in 1817, an unfaithfulship carpenter promised to be true to his wife, Sue, only to lay with an Indian woman as soon as he joined Perry on the Great Lakes.70
What really caught the maritime imagination was the South Pacific. After the first British and American vessels visiting the South Pacific reported naked women swimming out to vessels and having sex with any man who wanted it, and taking in payment the most trifling product of the industrialized world, sailors became enthralled with the notion that the South Sea islands were some sort of paradise. The story of the mutiny aboard the Bounty resonated for seamen throughout the first half of the nineteenth century in part because of the sexual encounters between the crew and Polynesian women.71 Alfred Terry aboard the whaleship Vesper was struck by the looseness and cupidity of the women on Easter Island who boarded the vessel for the crew's sexual pleasure. His description of the women, while not exactly romantic, was certainly graphic. He wrote that the women were naked except for “a strip of bark around their wastes and a bunch of leaves in their crotch.”72 William Clarke thought the women on Tahiti were “salacious” and said that in order to obtain “luxuries they never dreamed of when in their natural state,” the men “will prostitute their daughters and even their wives for a dollar.”73 The many portrayals of Polynesian women on scrimshaw depict a more attractive native than Terry and Clarke would have us think. The allure of the South Sea maiden also appeared in the Yankee ballad “The Lass of Mohee,” in which the native girl invites the sailor into her hut and tries, unsuccessfully, to convince him to remain with her when his ship is ready to sail.74 Herman Melville built his reputation as a writer by describing his experience on Typee in the Marquesas. The women not only were mostly naked, but they had a childish approach to the world that combined sexual curiosity with a desire to please. The girls who surrounded him when he first arrived were “unsophisticated young creatures” and “void of artificial restraint.” They were “wonderfully polite and humane; fanning aside the insects that occasionally lighted on our brows; presenting us with food; and compassionately” regarded Melville in his afflictions. Their “prying inquisitiveness” unnerved Melville, who confessed that “in spite of all their blandishments, my feelings of propriety were exceedingly shocked, for I could not but consider them as having overstepped the due limits of female decorum.” Melville was beside himself in describing the incredible natural beauty of his own personal favorite, the lovely Fayaway, who “for the most part clung to the primitive and summer garb of Eden.” In the South Pacific native woman, the sailor found all that he imagined any female could be; a child to be taught and protected, a mother and sister to nurse him, a sweetheart to idealize,