Liberty on the Waterfront. Paul A. Gilje
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habits of his shipmates, he quickly accommodated himself. Before the short voyage to Liverpool was over (they made soundings in seventeen days), he thoroughly identified with his fellow sailors. His constant complaints about the oppressive officers suggests that the sailors shared a resentment of those who commanded them.56
Other factors, however, also played an important role in bringing the forecastle together. Seasickness, experienced by nearly every green hand and by many an old sailor at the beginning of the voyage, served almost as a rite of passage for many. As both Dana and Browne could attest, seasickness did not elicit any sympathy, but it could form an odd bond between men who experienced this physical upheaval that marked the transition from landlubber to seaman.57
Work also molded a group identity. Sailors relied upon one another whether they hung precariously from a yardarm, labored on deck, or worked in the hold. The everyday experience aboard ship reminded every sailor of his dependence on his shipmates. Facing a crisis, whether storms or some unidentified warship on the horizon, the mutual dependence became even more apparent.
One daily symbol of the experience of group identity was the sea chantey. These songs reflected the group rhythms of work on a sailing ship to such a degree that specialized chanteys with particular beats were applied to different types of work. One man would sing the verse, following the general outlines of a well known chantey while fully capable of adding embellishments of his own, and the rest of the crew would chime in with the refrain. The hauling, tugging, or pushing would be tied to specific points in the chantey. There were chanteys for working the brake windless, capstan, halyards, sheets, and a wide variety of other tasks aboard ship.58
Whatever leisure time there was at sea obviously had to be spent with shipmates. On many vessels, Sunday was a day of slack work by common custom. Jack Tars would then take out their sea chests, rearrange their few possessions, mend and wash clothes, and spend time with each other without the immediate supervision of the officers. The dogwatch, too, was a period of relative ease. At these times tars shared stories or sang popular ballads. Men of the sea prized their ability to tell tales, holding their audience spellbound and stretching the truth past the point of credibility. Journals and books about the sea, especially in the nineteenth century, abound with examples of these yarns. Similarly, a sailor who could sing twenty or thirty verses of some well-known tune was held in high esteem. As Samuel Leech explained, sailors survived by singing songs, listening to “tough forecastle yarns,” and telling jokes “with sufficient point to call out roars of laughter.”59 Such moments helped to cast the bonds that created the fraternity of the forecastle.
The forecastle, however, was not always united. In Herman Melville's fictionalized account of his first experience at sea, a mean-spirited sailor named Jackson bullied the entire crew.60 John Larkin jumped ship from a whaler in the 1840s because of the ill treatment he received at the hands of the crew.61 At times these hostilities could erupt into violence. Young Benjamin Seamans broke his leg in a scuffle with shipmate Levi Hall in 1798.62 The second mate of the Charlotte who stepped between two fighting men was accidently stabbed.63 Aboard the whaleship Vesper, the blacksmith's mate stole a knife from one sailor. The two men began to argue, throwing the ship into an uproar. The captain interceded and told the men to take off their shirts so they could fight it out; the captain would make sure they would have “fair play.”64 William Silver wrote in his journal in 1834 that “to day there was a recurrence of those broils which this voyage has been witness to too many of them for the benefit of those concerned or the credit of the officers.”65 Ship's carpenter Samuel Furgerson complained on a long Pacific voyage that “The People disputing on account of their stealing bread from each other.” Furgerson later exclaimed, as he fretted over shortages on board, that there were “Dry times,” since “warm weather and Short Allowance of water with Salt Beef makes bad Neighbors.”66 One sailor commented that, although fighting was forbidden on naval vessels, men regularly settled arguments with their fists.67
Tensions between different nationalities in a crew added to the misery of some sailors. Captain Samuel Tucker reported tension between the French and American crew members of the ship Boston in 1778.68 Such animosities were not unusual for the multi-ethnic warships of the American navy. Similar problems occurred in merchantmen and whalers. On a voyage aboard the Governor Thorp from England to Boston, tension arose between the British seamen and American officers. After the captain manhandled one of the British sailors, the man complained, “that is the way you do in American ships.”To which the captain replied, “Yes, you son of a bitch, I'll murder you.” The captain then took the man into the cabin for a lashing.69 While J. Ross Browne found much to admire in his American shipmates, he thought the foreigners were intolerable and objected to the idea of sharing living quarters with blacks. After he did not join a work stoppage protesting the captain's refusal to grant the men liberty in port, the Portuguese sailors wanted to drive him out of the forecastle. Isolated and hated by both captain and crew, Browne had to leave the ship.70 Conflict occurred repeatedly between the African American steward on the Charles Phelps and members of the crew. Silas Fitch, who noted these problems in his log, revealed his own bias by confessing that the steward was “the frowardest and sasyest darkey that I have ever saw.”71
If relationships within the forecastle, running from amiable fraternity to armed hostility, were important to every sailor, cooperation between the forecastle and the quarterdeck—between the common seamen and the captain— was essential to the smooth functioning of the vessel. Technically the captain's power at sea was supreme. In signing the articles of a ship—the contract that established pay scale and regulations during the voyage—the sailor abdicated control over his person. The sailor not only agreed to work the ship but also consented to the discipline established by the captain and his officers. Nathaniel Ames described the captain as a “discretionary bashaw” who “enjoys the reality in its most exquisite form, the power of punishing, after which all ‘having authority' so greedily aspire.”72 More than one observer compared the sailors' lot to that of black slaves.73 Like the slave, sailors could be whipped as punishment. Discipline in the navy was most severe. In just six months the captain ordered men whipped almost ninety times aboard the frigate Congress in 1846.74 Even on board merchantmen and whalers, captains used corporal punishment to keep sailors in line.75 Captains also relied on physical force to terrorize a crew, beating, cursing, and threatening to kill the men if they so much as raised their arm in self-defense. Nathaniel Sexton Morgan reported numerous incidents of his captain pouncing upon seamen, especially the Kanaka (Hawaiian) natives and Portuguese, using “the worst and most profane language I have ever heard from mortal lips.”76 William McNally observed, “I know of no situation in which men can be placed where they can be rendered so completely miserable as on board of a ship, if the officers are disposed to make them so.” If the captain did not want to redress grievances, the “vessel becomes a perfect hell, the law has left no alternative for the crew but to suffer his caprice, whims, and tyranny in silence for a long voyage, or else do a deed that will bring them to the scaffold, or haunt them to their grave.”77 As one old salt explained to a novice sailor, there was no ground between duty and mutiny. “All that you are ordered to do is duty,” whether the captain was wrong or right, and “All that you refuse to do is mutiny.”78
Life aboard ships was more complex than this simple dichotomy between mutiny and duty suggests. While in many instances the autocracy of the quarterdeck limited some aspects of the sailor's liberty aboard ship, the relationship between quarterdeck and forecastle was more often under constant negotiation.
16. Seamen aboard all types of vessels were subject to corporal punishment. “Flogging.” Joseph Bogart, Log of the Bark Samuel and Thomas, August 16, 1847. Kendall Whaling Museum.
At sea there was supposed to be a clear hierarchy, with the captain on top, followed by his officers, followed in turn by the common seamen. The chain of command could breakdown at several points. In some instances aboard merchantmen a captain might find his authority undercut by the owners of the vessel. The