Liberty on the Waterfront. Paul A. Gilje
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accomplishments of a genuine man-of-wars-man.”14 In a sermon offered especially for fishermen in Beverly, Massachusetts, before the spring run of 1804, Reverend Joseph Emerson urged them to trust in God, observe the Sabbath, and avoid swearing. As he stood before the weatherworn faces of the fishermen, he acknowledged that he understood how hard it was for sailors not to use strong oaths.15 Common seamen prided themselves in swearing. Simeon Crowell admitted that as a young man about twenty in 1796 he took up bad language while in a fishing schooner off the Grand Banks. By the following year, his cursing had become so elaborate that he thought he might have shocked even some of the old salts with his “wicked conversation.” He also had “learned many carnal songs with which” he “diverted the crew at times.” Unfortunately, he did not copy any of these songs into his commonplace book. He did, however, offer a poem, “The Sailor's Folly,” which he wrote in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 13, 1801:
When first the sailor comes on Board
He dams all hands at every word
He thinks to make himself a man
At Every word he gives a dam
But O how shameful must it be
To Sin at Such a great Degree
When he is out of Harbour gone
He swears by god from night to morn
But when the Heavy gale doth Blow
The Ship is tosled to and froe
He crys for Mercy Mercy Lord
Help me now O help me God
But when the storm is gone and past
He swears again in heavy Blast
And still goes on from Sin to Sin
Now owns the god that Rescued him16
Drinking and cursing ashore were a part of the general carousing that marked the sailor's life on the waterfront. One sailor looked back at his life and proudly pointed to his accomplishments at sea and ashore. Bill Mann had tremendous black whiskers and the “damn-my eyes” look of an old salt. Mann declared that he “had killed more whales, broken more girls' hearts, whipped more men, been drunk oftener, and pushed his way through more perils, frolics, pleasures, pains, and general vicissitudes of fortune than any man in the known world.”17 Such a sailor was supposedly hell-bent to live it up while ashore. According to J. Ross Browne, “a sailor let loose from a ship is no better than a wild man. He is free; he feels what it is to be free. For a little while, at least, he is no dog to be cursed and ordered about by a ruffianly master. It is like an escape from bondage.”18 George Jones described the experience of “liberty men” on an American warship in the Mediterranean in 1825: “They go; fall into all manner of dissipation; get drunk; are plundered; sell some of their clothes, for more drink; quarrel with the soldiers; come back with blackened eyes; cut all kinds of antics; become rude and noisy; are thrown into the brig; have the horrors, and then go about their work.”19
Carousing frequently led to fighting. Often members of a crew, like Horace Lane's shipmates on the Sampson, bonded together, ready to take on all comers. Similarly in 1814, more than one hundred of Stephen Decatur's men from the frigate President were arrested after a fracas at a New York tavern. In this instance there were no serious injuries.20 Other brawlers were not so lucky. In 1812 a group of drunken sailors attempted to gain entry into a New York dance hall but were excluded by the Portuguese owner, who claimed that he was having a private party. Insulted and outnumbered, the sailors left. On their way back to their waterfront boardinghouse, they met some shipmates. With that reinforcement they returned and tried to force their way in. The Portuguese came charging out, swinging their knives and killing one of the sailors. These conflicts occurred countless times in almost every port.21
One of the sailor's problems, leading to the drinking, carousing, and even some fighting, was that he often had money jingling in his pocket. After being paid off from a voyage a seamen might have a month's or as much as a year's wages at his fingertips. Even before the voyage, once he signed the articles of agreement, he was usually paid a month's wages. Most tars flouted mainstream values and asserted their liberty by spending that money—that chink—just as quickly as they could. Thomas Gerry, son of politician Elbridge Gerry, wrote home from aboard the frigate Constellation that money was “the life and wife of a sailor,” but was “so scarce, that when we receive it the sum affords us no advantage and is offered to the God of Pleasure for want of a better berth.”22 Further down the social scale the attitude was much the same. On leave from a privateer in France in 1782, Ebenezer Fox spent money “with the improvidence characteristic of sailors.”23 Ned Myers declared, “As for money, my rule had come to be, to spend it as I got it, and go to sea for more.”24 Captured from an American privateer in 1776, cabin boy Christopher Hawkins found himself forced to serve aboard an English man-of-war for more than a year. Earning a full share of the prize money taken by the enemy of his country, Hawkins joined in the celebrating on a shore leave and quickly spent what he had earned. As Hawkins explained, the sailor's creed was “What I had I got, what I spent I saved, and what I kept I lost.”25 In a similar situation Joshua Penny, an American seaman pressed into the British navy, went on liberty in London sometime around 1800. Later he reminisced, “We went to London, with too much money not to loose a little. I had lived so long without the privilege of spending any thing, that I, too, was a gentleman while my money lasted.” Penny concluded, “No man spends his money more to his own notion than a sailor.”26 Indeed, as they left port, superstitious old salts would toss coins they discovered in their pockets toward the dock to avoid bad luck.27
One positive trait of the spendthrift tar was his generosity. A sailor's song published in 1800 highlighted “honest Bill Bobstay,” who sang like a mermaid and was “the forecastle's pride, the delight of the crew,” but who remained as “poor as a beggar.”
He went, tho' his fortune was kind without end.
For money, cried Bill, and them there sort of matters,
For money, cried Bill, and them there sort of matters,
What's the good on't, d'ye see, but to succoar a friend?
The song contrasted Bill with the purser named Nipcheese, known for his “grinding and squeezing” and plundering the crew.28 Sailors often took pity on those less fortunate than themselves. Naval prisoners of war repeatedly raised collections for other mariners forced to serve the British during the Revolutionary War. Captain Charles Ridgley reported that after the survivors of the whaleship Essex arrived in Chile in 1821, having crossed thousands of miles of ocean in an open boat, the crew of the Constellation wanted to devote a month's salary to each of the survivors. Ridgely, however, knowing “that thoughtless liberality which is peculiar to seamen,” limited the contribution of each man to one dollar.29 Writing of his voyage to the Pacific on the American warship Columbia in the 1840s, Charles Nordhoff explained that “there is no more liberal-hearted fellow than a man-of-war's man. His greatest delight is to divide his little stock of worldly goods with some ill-furnished acquaintance.” The sailor “would give away his last shirt and to an utter stranger, and feel happy as a king in doing so.”30 This generosity reflected many sailors' values. One marine serving with the navy in the opening decade of the nineteenth century, for instance, was repulsed by the acquisitive and self-aggrandizement values of Benjamin Franklin. After reading Franklin's autobiography, William Ray complained of “the parsimony of that lightening-tamer” in refusing to buy beer from his London landlady—a savings Franklin proudly highlights—because it disappointed “the woman in the trifling gains which she expected from him.”31
Ray's criticism of Franklin suggests that, contrary to the experience of Horace Lane and closer to that of Dana and Melville, liberty ashore meant more than mere license. When sailors wore flamboyant clothes, drank, freely cursed, used their distinctive argot, bucked all authority, and engaged in brawls, they sent a message to the larger society. These seamen rejected two fundamental tenets of society, hierarchy in the eighteenth century and the acquisitive values of the