THE IMAGE OF THE ORDINARY SEAMAN IN THE 18TH CENTURY

[AdamCyphers]

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/essays/essays_ordinary_seaman.cfm#head6

i ran across this in my web wanderings and wanted to know peoples opinions on the first part of this article.

[peglegstrick]

"'Tis their way to be violent in all their motions. They swear violently, drink punch violently, spend their money when they have it violently . . . in short, they are violent fellows, and ought to be encourag'd to go to sea, for Old Harry can't govern them on shoar. "

Sounds like some of the people I used to ride Harleys with.........I liked them a hell of a lot !!!

[Daniel]

The article is 80% canting nonsense and 20% obvious banalities. Witness this sentence:

There was a certain incommensurability about the sailor, which necessitated his exclusion from society in order to be accommodated within it.

"Incommensurability?" Incommensurate with what? Like most Foucault-citing poseurs, he just hopes the word is steep enough to deter the reader from climbing to the top and finding no meaning there. The fake paradox of "exclusion from society in order to be accomodated within it" depends on the false assumption that society stops at the water's edge.

As for artists representing sailors out of their element, I can open Rodger's Command of the Ocean and instantly find five paintings of sailors aboard ship on the water. True, sailors were more often shown on land than at sea, for the obvious reason that painters didn't often go to sea, and when they did (like Willem van de Velde) they were often being paid to paint large battle scenes rather than individual sailors. No fearful or ideologically driven desire to "show him as distant from it as possible" is necessary to explain sailors being painted on land.

The reference to the "commodification" of sailors' labor, a tortured way of saying that sailors were paid for their work as being somehow a new development of the 18th century proto-capitalist world is ludicrous. Sailors have sold their labor since classical antiquity; even slave-manned rowing ships like galleys and biremes needed wage labor to run the lines topside. I smell Rediker's propaganda at work here.

The statement that sailors didn't represent themselves artistically is true enough, I guess; not all were literate, and those that could write usually lacked leisure to paint, draw, or write about their lives. Dampier, Ringrose, Wafer, Exquemelin and the like wrote about their sailing experiences, but none of them was an ordinary "tar." So there's an obvious banality, but at least it's not absurd like the rest of the article.

[Mission]

Ha ha ha! I'm with Daniel - the overbearing prose is a bit much to take on a full stomach. I honestly only got a few paragraphs in before I lost interest in the college report-like quality of the thing. (What the hell is "visual rhetoric?")

For a down-to-earth image of the everyday sailor's life, I suggest reading an actual account to this sort of stuff and building a mental picture rather than looking for paintings. (I don't completely trust period artwork. Many artists 'improved' things in paintings until the mid 19th century when realism started taking hold as a style. Well, except for painters like Hogarth who made them look worse than they really were.)

For books, one of my favorites is Edward Barlow's book, Barlow’s Journal of his Life at Sea in King’s Ships, East and West Indiamen & Other Merchantman, volumes 1 & 2. It's pretty expensive, so I recommend going the inter-library loan route for this one. That's how I got it to read the first time. (Then I fell in love with it and spent 2 years skulking bookfinder.com until a fairly reasonably priced copy appeared.)