REVIEWS Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750, Marcus B. Rediker (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1987, 322p, illus, $12.95pb) Marcus Rediker of Georgetown University has undertaken to rewrite eighteenth century maritime history "from the bottom up" by focusing on the common seamen of the Anglo-American world. In so doing he hopes to correct the romanticized image of sai lors created by Herman Melville and later historians like Samuel Eliot Morison. As Rediker explai ns in hi s introduction, the sailor faced danger from two quarters. "On one side stood hi s captain, who was backed by the merchant and royal official, and who held near-dictatorial powers that served a capitalist system rapidly covering the globe; on the other side stood the relentlessly dangerous natural world" (p. 5). But it is the devil on the quarterdeck rather than the deep blue sea that attracts most of Rediker's attention . He asks, "What did these working people do for themselves ," in the face of violence from above, and seeks to di scover the conseq uences of the mariners' resistance to persistant illtreatment. Rediker's view of what life was like for the eighteenth-century mariner draws heav ily on contemporary observations and the records of more than 2,000 cases heard in the British Courts of Admiralty. Extensive footnotes (alas, there is no bibliography) also reveal the a uthor's wide acquaintance with the secondary literature. The picture he offers of the seafarer's lot is far from pleasant. Sadistic captains, poor food , worse living cond itions, and the most dangerous of all workplaces all combine to form a litany of horror. Rediker's seamen respond to these outrageous conditions in a variety of ways: they close ranks around the victims; they initiate slowdowns; they desert at the next port; and in the most extreme circumstances, they mutiny and/or tum to piracy. In the course of hi s work, the author provides us with a wealth of interesting information abo ut the ordinary seamen of the first half of the eighteenth century: average monthly wages ranged from a peacetime £1.46 to £2.20 during the period 's many wars; the median age of foremast hands was twenty-five; the literacy rate was 67 .67 percent; nineteen of sixty recorded mutinies during the SEA HISTORY 53, SPRING 1990
period resulted in piracy. The author made an invaluable contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the common seaman as an essential contributor to the enormous expansion of maritime commerce throughout the Anglo-American world of the eighteenth century. His extensive documentation of corporal punishment on board British merchant vessels is indeed sobering. But it is Rediker's interpretation that will interest most readers. Out of the struggle between foe' sle and quarterdeck, the author asserts, emerged an important basis for the nineteenth-century sailors themselves to have constituted a true proletariat. Like the factory workers who followed them, sailors brought only their bare hands to the job of operating, under the most severe of conditions , a machine (the ship) owned by capitalist employers. Perhaps the Anglo-American seamen did form a self-conscious proletariat in the eighteenth century, as Rediker contends, but hi s evidence is far from persuasive. Hi s own figures show that very few seamen could have spent as much as ten years at sea (Appendix A), and he
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cites Ira Dye to show that American sailors averaged only seven (p. 296). In short, sailors could and did leave the sea in droves by their late twenties, hardly the stuff from which a self-conscious proletariat is made. One could more easily argue that by leaving what was undoubtedly a most unpleasant and dangerous occupation, most sailors were taking the opportunity to reject the possibility of becoming proletarians rather than accepting that status. I draw a different conclusion from Rediker's evidence than the one he draws. At any given time in the early eighteenth century sailors as a group often worked under almost inhuman conditions. Unlike the plantation slaves and (later) factory workers with whom they are compared, however, relatively few indi vidual sailors endured such conditions for long. They simply quit. In his effort to offset the romantic image depicted by other maritime historians, Rediker has created hi s own romantic sailor-a stout-hearted, strongarmed man of democratic spirit who did his duty the best he could and rarely, if ever, deserved to be puni shed by those CAST IRON LIGHTHOUSES DOORSTOPS • BOOKENDS • COLLECTIBLES 45 DESIGNS ONLY $49.95 EA . H a nd · painted museum quality repli cas.
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