Liberty on the Waterfront - Paul A. Gilje Early American Studies

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Timothy, who died of an illness contracted while at sea.147

      Others remained more closely wedded to the sea all their lives while changing their nautical employment. Nicholas Isaacs filled many berths in his twenty years before the mast. He sailed in merchantmen throughout the Atlantic, fished the Grand Banks, fought aboard American privateers during the War of 1812, and had even been impressed into the British navy. About 1815 he moved to New York, got married, and thereafter worked the local fishing grounds and sold his catch to the city's markets.148 After John Hoxse completed his apprenticeship at age twenty-one, he signed aboard a ship to serve as its carpenter. Within a few years he lost his arm in the battle between the Constellation and the French frigate La Vengeance. Thereafter he tried to earn a living running a grocery but failed. For two years he supplied wood locally to Newport, Rhode Island, before that work proved too physically taxing for him. Although he signed aboard a sealer for the South Atlantic, he was never paid any wages for his two-year voyage. Finally he settled in as a fisherman off the coast of Rhode Island.149

      Some tars never left the forecastle. Crew lists throughout the period reveal men in their forties, and even a handful in their fifties. Luke Snow was forty when he served as a mariner aboard the Halifax Packet out of New York in 1760. In 1803 the Charlotte from Providence had a fifty-four-year-old on board. And in 1843 the Rival of Calais, also of Providence, had a fifty-year-old sailor.150 Black sailors were more likely to continue as foremast men than white sailors. Many of the white men who stayed at sea became officers. According to Providence crew lists, almost every white man who remained a mariner moved up in rank.151 The same was true of Salem seafarers in the eighteenth century.152 Although this trend probably persisted throughout the Age of Revolution, in most locations some older whites served out their days in the forecastle. Moreover, as shown by the Hammond brothers, entry into the officer ranks was not necessarily permanent.

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      5. This sketch of a man in typical sailor garb on a dock was found in a journal, interspersed with handwriting exercises. Journal of William Alfred Allen (ca. 1840). New Bedford Whaling Museum.

      Seamen pursued a variety of options depending upon their opportunities—or lack of opportunities. Coming from a great many backgrounds, and heading in different directions with their lives, the men who populated the waterfront and labored before the mast defy any grand characterization. And yet, despite men who saved money, moved up the ranks, returned to a land-based life, the popular image of the hell-raising, spendthrift tar persists.

      The expression of liberty that dominated the waterfront revolved around a freedom of action, in contrast to the property-bound definitions that preoccupied the age. While sailors worked to acquire money—an aim that would meet the approval of their landbound critics—the tar's concern with immediate gratification and rapid disposal of his wages implied a lack of respect for property that frightened those more concerned with the accumulation of wealth. For men who were disenfranchised and whose grasp on property was fleeting and tentative, the sailor's liberty ashore had a distinct appeal. The ideal of sailor liberty, however, fell somewhat short of reality. Excesses of liberty on shore led directly to the loss of economic and personal freedom.

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      The Maid I Left Behind Me

      William Widger lay imprisoned by the enemies of his country. This sailor in the American Revolution had tried his luck as a privateer aboard the brig Phoenix. His luck ran short, and the British captured him and sent him to Old Mill Prison in England. Confined by walls and guards, he turned his thoughts to his home in Marblehead. He had a dream that reflected the concerns of many sailors far from home as they thought of the women in their lives. Widger's dream brought him to the Marblehead water-front, where he quickly became frustrated by the inability of “his Giting home” since he stood on one “Side of the weay” and soldiers stood sentry on the other side. As in any dream, he somehow managed to proceed and met an acquaintance, “Georg Tucker,” at the end of “Bowden's Lain.” Tucker “Stouped and Shock hands with me and Said he Was Glad to See me.” Then Tucker unloaded a bombshell and congratulated Widger on his wife just delivering a baby boy.

      Startled, Widger asserted, “it was a dam'd Lye” and that “it was imposable for I had been Gone tow years and leatter.” Again, dreamlike, Widger pushed on “in a Great pashan” toward Nickes Cove where he met the one woman he knew he could trust—his mother. The old woman (William Widger was thirty-two) asked the sailor if he was going home to see his wife. Widger responded that he “was dam'd if ever I desired to See hir a Gain.” The maternal strings began to tug on Widger as his mother sought to ease his anger. She argued for the biologically impossible, asserting that “the Child was a honest begotten Child and it was Got before” Widger went to sea and that it was his. Widger was not to be moved, and repeated that it was impossible since he had been out to sea for two years and more. Widger continued “I was a dam'd foule to Coum home” and that he could leave in the brig he had arrived in. The debate went back and forth; the mother almost succeeded in convincing Widger to return home and see his wife and baby. Widger continued to remonstrate and swear, and, as he reports, “before I was don talking With hur a bout it I awaked.”1

      William Widger's dream highlights the contradictory meanings of liberty that shoreside attachments held for the sailor. Whether detained as a captive, or merely forced from home by his service at sea, the mariner could be both attracted to women ashore and repelled by them. Liberty on the waterfront allowed the sailor to engage in a variety of long- and short-term heterosexual relationships. Liberty at sea released the sailor, at least temporarily, from those relationships and compelled him to live in an all-male society where his imagination could run wild. He might long for absent loved ones, or he might relish the freedom of the fraternity of the forecastle. Most likely, he did both.

      The many meanings of liberty for the sailor—personal independence, carousing, and freedom to choose where he worked among them—were intricately intertwined with his relationships with women and his fellow sailors and with his sense of masculinity. At sea (or as prisoners of war) men lived in a homosocial, not a homosexual, world. Life aboard ship presented challenges to male sexuality. Separation from women and close quarters in the forecastle created the potential for sexual activity with other men. Even the nature of the work could suggest a less masculine identity. Although the true mariner had to be prepared for the most arduous labor, he also often had to be proficient at tasks like mending and washing that could be considered feminine. Regardless of the possibilities, the image of Jack Tar was an idealized heterosexual man. Everyone aboard ship may not always have lived up to that ideal, but its persistence was fundamental to maritime culture and sailors’ notion of liberty.

      Widger's dream also suggests a conflicted understanding of women. On the one hand is the woman who gave him birth, a woman whom he trusted almost enough to believe that he was not cuckolded. Contrasted with this mother was the wife who could not be trusted. She was the temptress and betrayer, who while he was away had slept with another man, gotten pregnant, and delivered of a baby boy. These two images—which suggest the Madonna and Eve—represent extremes in the mind of the sailor. Yet somehow they became blended. After all, the mother stood in alliance with the wife, arguing with her son that he should still return to his family and claim the infant as his. Within the dream Widger is torn. On one level, he is still drawn to the fireside and his wife. On another, he continues to rant and assert a vague desire to return to the safety and camaraderie of the forecastle. Within the real world, there is no resolution. Rather than settling the debate, Widger, who corresponded with his wife while in Old Mill Prison, merely awakes. Most sailors had an even more complex view of women including the sacred mother, beloved sister, innocent daughter, loyal sweetheart or wife, playful Mol, exploitive harlot, and exotic native. The boundaries between some of these remained vague and the categories often overlapped.

      We should not confuse popular images of womanhood with reality. Women's experiences and their relationships with sailors were varied. Whether she was in an ephemeral or long-term relationship with a sailor, or whether she exploited or was exploited, Jack Tar's liberty exacted a high cost on

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