Читать книгу Liberty on the Waterfront - Paul A. Gilje - Страница 11

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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 a woman on the waterfront. These women's lives were therefore often hard. Women labored mainly as seamstresses, or in boardinghouses and taverns and in the commercial sex industry. Although they formed strong bonds with each other, theirs was not a separate sphere. Women interacted with men beyond their own family on a daily basis. Some of these women fulfilled the various fantasies of the sailor—including a sentimentalized domestic ideal—while he was ashore. Others did not.²

Personal relationships ashore could pull on or push upon Jack Tar affecting his notions of liberty. To better understand this aspect of the sailor's life, I will examine concepts of gender identity at sea, the many images of women for the male waterfront worker, and some details of the lives of the women on the waterfront.³

Any understanding of masculine identity on the waterfront must begin with how men viewed themselves. The forecastle created a peculiar environment that had the potential to threaten the heterosexual identity of sailors. Isolated from women for long periods of time, compelled to live and work in a confined space literally on top of each other, and at times forced to labor at work land based society deemed feminine, sailors could have created a more homoerotic identity. They did not. Instead, they developed a notion of manhood that reflected both working-class and youth culture that emphasized proficiency at skilled labor and heterosexual prowess.⁴ For Richard Henry Dana, Jr., the ideal sailor fulfilled all the qualities of manliness. He complimented the mate on the Pilgrim by describing him as being every inch a man. Likewise, each crew member knew that “he must be a man, and show himself smart when at his duty.” For Dana, “an overstrained sense of manliness is the characteristic of seafaring men.” The manly sailor must confront the world with stoicism, ignore danger, minimize an injury, and avoid expression of feelings.⁵ In 1836 “A Brother Cruiser” looked at a picture of “The Boatswain's Mate” and proclaimed, “such a picture as that, I love to look upon a real man-of-war's man—a hearty, able bodied, American seaman.” His very look expressed “a love of enterprise, firmness of purpose, and a reckless daring.” Such a sailor never forgot his birthright, “he is never a fawning, cringing, sycophantic creature, but always a man!” Yet this ideal sailor understood the military necessity of discipline and always tipped his hat to his superior officers.⁶ From this perspective the manly sailor was independent and hardworking and knew both his duty and his place. There was something straightforward and honest in this portrait of the sailor that emphasized hard work and diligence rather than intelligence. J. Ross Browne, for instance, described one old salt, whom he greatly admired, as combining “all the noble generosity and daring of a real sailor—all those blunt, manly qualities which characterize the genuine son of Neptune—with the credulity and simplicity of a child.”⁷ Popular song reiterated these themes countless times. “Bonny Ben” in one song “was to each jolly messmate a brother.” Perhaps even more important, “He was manly, and honest, good-natured and free.”⁸

Ashore, all of these masculine characteristics became embodied in the manly sailor adorned in his best sailor garb, with a ready wit, generosity, and love of life. Understandably irresistible to any woman on the waterfront, the sailor possessed a strong libido that needed to be satisfied.

I took my love by the middle so small and gently lay'd her down

Those words to me she thus did say as we lay on the broom [heather]

Do what you will kind sir said she it's equal unto me

But little do my Mammy know I am in the broom with thee.⁹

At times the sailor could remain loyal to his sweetheart and he might eagerly promise to marry his love. Although such pledges of fidelity were sometimes serious, they often were expressions of the passion of the moment. A manly sailor could just as easily take or leave a woman.

If round the world poor sailors roam,

And bravely do their duty,

When danger's past they find a home

With each his fav'rite beauty

For Nan, and Sue, and Moll, and Bess

And fifty more delight them,

And when their honied lips they press,

Who says it don't requite them.¹⁰

If sailors objectified women and saw them largely as fit for serving the man's needs ashore—be they carnal or domestic—they saw themselves as users. Men came ashore, and whether it was to see a sweetheart or a harlot, they assumed that women would eagerly do their bidding. Only occasionally did sailors express any remorse over this attitude. The author of “The Husband's Complaint” declares that once he had a “loving Wife,” but that he was not content and “led her an unhappy life.” He came to appreciate her only after he lost her and soon remarried a woman who “turns out a drunken sot” and tells him, “I'll pay off your first wifes scores,” constantly fighting and berating him.¹¹ In one version of “The Maid I Left Behind Me” the sailor goes off to sea after promising his love that he will return. Opportunity knocks elsewhere and he marries for money, forgetting the girl at home and his parents. The song ends with a lament as the sailor's past haunts his dreams.

My father is in his winding-sheet, my mother too appears,

The girl I love stands by their side to wipe away their tears;

They all died broken-hearted, and now it's too late, I find

That God has seen my cruelty to the girl I left behind.¹²

This attitude, although surfacing occasionally in popular song, is buried under a weight of evidence in which the sailor believes he has the right to take from the woman.

If the handsome sailor was the ideal ashore, and if that image had such a strong sexual component, what about the handsome sailor's sexuality at sea? Did the fact the sailors often cooked, sewed, and served—ostensibly female work—affect their sense of themselves as men?¹³ Did the view of themselves as users transfer to sexual activity with other men at sea? Only a handful of comments about male sexual activity at sea exist in the many songs, diaries, reminiscences, ship's logs, court records, and other sources.

Herman Melville toyed with the sexual attractiveness of the ideal sailor for males. He described Billy Budd as “the Handsome Sailor,” with both feminine and masculine characteristics. Thus Billy has a “smooth face all but feminine in purity of natural complexion.” Melville characterized him as a “rustic beauty” competing with high-born dames. While asserting that “our Handsome Sailor had as much of masculine beauty as one can expect anywhere to see,” Melville in the next instant compared him to “the beautiful woman in one of Hawthorne's minor tales.”¹⁴ He avoided more explicit discussion of homoerotic behavior with obscure references to “wooden-walled Gommorrahs of the deep.” In Moby Dick, Ishmael shares a bed with Queequeg: “in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.”¹⁵

Such intimacy was no longer a private matter if authorities became aware of it. Buggery was one of the most frequent crimes punished with execution in the British navy from 1700 to 1861. It was less frequently punished in the American navy.¹⁶ Inthe record of punishments aboard the Congress for 1845 to 1848, three cases may have represented homosexual activity. In December 1845 and again in February 1846, adult seamen and individuals rated as boys were punished for “scandalous conduct.” The exact nature of that conduct is not delineated, yet given the host of other offenses listed, including insubordination, fighting, smuggling liquor, and drunkenness, the reader is left to suspect some sexual act.¹⁷Josiah Cobb provides a similar oblique reference to homosexual behavior in Dartmoor Prison during the War of 1812 when he says that the “unpardonable sin had been committed.” Again, considering the litany of other crimes explicitly mentioned—fighting, gambling, drinking, stealing—the unmentioned crime was probably sodomy. Cobb comments further that “This [the ‘unpardonable sin’—sodomy] was but seldom done;—howsoever depraved were the Rough Alleys [the criminal element among sailor prisoners of war held in Dartmoor] in other respects, there had been but two or three instances of this heinous sin being committed, on account of the serious penalty immediately following the conviction of the offender.”¹⁸

A survey of more than one thousand whaleship logs in the nineteenth century turned up only three clear references to homosexual activity aboard ship. These cases all involved unwanted advances of one man upon another. In each, the reaction was much the same. The culprit was identified and removed from the ship. The captain often was matter of fact and responding to the wishes of his crew. Hiram Baily, for example, wrote to his owners explaining that the “green boys” (hands new to sailing) had complained that the steward had gone down to the forecastle in the night and “got into there berths when the lights were out and took there inexpressibles in to his mouth.” While the green hands apparently objected, the captain did not take any action until three men had reported “that they waked up and found him in that Position,” while another awoke and found the steward “fooling around him to do proberly the same thing.” Baily intended to dismiss the steward in part as a result of these disclosures. His entire letter was written tongue in cheek and showed much good humor. He continued his description of the steward to the owners focusing not on his sodomy but on his incompetence as a steward. Moreover, Baily informed the owners that the steward had lied when he signed aboard the ship because he had incurred debts ashore that his advance could pay.¹⁹ Although this case and others show general condemnation for unwanted homosexual activity, it leaves us wondering about acts between two consenting individuals out of sight—which was no easy task on any vessel—of the prying eyes of the crew.²⁰

The one American source that comments extensively on sexual activity between males aboard ship is the diary of Philip C. Van Buskirk. According to B. R. Burg, when Van Buskirk joined the marines in 1846 as a drummer he entered a world peopled by working-class men who did not view this type of sexual activity as unusual, perverse, or even morally wrong. Mutual masturbation, riding the “chicken” with one another, and reveling in sodomy all fit into a continuum of the bisexual activity that occurred in brothels along the waterfront. Although most of Van Buskirk's love affairs went unconsummated, his descriptions are so explicit, and he is so consumed with the attractions of one boy after another, that he leaves the impression that it was almost impossible to walk across the crowded decks of an American warship without tripping over a pair of male lovers in each other's clasp. No doubt Van Buskirk participated in some homosexual activity; however, given his own penchant for exploring his mental universe to the exclusion of events and conditions surrounding him, he may have been a bit too preoccupied with his own particular sexual orientation.²¹ Homosexuality existed at sea, as indicated by the buggery trials in the British navy, the “scandalous conduct” aboard the Congress, the “unpardonable sin” that occurred in Dartmoor, the few incidents noted on whaling ships, and even the homoerotic references in Melville—but it was not a rampant practice.²²

The seafaring male's sense of masculinity revolved less around his bonds with men than around his relationships with women. While other sailors admired him because of his seamanship, stoicism, and hard work, the handsome sailor was handsome to women. It was as if the threat of the sea to unman the man—through separation from women, immersion in a homosocial if not homoerotic world, and the need to do some work that might be defined as feminine—created an overly developed sense of manhood. If maritime culture emphasized one type of manhood, it allowed for and indeed demanded many different types of womanhood.

Jack Tar's many images of women fulfilled some fantasy—domestic or sexual—for the sailor and reflected the peculiar nature of his liberty. In some instances attachments to women ashore could inhibit the sailor's liberty. In others men could take liberties with women ashore, or obtain liberty from women by going to sea. The sailors’ images of women emphasizing domesticity reflected the attraction of home life to men whose work took them away from the family circle. Focusing on these images reminded them of what they lost when they abdicated control of their lives by going to sea. While too great a concern with the domestic sphere might bring ridicule, the manly sailor was expected to retain some sentimentality for the women who represented the homestead.

6. These sketches of matronly women with mopcaps found on the inside cover of the journal by William Henry Allen suggest the maternal images that many sailors took with them to sea. William Henry Allen, Journal of the George Washington (1800). Huntington Library.

For most sailors the ideal of the sacred mother, symbolizing hearth and kin, was an important part of their view of women. Young men new to the sea often pined for their mothers and wished “themselfes to home with their mamys.”²³ Midshipman William Henry Allen was so homesick on his first voyage that he drew two pictures of a matronly woman wearing a mopcap—probably his dead mother—in the front of his journal.²⁴ Even the most hardened sailor retained a tender place in his heart for his mother. Samuel Dalton, a salt who had spent years away from home in the navy and merchant marine and who was impressed in British service against his will, saw his mother as representing all that he had lost by his seafaring life. He wrote her in 1809 describing himself as “but a wanderer in the world.” He lamented, “As the day comes it is spent in thoughts that Distract my soul to pieces & wishes for to once more behold my beloved Mother.”²⁵ Joseph Valpey, captured by the British during the War of 1812, extended his sympathies to all older women while emphasizing their maternal role in household service. He wrote a poem extolling the virtues of elderly women—motherlike figures—who nursed the sick and were willing to do work that younger women would not.²⁶

The relationship between the sailor and his mother became an important component of the sentimentalized nineteenth-century literature concerning seamen. The vision of the woman is not sexual, but domestic and maternal. The poem “The Sailor Boy's Mother” appeared in 1822 and recited the tragedy of a widow parting with her son and keeping him in her thoughts, even on a deathbed made more lonely by the sailor boy's absence. The lyrics focus on the mother resigning herself to God's will, laying in bed thinking of “her own darling son, Who wand'ring, had roamed far away on the billow.” She felt great sorrow, “For she thought how her child all wrapped in his shroud, / Might sleep in the waves ere the dawn of to-morrow!” Her mind turned to the youth's happy childhood and how his activity comforted her “As she mourned for the husband who sunk in the ocean!” Then, after thinking of how the boy departed to go to sea,

Twas thus the poor widow then prayed for her child—

Oh! may heaven preserve him far on the billow;

Then gently she sighed and most sweetly she smiled,

As she thought of her orphan—and died on her pillow!²⁷

Recollections of other female relatives could also symbolize sentiments of domesticity—the loving sister and dependent daughter. The image of the sweet and absent sister evoked a domestic ideal of protective and almost maternal role. G. Bayley's poem in a letter to his sister Lavina, penned amid the scurrying of huge cockroaches on a prison ship in Jamaica and interrupted by an overgrown rat jumping onto the table where he was writing, highlights this relationship. “In every season of the varied year / Ive known a sister's love, a sister's care.” Bayley continues with descriptions of peaceful rural scenes, emphasizing their bucolic nature and the presence of his beloved sister.

No birds now meet me with an early song

Lavina—was wont to share

A brother's pleasures and a brother's care

No more thy hand administers relief

Nor soothes my woes nor mitigates my grief.

Bayley sought strength and solace thinking of his sister “seated near some cool transparent brook,” reading, gathering hazelnuts, or in simple conversation with “Her wit engaging and her heart sincere.”²⁸

In contrast, daughters appeared vulnerable and needing protection. One tale of shipwreck, a favorite form of literature among sailors, featured the two beautiful daughters of a ship captain. The daughters are both brave and helpless and are last seen seated with the father, waiting for the sinking ship to break up. Perhaps the father could have made it to safety, as several crew members manage to scamper to shore. Knowing that his daughters could not be saved, he did not even try. Instead, as one witness described it, he braced himself for the end, fighting back “the parental tear which then burst into his eye.”²⁹ This sentimentalized portrait of a father unable to save his daughters was meant to pull on the heartstrings of a maritime readership fully aware of the power of nature and the limits of paternal protection for innocent daughters. It may have also subtly suggested the high cost such paternal care could entail.

When sailors turned their thoughts to their sweethearts or wives they combined both domestic and sexual fantasies. Jack Tar could idolize the woman of his dreams, envisaging a life of familial bliss, while recognizing that his absence created serious difficulties for his shoreside relationships. Although these reflections might be a source of anxiety and remind the sailor of the liberty he has lost by going to sea, they could also be a source of strength for men who not only had to battle the elements, but who also resided in an all-male culture for long periods of time. The temptations confronted by women appeared repeatedly in stories, songs, and stage productions of the loyal sweet-heart awaiting her sailor love's return. Within this context the sweetheart was the true sexual object of the sailor threatened by others. This idealized vision of honest womanhood contrasted with William Widger's subconscious fears. Josiah Cobb reported that while sailor prisoners in Dartmoor during the War of 1812 passed hour after hour spinning yarns for each other, one of the favorite topics was the sweetheart left at home.³⁰ Joseph Valpey noted in his Dartmoor journal that he spent an “afternoon amongst My Friends in talking About the Salem Girls,” and several of the poems he penned centered on his absent love.³¹ The same concerns appeared in songs and chanteys.³² One tune, found in the journal of Timothy Conner from his incarceration in Forton Prison during the Revolutionary War, highlighted the girlfriend's loyalty.

The song was in response to Polly's wish that the war be over. The sailor declares:

You true hearted women wherever you be Pray

take my advice and be arited [a righted] by me

Be true to your sweethearts and when they come home

Then you'll live as happy as Darby and Jone.³³

Sailor songs from the 1790s and early 1800s repeated this theme several times. Henry goes off to sea and his beloved Sally patiently waits for him. Sometimes he returns and they are married. Sometimes he perishes at sea, and forlorn she looks out across the ocean, withers, and dies. Often, the sailor is sustained through all kinds of peril merely by thinking of his sweetheart waiting at home.³⁴ In Charles Dibden's “The Taken,” Jack survives one ordeal after another, comforted by the tobacco box his Nancy provided him. Inside the box cover appear the words “If you loves I as I loves you, no pair so happy as we two.” In the end he returns to his Nancy.³⁵ In the standard version of “The Maid I Left Behind,” the singer remains loyal to his first love even though he travels the world over and sees exotic and rich women in several countries:

‘Mongst all my many ramblings

My heart it still is pure,

The witchery of hundreds

It unchanging did endure;

For amidst the flash of foreign eyes

I never yet could find

One who could my affections wean

From her I left behind.³⁶

Several of these songs were written for the stage and for a popular audience, including sailors.³⁷ Plays, too, often turned to the image of the female sweetheart remaining true to her absent sailor beau. In The Purse; or Benevolent Tar by J. C. Cross, the sailor's wife is pressured by a rich aristocrat, resists, and is rewarded when her husband returns to save her and her son from the clutches of the evil would-be suitor.³⁸ Isaac Bickerstaff's Thomas and Sally: Or, The Sailor's Return follows a similar outline, but also includes some revealing images of women. Sally is first seen sitting by a spinning wheel, representing domesticity and female industry. She and Thomas pledge mutual love to one another, then he is off to sea. Later, when Sally is again engaged in female industry (she is carrying a milk bucket), a rich squire offers her money, clothes, and promises if he can have his way with her. The squire is about to force himself on her when Thomas appears and rescues Sally.³⁹

The resolution of such difficulties followed an idealized goal, especially in the nineteenth century, of domestic bliss. The happy couple in “The Dark-Eyed Sailor” marries after Mary passes a test of her faithfulness to her William in disguise. The song concludes:

In a cottage neat by the river side

It's William and Mary they do reside

So girls prove true while your lovers are away

For a cloudy morning oft brings a pleasant day.⁴⁰

Similar images of domestic tranquility appear in the carvings of whalemen on scrimshaw. Typically the husband and wife gather around a comfortable chair, surrounded by children. In the background is a window with a ship in the harbor. Sometimes the carving portrayed a parting scene. Other times it represented an ideal of an ongoing domestic arrangement in which all relished one another's company. Such images may well have been simply the musings of a husband absent for years who wanted to present his wife with a token of his affection upon his return. They also reflect one aspect of women in the mind of the sailor.⁴¹

Seafarers could celebrate the virtues of married life, especially in contrast to more ephemeral liaisons. John Baker wrote a poem in his journal declaring, “I am Marry'd and happy with wonder.” He chided “rovers and rakes…who laugh at the mention of conjugal bliss.” Baker believed that only in marriage could “permanent pleasure be found,” in contrast to “the joys of lawless connection” which were “fugitive and never secure.” Such relationships were “Oft stolen in haste or snatched by surprise” and troubled by “doubts and fears.” Men with a “mistress ye hire” were “misled by a false flattering fire” that threatens their destruction. Baker believed it was far better to be married, and he concluded his poem:

If ye ask me from whence my felicity flows

My answer is short—from a wife

Who for cheerfulness sense and good nature I Chose

Which are beauties that charm us for life

7. Scrimshaw often idealized the home and family and was likely intended as a present to a loved one when the sailor returned from his voyage. “Domestic Happiness.” Kendall Whaling Museum.

To make home the mat of perpetual delight

Every hour each studies to seize

And we find ourselves happy from morning to night

By our mutual endeavours to please.⁴²

Sentimental attachment to domesticity and praise for marital bliss formed only one small component of the sailor's portrayal of women. Jack Tar may have regretted the loss of relationships at home while aboard ship and extolled the virtues of mother, sister, daughter, and wife. But he also relished the liberty he gained by going to sea and the liberties he took with women along the waterfront. The braggadocio with which he expressed his heterosexuality became a crucial aspect of his manhood and gender identity. What emerges out of the various chanteys and sailor songs, as well as illustrations on scrimshaw and sea journals, is a vision of women that runs the gamut from the idealized sweetheart to the lusty maid eager for some fun to the harlot willing to sleep with Jack for a little quick change.

Some songs, like “When Seated with Sal,” simply describe drinking and dancing with girlfriends and wives, having a grand time while briefly on liberty ashore. Prince Hoare's “The Sailor Boy” was written in this spirit. The sailor flirts with two girls, Poll and Nan, declaring, “Say shall we kiss and toy” while assuring them, “I goes to Sea no more.” Yet his refrain seems to say the opposite: “O I'm the Sailor Boy, A Capering a shore.”⁴³ This theme also appeared in sailor journals. The author of the logbook of the General Wolfe copied a bawdy poem in which the sailor attempted to seduce a young woman. The girl sees through the sailor, telling him, “You have a Longing Desire to insnare a maid, for when you have had your will with Me, than from me you shall go.” The tar responded, “Don't you say so My Charming pretty Maid, for I will never leave thee, so never be afraid.” The author knew such protests were untrue.⁴⁴ Frances Boardman copied a similar ditty in his journal in 1767 in which a ship carpenter seduces “Moley” with promises of marriage driven by “too lude desire.” Not only does he not keep his pledge of fidelity, but before he goes to sea again he murders the young woman.⁴⁵ “Jack in His Element” emphasized the lack of fidelity on the part of the sailor and implies that women were objects of sexual gratification:

I have a spanking wife at Portsmouth gates,

A pigmy at Goree,

An orange tawney up the Straights,

A black at St. Lucie,

Thus whatever course we bend,

We lead a jovial life,

At every mess we find a friend,

At every port a wife.⁴⁶

In a more bawdy vein, Timothy Conner copied several songs in his journal that focused on sexual gratification and mocked main stream morality.

When I was a prentice in my youth,

I pleased my mistress to the trouth;

I pleas'd my mistress every night,

And cuckold my master out of his sight.

Sailors no doubt enjoyed the idea of violating the marriage bed when some one else's wife was involved. They often assumed that every woman was a potential sexual target. In another song from Conner's journal, a young man arrives in town only to be met by two prostitutes, one of whom renders him her services. “The job being over he tips her the coin / She tips him the pox in the hight of his prime.” The verse shows that sailors could laugh at themselves and the price of their sexual encounters. With complete aplomb, the young man decides

Now baby being pox't he solemnly swore

He'd pox the whole village in spite of that whore

For he knew that the women would coucle [cuckold] the Men

Now dam them I'll pox all if I can.⁴⁷

Taking liberties with another man's wife could also lead to trouble, as one version of the chantey “A-Roving” makes clear. The sailor describes his advances on an Amsterdam maid:

And then I took her lily-white hand

In mine as we walked down the strand.

I put my hand around her waist

And snatched a kiss from her lips in haste.

Then a great big Dutchman rammed my bow,

And said, “Young man, dis bin mein frow.”

Then take a warning, boys, from me,

With other men's wives don't get too free.⁴⁸

Scrimshaw representations of this more sordid side of gender relationships are not as numerous. The Nantucket Historical Association has one piece that has a properly dressed woman on one side and a partially clad woman on a couch and in the arms of a man on the other. The woman in the more risqué engraving is succumbing to the man as the verse attached makes clear:

An easy yielding maid,

By trusting is undone;

Our sex is oft betrayed,

By granting love too soon.

If you desire to gain me,

Your sufferings to redress;

She said, o kiss me longer,

Before you shall possess.

But his kiss was so sweet, and so closely prest

That I languish'd and pin'd till I granted the rest.⁴⁹

Seamen's journals sometimes contain interesting depictions of shore life, including dancing girls.⁵⁰ Alfred Terry decorated the front of his log with an alluring picture of a Mrs. N. H. Chamberlin, with “27 South Hudson Street” scrawled below the naked torso. Although the exact date and circumstances of the drawing are unknown, Terry was deeply smitten with her charms.⁵¹ And throughout the period under study here, a few books contain Hogarthian scenes of women with ample breasts bulging from low-cut bodices in close proximity to Jack Tars.⁵²

Sailors may have approached the subject of loose women with a certain degree of equanimity, but they could also view women as evil, out to take Jack for everything he was worth. Joseph G. Clark explained that the waterfront was rife with women seeking to lead a sailor astray for his money. “Degraded and unprincipled females, by feigned smiles and hypocritical and special graces” attracted the favor of a seaman, “extorting from him valuable presents, or otherwise making large draughts upon his funds.” These women used men up, “relinquishing their victim only when the last dollar is transferred to their hands.” At that point, they dumped the sailor “without even an apology or its equivalent.”⁵³ This type of woman enticed young Horace Lane into a life of dissipation.

Although the image of the woman as exploiter appears in the eighteenth century, it may have become more poignant in the nineteenth century with greater urbanization and a perception that cities harbored many opportunities for sin. Stuart Frank, for example, argues that most eighteenth-century sailor ballads placed the seaman ashore in the midst of bucolic splendor courting a milkmaid or some other rural lass. In the nineteenth century, however, increasingly Jack Tar appeared in cities enticed by women aiming to take advantage of the sailor.⁵⁴

The sailor's attitude toward his exploitation by women was mixed. Whaler Ezra Goodnough repeatedly described how at Mahe in the Indian Ocean he and his shipmates went “to see the ladies and it was a great time among the women.” He referred to the prostitutes as “our sweethearts” and his own special girl as “my wife.” His expectations of this relationship were pragmatic. He explained that he had to get his girl a new dress when he returned to Mahe because “if I do not get her a new dress she will not remember me.” Although the women in Mahe had to be paid to remember, “that is more than the girls at home do” since “they will not think of a poor Devil either for love or money.” From this perspective Goodnough asserted, “there is plenty of girls i can get that are not particular wether they are married or not” and concluded “them are the ones for me[.] they are the comforts of life.”⁵⁵ Goodnough was not alone in this approach to women. In the song “Sailor's Money” the tar willingly allows his landlady and her daughter to take his last penny—suggesting that the money was nowhere near as important to him as the pleasures it purchased.⁵⁶ Songs like “New York Girls” and “Charming Jane Louisa” are “played for laughs, with self-deprecating, first-person humor” in which the sailor mocks his own gullibility.⁵⁷ Horace Lane actually fell in love with one of the girls he met in French Johnny's. When he returned to port some time later, he discovered that “she learned to drink and swear and died wretched in Philadelphia.”⁵⁸ In the song “Jack's Revenge” the sailor outsmarts the woman concerned only with profit. The sailor returns to his Kitty, pretending to be broke and down on his luck. Kitty tells him, “Begone from my sight, now you've spent all your money.” The sailor, of course, shows her his bag full of money and leaves, despite her cries that she really loves him.⁵⁹

8. Alfred Terry must have been captivated by the charms of Mrs. N. H. Chamberlin when in New York. The opening page of Terry's journal kept in the South Pacific contains this drawing. Interestingly, there is almost a Polynesian look to the depiction of this New York woman. “Mrs. N. H. Chamberlin.” Alfred Terry, Journal from the whaleship Vesper, 1842–1848. Mystic Seaport.

The odd combination of images that may have played in the sailor's mind is suggested by the frequent reference to the madam of a bordello with the word “mother.”⁶⁰ Of course this practice was not limited to the waterfront, and no doubt was in part based on the fact that such women were usually older than the employees rendering sexual favors. The irony was not lost upon waterfront customers. Moreover, the mobile maritime population sought out women who could provide services and fulfill some functions of being a mother, offering comfort and a bed, even if that included behavior not associated with more sentimental depictions of motherhood. The peculiar waterfront orientation of the mother label with houses of prostitution is suggested by the tongue-in-cheek reportage of an anti-prostitution riot in New York City in 1793. One newspaper proclaimed that the mob had attacked “Mother Carey's nest of CHICKENS” during the riot. Everyone in a port like New York would understand the joke; Mother Carey may have been the name of the keeper of this house of ill repute, but Mother Carey's chicken was also the common name of a sea petrel sighted on every cruise in the Atlantic.⁶¹

Although sailors could joke about their relationships with women ashore, there was also a dark side. A sailor could go to sea to escape from women who sought to control him. In this case going to sea meant liberty from tiresome shoreside attachments. The sailor sometimes viewed a wife as a tyrant who henpecked her husband, preventing him from enjoying himself. John Palmer copied a song into his Revolutionary War journal that claimed that a man who was married may as well be hanged because “His Wife at his Elbow Like an Emperor will Stand,” ordering him about. A wife needed constant praise and presents. Moreover, women would not allow the sailor to spend his money and go to the tavern to drink with his shipmates. This ballad Palmer labeled a “true song” and concluded:

So a Bachelors Life I Do think is the Best

be him Drunk or be him Sober he may take his Rest

No Wife to Controle him Nor Children to Cry

O Happy is the man Who A Bachelor Dies.⁶²

Going to sea also allowed a man to escape from a woman who would eventually betray him. Ultimately this view of women gave vent to expressions of misogyny. Charles Babcock wrote his brother Henry that his girlfriend was not to be trusted. Charles went on to exclaim that no woman could be trusted out of the man's sight for more than a week.⁶³ In a similar vein, Ebenezer Clinton copied the following lines on the inside cover of a journal:

Mankind from Adam have Been Woman's fools

Women from Eve have Been the Devil's tools

Heaven might have spar'd one torment when we fell

Not Left us Women or not threaten'd Hell.⁶⁴

Nathaniel Ames had contempt for all women. He commented despairingly about the “Wapping landladies and sailor's wives” who came aboard ships in London. Such women were not to be trusted and were searched “in the most indecent manner” both upon coming aboard, for fear they were smuggling liquor, and upon leaving, for fear that they were stealing. Ames, who wrote his book to provide an unadulterated account of what it meant to be a sailor, also explained (wrongly) that most sailors do not marry because of the “proverbial infidelity of sailors’ wives.”⁶⁵

Richard Henry Dana, Jr., offered a similar understanding of the seaman's view of women, focusing on the woman who married the sailor to obtain as much money as she could and, as soon as the tar set out on his next voyage, abandoned him. Dana described the despondency of “Chips,” the carpenter, when the Pilgrim received a mail delivery and there was no letter from his wife, whom he had married just before leaving Boston. “Sails,” the sailmaker, tried to comfort him by telling him he was “a bloody fool to give up his grub for any woman's daughter.” Dana did not leave this negative portrait here; he went on to have Sails describe his own ill-conceived marriage. Sails had just been paid off with five hundred dollars from a Pacific voyage—a small fortune—rented a four-room apartment for his new wife—which was spacious beyond belief for a nineteenth-century working man—packed it full of furniture, and provided half pay in his absence for his next voyage. When he returned she was “'off, like Bob's horse, with nobody to pay the reckoning;’ furniture gone,—flag-bottomed chairs and all;—and with it his ‘long togs,’ the half-pay, his beaver hat, white linen shirts, and everything else.” Sails concluded with advice to Chips, telling him to “cheer up like a man, and take some hot grub! Don't be made a fool of by anything in petticoats! As for your wife, you'll never see her again; she was ‘up keeleg and off’ before you were outside of Cape Cod.”⁶⁶

The hazy boundary separating the various images of women in sailors’ minds is suggested when Joshua Penny self-mockingly related how sailors go ashore and play the gentleman while their money lasted. Two such tars passed by a window where two “ladies” were sitting. One lady turned to the other and, in a voice intended to be overheard by the sailors, dismissively declared, “There goes two sailors, gentlemen for a week.” Without missing a beat, one of the sailors turns to the other and says “Yes .. . and there sits two strumpets for life.”⁶⁷ Perhaps the women mocked the pretensions of the seamen because they resented both the sailors’ independence and their rejection of values that would have kept them closer to hearth, home, and female companionship. The sailors, not surprisingly for men who had been out at sea in a largely male fraternity, focused on the sexuality of the “strumpets.” The women were not identified; they may have been prostitutes, or wives or sweethearts of men on the waterfront, or from a higher class. To Penny it almost did not matter. From Jack's cynical perspective, all women were captives to their sexuality and whatever relationships that entailed.

The interplay of these various images of women also appears in the sailor's approach to the exotic native. Here was the innocent child, trusting caretaker, carnal object, and sexual exploiter rolled up in one. The exotic female had long played a prominent role in travel and adventure literature. Captain John Smith, after having been rescued by other princesses, was saved by Pocahontas. Sailors had similar tales. In the Sumatran wilderness in 1780 escaped prisoner of war John Blatchford stumbled across a nearly naked girl who led him to safety.⁶⁸ The mulatto seaman Robert Adams reported sleeping with the wife of his Muslim master while held in Saharan Africa.⁶⁹ In a light-hearted song published in 1817, an unfaithfulship carpenter promised to be true to his wife, Sue, only to lay with an Indian woman as soon as he joined Perry on the Great Lakes.⁷⁰

What really caught the maritime imagination was the South Pacific. After the first British and American vessels visiting the South Pacific reported naked women swimming out to vessels and having sex with any man who wanted it, and taking in payment the most trifling product of the industrialized world, sailors became enthralled with the notion that the South Sea islands were some sort of paradise. The story of the mutiny aboard the Bounty resonated for seamen throughout the first half of the nineteenth century in part because of the sexual encounters between the crew and Polynesian women.⁷¹ Alfred Terry aboard the whaleship Vesper was struck by the looseness and cupidity of the women on Easter Island who boarded the vessel for the crew's sexual pleasure. His description of the women, while not exactly romantic, was certainly graphic. He wrote that the women were naked except for “a strip of bark around their wastes and a bunch of leaves in their crotch.”⁷² William Clarke thought the women on Tahiti were “salacious” and said that in order to obtain “luxuries they never dreamed of when in their natural state,” the men “will prostitute their daughters and even their wives for a dollar.”⁷³ The many portrayals of Polynesian women on scrimshaw depict a more attractive native than Terry and Clarke would have us think. The allure of the South Sea maiden also appeared in the Yankee ballad “The Lass of Mohee,” in which the native girl invites the sailor into her hut and tries, unsuccessfully, to convince him to remain with her when his ship is ready to sail.⁷⁴ Herman Melville built his reputation as a writer by describing his experience on Typee in the Marquesas. The women not only were mostly naked, but they had a childish approach to the world that combined sexual curiosity with a desire to please. The girls who surrounded him when he first arrived were “unsophisticated young creatures” and “void of artificial restraint.” They were “wonderfully polite and humane; fanning aside the insects that occasionally lighted on our brows; presenting us with food; and compassionately” regarded Melville in his afflictions. Their “prying inquisitiveness” unnerved Melville, who confessed that “in spite of all their blandishments, my feelings of propriety were exceedingly shocked, for I could not but consider them as having overstepped the due limits of female decorum.” Melville was beside himself in describing the incredible natural beauty of his own personal favorite, the lovely Fayaway, who “for the most part clung to the primitive and summer garb of Eden.” In the South Pacific native woman, the sailor found all that he imagined any female could be; a child to be taught and protected, a mother and sister to nurse him, a sweetheart to idealize, and a sexual object to gratify his desires.⁷⁵

The reality behind the various images of women and the persona of the handsome sailor is complex and multifaceted. A sailor's liberty confronted women with difficult choices. Women left alone on shore sometimes sought solace in another man's arms. Men also turned to other women in some instances. Both males and females also engaged in more long-lasting relationships. Moreover, women learned to depend upon one another in a variety of ways. Finally, life on the waterfront sometimes reflected the sailor's gendered image of women and sometimes not. Users and takers could be men or women. There were also relationships based upon mutual love and appreciation.

The family remained important to many seamen.⁷⁶ The poignancy of William Widger's dream attests to his attachment to his family, despite his fears. Throughout his stay in Mill Prison, Widger wrote to his wife and received letters from her in turn. Others at Mill Prison had similar experiences. William Russell, held as a prisoner during the Revolutionary War, dreamed of his wife, declaring in November 1781 that “Would to God, I could in a Dream be sent into the arms of my beloved and adored Wife.”⁷⁷ Jonathan Deakins wrote to his “Loving Wife” in 1782 to inform her he was still alive, but admitted that knowing her low circumstances back in Marble-head made him even more miserable. He signed the letter: “I remain your Loving husband Till Death.”⁷⁸ John Mitchell, the American agent for prisoners of war in Halifax in 1814, received several letters from men captured by the British who petitioned for special permission to return home to take care of a sick or needy wife and family.⁷⁹

Scrimshaw images reinforce the impression of how important the family was to men at sea. The whaler scrimshander, or carver, often portrayed domestic scenes. He also etched in the outlines of women based on the latest fashions from Godey's Lady's Book, a domesticated and refined ideal of womanhood that was often absent from his life. Perhaps more important, the scrimshander created a variety of implements to be used in the home, including elaborate pie crimpers and swifts used to hold yarn in the absence of the husband's helping hands. Similarly, scrimshanders decorated busks to be inserted into corsets, holding in the woman's waist and shaping her breasts, as an intimate gift to their loved ones. It was as if the whaleman who carved and crafted whalebone while absent for years at a time hoped to recapture a lost world of domesticity by creating an offering for the women in their lives to be used in female work, or even fashioning the female body.

Relationships between men and women could be sustained over long periods of time, in part through exchanges of letters.⁸⁰ Jacob Ball and Mary Timbrell started writing each other before they were married when he was a second mate. Their letters concerned mainly family and their daily activities. Jacob reported on his voyages, describing where he was to sail and under what circumstances. Once they were married Mary wrote of the purchases she made, money she obtained from the shipowner or the sale of items Jacob sent to her. She told him of the health of the children and other family news.⁸¹ Similarly, the correspondence between Elizabeth Hodgdon and Nathan J. Coleman began before and continued after they were married. Coleman sailed out of Boston as a mate on relatively predictable Atlantic voyages. Their letters included expressions of love as well as pragmatic matters. Elizabeth lived in Rochester, New Hampshire, before and after marriage. She also ran a school to support herself when her husband was at sea, earning about $14 a month.⁸² Cynthia Sprague and John Congdon each kept a journal to record their innermost thoughts, from his days as a second mate until she joined him on his voyages when he captained his own vessels.⁸³

9. Whalers often traced their scrimshaw designs from magazines. These matching whale teeth depict two women in the latest finery, clothes that most women on the waterfront were not likely able to own. “Two women in finery.” Kendall Whaling Museum.

10. Making whalebone busks, to be inserted into the front of a woman's dress to hold and form her breasts, was another type of scrimshaw. The relatively primitive illustrations on this busk show a woman sitting at a desk, no doubt writing to the absent sailor below. The ship is placed in between the two, symbolizing the reason for their separation. Scrimshaw from the Hinsdale Collection. New Bedford Whaling Museum.

The intricate web of relationships between siblings and across generations often appears in this type of correspondence indicating that whatever transpired between a sailor and his romantic attachment ashore often fit into a larger complex of family relationships. Elizabeth Hodgdon wrote to her sister, Sarah, describing the death of a sailor who fell from the rigging at sea. The sailor had been an orphan raised in the Hodgdon household and may have been betrothed to Sarah since she wrote to Elizabeth shortly thereafter describing her despondency over the loss of her loved one, and expressing her hope that Elizabeth would never suffer a similar loss. In a less tragic vein, it is Elizabeth's job even before her wedding to write to Nathan's parents to inform them of his plans for his next voyage.⁸⁴ Elizabeth Hammond, like her sailor brothers, moved from the family farm to seek employment in New Bedford. There, she met and married a sailor. We are left to wonder at the circumstances of this romance, but she did write to her parents asking them, on three days notice, to drop everything and attend the wedding ceremony before her betrothed sailed on a new voyage.⁸⁵

In other words, relationships between males and females were seldom in isolation from the world around them. In some instances, such as for officers and captains in the whaling industry of the mid nineteenth century, agents of the ship owners even came into play. Although shipping agents occasionally assisted foremast men and their families, their main concern was aiding the trusted officers who protected their investment. These businessmen therefore repeatedly paid advances to wives and even parents who needed economic assistance. One shipping agent, in an effort to convince a captain to extend a cruise, even promised to keep potential beaus away from the captain's fiancée. The U.S. Navy regularized the policy of allowing seamen to allot half their pay to their wives. This practice extended in some instances to the regular merchant marine if Dana's account of Chips is to be believed.⁸⁶

Officers and captains, however, had many advantages in their ability to protect their wives and families. They had greater economic wherewithal and more job security, and starting in the late eighteenth century captains formed marine societies in most ports. These organizations assisted them if and when they became incapacitated and provided for their widows and families in the event that they should die. Captains thus consciously developed a larger sense of community to help insulate their families from economic disaster as they confronted the hazards of their trade.⁸⁷

Further down in society, poor workers along the waterfront had fewer options. Yet here, too, contrary to stereotypes, men and women struggled to sustain relationships over long periods of time.⁸⁸ African Americans turned to the sea after the American Revolution to provide for their families and establish stable households. The pressures of the marketplace, and the poor wages earned by sailors, made this goal increasingly difficult to achieve. After 1830, most blacks with permanent families either sought to keep closer to shore through coasting (sailing on short voyages between various ports on the American seaboard), or obtained maritime-oriented employment on the waterfront.⁸⁹

White sailors faced many of the same difficulties. The Reverend Thomas Tuckerman, a missionary to Boston's poor, kept a record of some of his visits to families in 1826. In brief vignettes, we can see husbands and wives working in and around the waterfront striving to make ends meet. Mr. and Mrs. Hutchings, both twenty-six years old, lived in a cellar in Friends Street. He supported his wife and two young children by digging mud from under the docks. The Grangers were in their thirties and had met two or three years earlier in Nantucket when he was a sailor. They moved to Boston, where he found work as a carpenter. Forty-year-old Mr. Hobson, a mackerel catcher who lived on Ann Street in Boston's North End, may have married a younger woman, for the couple had two children under the age of two. These couples appeared to be getting by. Others were not. James Cooke had been to sea for half of his twenty-eight years. After falling from a mast the previous spring and breaking his leg, he was unable to work. During his confinement his lungs started to go bad and he did not expect to live long. He and his wife had two children, a two-year-old and an infant. The future looked bleak for Mrs. Cooke. She might soon be confronted with supporting herself as did Mrs. Wilson on South Russel Street. Wilson's ropemaker husband had been “broken by intemperance.” He entered the House of Industry—a kind of poor-house—and she supported her large family by doing washing.⁹⁰

Tuckerman detailed the occupation of the female only if she were the main breadwinner. In all likelihood, the wife in each of these families played a more significant economic role than Tuckerman's silence would indicate. Ashley Bowen, for example, worked as a fisherman, rigger, and seaman in Marble-head for several decades. Romance was not absent from his life; he had seen his future wife in a dream even before they met and could recognize her because she had five moles on her cheek. Regardless of her appearance, she was a worker. As Bowen labored away on the rigging of a fishing vessel, his wife Dorothy patiently sewed “colors” (flags) for his customers. When Dorothy died in August 1771, Bowen did not waste much time in finding a replacement. By November he had found himself a widow, had her property appraised, whitewashed his house, took his former wife's chest to his father's place, and moved the widow's goods to his house. On December 8 he was married, and then it was back to work for Bowen and, we assume, his new wife.⁹¹

The economic role of women can also be seen by their acting as deputy husband in the absence of their spouse.⁹² Lydia Hill Almy lived independently during her husband's absence in the late 1790s, taking in boarders, settling accounts, and telling her father-in-law that it was none of his business how much money his son had left with her.⁹³ Several sailors in 1812 signed over future privateering gains to their wives.⁹⁴ Mary Ball worked hard to manage the family's affairs when her husband was at sea. Fisherman Richard Pedrick gave his wife a power of attorney to collect dividends in 1810.⁹⁵ Two Marblehead women decided to split their sons’ or husbands’ prize money from two separate voyages.⁹⁶ Joseph Hart's fictional Miriam Coffin told of a woman who abused her role as a deputy husband.⁹⁷

Most women, however, were often left to their own devices when their husbands or lovers went to sea. This experience was not so much the result of a separate sphere as it was a consequence of a separated sphere—the physical distance from the males of the family.⁹⁸ Many women along the waterfront earned their livings by washing, sewing, cooking, boarding, keeping a store, and even running houses of ill-repute. Some, especially those who were married to officers, retained a degree of independence. Many of these women did not live in opulence, and most had to work just to get by.⁹⁹ In East Greenwich, Rhode Island, Cynthia Sprague and her mother, who was a widow of a ship captain, worked as seamstresses. Often they had so much business that they could hardly keep up with the demand, and Cynthia turned down an offer to work in a factory.¹⁰⁰

Others struggled. Ann Ludlow of Lombard Street in New York had not heard from her husband in over a year in 1805. She managed to eke out a living by taking in washing, sewing, and a few boarders (two sailors and a rigger, with two young women in the upper floor) in her small apartment. She even turned to her father in New Jersey for financial help.¹⁰¹ Circumstances often compelled women into gray areas that left their neighbors wondering. A Mrs. Smith on Ann Street, whose husband was absent at sea, claimed to be making a living as a washerwoman. Others thought differently. George Leonard, a shoemaker who boarded next door, declared, “I have no doubt that it was a house of ill fame,” and felt that since it was a quiet establishment, it “was one of the best sort.” Seaman Jesse Casey, who boarded in the same house as Leonard, said that he visited Smith's three or four times a week when he was lonely. He did not believe it was a house of ill-repute, admitting that if it had been he might well have used her services. Having fallen behind in the rent, and under the accusation that she ran a house of prostitution, Smith was evicted.¹⁰²

Many women faced hardship from a variety of causes, ranging from the difficulty making a living, the absence or loss of their spouse, or simply strains in their relationships. Thomas Gregory maintained contact with his wife while sailing for as long as fourteen months at a time. At one point his wife was ill, he got into debt, and he signed unto a voyage to Canton, China. His wife had to leave New York and stay with relatives in Norwalk, Connecticut. After he agreed to sail to the Orient four years later, Gregory explained that his wife “has anger herself quite sick” over the decision.¹⁰³ June Hammond went through three Marblehead husbands; the first two were lost at sea when she was relatively young.¹⁰⁴ Other circumstances could bring hardship to a family. The Eaton household in Brooklyn faced a crisis in 1840 because the father “drinks and wont work” and the mother “supports herself with one child and the 2 others live out.”¹⁰⁵ Several women in Providence brought sick or disabled sailor husbands, sons, lovers, and boarders to the Marine Hospital.¹⁰⁶

When confronted with adversity women often turned to one another for solace, comfort, and companionship.¹⁰⁷ Cynthia Sprague was disconsolate when John Congdon went to sea in 1841. Their exact relationship is unclear, although they had obviously discussed marriage. As soon as Congden left she reported in her journal that she was “too overwrought with emotion” and her eyes were full of tears. She cried for days. In this trying period immediately following separation, she found her greatest relief in talks with Susan Salisbury, whom Cynthia declared “feels for and sympathizes with me like an affectionate sister.” Over the next year or so Cynthia and Susan visited each other almost daily, often staying at each other's houses and like sisters sharing the same bed. Cynthia also found support from the wife of one sailor who “knew how to sympathize with me” and told her the separation would be easier once she was married. A few months later Cynthia had the opportunity of reciprocating within the larger community of maritime women. She was asked to take her turn sitting up the night with a sick child. Although she was not feeling well, she joined the vigil, confiding, “but it is a Sailor's child, how could I say no.” She shared her duties that night with a married woman, probably a sailor's wife, and even participated in preparing the child's body for a funeral when it died several days later.¹⁰⁸

The same bonds of community also operated in larger ports. The Reverend Henry Chase visited families all along the New York waterfront in the 1820s. In this intricately bound community, many religious women interacted with each another. His visit at Mr. Smith's at 96 Henry Street provides some suggestion of the network of support shared by waterfront women. Upon his first visit, triggered in part by Mrs. Smith and a Mrs. Wood attending the Mariner's Church, he discovered Mr. Smith was at sea, and was expected home soon. Mrs. Wood, whose father and husband had been lost at sea was at the Smith residence which was down the block from her own house and across the street from her mother's. (Wood may have been there to help because Mrs. Smith's invalid mother lived with her.) The next visit was more dramatic. Unfavorable news had arrived from Smith's ship, and they feared he was lost. Consoling Mrs. Smith was a Mrs. Conner, from nearby Harmon Street, who also attended the Mariner's Church and whose husband had perished off Cape Cod the year before. Through Chase's diary we can see women striving to maintain connections with their loved ones, and, in the case of Mrs. Smith, turning to other women in similar situations to sustain themselves.¹⁰⁹

Many of the women Chase visited were mothers as well as wives. After Chase offered his sympathies to Mrs. Smith, he crossed the street to find Mrs. Wood at her mother's. Apparently they were anxious, prompting Chase to commented in his diary: “Son of Mrs. Head [Wood's mother] just going to sea.”¹¹⁰ Several other women he visited had sons preparing for voyages. The main relationship that most seamen would have with a female before they went to sea was with their mothers. This close bond is evident in the fact that several young men on privateers signed over their share of future prize money to their mothers.¹¹¹ It was also not unusual for a sailor to recall his mother with fondness as he was about to die. Despite living what he described as a “profligate and dark life,” Richard Sheel thought of the Methodism of his mother as he confronted death at the Marine Hospital in New York City in 1837.¹¹²

Mrs. Wood's concern for her brother, after she had lost a husband and a father, suggests a genuine attachment between a sister and a maritime brother, as expressed in the Bayley letter to his sister Lavina. That some sisters viewed their mariner brothers with maternal affection can be seen in a poem by William Alfred Allen's sister after he died at sea in 1849.

There perished my poor child

Upon the ocean deep,

While moaning winds above him

Their constant vigils keep.

Farewell, then, child of sorrow

Thy grave is in the sea,

But long shall live thy virtues

Enshrined in memory.

The poem is simply signed RA, and only the note attached to the document makes it clear that this is a sister's and not a mother's lament.¹¹³

The image of the helpless daughter at sea was mainly myth, for daughters, like most women, remained on shore. The real danger for young girls on the waterfront was from sexual exploitation. Lanah Sawyer, the daughter of a sea-man, was seduced by a self-proclaimed gentleman who met her in the streets. He brought her to a house of ill-repute, Mother Carey's nest of Chickens, and spent the night with her. The defense lawyers not only brought Sawyer's morals into question, but also attacked all girls of her class. They argued that the only reason a well-dressed man would express interest in a sewing girl was for sex. Lanah's father was “well known amongst the seafaring People” and shortly after the jury acquitted the seducer, a riot broke out that led to the destruction of several houses of prostitution.¹¹⁴

Young women like Lanah Sawyer probably saw their behavior differently from the image portrayed by the defense lawyers in 1793. Yes, their station in life brought them out into the streets. And a young woman might even flirt with a man, whether he was a gentleman who deigned to pay her some attention, or a sailor with money in his pocket to buy a small favor or take her on a carriage ride. Like their male counterparts, many of these girls sought some liberty and autonomy in a world marked by dependence, especially female dependence, while also seeking some enjoyment and pleasure. Fifteen-year-old Margaret Graham was just such a girl in the summer of 1805. Her father, Archibald Graham, had knocked down a Portuguese sailor who had grabbed Margaret on the street. A few days later the Portuguese sailor sought revenge, stabbing and killing Archibald in a second brawl. The night of her father's murder, Margaret was in the company of other young women her age visiting waterfront houses with “fiddling and dancing.”¹¹⁵

The boundary between this type of activity and prostitution was often vague. The playful Moll of popular song and the sailor's imagination may have been a Margaret Graham eager for some music and excitement. She might also be a young woman willing to exchange sexual favors ranging from a kiss to sexual intercourse for a treat. From the perspective of Archibald Graham, a rigger who knew all too well the dangers of the waterfront for a young girl, this was precisely what he feared. Ironically, his death may well have propelled Margaret in the very direction he had hoped to avoid. The greatest predictor of prostitution was the death of a parent, especially of the father.¹¹⁶

Unfortunately, the record betrays only brief glimpses of women like Margaret Graham. We do know that economic circumstances, women's work paid barely a living wage, convinced many women to take advantage of the market for commercial sex. The reformer's portrait of a prostitute as a young woman entrapped in a form of bondage brought to an early grave through dissipation and disease is not accurate. There were varying degrees of prostitution. Some was casual and viewed as an occasional supplement to meager wages. Some was more continual and professional. As such, it might lead to economic security, or a more sordid life, or it might be abandoned for marriage or another occupation.¹¹⁷

Sailors availed themselves of the prostitutes that worked the waterfront. New York's poorest and most competitive brothels sprang up along Water Street and Corlear's Hook.¹¹⁸ Wherever the haunts of sailors, whether Fell's Point in Baltimore, or Ann Street on Boston's North End, there were sure to be houses of prostitution. There was an interracial component to much of this activity. As a young boy Horace Lane was taken aback by the black dancing girls of one New York waterfront dive.¹¹⁹ In every port there was some mixture of races—black women sleeping with white men and black men sleeping with white women.¹²⁰ While waterfront workers were not the only clients of a city's prostitutes, wherever a sailor went, he sought out practitioners of the world's oldest profession. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., stated that Indian women, even married Indian women, served as prostitutes for sailors in California.¹²¹ William McNally described how in the Mediterranean, in places like Port Mahon, Minorca, prostitutes were allowed aboard American warships.¹²²

There is no easy characterization of waterfront women. Male liberty ashore and at sea placed serious constraints on women's lives. Some women no doubt sold their bodies, while others established stable relationships with men. Some sought the pleasures of the dance hall; others sought solace in religion. Many strove for survival in a tough, competitive world.

From the mid-1700s to the early nineteenth century, however harsh the reality and however varied the experience of women, the waterfront was not immune to the rise of the cult of domesticity. This ideal even reached whalemen who were out in the Pacific for years at a time. The scrimshander aboard a whaler that reeked of boiled blubber, opened the pages of Godeys Lady's Book and traced the outlines of a woman primmed in the latest middle-class fashions on a tooth wrenched from a sperm whale's mouth and polished with shark skin.¹²³ The image of the mother, like that of the sweetheart, gained greater force in the nineteenth century with rise of the sentimentality of the Romantic era. Although middle-class values did not permeate all of the laboring classes, they had some impact. Seafaring became sentimentalized and there was increased concern with the family.¹²⁴ Emiline Fish wrote her husband, Nathan, “with four Babys making known their several claims, and not less than two or three attacht to my elbow,” but she invoked the saccharine ideal of domesticity when she urged him to return so that he could “feel sensibly ‘there is no place like Home.'” He replied with even more sentimentality by wishing “myself at home where I could be employed about the Garden and rock the cradle and do some useful chores.”¹²⁵ The concern with the companionate marriage also became evident with the increase in the number of captains—especially those on long-distance voyages in whalers and clipper ships—who brought their wives aboard.¹²⁶

11. A sailor illustrated his Valentine poem to his love with a couple holding hands. The man's waistjacket, vest, and stance all indicate his maritime profession. The inscription reads: “When I'm far away and landsmen spread their wiley snares / Heed not what these flatterers say, but think on him whom the ocean bears / On one whom when the furious blast tears up and whitens o'er the sea/ High on the yard as quivering Mast, oft heaves a sigh and think on thee. / When gay trm'd sparks around thee swarm, like humming birds round some sweet flower / And praise with purtness evr'y Charm, and oft confess their witty power / Say wilt thou then forget, that youth who scorns all flattery / That youth who boils midst torrid heat, inspite of perils sighs for thee.” “When I am far Away.” Kendall Whaling Museum.

Obviously, only a few couples enjoyed the privilege of going to sea together. There were also limits on how closely real life followed the domestic ideal. Cynthia Congdon felt the reach of these ideals even as she labored as a seamstress in her small seaport town in Rhode Island. In 1841 she tenderly confided to her journal, “last night I dreamed of my absent friend. He returned and I felt the soft kiss of love on my cheek. And heard his endearing voice. This was too much happiness for me to sleep and I awoke and found it was all a dream.”¹²⁷ Like William Widger, Cynthia's understanding of gender roles could also be a source of anxiety. Cynthia was not concerned with infidelity. Instead, this proud and strong woman, who continued to work as a seamstress and be an intricate part of the East Greenwich maritime community, focused on her dependent status. In 1844, after her marriage to John Congdon, Cynthia wrote, “I dreamed that Mr. Wall called to see me and after walking around the room he says to me ‘With the best information I can obtain your Husband is no more.’ Oh said I Mr. Wall! don't tell me so and my great distress waked me with the tear dropping on my cheeks. It affected me so much that I slept no more that night. What shall I do without my Husband. God only knows.”¹²⁸