Abstract
Stark reminders of the brutalities of work at sea course through this issue of the International Journal of Maritime History. This is not simply an allusion to the extreme dangers of the human interaction with the marine environment, evidence of which appears daily in news accounts of desperate seaborne migrants, ship losses, yachting tragedies and weather-driven catastrophes in coastal areas. Rather, the physical hazards presented by a remote, hostile environment are merely a backdrop to the primary concern of the contributors to this volume, which is the harsh realities of working according to the market forces that have shaped international seaborne trade and shipping since at least the fifteenth century. During this half millennium, seafarers, shipowners and nation-states have sought in various ways to bolster, resist, distort, adapt to, ignore or mitigate the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. Their various responses feature prominently in the articles that follow.
The short-term crisis that afflicted the shipping and commercial markets in the Atlantic economy in the wake of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1714) provides the context in which John Massey and George Lowther operated. These two comparatively ‘respectable’ individuals, as Joseph Gibbs relates, responded to prevailing and connected high levels of unemployment and low levels of pay in the British shipping industry by seizing a vessel belonging to their employers, the Royal African Company, and embarking on a piratical cruise in the Caribbean. Whether this decision was driven by class consciousness, desperation, rational opportunism or sheer folly is uncertain. In contrast, the state’s counter-response was certain and effective, culminating in the capture, trial and execution of Massey, and the hunting down of Lowther, who committed suicide rather than face the brutalities of the law. Two centuries later, the incidence of war continued to have a profound influence on the functioning of markets, largely through the intervention of states intent on exercising control over sea lanes and cargo carriage. This strategic objective lies at the core of Juan J. Díaz Benítez’s study of Spain’s engagement with, and withdrawal from, the Nazi Etappenorganisation during the Second World War. States were also keenly concerned to mobilise labour resources for their war efforts. While seafarers’ wages tended to rise, they were subject to quasi-military disciplinary codes, and their career options were strictly limited by the strategic priorities of the state. In Britain, during the First World War, relations between seafarers, shipowners and the state were apparently cordial, as the establishment of the National Maritime Board by these three parties in 1917 seemingly indicated. Yet, as John Fisher demonstrates, merchant seamen deployed in privately-owned vessels serving the state as armed merchant cruisers harboured grievances about their wage rates and conditions of service. Choosing to respond through industrial action, seafarers soon found that the Navy was quick to cry ‘mutiny!’ and threaten the complainants and prospective strikers with severe military penalties. In the Second World War, seafarers such as Bill Andersen – a New Zealander who joined the merchant navy when he was eighteen years old –responded to the inequalities propagated by the market system in shipping and beyond by engaging in political activity. In Bill’s case, this was rooted in his reading of Marx and Lenin, which led him to stimulate and organise collective action among his shipmates and join the Communist Party of Great Britain. His radicalisation, as Cybèle Locke explains, elicited a predictably robust response from the state, which resulted in Bill being imprisoned and fined for desertion in the late stages of the war.
In other settings, seafarers sought to protect their interests by developing professional bodies, as Bob Milburn shows in his discussion of the development of marine engineering in Britain during the nineteenth century. Many more seafarers looked to an old friend-cum-foe, alcohol, to ease the physical, emotional and psychological pains arising from spending long periods of time at sea. This unreliable cure, and its negative side-effects, persuaded captains of whaling endeavours to introduce temperance aboard their vessels, as described by Francis Allyn Olmstead in 1841 and analysed in Rodrigo Torres’ research note. Alcohol, moreover, is an addictive palliative-cum-stimulant that seafarers have been known to pass on to their pet animals, as Sari Mäenpää’s reference to the dependence on brandy of ‘Amigo the chimpanzee’– developed while afloat – attests. This anecdote serves as the preamble to a compelling examination of masculinities at sea, which focuses on the role of pets in mitigating the loneliness of the long-distance sailor in the early twentieth century. It transpires that an astonishing variety of animals – the majority sober – have contributed positively to the workings of the shipping industry by providing home comforts to seafarers in their extraordinarily brutal and homosocial working environment.