| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail. By Daniel Vickers with Vince Walsh. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. xiv, 336 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-300-10067-1.)
The new maritime history of the past quarter century has shifted the focus of much scholarship from ships and the cargoes they carried to the lives of the mariners and of their families ashore. Building on his earlier study, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850 (1994), Daniel Vickers analyzes the lives of mariners who worked out of the port of Salem between the early seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, with nearly half the book focusing on the 1700s.	1
Vickers demonstrates the centrality of maritime activity to the community of Salem and shows that seafaring formed a predictable "stage in the process of growing up" in that society (p. 136). He argues that Salem was set apart from other ports by "its limited size, its home-grown maritime population, and its small-vessel schooner fleet committed both to the cod fishery and West Indian trade" (p. 131). Acknowledging that conditions in Salem differed from those in larger North Atlantic ports such as London, Boston, Amsterdam, and Seville with their "more sharply stratified" societies, he still asserts that Salem "resembled scores of maritime towns on both sides of the [Atlantic Ocean]" (p. 136).	. . .

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