Reviewed by W. Jeffrey Bolster | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.2

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Reviewed by W. Jeffrey Bolster | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

W. Jeffrey Bolster, University of New Hampshire

Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution. By Paul A. Gilje. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 360 pages. $29.95 (cloth).
Notorious for their unpredictability aboard ship and on the quayside, seamen from the age of sail still have the ability to confound historians. Consider how they have been interpreted. Samuel Eliot Morison claimed in 1921 that wanderlust and a spirit of adventure pulled ambitious young men to sea. More recently Daniel Vickers has explained how and why it was simply normal for young men from coastal towns to find work aboard ship. Margaret Creighton and Lisa Norling have highlighted the centrality of gender to understanding maritime experience, and other scholars, including myself, have pointed to the role of race in shaping American maritime culture. Meanwhile, Marcus Rediker, Jesse Lemish, and others have argued for decades that maritime culture was shaped by a vivid and well-articulated class consciousness. Paul A. Gilje's valiant effort to build on this long tradition of scholarship neither upends its predecessors, nor advances scholars' understanding in significant new directions. But in its ambitious sweep and encyclopedic detail, Gilje's rendering of American maritime culture during the tumultuous century from 1750 to 1850 is unlikely to be surpassed.	1
To his credit Gilje has tried to shift the discussion of seamen's consciousness away from the archly proletarianized model depicted so passionately by scholars such as Lemisch and Rediker. The book's contention, and its conceptual core, is that liberty in many guises is a way to understand what Gilje sees as the largely unchanged world—and worldview—of seamen in the century following 1750. "Sailors were not a proletariat in the making," he writes, "nor were they a peculiar brand of patriot. They were real people who often struggled merely to survive" (6). Fascinated with the occupational subculture seamen created, yet leery of arguments that it cohered primarily around class, Gilje turned to liberty as the key to sailors' values. "My aim has been to examine liberty—and its many costs—in all of its varied meanings for those who lived on the waterfront in the Age of Revolution" (xii). Making the case that liberty was central to maritime culture, Gilje nevertheless found the concept so multivalent that it was difficult to use as a precise analytical category.	2
In the best tradition of social history, the author honors his subjects on their own terms and captures the ambiguities that defined them. In a departure from much social history, however, he eschews quantification. As the entire analysis is textually based, certain categories of questions cannot be posed or answered. Gilje necessarily ignores issues such as individuals' persistence at sea and their promotion (or lack thereof ) to officer's berths, as well as how those issues might have shaped their understanding of liberty.	3
Gilje clearly likes his protagonists, despite their confounding inconsistencies. With an eye for telling anecdotes, he has recovered the signature aspects of Jack Tar's life. The first of the book's three sections opens with a chapter on "The Sweets of Liberty," an examination of the drinking, treating, and whoring that exemplified seamen's forays ashore. Living for the moment, Gilje argues, most sailors understood liberty less in terms of principles or political economy than as a license for self-indulgence. The second chapter, "The Maid I Left Behind Me," explores masculine identity and sexuality as conditioned by the occupational norms of seafaring. Bawdier than other chapters, it is just as thorough: readers encounter wives and strumpets, sentimentality and homoeroticism, prudery, cuckoldry, and domestic tranquility. Part 1 ends with a chapter on work, discipline, and mutiny. Covering fishing schooners and privateers, as well as the navy, merchantmen, and whalers, this chapter includes sections on shipboard hierarchy, sea chanteys, and the grog ration. By the end of part 1, readers have followed labor recruitment, hiring practices, boardinghouse life, wages, women's lot in maritime communities, ethnicity in the workforce, and terrors of the sea. It is a tour de force in its revelation of the texture of seamen's daily life.	. . .

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