Reviewed by Joseph F. Cullon | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2

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Reviewed by Joseph F. Cullon | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Joseph F. Cullon, Dartmouth College

Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail. By Daniel Vickers with Vince Walsh. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. 352 pages. $35.00 (cloth).
Historians have long puzzled over why some young men chose life before the mast. Was it, as Samuel Eliot Morison suggested, a spirit of adventure? Did economic desperation push them to accept their berths as part of a seafaring proletariat as Marcus Rediker argued? Did seamen's exaggerated sense of personal liberty drive them from the comforts of home as Paul A. Gilje contended?¹ As different as their conclusions are, these scholars share core premises. First, they treat young seamen as individuals shorn, either by choice or circumstance, from the communities that produced them. Second, they assume that the choice of a seafaring life was so exceptional that it demands special explanation.	1
Daniel Vickers reverses course. He understands seafaring as a normal choice for a young man who grew up within miles of the coast and treats these young seafarers not as fleeing their obligations on land but as serving their families and communities through their work afloat. Vickers also parts company with previous studies by focusing intensely on one port: Salem, Massachusetts. The result is a thorough examination of Salem's sons who took to the sea from 1630 to 1850. In carefully charting their careers as they moved up to the quarterdeck or back to employment on land, Vickers emphasizes the interrelationship between work on land and sea and argues that Salem's seamen remained "rooted as much in the cultural habits and folkways of home as they were in the regimen of life afloat" (4).	2
As with his previous work, Vickers's provocative argument emerges from his mastery of local sources. With the assistance of Vince Walsh, he has assembled data for 10,451 man-voyages out of Salem from 1641 to 1850 and created biographical profiles for 2,620 seamen. Through the sophisticated manipulation of this data, Vickers charts a clear course through Salem's maritime past: its close connection to the fishery, its principal lines of trade, the shifting composition of its merchant fleet, and its labor market. By creating this essential context, Vickers identifies the rhythm and routine that defined much of seafaring life in Salem. Whereas the town boasted a small oceangoing fleet that undertook complicated transatlantic voyages, colonial merchants focused their energies on routes to the West Indies, employing ketches and schooners, which served double-duty as trading and fishing vessels. Thus colonial Salem's young mariners "sailed principally not in the far reaches of distant seas but in waters they knew in routine voyages" (62).	3
In colonial Salem there was never a sharp distinction between maritime and agricultural precincts. Indeed Vickers reveals how much labor on land and water complemented one another, as young men moved between them during their lifetimes. As a result Salem's male community almost literally went to sea together. Vickers discovered a dense network of kinship among mariners. Since shipboard service offered a cash wage that better compensated young men than the bookkeeping barter that characterized portside work, a stint at sea could aid those looking to settle onshore. Others saw in seafaring their main chance. "The most striking feature about Salem-born mariners" that Vickers uncovers "is the high proportion of seafaring men who rose into officer's posts" (112). From 1745 to 1759, 49 percent of all Salem-born seamen became mates and 27 percent became shipmasters. Promotion correlated with local persistence and attachments; young seamen who shipped themselves regularly out of Salem and who deepened their ties to the community through marriage moved up the ranks in their early twenties. Though the Atlantic basin has frequently been portrayed as a fluid international world, in colonial Salem the maritime labor market "remained deeply parochial" (129).	. . .

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