My passion for tales of seafarers and Atlantic history, more generally, emerged from my own wanderlust and love of travel. I’m constantly amazed at how early modern sailors crossed the globe amidst the most pressing challenges imaginable. By reading these sailing histories, with accounts of everything from monsoons to cannibalism, we might not feel quite so inconvenienced by a short flight or train delay! During my academic career, I have had the opportunity to complete research in different parts of Britain. This experience of living transatlantically has transferred to my scholarship and outlook. I hope you find the books on my list as fun and fascinating as I have!
I appreciate this book for bringing the local into the world of Atlantic seafarers. Daniel Vickers is one of the deans of early American social history (he is one of the historians mentioned in the Harvard bar scene in the film Good Will Hunting) and turns his talents here to explain how American seamen were different in the Age of Sail. The simple answer is that they were young. Unlike the long-distance professional seafarers of Europe, sailing in America, especially New England was more of a life stage on the way to other jobs and pursuits.
These sailors were not rootless wanderers forced to go to sea because they were poor; they were rooted in specific communities and filled a necessary role in local economies. As exciting as we find tales of mutiny, scurvy, and shipwrecks, most early American seafarers lived much more stable lives. I find this variation…
Two centuries of American maritime history, in which the Atlantic Ocean remained the great frontier.
Two centuries of American maritime history, in which the Atlantic Ocean remained the great frontier Westward expansion has been the great narrative of the first two centuries of American history, but as historian Daniel Vickers demonstrates here, the horizon extended in all directions. For those who lived along the Atlantic coast, it was the East-and the Atlantic Ocean-that beckoned. While historical and fictional accounts have tended to stress the exceptional circumstances or psychological compulsions that drove men to sea, this book shows how normal a…
Since the publication of my first book in 1988, my emphasis has always been on history as “story.” That is, the stories of men and women in past centuries with whom we share a common humanity but who faced challenges very different from our own. My goal is to bring their stories to as wide an audience as possible. Whether they describe Newfoundland fisherman in the 17th-century North Atlantic, expatriate Irish men and women in 18th-century Bordeaux, or colonial New Yorkers defying British authority on the eve of the American Revolution, the common theme is the impact of trade and the sea on the lives of ordinary people.
The common seaman and the pirate in the age of sail are romantic historical figures who occupy a special place in the popular culture, but they remain little known to us. But their lives are not beyond recovery. Rediker tours the sailor's North Atlantic, following seamen and their ships along the pulsing routes of trade and into rowdy port towns. He recreates life along the waterfront, where seafaring men from around the world crowded into brothels, alehouses, and city jails. And Rediker explores the natural terror that inevitably shaped the existence of those who plied the forbidding oceans of the globe in small, brittle wooden vessels. The mariners in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea are working men, struggling to overcome the exploitive tendencies of the age in which they lived.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea focuses upon the seamen's experience in order to illuminate larger historical issues such as the rise of capitalism, the genesis of free wage labor, and the growth of an international working class. These epic themes were intimately bound up with the everyday hopes and fears of the common men who toiled upon the deep.
