For a young New Yorker in the year 1812, the sea beckoned with the promise of adventure — and quick cash. Britannia might rule the waves, but the young republic was already giving the old country a run for its share of the rich seagoing trade. And so America’s rapidly growing merchant fleet had created a huge demand for seamen, experienced or not.
Young men rushed to answer the call. By the first decade of the 19th century, more than 50,000 American sailors would be employed on American commercial ships.
The coming war with Britain, which began in June 1812, offered even more chances for glory and riches, especially aboard the hundreds of American privateers that set to sea in a burst of patriotic enthusiasm — and no little greed — from New York, Baltimore, Salem and other seaports. Basically legally chartered pirates, privateers were authorized to capture and sell as prizes of war any British merchant ships and cargoes that fell their way, and a few of the luckiest ones made millions of dollars.
The unlucky ones were captured by a British warship right off the American coast before they could take a single prize themselves, their crews consigned to spend the rest of the war in vermin-ridden and brutal British prisons.
Who were these young men who risked life and limb, and what was life like for them? We actually know an extraordinary amount about them, probably more about these men than about any other class of American society at the time.
In an effort to protect American sailors from forcibly being seized and pressed into the British Royal Navy (this British affront to American sovereignty would in fact become one of the causes of the War of 1812), the US federal government issued “protection certificates” to all American sailors attesting to their citizenship. These included detailed physical descriptions of each man. Likewise, the British prison authorities recorded personal and physical details of the thousands of American sailors they captured during the war, which provides a vivid demographic snapshot.
These records actually affirm some of our most romantic myths about life at sea in the heroic age of sail — while at the same time offering some startling surprises.
First and foremost, it was an occupation for young men, distinctly urban boys. Nearly all American seafarers came from towns or cities along the coast; half came from the 12 largest coastal cities, even though these urban areas contained only 5% of the total US population at the time. (New York City’s population was a mere 100,000).
For an American of 1812, the sea was rarely a career; it was an adventure before settling down to more sober work, as well as a way for an otherwise unskilled laborer to make some quick money. The wages paid merchant seamen had risen swiftly with demand, and American seamen were soon earning $18 a month at a time when their counterparts in the British merchant marine and the Royal Navy were paid less than half that. Some American ship owners were offering as much as $30 or $35 a month.
Most young American men who went to sea did so between the ages of 16 and 20 and stayed at it only a few years; only 10% remained at sea for more than 15 years. There were a striking number of very young boys, some as young as 10 or 11, on ships. A third or more of the boys under age 15 may have been runaways.
It was an exceedingly dangerous occupation. The physical descriptions on seamen’s certificates in almost every instance mention scars and deformities: Nearly every sailor, without exception, had smashed, split, bent or broken fingers, missing nails or missing fingertips — all testimony to the day-to-day hazards of hauling ropes and other physically demanding and dangerous shipboard labor in the age of sailing ships.
One in 10 active seamen had much more serious injuries that had left them partially disabled. Men were injured falling from spars as they furled or set sails, suffered broken bones or worse when their ships were tossed about in violent storms, were scalded, stabbed or slashed in accidents, brawls and sea battles. Missing eyes, lame and crooked legs, missing fingers, twisted arms, ruptures were all too common.
An interesting sidelight cast by the records is the early popularity of tattooing among sailors. Many American sailors of the era had one or more tattoos, and the designs would have been perfectly familiar to a Navy man two centuries later: hearts and initials of loved ones, patriotic eagles, the Stars and Stripes, anchors, ships, mermaids, buxom girls, crosses. The difference was that they were both cruder in appearance than today’s and were pure hell to have applied: one common method was for a fellow sailor to tie three or four needles together, dip them in a mixture of wet gunpowder and India ink or some equally noxious chemicals like laundry bluing, then jab the bundle repeatedly under the outer later of skin; when it was all done the blood and excess color was washed off with rum or urine.
Surprisingly, as many as 15% to 20% of American seafarers at this time were free African-Americans from New York and other parts of the northeast. That was two or three or even four times the percentage of the black population in the places they came from. Half of black seafarers worked in menial roles as stewards or cooks; but the other half were regular seamen, on a par with their white counterparts.
In fact, life at sea was an opportunity for equal pay and equal respect for African-Americans that simply did not exist anywhere else in American society at the time. “To drive a carriage, carry a market basket after the boss, and brush his boots, or saw wood and run errands, was as high as a colored man could rise” on land, recalled William Brown, whose father, Noah, had been a sailor on American merchant ships in the early 1800s. But at sea, noted one traveler of a slightly later period, “the Negro feels as a man.”
Black seafarers responded to the opportunity by sticking with the life at sea much longer than their white counterparts: They were on average older, more likely to be married, more likely to be tied to one home port. That meant they were also more experienced, and on many Yankee ships, African-American sailors actually ranked higher, and earned more money, than white hands.
African-Americans were almost never officers — there were limits — but many observers commented on the equality and lack of racial animosity that existed among American sailors in this period. In both merchant ships and the US Navy, they messed together and worked together. Racial boundaries retreated in the face of the rules and regimentation of shipboard life; the depersonalization and dehumanization that all sailors suffered under the stern discipline of shipboard rules and regulations made race recede in significance by comparison. One visitor to New Orleans noted with wonder that black seamen might “give 20 lashes with the end of a rope to white sailors, but ashore they dare not even look them in the face.”
Life aboard ship ran the gamut of experiences. The US Navy had, by generous count, about 20 warships at the outbreak of the war — versus Britain’s 700 or so. There were stern captains of regular US Navy vessels who flogged their men mercilessly for minor infractions, giving them 36 lashes for leaving a shirt lying on the deck, throwing a man in irons for six weeks for drunkenness. There were other Navy commanders, like Stephen Decatur, who led by example and put great store in keeping their ships healthy, clean and well-ventilated, and the men in good spirits.
But even on the best-run ships, daily life was a shock to green recruits. Even on the largest warships, crewmen were crammed together in almost claustrophobic conditions. The famous US frigate Constitution was an imposing vessel, with its three towering masts and carrying up to 55 cannons on its 175-foot-long decks; still its 450 men had to sleep in hammocks practically touching one another as a cacophony of snores filled the fetid air at night in the enclosed berth deck. An unhealthy, monotonous and revolting diet consisting mainly of salt meat and hard biscuit — and yes, the statutory half-pint of rum a day — provided ample calories but was woefully deficient in essential vitamins and nutrients. Medical treatment by sometimes incompetent (or drunk) ship’s surgeons mostly did much more harm than good. A frightening number of the standard medicines in the ship surgeon’s medicine chest of that era were literally poisonous, containing toxic elements such as mercury, lead and antimony; sailors suffering everything from a cold to syphilis were routinely dosed with violent purgatives and emetics.
Nothing could prepare a young recruit for the shocking devastation wreaked on human flesh by shot, splinters and bullets in the course of naval battle. The wounded were dragged below to the ship’s “cockpit,” a tiny space in the lowest deck with about 41/2 feet of headroom; the surgeon, working on his knees in dim light as he bent over a makeshift operating table of a couple of sea chests shoved together, did what he could under impossible conditions. Surgeon Usher Parsons described the dozens of arms and legs he amputated in the 24 hours he worked nonstop following the Battle of Lake Erie, administering doses of opiates to blunt the pain before slicing through skin and bone with knives and saws, tying off the severed arteries, then moving on as quickly as possible to the next patient.
It was on the American privateers where real life most resembled the Hollywood depiction of grizzled cutthroat crewmen sporting pigtails and brass earrings. Many a green city lad was beguiled into signing onto a privateering vessel by a smooth-talking recruiter (who was paid a commission per head) who set up shop at a city tavern promising riches and glories and offering free drinks as an inducement.
A surprising number of common American seafarers of this age were literate, judging by the accomplished penmanship they used to sign their names on their seamen’s certificates; a few even left insightful and sometimes amusing accounts in diaries and journals, and some of the best were written by just such innocent young men who found themselves at sea for the first time, and in such rough company, in the War of 1812. One recounted the “vast quantities of villanous bad whiskey” and “the free use of that description of rhetoric which the Irish call blarney” that the recruiting agent had employed, along with a few dollars in advance money; and soon he was looking around nervously at the “hatless, shoeless, shirtless, graceless, unwashed, but not unwhipped” set of perfect villains who made up his crewmates.
Insubordination was rife on many privateers; one privateer captain filled his log day after day with laments describing his crews’ refusal to obey orders: “I reasoned the case with them,” he wrote in one typical entry, “. . . I found they would listen to no reason whatever.”
More poignant are the diary accounts of American privateersmen who were captured by the British and held in the notorious Dartmoor Prison. By the end of the war some 5,000 American seamen would be crowded into this massive stone fortress in the midst of an inhospitable, wind- and rain-swept moor in southwest England. Disease was rampant, the hordes of lice and fleas a constant torment. One captive American wrote a poem which began, “My country I fear has forgot me/And I doubt if I see you again.”
The joy and exultation when the war was over and the prisoners finally freed was almost uncontainable in their recollections. Many had been away from home for two or more years.
And one contingent of freed prisoners, mostly New Yorkers, at least showed that their ordeal had not dampened their native spirit. When they learned that the ship bringing them home from England was planning to sail to Norfolk, Va., they calmly informed the captain that he had a choice: He could voluntarily change course and head for New York — or they would “be under the disagreeable necessity” of taking over the ship and sailing it to New York themselves.
Stephen Budiansky’s new book is “Perilous Fight: America’s Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812–1815” (Alfred A. Knopf).