The best books to be grateful for not being a common seaman in the Age of Sail

I love David Grann’s book because it has such chilling depictions of scurvy and other maladies at sea that it had me running to my nearest source of vitamin C.

Grann's rich storytelling presents the challenges of seafaring in the eighteenth century—storms, shipwrecks, hunger, and disease—and proves that the most effective learning should be fun. By the time readers finish The Wager, they will know much about the inner workings of the early British Empire without even realizing it. 

In this book, Niklas Fryman takes an event that scholars had long thought rare—naval mutiny—and explains how it became the norm in the Atlantic during the 1790s and early 1800s.

I relished the dozens of remarkable stories of how common seamen organized, in small and large ways, to fight “the man” in the form of naval ship captains and European government structures. The result is to show that the common Jack Tar was a much savvier political actor than appreciated in his time or since.    

I love how Nicholas Rogers recreates a lost world in this book. This is a world where it was not at all strange for a man to be abducted from a seaside tavern by a gang of men and thrown into a British warship to serve the king.

The best book on naval impressment in Britain, this book shows how this form of forced service had a deep social impact. I especially appreciate the impressive social research that illustrates how impressment devastated families and drove whole seaport communities into rioting and other violent forms of resistance.   

Jeffrey Bolster’s book is the strongest work on the experience of African American seafarers in the Age of Sail. Black seamen endured all the same forms of deprivation as European sailors. But, in a twist that I love, Bolster carefully shows how sailing was a step up for many African American men because of the horrific conditions, including enslavement, that they potentially faced on land.

In turning to the sea, “Black jacks” not only improved their lives but they also propelled the early American merchant marine. By the early nineteenth century, as Bolster documents, Black sailors composed about one-fifth of all American seafarers. 

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 itself one of the most thrilling features of maritime history.